Discussion
Does that use a lot of energy?
bena: My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?
quotemstr: I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy.That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and you can't either. Nobody can.If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and not the market because prices don't internalize certain externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.
mltvc: How do you propose to convince people to get those externalities accounted without emotions? How do you convince people of the value of externalities that are far away in place or time (but not less real)?
quotemstr: > You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity?A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transaction is incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
spencerflem: It’s new capacity!They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”
spencerflem: How am I as an individual supposed to get externalities priced in?And given that right now they are clearly not, what’s your plan until then?
alphazard: Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they affect you directly?
AgentME: LLMs don't use a lot of electricity per user. Why should the fact that the energy usage happens in data centers instead of each user's house be an important moral factor?
oulipo2: Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
janalsncm: Wow, putting everything in the same units is really informative. Running my 450 watt gpu for a day is approximately equivalent to driving a car 10 miles.
burkaman: > As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else.Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if the price is wrong.> any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appealsWho are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.
jwilliams: It was genuinely a surprise to see how much relative energy petrol cars use (and shame on me - I'm an electrical engineer). I mean I think I knew it intuitively, but this simple chart blew my mind.
MerrimanInd: When one gets in the weeds on EVs for ICE cars two things become shockingly clear: internal combustion is hilariously inefficient YET gasoline is hilariously energy dense. Most people's intuition is wrong on both of these points but then they cancel each other out.
Terr_: [delayed]
dr_dshiv: One hour of Claude code— well, I’d guess it would be comparable to an hour of driving an electric car. How to know?
MichaelDickens: OP says one query uses 0.3 Wh. Driving an electric car for 10 miles = 3,000 Wh which is roughly 10,000 Wh per hour.I'm not sure how many queries is equivalent to an hour of Claude code use, but maybe 5 seconds, which means an hour of continuous use = 216 Wh, or ~50x less than an electric car.OP has a longer article about LLM energy usage: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
loganp: This is neat. I think I'm actually more interested in avg ChatGPT query than median single query so that I can enter a large query # and be confident in the associated energy cost for that larger number (e.g. what's the energy cost for 1,000 chat gpt queries)
nikcub: I can't find a github or email for Hannah - if you're reading this i'd like to add Australian energy price data via Open Electricity[0] to the data (reach out via my profile)[0] https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/
PowerElectronix: Useful work is debatable here, a lot of people just talk to the thing or use it instead of searching the internet.The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram, storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and then subsidise the users to use it.I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and burn when the investors get impatient.
jfengel: I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK.Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.
lm28469: Yeah without knowing the climate, temperature delta and insulation these values don't really mean much.
creeble: I doubt your 450w gpu runs at that wattage 24 hrs, unless you're mining with it.My (admittedly old) gpu+CPU idles around 50-75w.
janalsncm: During training it’s running at around 410. But yeah idling at 450 would be pretty crazy.
rsolva: It is not only about raw power consumption. Comparing driving an electric car with using AI only in kW hides a major point: Hyperscale datacenters are massively centralised, which brings it's own problems; a lot of energy is used for cooling, and water consumptions is enormous. Charging electric cars at home is distributed and does not suffer from the same problems as the centralised hyperscalers do. Also, running AI models at home is not much different than a gaming session :)
DoneWithAllThat: What’s startling to me is how many comments in this thread just take the provided values as gospel without asking questions that methodology answers either in the abstract or barely describes. Also going giving a cost for “United States” is absolutely nonsense - electricity, gas and gasoline prices vary widely across the country. There is no one cost for each, and the average is worthless for this kind of thing (especially since the average of each - gas vs. electric vs. gasoline cost - are independent variables that have no relation to each other on a region by region basis).Why are people so gullible?
Rebelgecko: I think specifically it's comparing gas heating vs AC. Heat pump heating would probably do better. In other words, it takes less energy to move heat inside/outside than to "create" it(With caveats like heat pumps are much less effective in extreme cold)
tl2do: In Japan, my country, this looks a bit different. A lot of electricity still comes from oil- and gas-fired plants. The mechanics differ (gas turbines vs. car engines), but in both cases we’re still relying on combustion. I suppose some countries have the same issue.
jolmg: > Desktop computer - 1 hour of use - 50 WhThat seems low...
dylan604: Train locomotives have used diesel powered generators that then powers electric motors. Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs? Or better asked, what would be the most efficient use of gasoline?
