North Dakota Tops Rankings Of Residential Energy Use Per Capita

North Dakota consumes the most energy per capita in the residential sector, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its Key Statistics and Indicators report on Wednesday.

According to EIA’s data, North Dakota ranked first in terms of residential energy consumption per capita in 2017, closely followed by Montana and Wyoming, while Hawaii was at the bottom of the rankings with the lowest per capita energy use in the residential sector.  

According to EIA’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), more than half of all energy consumption in U.S. homes goes for heating and air conditioning.

The highest energy consumption per capita generally occurs in states that have low population density and experience extreme temperatures in the seasons. Residents in those states are more likely to live in single-family homes than in other areas and states in the U.S., the EIA says. 

Hawaii, California, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and New York were the states with the lowest residential energy consumption per capita, because Rhode Island and New York have high population density, while Hawaii, California, and New Mexico have relatively moderate climates. Moreover, in Hawaii—the state with the lowest residential consumption per capita—close to two-thirds of homes don’t have heating systems.

As a whole, in 2017, people living in the United States consumed an average of 61 million British thermal units (Btu) of energy per capita in the residential sector, down by 2 percent compared to 2016. The 2017 energy consumption per capita was the lowest level since 1967, the EIA said.

In other sectors, the District of Columbia tops the rankings in terms of energy consumption per capita in the commercial sector, Louisiana is number one in energy consumption per capita in the industrial sector, and Alaska tops the energy per-capita consumption in the transportation sector, the EIA’s data showed.  

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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