Huh. We're absolutely crushing this at our house. We averaged 486 watts per person in the worst month this year so far. I cheat and charge the car at work, but even when I commute every day (40 miles round trip, half-mile elevation change), it's only half our energy consumption, so we're easily below 1kw per person. I'm not including embodied carbon of stuff we buy, but still...
We did buy energy efficient everything: Induction range, hybrid heat pump water heater, spent extra on insulation, heat pump furnace, LED lights, medium-wattage desktop computer, high MPGe EV, etc.
However, we live in a normal US house with few compromises (though we don't need air conditioning or heating most days, due to the local climate).
It makes me wonder how the average US household is at 12KW. That's roughly two of our house's air conditioners running full blast, per person, 24 hours a day.
If you've eliminated transportation and heating that is #1 and #2 for most people's energy consumption. Third place would likely be air-conditioning, and you've eliminated that too.
Even if we kept the thermostat at 120F in the winter and 32F in the summer, we’d still be under 3kw per person (due to our furnace being on 100% of the time and never reaching temperature).
The number also appears to include 'upstream' energy usage, things like how much energy was used to transport food to you. How much energy to produce the items you consume. I imagine raw household electrical usage is only a small fragment of this.
The 12kW includes producing and shipping that car battery every 7 years, and the fossil fuel derived fertilizer on the corn that feeds the beef you eat. And the distillation of the tonnes of ultra pure water required to make your phone. And so on.
But yes. It is relatively trivial to come closer to a sustainable level than the US average.
We did buy energy efficient everything: Induction range, hybrid heat pump water heater, spent extra on insulation, heat pump furnace, LED lights, medium-wattage desktop computer, high MPGe EV, etc.
However, we live in a normal US house with few compromises (though we don't need air conditioning or heating most days, due to the local climate).
It makes me wonder how the average US household is at 12KW. That's roughly two of our house's air conditioners running full blast, per person, 24 hours a day.