As this heat bubble hovers over New England many folks are heading home on a Friday night to turn on two things – the Red Sox and their air conditioners.
As they collapse into their couches, is it a big deal if they set their thermostat to 72 versus 73 degrees?
Let’s do some back of the envelope math:
The US residential market consumes 1.5 billion kWh of electricity this year, air conditioning is 9% of the total electricity use, and the average retail price of electricity is $0.119 kWh
So if we all got used to setting our thermostats to 73 instead of 72 (a savings of @ 1-3%) we would reduce our annual energy cost by somewhere between $160 million and $480 million dollars a year.
Does 72 feel THAT much better?
