8 ms·

Does that use a lot of energy?

233 points by speckx 8mo ago

quotemstr 8mo ago
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. 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. If you propose policy X and you can't get X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the system is broken. Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost we must account. We should have a prior that costs are accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals. What specific costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X" is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted externality. That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with fungible commodities like kWh.
- spencerflem 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they affect you directly?
    - spencerflem 8mo ago
      Climate change and pollution, and yes they do.
- srdjanr 8mo ago
  Sure, by your own argument, you should somehow increase the price of people telling other people what to avoid spending money on
- mltvc 8mo ago
  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)?
  - oceanplexian 8mo ago
    The idea that you would be worried about how many electrons you use and it's relationship to climate change is on its face kind of ridiculous. It's like worrying about how many times you personally ordered Chinese food affects the price of Diesel fuel in India. It's an absurd leap of logic, and the parent is right to call out these arguments which are almost always emotional.
- burkaman 8mo ago
  > 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 appeals Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.
- sixo 8mo ago
  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.
  - quotemstr 8mo ago
    Of course I'd use energy differently if it cost more. If I had to generate energy by pedaling a bike, I'd consider it costly indeed. So what? Energy doesn't cost as much as it would if I had to manually generate it, and who are you to say allocation decisions made under that regiment are good and ones made under ours are bad? Wouldn't your argument also compel us to use steel as if it were gold? Salt as if it were saffron?
  - stdbrouw 8mo ago
    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.
bena 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  > 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 transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
  - spencerflem 8mo ago
    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”
    - jeffbee 8mo ago
      It isn't all new capacity. The popular discourse hardly ever mentions it but AI is a small fraction of why we need new datacenters and the bulk of the demand is driven by general IT needs, particularly consolidation of small, grossly wasteful corporate data racks into vastly more efficient cloud services. Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/usa-electricity-growth https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/usa-electricity-growth
philipkglass 8mo ago
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 https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-use-a-lot-of
- measurablefunc 8mo ago
  Who pays for their research?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - philipkglass 8mo ago
    She's employed by Our World In Data. She is also a published author of printed books. Her substack does not have paid subscriptions enabled (or at least it did not as of last summer; see this post [1]). Our World In Data is funded by donations: https://ourworldindata.org/funding https://ourworldindata.org/funding [1] https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-substack https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-substack
  - keybored 8mo ago
    What narratives and framings does a blog post or “visualization tool” serve? What does their overall work? What’s their recurring ideological slant? Could be wholesome and altruistic. Or it could be something else. Someone can be an honest ideologue (useful idiot) without being directly funded by someone shady.
- 0x53 8mo ago
  And wrote a great book: Not the End of the World
janalsncm 8mo ago
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.
- creeble 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    During training it’s running at around 410. But yeah idling at 450 would be pretty crazy.
  - wink 8mo ago
    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.
medi8r 8mo ago
Glad it has AI. AI has nothing on cars. Save a car trip a week even if electric is way more than 10k queries.
- nikcub 8mo ago
  chatgpt use should be in the default set since energy use of ai is so often in the news now - and more often in social media
- nightski 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      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.
- petercooper 8mo ago
  Or even a 5 minute shower. About 2500 queries.
jwilliams 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  When one gets in the weeds on EVs or 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. Edit: another important point is that the "cost" to acquire gasoline is only the very end of the process. The energy has already been gathered, stored, and most of the processing is complete. Our cost (in money and energy) to "make" gasoline is really just gathering it. This is why the comparison to renewables is often a hard sell, it's just apples to oranges. Gasoline started on third base, renewables are batting from the plate. Some of the internal combustion enthusiasts are holding up e-fuels or synthetic fuels as the solution but then we have to pay for the entire energy gathering and processing pipeline and still be using a conversion method that's not at all efficient. It's the worst of both worlds.
  - Terr_ 8mo ago
    The tyranny if the rocket/horse equation: You need energy to carry the energy you need to move. There's a good reason so many sprawling civilizations of the past involve leveraging wind-power for transport.
  - dylan604 8mo ago
    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?
    - jfengel 8mo ago
      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.
dr_dshiv 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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-2025 https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
