American households spend a significant amount of money on heating and cooling of our homes as well as electricity to run our appliances, power out TVs and heat our water. I thought it would be interesting to look at energy consumption and usage for U.S. households in general.
Primary source of information I found was the 2005 Residential Energy Consumption Survey from the Department of Energy
Total expenditures by fuels used
Fuels used in billions for 2005
Electricity = $124.7B
Natural Gas = $52.34
Fuel Oil = $12.75
Kerosene = $0.24
LPG = $11
Primary heating fuel usage varies a lot from state to state. The census has data on house heating fuel by state.
Total Expenditures for space heating by fuel used
Total = $56.73B
Electricity = $7.42
Natural Gas = $31.97
Fuel Oil = $10.75
Kerosene = $0.24
LPG = $6.35
Electricity consumption by use in 2001 from DOE
I reproduced their graph here:
Air conditioning expenditures for 2005
91 million out of 111 million or 82% of households had AC and spent a total of $25.3B
Spending per household
The BLS.gov Consumer Expenditure Survey will give us data on the average spending per household.
In 2009 spending was $483 for natural gas, $1377 for electricity and $141 for fuel oil and other fuels. Of course not all houses spend money on all of these.
Note: The figures here do not include energy used for automobiles, industrial or commercial uses so the national usage figures will be much higher.
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