We spend just about every moment of our lives consuming power.  It is a fact of modern life.  Anyone who lives a “normal” life on the grid consumes electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  While there is nothing wrong with this, you pay for the power, when we begin to consider self-reliance and off the grid living we have to take stock of our energy consumption.  More like we have to put it in perspective.  According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration the average US household consumes 603 Kilowatt Hours per month or 10,837 kWh a year.  For most folks this is a nebulous number, what does it mean?  If I were the “average” person, what would it take to switch over to alternative energy?

The specter of efficiency

I don’t know why, but the Tin Hat Ranch is always reverting to math.  If we take the 10,837kWh per year and divide it by 365 we find that the average household consumes 29.690kWh of energy per day.  While this is still a pretty nebulous number, coincidently on gallon of gasoline equates to roughly 33kWh of energy.  If you could hold in your hands the “energy” the average US home consumes in a day, a gallon of gasoline would be a good representation.  But it is not that easy, nothing is ever that easy.  How can you convert gasoline into Candy Crush time on your iPhone?  Right, you can put the gasoline in a generator.  Things start to get interesting when you pull the cord to start the generator.  Let’s assume you are using the favorite generator of off the grid backwoods folks, the Honda EU2000i.  Using Honda’s spec’s we note that the unit will generate 8,000 watts of energy on 1 gallon of gas.  For those of you that have your calculators out you will notice that only about 25% of the energy of the gallon of gasoline was converted to electricity.  Why?  Gasoline engines are not 100% efficient and neither are generators.  Almost three quarters of the energy in the gallon of gasoline is lost to heat.  In the end, it takes about 4 gallons of gasoline to represent the power the average household uses in a day.

The same thing happens in commercial power.  Most commercial power uses some sort of fuel, whether it be coal, nuclear, gas, etc to heat water into steam.  This steam is then used to turn massive steam turbines which in turn spin generators.  Because they are using the heat and operate on a large scale their efficiencies are a bit greater, on the order of 30-60%.  Even so, in most cases most of the energy is wasted as heat.

But wait…it gets worse

“Alternative” energy is no different, in fact it is far less efficient.  If we consider solar energy the typical solar panel available to us consumers only converts 15-20% of the sun light that strikes it into electricity.  A typical off the grid home will also have batteries and an inverter, which also have inefficiencies.  Since I am assuming most of you are on the grid I am going to keep this simple and assume we are using the power directly from the panels to put things in perspective.

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