  - recursive 8mo ago
    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.
  - dr_dshiv 8mo ago
    My point is that Claude might easily be about 50x more energy intensive than normal ChatGPT prompting.
    - stratos123 8mo ago
      A coding agent runs near-constantly, so of course it'd require a lot more compute than running even, say, a multi-minute query with a thinking model every hour. How much exactly is pretty hard to calculate because it requires some guesswork, but... For a long input of n tokens from a model with N active parameters, the cost should scale as O(N n^2) (this is due to computing attention - for non-massive n, the O(N n) term is bigger, which is why API costs per token are fixed until a certain point and then start to rise). From the estimates from [1], it's around 40Wh for n=100k, N=100B. I multiply by 2.5 to account for Opus probably being ~2.5x larger than gpt-4o, and also multiply by 2 to pessimistically assume we're always close to Opus's soft context limit of 200k (it's possible to get a bigger context for extra cost, but I suspect people compact aggresively to not have to use it). That gets me 7.2J/t, which at a rough throughput estimate of 20t/s gives me power of 144W. Like a powerful CPU or a mediocre GPU, and still orders of magnitude lower than a car. [1] https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use#appendix https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...
loganp 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
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/ https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/
- philipkglass 8mo ago
  Her github is here: https://github.com/HannahRitchie https://github.com/HannahRitchie
  - nikcub 8mo ago
    thank you!
Sharlin 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.
  - Sharlin 8mo ago
    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.
- adiabatichottub 8mo ago
  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.
jfengel 8mo ago
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.
- Rebelgecko 8mo ago
  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)
  - CollinEMac 8mo ago
    You can select gas heating vs electric heat pump. The heat pump looks to be about a third the cost of gas.
- lm28469 8mo ago
  Yeah without knowing the climate, temperature delta and insulation these values don't really mean much.
- quickthrowman 8mo ago
  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.
DoneWithAllThat 8mo ago
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?
djhworld 8mo ago
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.
- MostlyStable 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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!
    - MostlyStable 8mo ago
      It's not a cost thing, I just don't like changing bulbs. I find it annoying, and with enough bulbs, when the lifetime is down to 4 years, you are doing one every few months on average. But yes, I have thought about presence sensors. I'd really only need 3-4 to cover the primary areas where lights get turned on and not off (if I don't do it). I just haven't gotten around to it
  - wvbdmp 8mo ago
    But now you’re using up switch cycles!!!
skybrian 8mo ago
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/ 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.
- mikepavone 8mo ago
  I'm not sure it's even a particularly relevant comparison to an hour of use of various other electronic devices. I'm sure the median user is running a lot fewer queries than a Claude Code power-user, but I would guess it's still more than one in a typical session.
- scarmig 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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.
- Otterly99 8mo ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I also was under the impression that queries cost were mostly meaningless, but it seemed only is true for fresh sessions and short queries. I have to say, the result is less dramatic than I expected but still more significant for heavy users (such as myself).
alnwlsn 8mo ago
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 sleep Also 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.
- nomel 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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!"
jolmg 8mo ago
> Desktop computer - 1 hour of use - 50 Wh That seems low...
- bpye 8mo ago
  50W average doesn't seem absurd, peak power is going to be an order of magnitude higher, but computers are often running pretty close to idle...
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- Hamuko 8mo ago
  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.
ForHackernews 8mo ago
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/ https://www.compareforexbrokers.com/us/bitcoin-mining/
- SebRollen 8mo ago
  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]. Edit: made a chart with this data, but adding in a bitcoin transaction[2] [0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [1]: https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/ https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/ [2]: https://imgur.com/a/ggAGylW https://imgur.com/a/ggAGylW
ssl-3 8mo ago
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.php?t=epmt_5_3 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
- philipkglass 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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.) --- edit: I now see a note at the very bottom stating that it is using an assumed "$0.17 for electricity". $0.17 per kWh is plenty close enough for rough figurin', so I'd like to take this opportunity to retract my previous complaint.
    - philipkglass 8mo ago
      Yes, for the petrol car it's showing primary energy from petrol (gasoline). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#Gasoline_gallon_equivalent_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#Gas... Assuming 33.41 kWh/gallon it takes about 0.3 gallons to get 10 kWh, which costs $0.97 at a pump price of $3.23 per gallon.
RobinL 8mo ago
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/ https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy_usage/
- csours 8mo ago
  One may look at aluminum as a solid form of energy. In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
