How much kW of energy does one person require per day?

Question

How much energy does one person consume per day( on average).

NOTE: Please refer to sources

Answer 1

Require? None. Other than whatever 2000 calories per day to keep the body functioning calculates out to. The rest is 'elective'.

Answer 2

I prefer to measure energy in Joules.  It's much less confusing than kWh because it's harder to confuse with kW.

Watts are a measure of the RATE of energy usage and are equivalent to Joules per second.  Joules are a measure of energy, rather than a rate of energy usage.  Everywhere you see "Watts" you can replace it with "Joules per second" and still be completely accurate.

If Watts are "Joules per second" (Also written as Joules divided by seconds) then multiplying Watts by a number of seconds will give us Joules.  An hour is just  3600 seconds so a Watt hour is simply 1 Watt (Or 1 Joule per second) for 3600 seconds which equals 3600 Joules.  1 kWh is 3600,000 joules and 1 kW is 1000 joules per second.

Now that's out of the way, we basically have three different ways of measuring energy usage "per person".

1. The energy they produce in their muscles.

2. The energy they directly use in appliances.

3. The energy they indirectly use.

I used the calorie calculator linked in the references section to calculate how much energy I would use in a day and it came out to 2266 calories which is 9480 joules.  This will vary depending on your size, gender, age and level of activity.  This is the answer to number 1.

To find out how much energy you use directly in appliances, it's probably easiest just to watch what you do each day and write it down.  Add up your energy usage for your house on your electricity meter for a month (usually in kWh) and divide it by the number of days in the month and the number of people in the house.  Do the same for gas if you have it although you may need to convert cubic metres into joules using the conversions available in the references section.

Do the same for your car.  Add up the amount of petrol you use in a month and divide that by the number of days in the month.  If you have a passenger you can also take off some of the energy from some of the days.  If you catch a bus, it's a bit more complicated but you can just take the bus's horsepower, convert it to kilowatts, multiply that by the number of seconds you were on the bus and divide it by the number of passengers.

Lastly, you need to add up the energy usage at your work and divide it by the number of people who work there.

The final number you come up with after adding all these together (including the answer to number 1.) will be the answer to number 2.

Calculating the energy you indirectly use means adding in the costs of the trucks used to transport your food around and the electricity used to power the lights in your supermarket and even the streetlights.

The easiest way to calculate this would be to simply add up the power output of all the power stations in your country along with all the barrels of oil used daily converted into joules and divide the number you get by the number of people in your country.

This will not be a highly accurate figure but it will reflect the area you live in and should be reasonably accurate.

Because they say that no one is more than six degrees of separation from any one else in this world, then it's quite likely that the energy I use affects someone who affects someone who affects you and therefore we're all tied into this together.  The worldwide consumption of energy divided by the worldwide population is the answer to number 3.

Answer 3

A LOT.

WE NEED TO LIVE IN TEEPEES AND DRIVE HORSES AND WASH OUR CLOTHES IN THE RIVER.

Answer 4

On average, according to the UCI,  for the USA people's  home electricity use is 2,000 kWh a year per person. This is about 5.7 kWh per day.

Answer 5

We have no idea how much energy is being consumed on our behalf, by industries all round the world, by transportation of things to us and hither and yon to put things we use together.

When we think of the fuel we directly consume, do we gove any thought to all the energy needed to create and bring that energy to us?

Even when I heat my home with sunlight, I am using energy too. I am also generating it, locally, just as though I were buying it from another person who captures it away from my home.

Ontario hydro has had maximum demand of 27 gigawatts for 8 million people. and we often use a figure of about 4 times our electrical demand is our total energy use, so we might expect our total energy might be order of 100 gigawatts for 8 million  people. That is like 12.5 gigawatts per million people or 12.5 kW per person.

To be sure, that must be a cost of  $0.63 an hour or about $15 a day just for energy. Lots of people must be using a lot less than that $15 a day.