ZeroGravitas: Nissan makes a range of these under the e-power branding:https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...
sixo: Your dismissal of moral concerns is not convincing.Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.
stdbrouw: Doesn't this argument hinge on equivocating between two different definitions of aversion, though? I'm averse to bananas, but that doesn't mean I think it's immoral to eat them. The moral dimension kicks in if somebody else had to ride that stationary bike for you, because then you'd be wasting their time on frivolities.
alnwlsn: I attached a generator with some supercaps and an inverter to a stationary bicycle a few years ago, and even though I mostly use it as a way to feel less guilty watching Youtube videos, it does give me a quite literal feel for some of the items on the lower end of the scale.- Anything even even halfway approaching a toaster or something with a heater in it is essentially impossible (yes, I know about that one video).- A vacuum cleaner can be run for about 30 seconds every couple minutes.- LED lights are really good, you can charge up the caps for a minute and then get some minutes of light without pedaling.- Maybe I could keep pace with a fridge, but not for a whole day.- I can do a 3D printer with the heated bed turned off, but you have to keep pedaling for the entire print duration, so you probably wouldn't want to do a 4 hour print. I have a benchy made on 100% human power.- A laptop and a medium sized floor fan is what I typically run most days.- A modern laptop alone, with the battery removed and playing a video is "too easy", as is a few LED bulbs or a CFL. An incandescent isn't difficult but why would you?- A cellphone you could probably run in your sleepAlso gives a good perspective on how much better power plants are at this than me. All I've made in 4 years could be made by my local one in about 10 seconds, and cost a few dollars.
RobinL: One thing missing but important to understand is the energy embodied in buying 'stuff'. At a very rough approximation, the cost of stuff, especially consumer goods manufactured cheaply, is quite a high percentage energy.When you look at people's energy usage, quite a lot of it ends up being the embodied energy in the stuff they buy. For quite a lot of people, it's probably the largest category of energy consumption. I once had a very rough go at calculating this here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy_usage/
jfengel: When it comes to the environment the most efficient use is to leave it in the ground.Hybrids work for trains because they are so large and don't need big swings of acceleration or to climb steep grades. They can run the diesel generators at maximum efficiency.Battery power would be better, because you can build even larger power plants running at higher heats and not have to haul them with you, but the costs of sufficient battery is too large, so far. That is changing.
einpoklum: Isn't it better for trains to just to draw from the electric grid?
ssl-3: The presentation is nice, but some of the conversions are questionable.For instance: The cost section, wherein 1kWh in the US is figured as having a cost of 9.7 cents.In reality, it's not that way at all. Unless we're fortunate enough to live in an area where we can walk over to the neighborhood generating station and carry home buckets of freshly-baked electricity to use at home, then we must also pay for delivery.On average, in 2025, electricity was 17.3 cents per kiloWatt-hour -- delivered -- for residential customers in the US.https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
philipkglass: I looked at the electric car example for the United States. It has 3 kilowatt hours priced at $0.51, 17 cents per kilowatt hour, which seems about right. The "petrol car" example at the top of the chart isn't powered by electricity so its cost number is not directly comparable to the things that consume electricity.
ssl-3: On the energy tab: It says that driving a petrol car 10 miles uses 10,000 Watt-hours, eg 10 kWh.On the costs tab, for the United States: It says that this has a cost of $0.97.97 cents ÷ 10kWh = 9.7 cents per kWh(I didn't look further than that. Perhaps I should have.)
philipkglass: [delayed]
MerrimanInd: That's a complicated question that unfortunately has quite a bit of "well it depends" in the answer. I worked in the auto industry for a long time - both doing engine development and EVs - so my opinions here are well-informed but not world expert.From a pure energy efficiency perspective you can't beat economies of scale. A stationary power plant (even ones that are just big gasoline engines) run at a constant load and RPM so they can be optimized for pure efficiency, they rarely have to start, warm up, and shut down, and they can use larger and more expensive exhaust aftertreatment systems. Most energy conversions grow more efficient with scale and this is no different. The locomotive powertrain works for a handful of reasons but one of them is you can build much more efficient engines that are optimized for a single constant speed and load. But most of the advancements in internal combustion engines over the last 20-30 years don't increase peak efficiency but increase the conditions in which they're efficient. Variable valve timing and lift are probably the most underrated and overpowered technologies that have transformed engines from having one narrow regime of high efficiency to running well over a huge range of the map. But turbocharging, variable intake geometries, 7+ speed transmissions, and mild hybrid systems like belt-starter-generators get honorable mentions here. However we're not talking about anything close to EV-levels of efficiency. I think the cutting edge research engines are running in the mid to high 40s for thermal efficiency (percentage of fuel energy captured as useful work), most passenger car engines probably peak in the mid 30s.So while there is some efficiency to be gained by a more locomotive-style system it's not as much as you would hope. In the industry that's called a series hybrid system, vs a parallel hybrid system where either ICE or EV power can go to the wheels. The benefits of a series system are more emissions and product features. You can get the full torque and power of an EV, you can start and stop the IC engine in a more emissions optimized way, and and you can filter load spikes to use a small engine that meets average not peak load.From a more pragmatic perspective, with the energy density of gasoline and other liquid fuels it's probably best to use it in applications for which you just can't use full electrification. Planes are currently the best example of this. It's also worth noting that passenger cars benefit massively from strong hybridization because of the uneven load cycles so that's a technology where you can deploy a gasoline engine but then claw back a lot of the efficiency losses with hybrids. That's not always true, for example boats don't really have a regen cycle so hybridization just doesn't get much.
