The Energy To Light Christmas – Forbes

Once Thanksgiving is over, many people start hanging their holiday lights and keep

them shining brightly until after the New Year. They’re beautiful and we always

add to them at our own house.

So the energy company, Arcadia, decided to explore the impact of these Christmas lights in terms of energy usage, energy costs, and extra CO2 emissions that result from that.

 Just looking at the month of December, their results were quite interesting. They also suggest ways to decrease those costs and emissions without losing the beauty of traditional holiday lights.

First, Arcadia estimated the total energy used to power a single home’s Christmas lights for the month of December. Using standard equipment, one 20-ft string of 100 incandescent bulbs uses 40W of electricity. Home Depot HD estimates that a home will use nine such strings on average to light their Christmas tree and outdoor lights.

Assuming the lights are on six hours a day, this means that an average household will use 65 kWh of electricity in December for their lights.

In order to understand the nationwide impact, Arcadia looked at the number of households in each state, using the Pew Research’s data that found 90% of households celebrate Christmas. Arcadia assumed that half of homes that celebrate Christmas use lights, which leads to the total consumption of 3.5 billion kWh in the month of December to power Christmas lights in the United States.

Using Arcadia’s proprietary nationwide energy bill data, they estimated that running those lights in December costs Americans a total of $645 million. For each household that has Christmas lights, that’s an average of an extra $12 on their December power bill (up to $20 in California).

Of course, that’s chump change compared to the $465 billion we spend on Holiday gifts and goodies, according to the National Retail Federation. But it’s nice to know the good feelings of lights is such a great bargain.

Arcadia’s also used proprietary calculations to estimate that powering those lights emits almost 2 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The Energy Information Administration says that the average household uses over 10,000 kWh of electricity each year per year. So that 3.5 billion kWhs used to power Christmas lights across the country in December is about the usage of 350,000 homes, or the total output of the average-sized natural gas-fired power plant, or the output of a thousand MW wind turbines.

If you only use LED bulbs in those lights, the amount of power drawn by them drops by 75%, according to the Department of Energy.

If we all did that, it would be a real Christmas present we could give to Planet Earth.

Original Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2020/12/20/the-energy-to-light-christmas/