  - bob1029 8mo ago
    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.
groundzeros2015 8mo ago
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.
rtcode_io 8mo ago
Aa Digital ID is getting forced on the public, it is dangerous, almost traitorous to demand/suggest ordinary citizens need to care about energy efficiency to the point of giving up their freedoms/conveniences! Focus your thinking on solving/promoting energy production instead!
davidw 8mo ago
A bicycle continues to be the most efficient means of transportation: https://bsky.app/profile/davidho.bsky.social/post/3mga7uhxnds2a https://bsky.app/profile/davidho.bsky.social/post/3mga7uhxnd... Even an eBike is way, way more efficient than a gas-powered car, and causes orders of magnitude less wear and tear on the road.
- frankus 8mo ago
  The number I guesstimated for my e-scooter is about 500 miles per dollar of electricity.
keybored 8mo ago
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.
- lokar 8mo ago
  Switch to heat pumps for everything
- Symbiote 8mo ago
  I often do my laundry at night, what's the problem? I set it to finish roughly when I intend to get up. Turning the lights off made a lot of sense in the 1990s and earlier, when each bulb was 60W.
thefifthsetpin 8mo ago
I clicked-through on one of the sources (a blog post on "ohmaticelectrical"), and the website is either hacked or is just really scummy. Here's what I was greeted with: https://imgur.com/a/https-ohmaticelectrical-co-uk-scams-OmLx2TC https://imgur.com/a/https-ohmaticelectrical-co-uk-scams-OmLx... (The scammer didn't actually manage to put anything in my clipboard, so I'm not sure what they were hoping I'd run.)
erelong 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.
- quickthrowman 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      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.
- adiabatichottub 8mo ago
  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.
anjel 8mo ago
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?"
- supertrope 8mo ago
  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.
thih9 8mo ago
Some more things I’d like to see: - AI related values of course - elevators, escalators - traffic signals, street lights
deepsun 8mo ago
> Gas heating (Single room) (1 hour of use) -- 2700Wh. Wow dude, your room is very-very poorly insulated. Having a 2700W heater turned on constantly just for one room is a lot. If it's 0C outside and 20C inside, a typical room should not lose more than 500W, but better be in 200--400W range .
OldSchool 8mo ago
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 35-40%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.
- ZeroGravitas 8mo ago
  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.
theodorejb 8mo ago
In my petrol-powered Prius I average 52 MPG, so at the current price of gas ($2.60/gallon) I pay $0.50 to drive 10 miles - less than the listed cost to drive an electric car the same distance.
eru 8mo ago
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. My dryer is also a lot more efficient than theirs, at least if Miele's app is to be believed about how much it uses each cycle.
- michaelt 8mo ago
  > 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 https://www.argos.co.uk/product/7623899
  - eru 8mo ago
    Yeah, looking at the text at the bottom, I looks like they took the peak power usage of their AC, not the steady state.
sholladay 8mo ago
0.3Wh for the median ChatGPT query seems optimistic to me. It looks like it’s based on a quote from Sam Altman. The GPU alone is probably pulling close to 0.2Wh per second.
charlie90 8mo ago
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.
no-name-here 8mo ago
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...
- Garlef 8mo ago
  I guess that's much harder: Those who measure correctly are likely also interested in saving.
DuckConference 8mo ago
Most clothes washer cycles are about an hour, is the motor really averaging 800 watts over that time?
- Symbiote 8mo ago
  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.
londons_explore 8mo ago
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.
- zahlman 8mo ago
  What if you want to turn it off to have darkness?
  - zparky 8mo ago
    engineer vs end user
  - Leno1225 8mo ago
    Classic example of “we figured out we could, didn’t consider if we should”
- cogman10 8mo ago
  Do you have a link to the 300 lumens per watt lighting? I'm curious. I think that mostly only applies bulbs without inverters.
  - londons_explore 8mo ago
    Philips UltraEfficient LED | Energy-saving lighting solution | Philips lighting https://share.google/lptcUJwHZWOQP1JMJ https://share.google/lptcUJwHZWOQP1JMJ They are direct AC bulbs, no inverter needed. They do have smoothing capacitors so they don't flicker, and I think a slight redesign of the drive circuitry could add ~10% more efficiency...
kkfx 8mo ago
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.
fritzo 8mo ago
How does it make sense to compare renewable vs non-renewable energy sources? Where does that electric car's energy come from? Suppose the electric car's energy is solar. Then driving the electric car consumes zero barrels of oil, and so is infinitely more renewable than the petrol car. Or how efficient is the electric car at capturing available energy? Maybe the petrol car is 20% efficient at capturing available oil reserve energy. But the electric car is like 1e-30% efficient at capturing available solar output. Incomparable.
sha16 8mo ago
I wanted to write an app like this. Here's what I think would be useful for some people to compare: more checkboxes that represent typical daily activities like "how much energy does driving to the grocery store (x miles away) use" or "how much energy does idling in my car for 30 mins use", "how much energy does riding the bus/trolly/etc use", "how much energy does keeping my place warm vs kind of chilly", and also "how much energy does a cargo ship use to cross the pacific" or "how much energy does it take to source, manufacture, package, transport, and stock a pack of bubblegum". I think that would help people realize the largest components of their footprint and also how it relates globally.
dataspencer 8mo ago
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?