groundzeros2015: Exactly. The environmental/social burden isn’t just the energy used in the raw physical form, but the cost to acquire and make it useable.The problem with gas is not that burning it doesn’t maximally capture all energy, but that there are externalities to doing so.
medi8r: Glad it has AI. AI has nothing on cars. Save a car trip a week even if electric is way more than 10k queries.
petercooper: Or even a 5 minute shower. About 2500 queries.
20after4: Yes, similarly in the US: I think the largest portion of the energy in the US is produced with gas fired power plants.
nightski: 1 chatgpt query is a little misleading though. Let's see an 8 hour full bore claude code agent session. Or maybe running 3 agents for several hours a day.
fwip: It also doesn't include the amortized cost of training the models, as far as I can tell. I believe I heard that training the models took more energy than total queries against that model, but I could be mistaken.
kimixa: I believe training currently costs significantly more than inference to all the current vendors, so I'd be surprised if it doesn't also use more power.And by the look of it, that'll be the norm pretty much forever - unless something fundamental about how models can be trained/updated, an "older" model loses value as it's knowledge becomes out of date, even if we no longer get improvements from other sources or techniques.But other things likely change based on "lifetimes" and usage patterns too - e.g. a large battery for an electric car may have a higher upfront energy cost in manufacturing than a small ICE + fuel tank, but presumably there's a mileage that the improved per-mile efficiency overcomes that, and then continues to gain with each additional mile.
jborichevskiy: Amazing stuff, have you written up a blog post? I could see a video being a fun format for this as well. Might help people develop the intuition for watts/power consumption in a different way
alnwlsn: Kind of, it's in bits and pieces here:https://hackaday.io/project/191731-practical-power-cyclingand is also a few years out of date
philipkglass: The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-use-a-lot-of
0x53: And wrote a great book: Not the End of the World
sien: Yep. It's a very good book and well worth a read.It's interesting to see how upset people are on Goodreads about that book:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145624737-not-the-end-of...The top reviews are mostly people angry with Ritchie for not being a catastrophist.
groundzeros2015: I don’t think the problem Is how many joules of energy are used. But the cost/burdnen to produce them. The costs and forms for each of these examples is very different making their energy use incomparabale.
csours: Do you have to run new electric transmission lines? Will you have to maintain those power lines?
mrguyorama: We once dammed basically every river in the nation because it was in vogue at the time.Maybe building overhead power lines for rail infrastructure should be the "hip" thing right now instead of AI. Maybe building oodles of solar power farms and batteries should be "hip"We built electrical infrastructure to the most remote residences just because we could and because it was an investment in our people. We directly funded our massive and formerly world class rail network because we could, and because it would pay off. We built a world class road network half as a make-work project, and it still pays dividends. We purchased Alaska, with no obvious reason. We built a space program to have slightly better nuclear weapons, and it's part of the reason we were so dominant in computer chips for so long.We have spent something like 40 trillion dollars over the past 25 years, and almost none of it on anything of real value. More than a little of that debt is just handouts to already rich people.We can build new electric transmission lines and I'm so tired of things that we absolutely 100% can do if we just demand it be done being somehow treated as a problem. America can afford infrastructure.
Sharlin: For reference it would be good to have per-passenger numbers for "sitting on a diesel bus", "sitting on an electric bus", "sitting on a tram", "sitting on a commuter train" as well.
20after4: The marginal cost of one extra passenger is going to be very nearly zero. The vast majority of the cost is just moving the bus / train / plane, and the overhead / inefficiencies in the system. I've seen somewhere the numbers for one passenger on trains and planes but I can't remember where that was. Just know it is a very very small amount for the added weight of one more passenger.
Waterluvian: Any sense what the efficiency ratio was for your setup?
nomel: Where I am at least, people using less power because power because power need to profit more, is wild.They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.Yes I'm angry, because I pay more in electric than most anywhere in the world. If I charge my care with LEVEL 2 using city provided charges, during the day, it's more expensive than gas.
