On Tuesday afternoon, the Energy Department published electricity industry data for August. Among the thousands of values was this number: 155,863.
As in 155,863 thousand megawatt-hours. That was the nation’s residential consumption of electricity in August.
Residential consumption has never been that high in any month in history.
August 2016 consumption is now number one. It beat number two, July 2011, by seven tenths of a percent.
Residential consumption has exceeded 150,000 thousand megawatt-hours in just nine months in history. Number one and number six, July 2016, were this summer.
Every other month in which residential consumption exceeded 150,000 was in the summers of 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2012. So it’s been awhile before growth restarted.
Commercial consumption too has never been as high as it was this August. By a lot.
Only twice has commercial consumption exceeded 130,000 thousand megawatt-hours.
Way back in August 2007, it was 130,475. This August, commercial consumption was 134,232. It beat August 2007 by nearly three percent.
So the residential and commercial classes bought record volumes of electricity this summer.
Number-crunching courtesy of Public Utilities Fortnightly.
