Read this post on Josh’s Substack: Powering Spaceship Earth.
The US uses about 6.6 TWh of electricity on holiday lights in a year. Just that sliver of US electricity use is more than the annual electricity consumption of over 70 individual countries.
For some of these countries, like Greenland, this low electricity use is mainly a population story. For too many, however, it is a story of energy poverty. Because the holiday lights data is about two decades old, this likely understates the energy-poor areas of the world. Take, for example, El Salvador. In 2007, it used about 5.35 TWh of electricity; in 2023, El Salvadorans used 7.22. If US holiday lights used 0.6 TWh more electricity in 2024 than in 2007, total electricity use in El Salvador falls back under the US’s holiday lights consumption.
That 6.63 TWh is miniscule. To give you a sense of scale–0.2% of the US’s total electricity consumption in 2007 was holiday lights. It’s not a scientific standard of energy poverty, of course. The United Nations Development Program says 1.18 billion people are in energy poverty by a more demanding standard. Roughly one in eight people in the world lack “adequate, reliable, and affordable energy for lighting, cooking, heating, and other daily activities necessary for welfare and economic development.”
Like fireworks, holiday lights are a testament to humanity’s inventive spirit. Lights not just for survival, but for celebration. Samuel Florman rightly said that human existence would be a “dull business” without these kinds of outlets. He was speaking about technology as a whole, but the same sentiment holds when talking about lights and energy.
Lighting is an incredible example of making the expensive and out-of-reach into cheap and common. Researchers with HumanProgress.org showed that, in the United States, it takes only 0.00012 hours of labor to earn the equivalent of 1,000 lumen-hours. What once took our “Paleolithic ancestors,” they write, 58 hours of gathering wood is now essentially free.
As costs fell, lighting spread everywhere. Bill Bryson put it this way, “Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century.”
The banality of lights means, as Tony Morley observed in his history of light, “We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was.”
With this history in mind: enjoy the holiday lights, put up more of them, and keep working towards a world lit for all.