233 points by speckx 8mo ago

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. 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. If you propose policy X and you can't get X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the system is broken. Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost we must account. We should have a prior that costs are accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals. What specific costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X" is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted externality. That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with fungible commodities like kWh.

spencerflem 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  Which specific externalities are you concerned about? Do they affect you directly?
  - spencerflem 8mo ago
    Climate change and pollution, and yes they do.
srdjanr 8mo ago
Sure, by your own argument, you should somehow increase the price of people telling other people what to avoid spending money on
mltvc 8mo ago
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)?
- oceanplexian 8mo ago
  The idea that you would be worried about how many electrons you use and it's relationship to climate change is on its face kind of ridiculous. It's like worrying about how many times you personally ordered Chinese food affects the price of Diesel fuel in India. It's an absurd leap of logic, and the parent is right to call out these arguments which are almost always emotional.
burkaman 8mo ago
> 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 appeals Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.
sixo 8mo ago
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.
- quotemstr 8mo ago
  Of course I'd use energy differently if it cost more. If I had to generate energy by pedaling a bike, I'd consider it costly indeed. So what? Energy doesn't cost as much as it would if I had to manually generate it, and who are you to say allocation decisions made under that regiment are good and ones made under ours are bad? Wouldn't your argument also compel us to use steel as if it were gold? Salt as if it were saffron?
- stdbrouw 8mo ago
  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.