NortySpock: Energy security is national security.Cheap electricity means you can do things that made "no sense" with expensive electricity. (e.g. smelt aluminum)Cheap electricity means you can underbid regions that have expensive electricity...As Technology Connections said, "Panels that cover your electrical needs for the next 25+ years? In the Midwest, we call that a good deal!"
noosphr: Most of those technologies also need uninterrupted power supplies. Something wind, solar and batteries for the next 50 years aren't.
oceanplexian: > internal combustion is hilariously inefficientIt's inefficient but not hilariously so. Modern ICE are quite amazing technology.Combined gas turbines (you know, the energy source that powers your electric car) are about 60% efficient for the really good ones, minus 5-7% transmission losses, minus 10-12% charging losses, minus 20% loss in cold climates, lands you at around 35-40% efficiency from fuel source to the wheel.The Atkinson-cycle engine in the Toyota Prius gets around 40% give or take some losses in the drivetrain. Electric have plenty of upsides, but for some people with cheap gas+high electric costs+cold climate you would honestly be better driving a hybrid.
CollinEMac: You can select gas heating vs electric heat pump. The heat pump looks to be about a third the cost of gas.
alnwlsn: I'm as curious as you to be honest - putting a strain gauge on the pedals for measuring mechanical power has been on my list for quite a while. My own (probably inaccurate) measurements right after the generator says I can get 60-70Wh in an hour, but I can get to 100Wh if I try harder. I have reason to believe my setup underestimates power because my ammeter clamps at 5A and I know I can peak over that on the down stroke of the pedal.I've seen numbers like 250W mechanical power for an average trained cyclist, so either my setup is rather inefficient, my measurements are off, or I'm going to find out that I'm nowhere near as strong as a real cyclist.
erelong: not sure I understand the petrol car using 3x as much energy as an EV... wouldn't it make sense to convert gasoline to electricity then? I presume that must not be as efficient as other ways to convert fuel to gasoline? (I understand the math is there but... I'm temporarily failing to get it)I think lists like these might be useful for energy audits and thinking about ways to make better use of energy
beejiu: 70% of the energy in a petrol car is lost as heat. Only around 30% or less of the energy actually propels the car. I imagine that's why there's a big difference.
djhworld: I think stuff like this really crystalises how people misunderstand how much energy stuff uses.My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.
taeric: The ridiculously dramatic drop in power we dedicate to lighting is one that is just tough for folks to internalize. As you said, used to, you could have ~10 lights in your house that would add to upwards of 1kw. Nowadays, you can have 50 lights and barely hit 500w. Just mind blowing how far we dropped energy on those.Same goes for televisions. Your modern TV is probably closer to the basic light bulbs before LEDs.I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.
quickthrowman: > I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.For commercial and industrial installations, VFDs have probably been the biggest efficiency gain, even moreso than lighting. Half of all electricity consumed is used by motors. Thank goodness for solid state power electronics!
MostlyStable: I turn LED lights off because of the difference in operational life, and I don't like changing bulbs. M GE bulbs say they have a rated lifetime of 13 years......at 3 hours of usage per day. So if they don't get turned off, then that 3 hours can very easily become 12, and now you are at a rated lifetime of ~4 years instead.
quickthrowman: A ‘standard’ (A19 shape, E26 base) 8W 800 lumen LED lamp costs around $5 and will use about $20 of energy over a 15,000 hour lifespan, assuming $0.15/kWh.That works out to around $0.035 per day for the lifespan of the lamp if you run it constantly for 24 hours a day, I wouldn’t waste time thinking about it. It’s an extra $10 over 12 years, you’re still using the energy.Investing in occupancy or vacancy sensor wall switches at $25 a piece would be the best option, then you don’t need to remember to turn the lights off!
quickthrowman: You can reject 4 watts of heat with 1 watt of electricity using vapor-compression refrigeration.You can get that up to 7 or 8 watts (or more!) per watt with evaporative cooling towers and vapor-compression combined.AFAIK you can’t move heat into somewhere using cooling towers, they only increase cooling efficiency.Heat pump heating is limited to around 4W of heat moved for every 1W of electricity, with the efficiency dropping as delta T drops (aka as it gets colder outside)You can generate 1 watt of heat with 1 watt of electricity and a resistive heater, they’re more or less 100% efficient.
adiabatichottub: Yeah I'm not sure that EV number maths out. That's 18kw at 60mph for 10 minutes. It sounds really low to me. Going 45mph on a 110lb eMoto with 180lb rider takes ~6kw.
skybrian: I see it has a ChatGPT median query, but for those of us using coding agents this isn't so relevant.Here's a post that makes an estimate:https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/> So, if I wanted to analogize the energy usage of my use of coding agents, it’s something like running the dishwasher an extra time each day, keeping an extra refrigerator, or skipping one drive to the grocery store in favor of biking there. To me, this is very different than, in Benjamin Todd’s words, “a terrible reason to avoid” this level of AI use. These are the sorts of things that would make me think twice.
scarmig: I end up shrugging. For a Claude Code power user, today, a day's use uses less electricity than a morning commute in an electric car. To say nothing of the costs to keep your workstation running, your building heated or cooled, etc. Not quite a rounding error, but a relatively minor component of overall usage.
