The Invisible Trillion · The Energy Question, Honestly

A Day in Your Energy Life

Let’s walk through an ordinary day for a 14-year-old in a typical American household, and count the Wh.

You wake up. The alarm on your phone wakes you up. Your phone charged overnight — 15 Wh. The house was air-conditioned while you slept — call it eight hours of AC, roughly 20,000 Wh for the whole house, or about 7,000 Wh for your share. Already, before you are out of bed, your share of the day’s energy use is 7,015 Wh.

You take a shower. Hot water heater, ten minutes, maybe 3,000 Wh. You get dressed in clothes that went through a washer and dryer — amortized over the life of the clothes, about 100 Wh for today’s outfit. Breakfast: toaster, 200 Wh; refrigerator’s share of today, 500 Wh; the embodied energy in the food itself, which is huge but hard to count, let’s skip it for now.

You look at your phone for twenty minutes while eating. The phone itself: maybe 3 Wh for that session. But — and this is the part nobody talks about — every video you watched, every TikTok you scrolled, every image that loaded, was served to you from a data center somewhere. The data-center energy per minute of video streaming is small, maybe 1 Wh per minute. Twenty minutes of scrolling: maybe 20 Wh of data-center energy on your behalf, most of it not for you specifically but spread across all users of that service.

You go to school. If you take a bus, your share of the diesel is about 2,000 Wh for the round trip. If a parent drives you in an SUV, it’s more like 8,000 Wh. If you walk, zero.

At school, you use a laptop for four hours. 200 Wh. The school’s lights, heating, and AC on your behalf: roughly 15,000 Wh for the day.

After school, you come home and do homework. You ask ChatGPT three questions to help you understand something about the French Revolution. Each query uses somewhere between 1 and 10 Wh of data-center energy, depending on the model and how long the answer is. Call it 15 Wh total for the session. Your laptop during the homework: another 200 Wh.

Then you watch two hours of a show on your TV. 200 Wh for the TV, another 50 Wh for your share of the data center streaming it.

Dinner: the oven, 3,000 Wh. The dishwasher later, 1,500 Wh.

Your phone all evening: 10 Wh.

You charge your phone for tomorrow: 15 Wh.

Total, roughly, for your share of one day: about 40,000 Wh, or 40 kWh.

In the context of this day, here is what the ChatGPT session cost: 0.04% of your day’s energy use.

That is not a typo. Every AI query you made today, added together, was one twenty-five-hundredth of your day’s energy footprint. The AC alone used roughly 500 times as much. The car ride used roughly 500 times as much. The cheeseburger at lunch used roughly 200 times as much. Even the dryer used more.

This is the part of the story that gets almost no airtime on TikTok.

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