A few years back they tore down the modest house across the street from me and built a house in the Vienna Modern style. Which is to say, the biggest possible house that would legally fit on the lot. That’s all they build in this Town, and has been for at least the past 15 years.
Having watched this house (and many like it) go up in my neighborhood, I can tell you that it isn’t a particularly energy-efficient design. It’s standard 2×4 construction with fiberglass batt insulation. Not significantly different from the way houses were being built half-a-century ago. There was a Tyvek wrap put on under the siding, which is good from an energy consumption standpoint. But that’s far more than fully offset by the large amount of glass area, which is bad for energy consumption. You can’t see it here, but most of the northwest-facing back of the house is glass. Which is a dead loss for energy consumption.
Consistent with that, none of the several vehicles associated with the house is fuel-efficient. I think I’ve spotted a couple of full-sized SUVs, plus the obligatory shiny new truck. All old-school straight gas engines.
This neighbor has a penchant for having the exterior of his house decorated with lights and gizmos to suit every season. In the Christmas season, his professionally-installed lighting outshines the adjacent street light. As you can see from the photo above, it stands out on what is otherwise a fairly low-key street.
Since I’ve been spending some time researching Christmas lights, I got to wondering just how much energy that light display requires. Just for lighting the eaves of the house. (I’ll ignore the bushes and fences, which are wrapped in what appear to be mini-LED strings.)
So, what’s your guess? Only the two sides shown here are lit. The other side and the back are dark. Does that much lighting require roughly:
- 100 watts
- 250 watts
- 500 watts
- 1000 watts
- Over 1000 watts
It’s easy enough to estimate. Count the bulbs, and multiple by an estimated watts per bulb, given that these are almost certainly LED C9 bulbs.
The correct answer is b. That’s about 320 C9 LED bulbs, and each such bulb takes somewhere between 0.6 and 1.0 watts. So the whole set consumes somewhere between 200 and 320 watts. Call it 250 at a guess.
Plus the lights for the shrubs and fence. Arguably somewhere around 400 watts for the entire display.
That strikes me as remarkably little electricity, for that over-the-top amount of lighting. But I grew up in the era of incandescent lighting.
I reckon that the carbon footprint for that light display, for the entire season (it was put up a couple of weeks ago), is no more than 100 pounds of C02. (Calculated as 28 days x 14 hours per day x 0.4 kilowatts x 0.65 pounds C02 per KWH.) Or roughly what you’d get from burning five gallons of gasoline.
Obviously, even if you wanted this sort of over-the-top, brightest-house-on-the-block display, you could cut the energy use in half with the addition of a $5 timer. Just turn the lights off from (say) midnight to dawn, when nobody is out-and-about to see them. The fact that he doesn’t bother to do that demonstrates exactly how much he cares about the consequences C02 emissions in the modern world.
If a tree falls in the forest, where no one can hear it, does it make a sound? You can philosophize over that all you want. But for sure, a light display that no one can see still uses energy. That makes this all-night lavish lighting display a poster child for just how little effort some people are not willing to go to, to rein in their C02 emissions. Not worth five bucks for a timer.
Once upon a time, you could make a “base load” argument for the relative harmlessness of nighttime energy use. It’s difficult or impossible to throttle down coal-fired and nuclear power plants on a daily basis. Where coal is still the backbone of the electrical grid, electricity use in the dead of night (when demand is otherwise down) required minimal or no additional fuel consumption beyond that “base load” floor that must be maintained. But with the transition of the grid from coal to natural gas turbines, where power plants can be fired up or shut down relatively quickly, that’s an increasingly obsolete argument. Shifting electricity consumption to off-peak periods may reduce the total amount of generating equipment (capacity) that a system requires, but I don’t think it has much impact on the amount of fuel burned.
But I think this extra-bright light display underscore that the future is electric. Some people are simply programmed to be energy hogs. I’d bet it never even occurred to my neighbor that he could have his installers add a timer to the system. But modern LED lighting makes up for his indifference to energy waste, effectively putting a cap on the amount of energy that even the most determined energy waster can use.
Sure, he could waste more energy if he tried. But the point is, he’d have to go out of his way to do that. If he doesn’t give it a thought — and I’d say that’s likely here — LED-as-default acts to moderate the environmental impact of the resulting excess.
The upshot is that, courtesy of LEDs, this entire “brightest house on the block” lighting display turns out to be … fairly harmless, environmentally. In the grand scheme of things. And since old people are set in their ways, and aren’t going to change even as global warming progresses, we need more of that sort of self-limiting process.
The nicest thing about it is that as renewables’ share of electricity generation increases, and the carbon-intensity of the grid falls, displays like this should become ever-more-harmless in the future.
And so, if that all proceeds according to plan, at some point in the future, our kids can look at a display like this and only think of Christmas, and nothing else. Which would be an improvement over their parents’ generation.
