The Super Bowl is known for unpredictable half-time shows, fabulous TV commercials and, of course, football. But how about energy savings?
Opower, an energy consulting firm, compared the electricity use of 145,000 American households during last year?s Super Bowl with consumption on other winter Sundays when the weather was similar. Power use was down by as much as 7.7 percent, depending on the region of the country. And in the West, where the game ended early in the evening, electricity consumption was depressed until bedtime.
The precise reasons are hard to identify, but apparently the increased reliance on some appliances ? running a big-screen TV, opening and closing the refrigerator ? were outweighed by other changes in routine, like not running the clothes dryer or the vacuum cleaner.
?With so many people glued to the couch during the game, fewer households are using electricity for cooking, cleaning or anything else other than watching the tube,? wrote Barry Fischer, who edits Opower?s blog. And viewers tend to gather in front of just one screen, something he refers to as TV pooling.
Sometimes the watchers are from several households, so one family may fire up a big-screen TV while other houses are empty, he pointed out.
In some ways, the notion evokes Earth Hour, if without the noble intent. During Earth Hour, an event scheduled this year on March 23 at 8:30, households are encouraged to turn off nonessential lights.)
The energy savings over the three and a half hours of the football broadcast could be worth upwards of $3.1 million, the company said. However, some of the energy use could simply be shifted to another time ? like the laundry chore ? and the study does not attempt to calculate whether extra gasoline was burned, or extra natural gas was used to bake all those chicken wings.
Using smart meters, the study measured the consumption of 91,355 households in the West and 54, 574 in the East. The lowest usage was at halftime, and the average drop at halftime was 5 percent, OPower said.
While traditional meters give utilities 12 monthly readings, smart meters usually take readings every 15 minutes, yielding 35,000 data points a year, Mr. Fischer said. Optimally, the data is used not to track Super Bowl patterns, of course, but to find strategies for encouraging energy conservation during peak demand times, when electricity is costly.
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