The latest issue of 88 Energy News shows the average household uses approximately 88 pounds of electricity every year. That’s enough energy to supply approximately 1,000 homes for a year.
That’s a little more than the average amount of energy produced by the entire US population. So it’s a little more than the total amount used by all of the US military.
That is far too low and the energy produced by the entire US population is only about half the national average. Even assuming the average American uses about 100 times the amount of energy that the average worker does, we still wouldn’t be near the energy efficiency of the entire population. The average American worker uses about 1/5 of the average American household’s total energy usage.
In other words, the same people who are doing all this energy consuming stuff are using just less than half of what the entire US population uses. But they are not making energy efficient appliances because they are not. They are just using less as a means to an end. And we could be doing a lot more.
It’s the other way around. We all have a set of energy efficient appliances, but we don’t have a set of smart appliances. In fact, it’s not even possible to use smart appliances without going to the smarts.
The problem with smart appliances is that, while they may be energy efficient, they may not be smart. A smart refrigerator may be energy efficient, but it may not be smart. A smart dishwasher may be energy efficient, but it may be smart. A smart washing machine may be energy efficient, but it may not be smart.
That’s a problem, right? You have to look deeper and find the smarts. But, in this case, there is a solution. We can ask for energy efficiency in Smart Appliances. The smarts in Smart Appliances are the smart appliances. In fact, there is nothing more clever than asking for energy efficiency.
Here’s the problem, though. Smart appliances that save energy use less power, but they don’t use less power when they are put to their most efficient use. In other words, smart appliances that use less power when they are put to their most efficient use are not smart. In other words, the smart appliances you bought at work, at the store, and on your smartphone that save you energy are not smart.
I really like this quote: “The smartest thing you can do is walk into your home, turn on your electricity, open the blinds, and look out your windows,” a leading smart-home expert said. “You can’t really get smarter than that.