SchemaLoad: At least for programming usage the power usage seems worth it. For starting up 1 million bots to argue with each other on facebook it's obviously a total waste.At any rate, the power usage will become more apparent when these products stop being subsidised, where power usage is being charged to the end user.
frankus: Every single ICE car driving down the highway is throwing away enough waste heat to heat a small apartment building on a freezing cold day.
harrall: In 1800, humanity generated 0.3 terrawatts (TW).Humankind generates 20 TW today. That’s a massive jump.And everyone wants more power. It determines what society can do.But 20 TW is a pittance in the grand scheme of the vast universe. Imagine if we were generating 100 TW or 1,000 TW.That’s why we talk about stuff like the Kardashev Scale — type 1, 2, 3 civilization type stuff.Electricity is not currently cheap. 20 TW is a pittance. One day humanity will reach a point where we’re generating 500 TW of power and questions of being able to smelt aluminum or make drinking water from brine seem almost like a joke. We will have flying construction drones 24/7 at that scale of energy production. At that point, we’ll be asking questions like “when will we have enough energy to terraform a planet?”Of course, there are side effects of greater power generation such as global warming… but once again, it’s a scale thing. The universe is vast.Slowly, we are getting there.
Waterluvian: Oh don’t sell yourself short. It can certainly be both! (:Thanks for sharing the details.
alnwlsn: All in good fun of course, it has to be healthier than watching Youtube just sitting around normally.
sitharus: > Combined gas turbines (you know, the energy source that powers your electric car)Not everywhere. My car charges off an average of 80% renewables (mostly hydro and geothermal), right now it's 95%.But it is definitely something you need to take in to account when purchasing, an EV isn't right for everyone.
einpoklum: Possibly, yes. But that seems to be worth it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification"Maintenance costs of the lines may be increased by electrification, but many systems claim lower costs due to reduced wear-and-tear on the track from lighter rolling stock. There are some additional maintenance costs associated with the electrical equipment around the track, such as power sub-stations and the catenary wire itself, but, if there is sufficient traffic, the reduced track and especially the lower engine maintenance and running costs exceed the costs of this maintenance significantly."
noosphr: This is something that always gets lost in these conversations.Whenever you do the real world calculation for what an electric cars CO2 profile looks like it turns out to be the same as a gasoline car unless your country is majority nuclear.
ramidarigaz: > Whenever you do the real world calculation for what an electric cars CO2 profile looks like it turns out to be the same as a gasoline car unless your country is majority nuclear.Not at all true: https://www.carboncounter.com/US-specific but you can even pick a state and it will use the generation mix of that state
noosphr: You charge your car at night.At night the sun doesn't shine.The mix is mostly coal or if you're lucky mostly gas.This is the type of bullshit I mean by doing real world calculations.
thih9: Some more things I’d like to see:- AI related values of course- elevators, escalators- traffic signals, street lights
adiabatichottub: Right, a lot of discussion about the energy economy of transportation would probably be better framed using units of people-miles or cargo-miles, per unit energy.
anjel: This needs a phantom power feature. How much does your phone charger consume when its it charging your phone but still pligged in. Whats the cost of your TV when its "off?"
alexfoo: Pumped hydro is one solution. You bank the excess wind/solar using gravitational potential energy and then draw on that whenever you need to.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
hnav: is that a sustained 20TW? Absolutely crazy that we're generating 60kwh per person daily. Where does it all go?
toomuchtodo: Lots of it is lost to heat with legacy fossil generation.
toomuchtodo: Ember Energy: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025> Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.What does this mean? It means we are most of the way there with solar and batteries alone, even if we need a bit of carbon based generation to bridge the gap while solar and battery deployments scale globally. Solar and batteries will only continue to get less expensive and better.Our World In Data: Installed solar energy capacity - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...Solar PV go brrr.
toomuchtodo: To note, we are almost at installing 1TW of solar PV every year globally.
csours: One may look at aluminum as a solid form of energy. In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
bob1029: One gram of finished 3nm packaged semiconductor is roughly equivalent to half a kilogram of refined aluminum in terms of energy cost. If you want to spend a lot of energy for not much mass, photolithography is fantastic.
frankus: The electric shower also seemed pretty optimistic. I live in an area with about 50°F/10°C ground temperature and my 14.4 kW water heater can just keep a relatively efficient shower head flowing at a comfortable temperature.
lokar: Heat pump or resistive?
