Greetings! I am very new to permaculture. I read a little on the subject during my youth, but those books perished during a flood in 2010, and I've been a pretty typical suburbanite for all my life. I currently work as an emergency dispatcher for my local government. I just started reading "Building a Better World in Your Backyard," and I was intrigued by the Eco-Poser test. I found it to be a simple and straightforward approach for understanding where I need to begin and getting started on this journey toward a more sustainable lifestyle. Reducing one's electric bill is a gateway drug any Dad in America could eagerly embrace, and then before you know it he's stopped shampooing and drinks raw milk every day.
All that being said, I have a quibble (of course). The average energy bill in terms of dollars isn't a useful metric to me. This is because energy rates vary across jurisdictions, so there's a doubt in my mind that if I compare my bill against the average I'm not really getting an accurate measure of my energy usage so much as I'm measuring how much or how little I pay for my energy, relatively. The usefulness of measuring several different forms of energy (gas, electric, etc.) by expressing them in terms of dollars isn't necessary because my home only uses electricity. This makes it simple for me to look at my bill and see exactly how much energy I am using expressed in kWh.
So, I've decided to do my analysis by comparing my energy usage against the average kWh usage in the United States. According to the World Bank, the average US resident as of 2014 uses 12,993.94 kWh annually, which averages to about 1,082 kWh per month. This is quite a bit higher than the average according to the US Energy Information Administration which is 10,972 kWh annually per residential customer in 2018 or 914 kWh hours per month. I will err on the side of conservation and use this lower number as my measure for the average. Interestingly, the EIA also indicates that residents of my state (Tennessee) have the highest annual electricity usage for residential customers at 15,394 kWh annually or 1,282 kWh per month. Although I don't have any data on why exactly that is, I suspect it might be due to many Tennesseans using electricity for all their energy needs without any offset from other energy sources such as natural gas due to the historical and market forces of the TVA system.
My power company provides a very helpful graph of my total energy usage for the past twelve months. I am consistently below average for a Tennessean, but in terms of the EIA national average I am only below average for four out of the past twelve months. These four months correspond to the four mildest months in terms of temperature: April, May, November, and April again. When the temperature is neither very hot nor very cold, I usually turn off the A/C completely. When I do this, my energy usage isn't just below the national average, but it is easily half what I use in the hottest and coldest months.
This confirms that heating and cooling are indeed the worst energy culprits. It also gives me a goal to work toward, since it's obvious that if I can find better, less ecologically impactful ways of maintaining comfortable temperatures in my home, I'll be able to level-up on the Eco-Poser scale. I assume there will be some sort of shiny badge for this achievement, with exciting and exclusive benefits, which if they were widely known, would result in neighborhoods of wofatis stretching so far and so wide that the McMansions of America would become but a distant memory.
