• Question: how much energy do we use on average in a year?

    Asked by 565enek22 to Emma, Karla, Shane, Stephen, Yang on 7 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by 866enek48, 939enek48.
    • Photo: Emma Hanley

      Emma Hanley answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      If you think of the amount of energy it would take to boil a full Kettle around 8-10 times (depends on the kettle), it uses 1 kWh of energy. A kWh stands for a kilowatt hour and is a unit of energy. In Ireland in one year (in 2015) we consume 131,849,310,000 kWh across the electricity, heating and transport sectors.

    • Photo: Karla Dussan

      Karla Dussan answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      :O That is so much!

      Another very useful way to compare how much energy we use, it’s the “per capita” measure, which means like how much kWh of energy is used per every person in a country (for instance) per year… Some countries use sooooo much more than others: A person in the United States uses two times more energy than a person in Ireland, or ten times more energy than a person in Colombia!

    • Photo: Shane Mcdonagh

      Shane Mcdonagh answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      It’s hard to imagine just how much energy we all use everyday!
      Especially on things you might not think of like all the energy that went into making the food you eat, the clothes you wear, getting clean water to your house, making the books you read, or all the computers running that enable us to chat like this.
      That’s why its important to think about the effect all the things we do have and not just the ones that are easy to see like remembering to turn the lights off when we leave a room.

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