GuB-42: Did you try charging an e-bike with your contraption?I don't know what you can take of this, maybe you can see it as advance pedaling, or to get a feel for energy conversion losses. Anyways, it is the kind of harmlessly stupid idea that I would want to try just because I could.
zymhan: What a ridiculous idea, I love it.
OldSchool: Kind of a stretch to suggest that an internal combustion vehicle requires 3x more "energy" to move it than an equally physics-burdened (weight, friction, etc) electric vehicle...This is only "true" if the energy stored in the vehicle's battery got there without any relevant conversion inefficiency; If those joules came from a gas-fired plant, overall efficiency is only about 35%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.
lokar: I charge during the day, from my rooftop PV panels. Over a year we are net negative on grid consumption.
OldSchool: IF the joules of energy in your EV battery came from gas-fired or coal-powered generation, a similar amount (~60%) was simply dumped somewhere else.
eru: Why does their air con take 1kW to run? I wonder how much below ambient they are setting their temperature, and how old that aircon is and how bad the insulation?The washing machine seems also inefficient.
dmd: Where does that 0.3 TW figure come from? That seems awfully high.
eru: > They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.Sounds more like you guys should be lowering barriers to entry, not setting up a global non-profit cartel.
eru: Have you heard of batteries?
eru: You have pretty much the same heat losses with nuclear, or anything else where you heat water to turn a turbine.
eru: I love Technology Connections, but he has no idea what discounting is in economics. Or at least he writes his videos as if he doesn't.
michaelt: > I've seen numbers like 250W mechanical power for an average trained cyclist, so either my setup is rather inefficient, my measurements are off, or I'm going to find out that I'm nowhere near as strong as a real cyclist.Cyclists' power output is sometimes reported as a 'power curve' - a chart with power on the vertical axis, and duration-of-that-power on the horizontal axis.For example, a cyclist might be be able to produce 500W for 15 seconds; 350W for 1 minute; 270W for 10 minutes; 200W for 1 hour; and 150W for 5 hours.
ForHackernews: Doesn't show the comparative energy waste of bitcoin?This source[0] says> One Bitcoin now requires 854,400 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce. For comparison, the average U.S. home consumes about 10,500 kWh per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, April 2025, meaning that mining a single Bitcoin in 2026 uses as much electricity as 81.37 years of residential energy use.[0] https://www.compareforexbrokers.com/us/bitcoin-mining/
SebRollen: About 1,200 kWh per transaction, currently[0]. I wrote about this back in 2022, when it was about 2,200 kWh per transaction[1][0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [1]: https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/
empath75: LLM calls are getting cheaper every day.
recursive: Are they getting cheaper faster than their usage is increasing?
recursive: Beside the point, but 10,000 Wh per hour is kind of an insane unit. It's 10,000 watts. Or 10 kW if you're really into the whole brevity thing.
michaelt: > Why does their air con take 1kW to run?The author is in the UK, so they probably looked at a product like [1] which is "ideal for rooms 16-26m²" and has cooling power consumption of 1005W.Residential air conditioning in the UK often involves small, noisy units that are only used for a few weeks at the height of summer. They'll have a thermostat built in, sure, but the user will eagerly turn them off when the room's cool just to get some quiet.[1] https://www.argos.co.uk/product/7623899
j16sdiz: But that's not an apple-to-apple comparison.Like, if you "save energy" by not driving a petrol car, you can't "use the same energy" on electric car, or lighting.. not even prower a generator.They are not interchangeable.. But this chart encourage us to think them as the same.
nomel: True. I suggested global because it allows for scale with copy/paste designs, where things like nuclear could actually become viable.Where I am, we have a solidly aligned state government. There's no concept of consequences for anyone in power. They're paid by the local companies to pass laws to make competition legal. Some are investors. All corrupt. That's what you get with a solid political alignment.
appreciatorBus: Yup. In my experience, average non-nerd folk very very little feel for this stuff. I suspect some believe energy consumption of phone vs car is basically a toss up.
