Average US household electricity consumption is 877 kWh/month, which would be 29kWh/day.

Either they mean a very efficient/small house, or homeowners with unusually frugal habits.

Edit: Average UK household electricity consumption appears to be around 10kWh/day.

“The average American or Canadian household in 2010 used about twenty times more than the typical Nigerian household, and two to three times more than a typical European home”

Also depending on the country few people use cloth driers - you just hang your clothes on a cable and let them dry by themselves.

Houses in colder parts of EU are also usually better isolated than in US ([1] that's a typical Polish house for example), and more people live in flats in blocks instead of independent houses (so heat loses are vastly reduced because you only have 1 or 2 outdoors walls).

Homes are also simply bigger in US. Average home size (including flats) in my country is a little over 70 square meters. It's probably bigger in western Europe but not by that much.

Also big houses usually have 2/3 stories instead of being very "wide".

And electric heating/cooking isn't very popular, but I think that depends on the country.

It all goes back to electricity prices - in Poland in 1980s most houses had no isolation, everybody heated with coal which had fixed (and very low) prices. Then communism ended, prices were free to change with the market, some taxes were introduced, and suddenly everybody isolated their houses in like 10 years. Otherwise you burned money like crazy.

[1] https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pressland-cms/cache/__...

I think the decline of the jet stream is a bigger deal for Europe than the US. Hotter summers and colder winters.

I think the poster might be Dutch or similar :p

I believe a typical Polish "house" will be an apartment.

[0] https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...

They need it for ventilation because 6th floor office windows don't open for obvious reasons.

Most of the US houses I've been in use either gas or fuel oil for heating.

Presumably if electricity was free during th day and expensive at night, that habit would change rapdily.

I use about 20kWh per day--I have a somewhat smaller house--and vaguely looked into whole house batteries a few months back and concluded they would only make sense if I had it wired into just a few critical systems like my furnace. But, at the end of the day, I should still just get a propane-fueled generator at this point if I ever got anything.

So $2K for a battery that can power a house for a day seems almost an order of magnitude off if they literally mean power an entire normal house.

Yes, a propane or natural gas generator is a lot more flexible/higher capacity

Also, FWIW, the North American edition of the Economist accounts for more than half the readers. UK readers are less than 20% of the total.

As for your other comment, that air conditioning and spending US$2000 isn't "representative of the world," I think you will be very surprised if at some point you travel outside the US. The rest of the world does not consist of Elbonian mud farmers as you seem to think. Air conditioning is common throughout the warmer parts of the world; the majority of the world's population has access to air conditioning, though not always at home. The gross world product is about US$17500 per person per year, PPP.

I'm not quite sure what prompted you to drag this down to that level. FWIW, I spent several years living in Europe and the Middle East. In homes that weren't air conditioned even. And a fair amount of travel to many other places.

"The rest of the world does not consist of Elbonian mud farmers as you seem to think"

Wow. You have no reason to go there. Fuck off. Saying that lacking $2k of discretionary money to spend on lithium batteries is "Elbonian mud farmers". Wtf. I've certainly had times I my adult life where I didn't have $2k of discretionary money.

Although I'd bet the weight of the cells does make up the majority of the mass of a Powerwall, other components might have significant weight. From some quick, cursory research, it seems to have a metal frame/cover and apparently has some kind of liquid cooling. (Also, minimizing weight for a Powerwall seems less important than for an EV.)

Our house uses about 20 kWh a day during the summer, with some minor AC usage in one of the rooms when needed.

During the winter probably about 30kWh, and that excludes extra costs like wood for fireplace.

My house is fully insulated and all windows are double glazed, so that keeps energy usage more efficient. I also have a solar heater (aka "geyser") which lowers energy costs even more. So with that in mind, I really can't believe they're using less than this in Europe...

I've heard that the EU has a lot more district heating (which wouldn't show up in an electricity bill, AFAIK) and I'd imagine a fair deal of older buildings have a boiler using oil or gas or something else to burn.

AC is also just not very prevalent.

In the UK gas boilers are common even in newbuild homes. I don't know a single person with AC (though it's common in offices).

