“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.