I bet like me you don't know the answer, or perhaps you know parts of the answer like how much you pay each month for electricity or gas, but this is just part of the picture.
I tried to work it out for the past 12 months.
tldr: I use 3 times the average, mostly in transport, reducing this requires huge lifestyle changes.
I defined 5 categories and looked at the UK averages - where the average use per person per year is 25MWH
Travel, my travel data from google maps, said I travelled 37k miles, rough calculations put the energy use of this at 55MWH. Comparing this to the government travel survey means I use 10 times the national average travel energy use.
Home Energy. Our smart meter data says that we used 20MWH whereas the price cap data suggests that average is 15MWH. On a per person basis my quarter of our family of 4 use is about the same as the national average.
Business, the energy embedded in products and services that I directly use (those Amazon deliveries and Greggs sausage rolls). Very difficult to get data for this, but the national average per person business consumption is about 5MW and I think I probably consume about 1.5 times the average, with a further 2MW for all of the stuff that gets imported. Total = 7MWH
Industry, which is the underlying infrastructure that we all rely on. The national average is about 5MW so I went with this number.
Food, I don't eat more than anyone else so I went with the average of 4MW. My annual food consumption of 800k calories is about 1MWH the other 3MWH is food processing.
In total I use 76MWH, which is 3 times the national average. The biggest difference is in transport, and within this are the 23k miles that I flew.
So what - how Pete saves the planet - just to get to the national average I need to fly less (I have an international job), and buy less stuff. But to make a big reduction needs huge personal change. What would it take to be a 10MWH human?
What do you think?
Sources = DUKES, UK Travel Survey, Ofgem, anything else is very rough numbers, mostly guessed.
