Does that use a lot of energy?

The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.

This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-use-a-lot-of

I think stuff like this really crystalises how people misunderstand how much energy stuff uses.

My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.

Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.

I attached a generator with some supercaps and an inverter to a stationary bicycle a few years ago, and even though I mostly use it as a way to feel less guilty watching Youtube videos, it does give me a quite literal feel for some of the items on the lower end of the scale.

- Anything even even halfway approaching a toaster or something with a heater in it is essentially impossible (yes, I know about that one video).

- A vacuum cleaner can be run for about 30 seconds every couple minutes.

- LED lights are really good, you can charge up the caps for a minute and then get some minutes of light without pedaling.

- Maybe I could keep pace with a fridge, but not for a whole day.

- I can do a 3D printer with the heated bed turned off, but you have to keep pedaling for the entire print duration, so you probably wouldn't want to do a 4 hour print. I have a benchy made on 100% human power.

- A laptop and a medium sized floor fan is what I typically run most days.

- A modern laptop alone, with the battery removed and playing a video is "too easy", as is a few LED bulbs or a CFL. An incandescent isn't difficult but why would you?

- A cellphone you could probably run in your sleep

Also gives a good perspective on how much better power plants are at this than me. All I've made in 4 years could be made by my local one in about 10 seconds, and cost a few dollars.

I see it has a ChatGPT median query, but for those of us using coding agents this isn't so relevant.

Here's a post that makes an estimate:

https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/

> So, if I wanted to analogize the energy usage of my use of coding agents, it’s something like running the dishwasher an extra time each day, keeping an extra refrigerator, or skipping one drive to the grocery store in favor of biking there. To me, this is very different than, in Benjamin Todd’s words, “a terrible reason to avoid” this level of AI use. These are the sorts of things that would make me think twice.

It was genuinely a surprise to see how much relative energy petrol cars use (and shame on me - I'm an electrical engineer). I mean I think I knew it intuitively, but this simple chart blew my mind.

Glad it has AI. AI has nothing on cars. Save a car trip a week even if electric is way more than 10k queries.

> Desktop computer - 1 hour of use - 50 Wh

That seems low...

For reference it would be good to have per-passenger numbers for "sitting on a diesel bus", "sitting on an electric bus", "sitting on a tram", "sitting on a commuter train" as well.

Wow, putting everything in the same units is really informative. Running my 450 watt gpu for a day is approximately equivalent to driving a car 10 miles.

I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK.

Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.

I can't find a github or email for Hannah - if you're reading this i'd like to add Australian energy price data via Open Electricity[0] to the data (reach out via my profile)

[0] https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/

Doesn't show the comparative energy waste of bitcoin?

This source[0] says

> One Bitcoin now requires 854,400 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce. For comparison, the average U.S. home consumes about 10,500 kWh per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, April 2025, meaning that mining a single Bitcoin in 2026 uses as much electricity as 81.37 years of residential energy use.

[0] https://www.compareforexbrokers.com/us/bitcoin-mining/

One hour of Claude code— well, I’d guess it would be comparable to an hour of driving an electric car. How to know?

This is neat. I think I'm actually more interested in avg ChatGPT query than median single query so that I can enter a large query # and be confident in the associated energy cost for that larger number (e.g. what's the energy cost for 1,000 chat gpt queries)

I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy.

That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and you can't either. Nobody can.

If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and not the market because prices don't internalize certain externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.

As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else. If you propose policy X and you can't get X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the system is broken.

Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost we must account. We should have a prior that costs are accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals. What specific costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X" is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted externality.

That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with fungible commodities like kWh.

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"

And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.

Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.

You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?

What’s startling to me is how many comments in this thread just take the provided values as gospel without asking questions that methodology answers either in the abstract or barely describes. Also going giving a cost for “United States” is absolutely nonsense - electricity, gas and gasoline prices vary widely across the country. There is no one cost for each, and the average is worthless for this kind of thing (especially since the average of each - gas vs. electric vs. gasoline cost - are independent variables that have no relation to each other on a region by region basis).

Why are people so gullible?