bena 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
> 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 transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
- spencerflem 8mo ago
  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”
  - jeffbee 8mo ago
    It isn't all new capacity. The popular discourse hardly ever mentions it but AI is a small fraction of why we need new datacenters and the bulk of the demand is driven by general IT needs, particularly consolidation of small, grossly wasteful corporate data racks into vastly more efficient cloud services. Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/usa-electricity-growth https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/usa-electricity-growth

philipkglass 8mo ago

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 https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-use-a-lot-of

measurablefunc 8mo ago
Who pays for their research?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- philipkglass 8mo ago
  She's employed by Our World In Data. She is also a published author of printed books. Her substack does not have paid subscriptions enabled (or at least it did not as of last summer; see this post [1]). Our World In Data is funded by donations: https://ourworldindata.org/funding https://ourworldindata.org/funding [1] https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-substack https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-substack
- keybored 8mo ago
  What narratives and framings does a blog post or “visualization tool” serve? What does their overall work? What’s their recurring ideological slant? Could be wholesome and altruistic. Or it could be something else. Someone can be an honest ideologue (useful idiot) without being directly funded by someone shady.
0x53 8mo ago
And wrote a great book: Not the End of the World

janalsncm 8mo ago

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.

creeble 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  During training it’s running at around 410. But yeah idling at 450 would be pretty crazy.
- wink 8mo ago
  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.

medi8r 8mo ago

Glad it has AI. AI has nothing on cars. Save a car trip a week even if electric is way more than 10k queries.

nikcub 8mo ago
chatgpt use should be in the default set since energy use of ai is so often in the news now - and more often in social media
nightski 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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.
petercooper 8mo ago
Or even a 5 minute shower. About 2500 queries.

jwilliams 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
When one gets in the weeds on EVs or 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. Edit: another important point is that the "cost" to acquire gasoline is only the very end of the process. The energy has already been gathered, stored, and most of the processing is complete. Our cost (in money and energy) to "make" gasoline is really just gathering it. This is why the comparison to renewables is often a hard sell, it's just apples to oranges. Gasoline started on third base, renewables are batting from the plate. Some of the internal combustion enthusiasts are holding up e-fuels or synthetic fuels as the solution but then we have to pay for the entire energy gathering and processing pipeline and still be using a conversion method that's not at all efficient. It's the worst of both worlds.
- Terr_ 8mo ago
  The tyranny if the rocket/horse equation: You need energy to carry the energy you need to move. There's a good reason so many sprawling civilizations of the past involve leveraging wind-power for transport.
- dylan604 8mo ago
  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?
  - jfengel 8mo ago
    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.

dr_dshiv 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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-2025 https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
- recursive 8mo ago
  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.
- dr_dshiv 8mo ago
  My point is that Claude might easily be about 50x more energy intensive than normal ChatGPT prompting.
  - stratos123 8mo ago
    A coding agent runs near-constantly, so of course it'd require a lot more compute than running even, say, a multi-minute query with a thinking model every hour. How much exactly is pretty hard to calculate because it requires some guesswork, but... For a long input of n tokens from a model with N active parameters, the cost should scale as O(N n^2) (this is due to computing attention - for non-massive n, the O(N n) term is bigger, which is why API costs per token are fixed until a certain point and then start to rise). From the estimates from [1], it's around 40Wh for n=100k, N=100B. I multiply by 2.5 to account for Opus probably being ~2.5x larger than gpt-4o, and also multiply by 2 to pessimistically assume we're always close to Opus's soft context limit of 200k (it's possible to get a bigger context for extra cost, but I suspect people compact aggresively to not have to use it). That gets me 7.2J/t, which at a rough throughput estimate of 20t/s gives me power of 144W. Like a powerful CPU or a mediocre GPU, and still orders of magnitude lower than a car. [1] https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use#appendix https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...

loganp 8mo ago

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 8mo ago

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/ https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/

philipkglass 8mo ago
Her github is here: https://github.com/HannahRitchie https://github.com/HannahRitchie
- nikcub 8mo ago
  thank you!

Sharlin 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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.
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  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.
adiabatichottub 8mo ago
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.

jfengel 8mo ago

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.

Rebelgecko 8mo ago
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)
- CollinEMac 8mo ago
  You can select gas heating vs electric heat pump. The heat pump looks to be about a third the cost of gas.
lm28469 8mo ago
Yeah without knowing the climate, temperature delta and insulation these values don't really mean much.
quickthrowman 8mo ago
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.

