UK electricity consumption 
I recently got one of these household electricity display devices
things and being the information fiend that I am I’ve started studiously recording how much electricity I use. That lead to the obvious question, How much is normal electricity consumption in the UK
. The Internet did not provide me with reliable and consistent answer to this question, so after not inconsiderable rooting for information, I derived the answer from the most up to date available:
1 860 kWh (per person per year, UK, 2007). I’ll write about how my consumption compares once I have more lovely data to play with.
That is based on data from The Department of Business Innovation and Skills on the UK domestic electricity consumption in 2007 (117 126.2 GWh) and the associated number of domestic meters (26 670.3×103) 1. For the per person figure, the UK 2001 Census provides a persons per household figure of 2.36 2.
August 3rd, 2009 at 06:27
What are the units of the 2.36? And while you’re at it, can we please have a global average as a comparator?
August 10th, 2009 at 20:18
Wikipedia has a page listing the electricity consumption per country, using that data the world per capita annual average comes out at 2603 kWh (2005). The UK, however, comes out at 5844 kWh, which is obviously rather different to my figure. The data used on Wikipedia represent total electricity usage for a country, not domestic usage. From UK government data the equivalent figure is 5368 kWh (2005), just 8% out. So if we assume the data for other countries are just as good we can continue the current trend of stupid assumptions and bad ‘science’ by assuming that on average other countries have the same domestic/industry split i.e. domestic accounts for 37 % of the total usage. This results in a global domestic usage value of 828 kWh.
So the UK average pie eating grumbler is using 160 % more leccy than the grey global average person. I leave calculating the domestic/industry split for each country on the planet as an exercise for the reader. When said reader has worked out the answer he can give us a more accurate answer.
Oh… and the units for 2.36 should be pretty obvious from the sentence – I would guess you’re just being a pedant, but that seems very unlikely.
January 1st, 2010 at 10:40
Hi,
So far as I know UK domestic *mean* household electricity consumption is ~4.7MWh/y and modal is nearer ~3.3MWh/y (the different presumably being in part the ~1.5M households out of 26.5M that are not on the gas grid, some of which will be heating with electricity: ~33% of domestic electricity is supplied on an Economy 7 tariff).
That gives me figures on either side of yours, but not too far out.
But it is possible to do much better: we *don’t* heat with electricity, and our consumption for a family of 4 (including me working from home part-time) is under 2MWh/y.
http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html#meter
Rgds
Damon
January 1st, 2010 at 10:43
BTW, if your new meter gadget is one that clips on to the main supply live wire, I’d be interested to know if you see something that others have reported, that compact fluorescents and other electronic gizmos are shown as consuming far more energy than the rating on the device, and/or the consumption shown if you use a plug-in power meter.
If so, it’s because the clip-on cannot deal properly with the ‘power factor’ of these electronic devices, but I’d love to be wrong!
Rgds
Damon
January 18th, 2010 at 16:30
Damon. You’re quite right about the need to distinguish between mean and modal consumption figures. I would be interested to know the source of your consumption data?
Of course, if you’re using modal consumption data, that should be compared with the occupancy data for the households in your modal set, rather than the UK average, which might not be the same.
Unfortunately I lost all my households consumption data in a rather unfortunate hard-drive incident
. From what I was observing though, I am not far under the national average, mainly due to an old PC and being in rented accommodation (which means a nasty old electric cooker).