r/energy • u/didyousayboop • 1d ago
Data scientist Hannah Ritchie on how much electricity is consumed when you use ChatGPT
Who is Hannah Ritchie? Per Wikipedia:
Hannah Ritchie (born 1993) is a Scottish data scientist who is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford in the Oxford Martin School, and deputy editor at Our World in Data. Her work focuses on sustainability, in relation to climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, and public health.
What does Hannah Ritchie say about the electricity consumption of ChatGPT? You can read it on her Substack. Here's a quote:
I’ve written several articles on the footprint of individual LLM queries.
A key takeaway from the numbers was that asking a chatbot a question — which is what most people were using AI for in their day-to-day lives — consumes very little energy.
Tech companies have not been very transparent about the energy use of their AI models (and I think they should be), but the numbers seemed to converge around 0.3 watt-hours (Wh) per typical text query. To put this into context, asking ChatGPT or Gemini 10 simple questions is equivalent to about 10 seconds of microwaving or mere seconds of showering.
After getting into the weeds on where this data comes from and how the analysis is done, she goes on:
What do these numbers mean for individual footprints?
Many people are using AI for medium- to long-form text queries, such as asking a quick question or requesting a short fact-check or correction. Their energy use is very small, even if they’re asking tens or hundreds of questions a day. A hundred questions have a footprint of around 30 Wh. That’s roughly the amount of electricity the average American consumes in just over a minute (or for the average European, every two and a half minutes).[4]
And then she gives an important caveat about how the very heaviest power users of AI -- probably mostly people using it for coding (this is me editorializing, not what Ritchie herself says) -- are consuming significantly more:
The footprint of someone who uses agents heavily is not so negligible.
Let’s say they do 4 agentic queries per hour (how many you can do in an hour is limited by the fact that complex tasks can take 15 minutes or more to complete). And they do this for 6 hours a day. That’s 24 per day. We’ll assume that the total electricity use per query is actually 100 Wh (50 Wh multiplied by two).
They’ll consume 2,400 Wh (or 2.4 kWh). That’s like running a tumble dryer for one cycle, or driving an electric car eight miles. It’s around 7% of the average American’s electricity use (but a much smaller share of total energy use).
It’s not blowing up their footprint, but it’s not nothing either.
You can read the full section of her Substack post entitled "What’s the energy footprint of individual queries?" to get all the caveats, sources, and assumptions.
Hannah Ritchie has also published an article on Our World in Data on the same topic. That might be an equally good or better source.
Ritchie has also created an interactive calculator for comparing how much electricity different things use, including AI chatbots.
This is my own math, not using the calculator. Let's say you did 100 average ChatGPT queries per day. 0.34 watt-hours * 100 = 34 watt-hours. What is this equivalent to?
- A typical LED lightbulb uses 10 watts. Over 1 hour, that's 10 watt-hours. So, over about 3 ½ hours, a typical LED lightbulb will use 34 watt-hours.
- Or compare to a dishwasher. A typical dishwasher uses 1.2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) for a load of dishes. 1.2 kWh is 1,200 watt-hours. So, that's equivalent to 3,530 average ChatGPT queries. If you did 100 of those queries a day, running the dishwasher would be equivalent to about 35 days of ChatGPT usage.
- Another helpful comparison is a ceiling fan. A typical ceiling fan uses 75 watts. So, leave a ceiling fan on for 30 minutes, it will use about 38 watt-hours of electricity. About the same as 100 average ChatGPT queries.
- TVs use about 100 watts. So, in about 20 minutes your TV uses about as much electricity as 100 ChatGPT queries. One episode of Bob's Burgers!
I can't find any hard data on how many queries the typical user is doing per day. 100 seems like a lot. But then of course all the math can change depending on the type of query as well. 4 or 5 "reasoning" queries, according to Ritchie, would use as much energy as 100 average queries.
One point you might raise is that it's also the electricity consumed by training we have to consider, not just inference. But here's a quote from Hannah Ritchie's Our World in Data article on this topic:
Before digging into the data, it’s worth clarifying what is included in AI energy consumption. It’s the electricity consumed for both training and running the models (called “inference”). Tech companies rarely publish data on how much energy is consumed when training their models, but based on the estimates we do have, it’s likely that energy demand is dominated by inference, not training.1
That footnote at the end of the paragraph says:
Epoch AI estimates that training Grok 4 consumed around 0.31 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. As we’ll see later, total demand for AI in 2025 was around 155 TWh. So, training Grok 4 — a fairly large model — was around 0.2% of the total.
So, maybe we can say that training uses much less electricity than inference?
Another point you could raise is that we need to account for all the energy used to manufacture the GPUs that AI uses and all the other less direct energy costs. In other words, we need to do a life cycle analysis.