DoneWithAllThat 8mo ago

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?

djhworld 8mo ago

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.

MostlyStable 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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!
  - MostlyStable 8mo ago
    It's not a cost thing, I just don't like changing bulbs. I find it annoying, and with enough bulbs, when the lifetime is down to 4 years, you are doing one every few months on average. But yes, I have thought about presence sensors. I'd really only need 3-4 to cover the primary areas where lights get turned on and not off (if I don't do it). I just haven't gotten around to it
- wvbdmp 8mo ago
  But now you’re using up switch cycles!!!

skybrian 8mo ago

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/ 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.

mikepavone 8mo ago
I'm not sure it's even a particularly relevant comparison to an hour of use of various other electronic devices. I'm sure the median user is running a lot fewer queries than a Claude Code power-user, but I would guess it's still more than one in a typical session.
scarmig 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.
Otterly99 8mo ago
Thanks for sharing this. I also was under the impression that queries cost were mostly meaningless, but it seemed only is true for fresh sessions and short queries. I have to say, the result is less dramatic than I expected but still more significant for heavy users (such as myself).

alnwlsn 8mo ago

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 sleep Also 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.

nomel 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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!"

jolmg 8mo ago

> Desktop computer - 1 hour of use - 50 Wh That seems low...

bpye 8mo ago
50W average doesn't seem absurd, peak power is going to be an order of magnitude higher, but computers are often running pretty close to idle...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
Hamuko 8mo ago
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.

ForHackernews 8mo ago

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/ https://www.compareforexbrokers.com/us/bitcoin-mining/

SebRollen 8mo ago
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]. Edit: made a chart with this data, but adding in a bitcoin transaction[2] [0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [1]: https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/ https://rollen.io/blog/crypto-climate/ [2]: https://imgur.com/a/ggAGylW https://imgur.com/a/ggAGylW

ssl-3 8mo ago

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.php?t=epmt_5_3 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

philipkglass 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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.) --- edit: I now see a note at the very bottom stating that it is using an assumed "$0.17 for electricity". $0.17 per kWh is plenty close enough for rough figurin', so I'd like to take this opportunity to retract my previous complaint.
  - philipkglass 8mo ago
    Yes, for the petrol car it's showing primary energy from petrol (gasoline). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#Gasoline_gallon_equivalent_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#Gas... Assuming 33.41 kWh/gallon it takes about 0.3 gallons to get 10 kWh, which costs $0.97 at a pump price of $3.23 per gallon.

RobinL 8mo ago

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/ https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy_usage/

csours 8mo ago
One may look at aluminum as a solid form of energy. In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
- bob1029 8mo ago
  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.

groundzeros2015 8mo ago

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.

rtcode_io 8mo ago

Aa Digital ID is getting forced on the public, it is dangerous, almost traitorous to demand/suggest ordinary citizens need to care about energy efficiency to the point of giving up their freedoms/conveniences! Focus your thinking on solving/promoting energy production instead!

davidw 8mo ago

A bicycle continues to be the most efficient means of transportation: https://bsky.app/profile/davidho.bsky.social/post/3mga7uhxnds2a https://bsky.app/profile/davidho.bsky.social/post/3mga7uhxnd... Even an eBike is way, way more efficient than a gas-powered car, and causes orders of magnitude less wear and tear on the road.

frankus 8mo ago
The number I guesstimated for my e-scooter is about 500 miles per dollar of electricity.

keybored 8mo ago

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.

lokar 8mo ago
Switch to heat pumps for everything
Symbiote 8mo ago
I often do my laundry at night, what's the problem? I set it to finish roughly when I intend to get up. Turning the lights off made a lot of sense in the 1990s and earlier, when each bulb was 60W.

thefifthsetpin 8mo ago

I clicked-through on one of the sources (a blog post on "ohmaticelectrical"), and the website is either hacked or is just really scummy. Here's what I was greeted with: https://imgur.com/a/https-ohmaticelectrical-co-uk-scams-OmLx2TC https://imgur.com/a/https-ohmaticelectrical-co-uk-scams-OmLx... (The scammer didn't actually manage to put anything in my clipboard, so I'm not sure what they were hoping I'd run.)

