Thursday, 18 December 2014

Average Person in the UK Using 10% Less Electricity Than Five Years Ago

The rise of the electrically powered gadget is unstoppable.

You most likely have a 40 inch flat screen TV, maybe two. It might have games consoles, PVRs, cable or satellite boxes attached to it. Your smartphone(s) needs charging every day, you may even have a smart watch tethered to it that needs charging too. You may have laptops, desktop PCs, tablets and their associated broadband routers and NAS drives all blinking away 24 hours a day. Then there's white goods like fridges, dishwashers, washers, tumble dryers etc.

So you might think that the rate at which we are using electricity is increasing along with the number of electrical gadgets, but you'd be wrong. According to figures from the Energy Saving Trust published on the BBC News website this morning, the average person in the UK is in fact using 10% less electricity than five years ago:

The reason is that modern appliances are massively more efficient than their older counterparts. An LED backlit TV will consume much less electricity than an old CRT tube TV did. Energy saving light bulbs consume a fraction of what an incandescence bulb did. New fridges are often A++ or A+++ rated appliances for energy efficiency where old fridges were B or C rated.

This is an ongoing technology success story, and we should continue to seek efficiencies wherever we can to continue this trend.

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