How many kilowatt hours does the US use just making ice for beverages?
Is a significant percentage of our power consumption making ice for beverages?
Probably not as much as you’d think.
It’d be hard to separate the power used to make ice in a freezer from the power used to keep the meat cold.
Refrigerators use is a fairly small part of the electric bill - roughly about 60-$100 a year. For me that’d be less than 5%, but I’m terribly inefficient in my AC use. That would Ice making in my home somewhere less than 1%.
For restaurants ice making might be a more significant part of their bill, but not as much as their AC or regular refrigeration.
Even assuming the staggering figure of 1% of energy going to icemaking. That’s still more power than many countries use for everything. But then you realize, they probably are making ice too.
And none of what I talked about pertains directly to ice for bevereges.
Just for kicks, here’s another approach:
Assume each person in the US consumes 2 L of liquid (generously) per day. Assume (again generously) that all of that liquid was frozen, and was drunk as it melted. To freeze 2 L of water, you have to remove about 84 kilojoules of energy to get it from 20 C to freezing point, another 668 kilojoules to actually freeze it, and let’s say another 84 kilojoules to cool it further to -20 C, for a total of 836 kilojoules. Now, you do that by using a refrigerator, which adds inefficiencies (thermodynamics is a bitch). Let’s assume you have a refrigerator which is 20% efficient – it then consumes 4200 kilojoules to freeze all of that water.
4200 kilojoules is a bit over one kilowatt hour. For comparison, the average US citizen consumes 35 kilowatt hours of electricity each day. So, by my estimate, that’s about 3% of a person’s total electricity consumption. And that’s probably a big overestimate – perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude (most people probably don’t drink that much, AND only a small fraction of what they drink is ice, AND big commercial refrigerators could be much more efficient, etc.)
I don’t think this is quite right. The refrigerator operates as a heat pump and as such, under ideal conditions, should be able to move several joules for every joule it consumes, rather than the other way around. I tried to dig up some hard numbers, but couldn’t find much related to the refrigeration system itself rather than overall efficiency. I would guess that one could use a 1:1 ratio (100% “efficient”) as a conservative estimate.
Fair enough. A bit more googling revealed that the coefficient of performance for typical compressors is something around 3 or 4 – meaning three or four units of energy moved out of your refrigerator for every unit consumed. Of course, there’s other losses for the whole system as heat leaks back in… but correcting my original estimate reduces the energy consumed for freezing water by another order of magnitude.
This “cite” here: http://www.fesmag.com/energy-aware/article/CA6549981.html
says the following: “Across the United States, commercial facilities such as restaurants, hospitals and hotels operate more than 1.2 million ice makers. Together they consume more than 9.4 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity each year and rack up more than $800 million in annual electricity bills.”
I have numbers for the total kWh consumed by household refrigerators, but not the freezer portion, nor the percentage of the freezer portion used for ice making. The total household refrigerator energy use was 156.1 billion kWh per year in 2001.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs2001/enduse2001/enduse2001.html
You just asked this question:
I did asked an ice making question. Then I completely and deliberately restated it.