My average actual occupied usage is closer to 20-25 kWh/day, varying mainly by AC load.

In India, the average household has a 2.5 kW Peak Power meter and usually, about 10 kWh per day is consumed.

So, not exactly a back-pack, but yeah.

The average individual house in India, is constructed in a plot of about 200 Square Yards. Usually available roof space is about 1000 sft.

Assuming no shadows or high rises in the vicinity (80% of homes have good sunshine even in dense cities), this area is sufficient for about 5 kW of installed capacity.

Most of the deccan plateau gets about 6 hours of good sunshine year-round. So that translates to about 30 kWh of power generation capability.

So, a 3 kW installed capacity, with 1 powerwall will be sufficient to power an average household for most of the year.

Of course, this does not take into account usage of ACs (a fast increasing power consumption category in India)

However, it costs about Rs. 100,000 for 1 kW of installed capacity (including inverter and grid connected meter, no batteries) For 5 kW, that is 500,000 Rs. (about 7000 USD) of investment.

Average annual salary of an Indian household in an urban area is about 15000 USD. About half of that in rural areas.

If there are good financing options and grid connected reverse selling meters (they are being encouraged by many local and state governments), there could be a revolution in installed solar capacity and utilization.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...

The point is

1) shifting some consumption during peak hours off of peak rates

and

2) having backup to get you through a limited outage, not necessarily at your full normal consumption level but without having to be in the dark / without internet / without phone and possibly car charging.

Nobody should evaluate this by whether one battery pack by itself provides all the energy anyone needs for everything with no limits. It’s one component with several good use cases.

So unless you have enough generation to completely decouple from the net you are not really independent or it will cost you.

So without additional Equipment just having solar and a power wall wouldn’t help during outages.

Yes you need cords, appliances, and other equipment, including extra equipment if you are not connected to the grid, that is a given.

This will not be representative of energy usage in houses, larger apartments with many exterior sides & lots of exposed glass.

edit: house prior to that was an older 100 m^2 semi-detached house with much worse insulation. Similar setup with natural gas for cooking & hot water. Annual electricity consumption was 1750 kWh / year so about 4.8 kWh / day on average, for two people. Not so different to the current situation. Curious. From memory we ran the air conditioner on a few days in summer and electric heating in the depths of winter. From memory the house was somewhat unpleasantly cold some of the time so perhaps we tended to put on warm clothing rather than try to heat the whole place.

I was shocked by a few other comments saying 30 kWh/day. Is it because they use electricity to cook and heat water?

    : user@host:~; units
    2529 units, 72 prefixes, 56 nonlinear units

    You have: 40 kg * 0.6 MJ/kg
    You want: MJ
     * 24
     / 0.041666667

24 MJ would be 1 MJ/hour for 24 hours, or 3 MJ/hour for 8 hours, about 300 or 800 watts, respectively. Some houses use much more than that; others use much less. If you're looking at your electric bill, 500 watts would be about 370 kWh per month:

    You have: 500 watts * 1 month
    You want: kWh
        * 365.2422
     / 0.0027379093

The article claims that in the early 01990s this quantity of batteries would have cost US$75k. I'm pretty sure this is wrong. This quantity of lithium-ion batteries might have cost US$75k, but even today lead-acid batteries cost half what lithium-ion batteries do.

I don't think the price of lead-acid batteries has changed that much over the last 25 or even 50 years, though admittedly I don't have any 30-year-old battery catalogs to check pricing in. Lithium-ion batteries in the 01990s would have weighed only a little more than lithium-ion batteries today, so it looks like they're using the pricing of lithium-ion batteries and the weight of lead-acid batteries.

If you're powering your house from batteries, you should probably do it with lead-acid batteries, not lithium-ion batteries. The big disadvantage of lead-acid batteries is that they weigh roughly three times what lithium-ion batteries do (per joule), so lead-acid electric cars had roughly a third the range of lithium-ion electric cars. But the weight is not enough to matter for a house.