erelong 8mo ago

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 8mo ago
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.
quickthrowman 8mo ago
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 8mo ago
  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 8mo ago
    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.
adiabatichottub 8mo ago
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.

anjel 8mo ago

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?"

supertrope 8mo ago
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.

thih9 8mo ago

Some more things I’d like to see: - AI related values of course - elevators, escalators - traffic signals, street lights

deepsun 8mo ago

> Gas heating (Single room) (1 hour of use) -- 2700Wh. Wow dude, your room is very-very poorly insulated. Having a 2700W heater turned on constantly just for one room is a lot. If it's 0C outside and 20C inside, a typical room should not lose more than 500W, but better be in 200--400W range .

OldSchool 8mo ago

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 35-40%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.

ZeroGravitas 8mo ago
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.

theodorejb 8mo ago

In my petrol-powered Prius I average 52 MPG, so at the current price of gas ($2.60/gallon) I pay $0.50 to drive 10 miles - less than the listed cost to drive an electric car the same distance.

eru 8mo ago

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. My dryer is also a lot more efficient than theirs, at least if Miele's app is to be believed about how much it uses each cycle.

michaelt 8mo ago
> 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 https://www.argos.co.uk/product/7623899
- eru 8mo ago
  Yeah, looking at the text at the bottom, I looks like they took the peak power usage of their AC, not the steady state.

sholladay 8mo ago

0.3Wh for the median ChatGPT query seems optimistic to me. It looks like it’s based on a quote from Sam Altman. The GPU alone is probably pulling close to 0.2Wh per second.

charlie90 8mo ago

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.

no-name-here 8mo ago

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...

Garlef 8mo ago
I guess that's much harder: Those who measure correctly are likely also interested in saving.

DuckConference 8mo ago

Most clothes washer cycles are about an hour, is the motor really averaging 800 watts over that time?

Symbiote 8mo ago
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.

londons_explore 8mo ago

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.

zahlman 8mo ago
What if you want to turn it off to have darkness?
- zparky 8mo ago
  engineer vs end user
- Leno1225 8mo ago
  Classic example of “we figured out we could, didn’t consider if we should”
cogman10 8mo ago
Do you have a link to the 300 lumens per watt lighting? I'm curious. I think that mostly only applies bulbs without inverters.
- londons_explore 8mo ago
  Philips UltraEfficient LED | Energy-saving lighting solution | Philips lighting https://share.google/lptcUJwHZWOQP1JMJ https://share.google/lptcUJwHZWOQP1JMJ They are direct AC bulbs, no inverter needed. They do have smoothing capacitors so they don't flicker, and I think a slight redesign of the drive circuitry could add ~10% more efficiency...

kkfx 8mo ago

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.

fritzo 8mo ago

How does it make sense to compare renewable vs non-renewable energy sources? Where does that electric car's energy come from? Suppose the electric car's energy is solar. Then driving the electric car consumes zero barrels of oil, and so is infinitely more renewable than the petrol car. Or how efficient is the electric car at capturing available energy? Maybe the petrol car is 20% efficient at capturing available oil reserve energy. But the electric car is like 1e-30% efficient at capturing available solar output. Incomparable.

sha16 8mo ago

I wanted to write an app like this. Here's what I think would be useful for some people to compare: more checkboxes that represent typical daily activities like "how much energy does driving to the grocery store (x miles away) use" or "how much energy does idling in my car for 30 mins use", "how much energy does riding the bus/trolly/etc use", "how much energy does keeping my place warm vs kind of chilly", and also "how much energy does a cargo ship use to cross the pacific" or "how much energy does it take to source, manufacture, package, transport, and stock a pack of bubblegum". I think that would help people realize the largest components of their footprint and also how it relates globally.

dataspencer 8mo ago

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?