The Energy Wasters Report

The Boston Globe has coined an interesting new term for the energy that gets wasted by all those appliances that are plugged in but not turned on - ‘phantom load.’ The article estimates that 2-8% of a home’s usage is phantom load, at a cost of $450 Million across New England. It also points out that unless a utility is capital constrained and not faced with shelling out capital for new power plants (as in California, my home state), they’re generally not incented to help reduce phantom load because they make more money the more power consumers use.