AngryData: If everyone had their own turbine to generate electricity from gasoline then it would be. But from a central power plant there are transmission losses which cuts out a lot of the potential efficiency increase. The obvious upfront and maintenance cost of everybody owning a personal turbine though makes that method kind of iffy.
bethekidyouwant: This means you don’t take your car to work, which isn’t typical
ropable: It gets across just how ridiculously energy-dense liquid petroleum fuels are.
charlie90: Its always interesting how complex electronics uses little energy. But its the simple stuff like heating water or turning a motors that use magnitudes more.Physically, it makes sense, but its sort of counter intuitive in terms of utility. You might imagine the tools with the most utility use the most energy.I think thats how many people think of it.
noosphr: Yes, we just need to build the mountains first.
frankus: I wish we did more e.g. district heating with that waste heat in the US.
ssl-3: I had this problem once with a water heater: Get in shower, and things are nice and hot. But the temperature decreased rapidly, and immediately.It turned out that it had been plumbed backwards.
frankus: This one is resistive (tiny and cheap to purchase) but will be just an emergency-backup shower once my home renovations are done.The house is getting a split-system air-to-water heat pump with an indirect tank for domestic hot water, so it should cut that down substantially (the unit maxes out at around 3kW input but likely will run longer to recover/preheat).
no-name-here: We need an equivalent for water as well! Almost none of the public has any idea about water use across the industrial, agricultural, and residential sectors...
no-name-here: 1. Your prediction is that soon browing the web for a few hours is going use >30,000+ Wh (based on the "equivalent" you mentioned)? (For comparison to that 30,000+ figure, the energy use from using a laptop for a few hours is 75 Wh, all per OP source.)2. > most of this will be done just to sell more adsAre you predicting that the value of ads is going to increase by a number of magnitudes? Because 30,000+ Wh of electricity has a quite significant cost, and even a video ad currently only earns pennies, so I'm trying to imagine how the math would work in this scenario?
Garlef: I guess that's much harder: Those who measure correctly are likely also interested in saving.
Hamuko: Thought the same thing. I think I measured my gaming PC to idle at like 70–100 watts. Obviously an average office PC would be lower, but you also need to add on the energy for the monitor, which seems to start at around 15 watts for some basic monitors, and I imagine that's not at high brightness.
antisthenes: That means relatively dirty combustion near where people live. The population density around fossil fuel power plants tends to be pretty low in wealthy countries.You can't pump hot water the same distance you can transmit electricity on HVDC towers.
DuckConference: Most clothes washer cycles are about an hour, is the motor really averaging 800 watts over that time?
londons_explore: Interestingly, the latest generation of LED lights are so efficient that it makes little financial sense to bother having a light switch. 330 lumens per watt from recent Phillips bulbs!The cost of having an electrician wire that switch is probably more than a little 2.5 watt light will use in it's lifespan - particularly when you account for the fact lights in hallways are probably in use most of the time anyway.Add in the effort of switching the light switch a few times a day for many years and it's certainly the case! Or the risk of fumbling in the dark for a light switch at the far end of a room or in a house you aren't familiar with.Obviously you might still want to turn it off for maintenance, but you have the breaker for that.
kkfx: Nice! A small note: airfryer tend to cycle on/off much less then slow-air/static ovens so they consume way more per unit time, gas ovens never fully stay "off" when operating, they just reduce the flames.
zahlman: What if you want to turn it off to have darkness?
keybored: My electricity provider has a rough breakdown. Which I was kind of incventivized to look at because of money. Heating is the big one. The electricity bills are seasonal.Next.I can do my laundry at night because the electricity is cheaper.. oh wait I can’t. That’s apparently unsafe. So I have to do it in the evening. Okay. I’m not going to move my whole small freetime evening around to save a buck on the half-evening long wash cycle. So nevermind that.The nagging about turning off all the lights were always a consumer blaming ritual that doesn’t matter.
Symbiote: [delayed]
Symbiote: The EU Energy label on the first (more expensive) washing machine I looked at said 440Wh for a cycle, so 800Wh for an average one isn't unreasonable.
ZeroGravitas: The upstream energy costs of supplying fossil fuels can also be counted. They add about 1/4 or 1/5th of the total in what are called "Well to wheel comparison". The comparison in the article is "tank to wheel'It's not a direct analogue to energy but CO2 emissions per km are roughly 4 times lower for an EV charged on the EU grid in 2025, well to wheel.