There is enough lithium in Earth's crust to power the world economy through the night. There is, I think, not enough lead. So although lead is currently cheaper, lithium is more scalable. Other less developed candidate options include sodium batteries and aluminum fuel cells.

Nickel-iron batteries might be even cheaper, though I'm not sure, and they're definitely more scalable. Nobody sells them anymore, though lots of telecom centers still run on them.

It's unfortunate that the article cites a power capacity, "1.2 gigawatts-worth of storage", but not an energy capacity, for the US's utility-scale storage rampup last year. 1.2 gigawatts for five minutes would be 100 MWh, in the quaint units used in the energy markets; 1.2 gigawatts for 12 hours would be 14'400 MWh. There is a very significant difference between these; one requires 144 times as much battery behind it than the other. By contrast, the difference between 100 MWh over 5 minutes (1.2 gigawatts) and 100 MWh over 12 hours (0.008 gigawatts) is mostly a matter of what shape the batteries are and how much active cooling is needed. One wonders if this is not simply an error because the author did not know the difference between gigawatts and gigawatt-hours.

Oh come on, isn't that wildly overdoing it? We have almost eight thousand years to go before the fifth digit becomes necessary!

https://smarterbusiness.co.uk/blogs/average-gas-electricity-...

https://www.electriciancourses4u.co.uk/useful-resources/how-...

https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/how-much-elec...

ADDED: I can believe there's some difference because of AC but I basically don't have AC (just one window unit I run a few days a year), have oil heat, and have a somewhat smaller than average house but I still use about 20kWh/day.

The delta does seem to be real though.

This is a medium size house in a colder region of the US.

Do you have an electric hot water heater? That would probably boost my use a lot.

My Silicon Valley house consumed ~450kWh/month (15kWh/day) (before we bought an EV) which is very much on the low side from what I see here. 1100sqft. No A/C. Rarely run the heat. Every single light in the house is an LED. Gas appliances. 2 people, not home during the day.

The appliances, as I mentioned, are all gas, but still a clothes dryer and a washing machine consume some electricity, as does the pump on my furnace, as do ceiling fans in use when necessary.

And of course, the devices that cycle on and off all the time; the refrigerator, instant hot tap under the sink.

And then there's the actual electricity we consume during the times we're home to do things like light the house, watch television or use computers, listen to music, etc. It is quite easy to use 2000-2500w when home and active in the evenings.

> houses in the UK .. 3kWh/day

Seems believable from what I've heard.

https://www.theenergyshop.com/guides/average-gas-and-electri...

The best way to reduce your energy bill (whichever source) is to live in the right climate zone I guess.

Do you know why you use that much?

Do you heat your water with electricity?

Fridge, freezer, tv, WiFi, Desktop PC, charging phones and laptop, ligths.

- Electrical heat is not the most common form of heating, but it's been growing a lot and is also a big consumer when it is used

- Laundry Washer/Dryer are pretty large consumers (mostly the dryer)

- Water heaters are often electrical

- Electrical ovens and stove ranges are pretty common, which can pull quite a bit depending on how much use they receive

- Microwaves pull a bit, but not huge

But it doesn't work everywhere for heating. Consider that even in the hottest climates in the US, you're cooling your air by 30 degrees. But in the coolest climates, you're heating your air by 60 degrees.

My sister has this system in Philadelphia, but when it gets cold enough the more inefficient raw electric heating kicks in, and that really chews through electricity like no other.

Additional freezer, washer & dryer, oven (I have a propane range but many do not), microwave, there's some additional water heating in the dishwasher as well as for drying, TVs, other electronics like printer stereo etc., furnace/water heater are oil but still have pumps etc.

I'm alone in a flat tough, I guess you are a family?

What else are you using electricity on?

In Arizona and New Mexico, where I grew up, common inefficient houses need air conditioning during the day and heating at night much of the year.

So it's easy to see how, even if cooling is not required most of the year, you could easily use 50 kWh/day of electrical energy in the kinds of huge houses people have in the US.

Heating isn't separate for me. For me, cooling isn't required most of the year (probably similar to UK weather), but for many parts of the US cooling is required almost year-round.