Saving Electricity

Assuming you could get 100% citizen compliance in this country, and assuming you could come up with a number for "average household" use, then average household energy savings... What amount of energy could be saved, and what might that savings amount to in dollars? -- Sonya

Well, to start idle devices use as much as 10 percent of a typical household's energy use.[1] A typical household uses 10,837 kilowatt-hours per year and there are 116,716,292 households in the United States as of the 2010 US census.[2][3] (There are three random facts in the last two sentences. I love the internet.)

If each one unplugged their idle devices, the total energy saved would be...

...116,716,292*10,837*0.1 = 126,485,445,640 kilowatt-hours, or 3.5162954 exajoules.

That's the raw math, but how much energy is that really? It's more than twice the annual electricity consumption of South Korea and between two and three percent of the annual electricity consumption of the United States. It is also more than 15 times the explosive yield of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba.[4]

The cost of all the electricity that would be saved? Well, in residential areas, electricity costs an average of 13.01 cents per kilowatt-hour, as of August 2014.[5] With 126,485,445,640 kilowatt-hours of electricity being saved, the total amount of money saved would be approximately 1.64 trillion cents (more pennies than are currently in circulation), or $16,455,756,477.80. That would look like 16 of these (those are 100 dollar bills) and would take 80 years to print out with a typical printer (again, assuming that you're printing 100 dollar bills).[6]

That sum of money would also be enough money to pay for electricity for a single residence for 11,671,635 years and 211.7 days. Which, by the way, is probably longer than anyone has owned a house for.^{[original research?]}