The federal government reported last week that new single-family house sales were up 17.8 percent in October, compared with October 2015.
Trends in sales of new single-family houses drive trends in sales of electricity.
For every new single-family house, in the South especially, monthly electricity sales increase almost two thousand kilowatts-hours on average.
This is a large increment. It would net out, for example, energy efficiency improvements of twenty existing houses of a hundred kilowatts-hours monthly.
Most new single-family houses nationally are in the South, where more electricity is generally used. In October, it was fifty-seven percent.
Twenty-six percent of new single-family houses were in the West. Only eleven percent were in the Midwest. Only five percent were in the Northeast.
Despite energy efficiency improvements built into new single-family houses, they tend to use more electricity than existing houses. Around ninety percent of new single-family houses are detached. Around ninety-three percent have air conditioning. Around forty-four percent have four or more bedrooms.
As for the impact of requiring new single-family houses in some areas to use a zero or near-zero amount of electricity? Consider the extremely gradual turnover of the housing stock.
October’s seasonally-adjusted annual rate of new houses was five hundred and sixty-three thousand. This is not a large number relative to the country’s seventy-five million detached single-family houses, and nine million attached single-family houses.
The median year of when existing houses were built in the U.S.? 1976.
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