Monday, November 12, 2007

Stewardship and Christmas

I'm interested in knowing people's opinions on Christmas lights. Knowing that we are in an energy crisis where even the smallest changes can and will have a major impact on our planets future, how can we justify lights for a holiday. What happened to burning candles and using things like garland, wreaths, ribbons, and bows to decorate?

Let's look at this:
http://www.ases.org/askken/2006/06-41.htm

It says that the avg person uses about 4.4 KWH (I'll use 4 KWH for my calculations) of energy on their light display and that amounts to about $13 per month (I'll assume $10 just to lower the number a bit). The current population being 301,139,947 according to google at the time of writing, and an avg household size of 2.6 ( info here).
Using that there should be roughly 115,823,056 households. We'll assume that everyone only runs it for the month of December, which we know is not true. We'll even assume that 2/3 of these households can't or won't run light displays. That leaves us with 38,221,608 households running light displays for 1 month at 4 KWH giving us a total of 152,886,433.92 KWH of power used for Christmas light displays and a rough cost of ($10 * # of households) $382,216,080. And that's using energy cost figures from last year, and we all know that energy prices keep going up. Just think what a difference could be made if everyone agreed to shut off their Christmas lights for a year and donated their $10 (or $13) to a good cause. Imagine the decrease in the carbon foot print and the increase in the longevity of our planet.

I'd be interested in seeing how the math would work out for the new LED display lights. Perhaps we could even cut the costs in half with LEDs and people could still have a serious impact with $191 million. Even if half of those people didn't want to donate their savings it'd still be 95.5 million dollars!

Okay, I'm reasonably sure I've convinced at least myself of the benefits of not running a light display so that's enough math on this topic for today. Now, I'm asking you to consider this and think seriously about not plugging the lights in and seeing what kind of a difference you can make.

1 comment:

Gene said...

Lights are pretty much one huge pain on the outside of the house and you've given me a very good reason to never hang any. Nice work!