I got this from my brother, and decided to post it because I found it interesting, and I want at least a few of my postings to be intellectually interesting...
From Steve:
I’m glad to see that I’m writing your blog now.
Maybe we can jazz it up a little bit, the RSS feed was a good first step. This means I can monitor your/my blog now. We should talk more about energy issues. Here’s an interesting email I wrote to a Virginia business woman. She was wondering about the cost and consumption of electricity compared to natural gas for residential homes in the Richmond area. She found my information though our Virginia Energy Patterns and Trends project (VEPT). Several links are Virginia specific, but the information can be generalized to any location.
VEPT is currently an inactive project and data for 2011 is not available. Assuming that residential efficiency hasn’t changed dramatically, there will be little difference in the information from 2007 to current. I would direct you to these two tables:
These show total consumption of electricity and natural gas for the state. We do not have access to more detailed, like county specific data. This isn’t data like “gas used for heating air” or “electricity used for heating water.” Consumers don’t report these values to anyone, and most wouldn’t know the percent of their electricity bill that goes to the end use. DOE attempted to provide guidance with reports such as this one:
Virginia has taken a similar approach and published the energy saver’s handbook also the Virginia Energy Plan. You can get this from DMME or from here: http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/energyover/index.asp
The comparison you are asking about is difficult to do without making a large number of assumptions. If the house is built to identical code standards with equally efficient
appliances there will be negligible difference in energy (i.e. capacity for work) consumption. This energy will be delivered in the form of natural gas or electricity meaning that the price paid difference will simply be the per unit energy cost of the fuel. The major factors are the insulation factor (this includes windows and insulation), HVAC efficiency, water heater efficiency and appliance efficiency. The usage, of course, is also important, but not relevant to your question.
Unfortunately, this means that one cannot make a definitive statement about the benefits of one fuel source over another. I find resources like WellHome (http://www.wellhome.com) and Energy Savers (http://www.energysavers.gov/) to have good articles that are targeted for the general consumer. They have several nice graphics like:
GE has an excellent tool to describe appliance efficiency here: http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/appliances/
There are several companies in the commonwealth that specialize in doing energy audits of houses. See: http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/energy_audits/index.cfm/mytopic=11160
This sort of audit on specific houses will let you do an apple to apple comparison. A company that does energy audits in your area should be able to offer generalizations based on their experiences.
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