By Ken McCall Staff Writer
Candlelight dinners and quiet nights reading by flashlight are all well and good.
But for many of us, the novelty has long worn off. Darn it, we want our DVRs, mp3 players, wireless routers and charged cell phones!
Now!
Never mind the refrigerator and toaster and lights, we need our broadband. We're going through digital withdrawal!
As 10-year-old Kylee Kussman of Kettering told her father Mark on Sunday night: "No Internet, no TV, no video. No wonder Amish kids run away."
The national numbers in recent years and the ambient crankiness this week has clearly shown that we Americans are addicted to electricity. Perhaps even more than oil.
Consider: From 1949 to 2007, the population of the United States roughly doubled, but the amount of electricity generated grew by a factor of 13. Back in '49, when baby boomers were babies or about to be, the average American used about 2,000 kilowatt hours every year. In 2007, that figure was almost 14,000.
And the trend is unlikely to reverse any time soon.
"Our lives are so much more dependent on an uninterrupted flow of electricity than they were just 15 or 20 years ago that it's sometimes difficult to compute," said Jim Owen, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for investor-owned utility companies like Dayton Power & Light and Duke Energy. "What has really crept up on us and driven so much of the demand is this new digital economy."
Figures from the U.S. Department of Energy show that the big ticket energy users are still those appliances that raise and lower temperatures of things. Heating and cooling, kitchen appliances and water heaters accounted for almost two-thirds of electricity use in the average American household in 2001, according to the federal Energy Information Administration's Residential Energy Consumption Survey.
In addition, new homes are getting larger, and larger homes eat more energy. According to the National Association of Homebuilders, the average size of a new home increased by almost a quarter between 1987 to 2004 -- 1,905 square feet to 2,349.
But the appliances that keep them warm and cool have all become dramatically more efficient in the last few decades, Owen points out.
And, while the latest household survey by the federal government is not quite ready for release, Eileen O'Brien, statistician for the Energy Information Administration, says preliminary numbers show one of the fastestgrowing household electric appliances between 2001 and 2005 was the personal computer. More than two-thirds of American homes had at least one computer in 2005, up from 56 percent only four years earlier.
"If you look at the rise in the number of televisions and computers, you'll see where that growth is coming from," O'Brien said.
And we're buying more of the other electronic toys, too.
This year alone, the Consumer Electronics Association is projecting $173 billion in sales of devices and accessories that provide data access, communications or entertainment. That's up 46 percent from only five years ago, said Chris Ely, a senior research analyst for the association. And this is occurring as prices are coming down, he said.
The average household now owns 24 consumer electronic devices and spends more than $1,400 a year on them, according to the association's most recent nationwide survey, released in April.
That tracks with the household of this reporter: Ours has 25 consumer electronics. And some of us miss them dearly.
"It's not fun," said Owen of the Edison Electric Institute. "I think Americans are understandably not that tolerant about having an extended outage. And the utilities understand that. Nobody wants the power to be off less than the utilities. Nobody."
Staff Writer Jim DeBrosse contributed to this story.
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