Sharlin: Yes, I know, and marginal numbers would also be great to have. But just the naive cost of energy per passenger-kilometer averaged would be good to see, given that it too would be much less than that of a private car.
tmnvix: And then look at how little distance you need to travel to produce 1kg of CO2.
wink: I think you simply can't predict any number without really measuring it.Ryzen + GPU + 1h of gaming, but 3 screens attached.still a "desktop computer" - stuff in the browser can spike GPU wattage, but I don't think it will be meaningfully different over several hours of true idle..My problem is more like: I could measure that, but I'd have to recable everything to have the power meter behind the power strip with just PC + screens... which I will probably do at some point, but it involves redoing 50% of the cables in this room.
pcchristie: This is wrong, and by a long way.
namibj: Maybe today, but basically everywhere south of Canada solar is so high ROI that it's just a question of time before sunlight hours have electricity so much cheaper that the primary daytime parking locations become the favored (slow-)charging spots.For you to prefer charging there your employer only has to charge you less during the day than your utility charges during the night, so the day/night rate arbitrage can easily pay for the metering hardware and installation (at the next opportunity to install without having to dig the parking lot up just for the chargers), with the rest being profit to incentivize the managers to install/offer this.
eru: Vote with your feet (and wallet), and support anything that makes people voting with their feet easier.It's the McDonald's theory of policy: you don't vote on their burgers at the ballot box, you just go to Burger King or get a doner kebab, if you don't like it.
lesuorac: What discount rate are you using?Solar has one of the lowest capital costs [1] so the discounting works in it's favor. And then the non-discountable operating costs also works in its favor since the fuel supply (light) is free.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
lokar: I produced over 400kWh last week, in February.
supertrope: Switching mode power supplies use milliwatts when there's no load. Appliances are usually 3W or less when off as they need to keep the IR sensor turned off. The best appliances are <1W.
Leno1225: Yeah, or water towers. No need to play god here.
supertrope: Pumped hydro energy storage relies on the cheapness of water and existing geology. If you have to build the chambers instead of damming a river it's too expensive. Most of the good spots to have a reservoir are already used. If you have to manufacture the bulk media instead of just using water it's too expensive.
quickthrowman: Gasoline engines are around 30-35% efficient, the rest is lost as heat. That goes for whether they’re spinning an alternator as part of an engine-generator set or just moving a vehicle.You can’t get more than 35-40% efficiency so converting to electricity is a wash, you lose the energy to heat no matter what.Also, the chart does not take into account how the electricity for the EV is generated, it would be just as inefficient as the gasoline car if the electricity was generated by burning hydrocarbons, but that detail is left out.
megaman821: To get those types of numbers you would have to be charging from a grid that is nearly 100% coal. Real grids heavily favor EVs.
quickthrowman: Yeah I probably should’ve mentioned that the more solar/wind/hydro you use to charge an EV, the more the efficiency goes up, thanks.
cogman10: Yup. It's why even in fairly red states like my own (Idaho) solar, wind, and battery are going up everywhere. Even without significant subsidies the economics are really good for renewables.They'd be even better if we didn't have extreme tariffs on China.That's actually what's convinced me that renewables are a better choice than nuclear. I still like nuclear, but renewables are just so much easier and faster to deploy while being a lot cheaper. To make nuclear competitive requires regulatory changes along with a government that's simply willing to tell it's NIMBY citizens YIMBY.Government literally has to get in the way of renewable deployments at this point to stop them.
cogman10: Do you have a link to the 300 lumens per watt lighting? I'm curious.I think that mostly only applies bulbs without inverters.
cogman10: The wind blows, water flows, nuclear glows. Further, demand's at lows.In my state (idaho) at night the power mixture is primarily renewable/clean because of this.
londons_explore: Philips UltraEfficient LED | Energy-saving lighting solution | Philips lighting https://share.google/lptcUJwHZWOQP1JMJThey are direct AC bulbs, no inverter needed. They do have smoothing capacitors so they don't flicker
dr_dshiv: My point is that Claude might easily be about 50x more energy intensive than normal ChatGPT prompting.
ben_w: > Something wind, solar and batteries for the next 50 years aren't.False. If you'd stopped before the "and" you would have been correct, though.Batteries are really cheap now, and supply of batteries is growing basically as fast as people can get the investments and permissions for the inputs and the factories.
cogman10: Which of these bulbs? The highest efficiency I'm seeing poking around is 230L/W (Don't get me wrong, still very impressive)
dataspencer: I find this at best non-enlightening and at worst misleading because there is no consistent unit of comparison: 10 minutes here, 1 hour there, 10 miles somewhere else. That renders the visual comparison of a bar chart pretty uninteresting, no?
eru: Yeah, looking at the text at the bottom, I looks like they took the peak power usage of their AC, not the steady state.
eru: Yes, the tariffs on Chinese PV and EV are really crazy.Well, at least we don't believe in tariffs where I chose to live.
eru: No, the problem is he speaks like he doesn't understand discounting at all. He treats a recurring revenue (or energy) as fundamentally different from a one time gain, as opposed to something you funge via discounting rates.You are one level ahead: I'm more than happy to debate what discounting rates you should be using!
