Here is some information
Here is everything that you need to know. It is a copy and paste from an email I had received so format may not be as good. The costs are in US dollars.
Device
Typical Consumption
Cost per hour
Heat pump or central air
15,000 watts
$1.50
Water heater or clothes drier
4,000 watts
40 cents
Water pump
3,000 watts
30 cents
Space heater
1,500 watts
15 cents
Hair drier
1,200 watts
12 cents
Electric range burner
1,000 watts
10 cents
Refrigerator
1,000 watts
10 cents
Computer and monitor
400 watts
4 cents
light bulb
60 watts
0.6 cents
This table assumes that a kilowatt-hour of electricity costs 10 cents, which is an average rate depending on your location.
If your house has electric heat, then the middle of winter is a time when you are going to use a lot of power. A heat pump might run 10 to 15 hours a day. At $1.50 an hour that's $15 to $22 per day. Over the course of a month that's several hundred dollars worth of electricity. The same applies in the summer if you use the air conditioner a lot.
Water heating uses a good bit of power as well. When you take a shower or run a load of clothes in the washer, the electric water heater might run for an hour re-heating the water in the tank. That's 40 cents. A typical household can burn several dollars a day heating water. Because we don't normally think of it this way, it is funny to consider that every shower you take costs 40 cents! When you add in the cost of washing and drying the
towels (every load of clothes that you run might cost $1 to $2 for washing and drying) plus the soap and shampoo, it can cost nearly a buck to take a shower!
Refrigeration is another big power drain because the refrigerator can easily run for 10 hours a day. That's about $1 per day to keep the milk cold. If you leave the computer or TV on all day it can add up to $1 per day as well.
Then we get to to light bulbs. At 0.6 cents per hour it doesn't seem like much. However, many fixtures contain 2 or more bulbs and it is easy to leave several fixtures on. If 10 bulbs are burning that's 6 cents an hour. If they burn for 6 hours a day that 36 cents per day for lighting. Multiply that by 30 days in a month and it's $10 per month for photons.
Using a space heater or an electric blanket to heat a smaller area at night
is probably the easiest way to save big on your power bill. Saving hot water
is the next easiest.
Question
Where electricity is produced from a coal fired power station, how much coal
is required to run a 100-watt light bulb 24 hours a day for one year?
Answer
We'll start by figuring out how much energy in kilowatt-hours the light bulb
uses per year. We multiply how much power it uses in kilowatts, by the
number of hours in a year. That gives 0.1 kW x 8,760 hours or 876 kWh.
The thermal energy content of coal is 6,150 kWh/ton. Although coal fired
power generators are very efficient, they are still limited by the laws of
thermodynamics. Only about 40 percent of the thermal energy in coal is
converted to electricity. So the electricity generated per ton of coal is
0.4 x 6,150 kWh or 2,460 kWh/ton.
To find out how many tons of coal were burned for our light bulb we divide
876 kWh by 2,460 kWh/ton. That equals 0.357 tons. Multiplying by 2,000
pounds/ton we get 714 pounds (325 kg) of coal. That is a pretty big pile of
coal, but let's look at what else was produced to power that light bulb.
A typical 500 megawatt coal power plant produces 3.5 billion kWh per year.
That is enough energy for 4 million of our light bulbs to operate year
round. To produce this amount of electrical energy, the plant burns 1.43
million tons of coal. It also produces:
Pollutant
Total for Power Plant
One Light Bulb-Year's Worth
Sulfur Dioxide - Main cause of acid rain
10,000 Tons
5 pounds
Nitrogen Oxides - Causes smog and acid rain
10,200 Tons
5.1 pounds
Carbon Dioxide - Greenhouse gas suspected of causing global warming
3,700,000 Tons
1852 pounds
It also produces smaller amounts of just about every element on the periodic
table, including the radioactive ones
<
http://www.howstuffworks.com/nuclear.htm> . In fact, a coal-burning power
plant emits more radiation than a (properly functioning) nuclear power plant
<
http://www.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power.htm> !