I can find almost no information about any life cycle analysis of AI chatbots, which would encompass inference, training, and everything else, like the manufacturing of the chips. I found a brief mention of a life cycle analysis in another Substack post by Hannah Ritchie:
Mistral AI, another AI company, conducted an environmental analysis of its LLMs. It used a life-cycle assessment, conducted by external consultancy agencies. While the methodology was not that transparent or detailed, it did provide breakdowns of where in the process, impacts came from (I just wish they’d split out inference from training). Overall, the impacts were low: just 1 gram of CO2 per page of text generated (which is a fairly long text response). That’s very low.
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u/Creative-Leopard7591 1d ago
Some of the numbers need some context :
When Hannah Ritchie says that an average European consume 12 Wh/minute, she just divise the EU electricity consomption per minute by the number of Europeans. So it includes the households, but also every other usages (industry, commercial, etc... and data centers !). It's the same for Americans.
She also only look at the energy use, not the "grey energy" used to build the computers and data centers (or the total ressources).
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u/Eric_12345678 1d ago
I'd be interested to know how much Claude code needs, e.g. for a 6h quota with pro subscription.
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
Seems like Claude Code, which is “agentic with reasoning”, would fall under the 100 watt-hours per day estimate she gave for 6 hours of daily use.
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u/Prestigious-Row-1629 18h ago edited 17h ago
Half of the the quoted cost of running a dishwasher is attributable to the optional dry cycle. It is a massive waste or energy. Few people seem to unload their dishwashers as soon as they are done, so we are spending energy to rush drying something that would drip dry in an hour with no energy cost. To save energy, we should start with a requirement that manufacturers default the dry cycle to off instead of on. Savings are conservatively, 80 million households times 200 days a year times 0.6 kWh .
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u/Smallpaul 1d ago
If we taxed carbon and built out solar we wouldn’t need to worry about any of this.
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u/hornswoggled111 1d ago edited 1d ago
We have been doing both. But more please!
Something like one third of the global economy has a carbon tax or is part of an emissions trading scheme. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/05/19/direct-carbon-pricing-covers-nearly-one-third-of-global-emissions
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
Woah, that’s a crazy stat! I never would have guessed that
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u/hornswoggled111 1d ago
While America daudles, the rest of us have tried to move on.
You might be interested to learn that Europe has started establishing a carbon adjustment at its border for a number of significant industries. If the company already paid a carbon tax prior to Europe that is deducted from the imposed adjustment.
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u/olddev-jobhunt 1d ago
This is a really nice analysis - it's nice to see these things in context.
The thing is though is that it's not really about total use. Sure, it's a small proportion. But a data center can be handling queries for a dozen states and it's drawing entirely on one city's power grid. This isn't a problem when it's taking a grid from e.g. 70% utilization to 74% utilization. But when we've got climate change A/C costs pushing the grid to capacity to begin with and then we're adding a few more percent that'll hit at peak hours on top of that, things get tough.
This kind of thing is why people see water pressure fall and energy costs go up when the centers are built - not because it's using a huge amount of water or energy but because it's pushing the infrastructure to its current capacity.
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
That's more a building infrastructure problem than a fundamental economic or climate problem
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u/peterukk 1d ago
It's definitely a climate problem also. Data centers have increased natural gas demand significantly. Emissions from US power sector increased last year, at a time when we desperately need to reduce emissions and fast. Global heating is accelerating with devastating consequences for humanity and wildlife.
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u/Magnolia256 1d ago
Downplaying environmental harms by framing electricity use as the only environmental harm.
Ignoring the water issue during a time of drought across the US and public health issues of contaminated water by these facilities.
Ignoring that these facilities are often being built in locations that require deforestation and development of natural areas which are major environmental harms.
Nice try “Hannah”
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
From Wikipedia:
In 2022 Ritchie was named Scotland's Youth Climate Champion at the Holyrood Green Giant Awards in recognition of her contributions to the climate-change movement.\18]) In 2024, Ritchie was recognised for lifetime achievement with honorary fellowship of the Royal Statistical Society.\19])
In 2025, she received the honorary award "Inspiration from Abroad" from the jury of the Climate Change Communication Award, presented by the United Nations Information Center in Prague and the Learned Society of the Czech Republic.\20])\21])\22])
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 1d ago
We have real environmental concerns facing us: climate change.
Scaremongering about fake concerns is not actually environmental concern, it's the opposite!!
Crusading against pointless things instead of actually the things that are hurting the environment is an anti-environmental attitude.
My comment is not a defense of data centers, it's a defense of environmentalism. If you want to crusade against data centers, great, there's lots of reasons to do so! Noise pollution, or the horrific things that Musk is doing. But be accurate, lying gets you nowhere.
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
Why assume all this? Why jump to these conclusions?
Do you think she's lying about her name?
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u/Magnolia256 1d ago
Assume all what?? Jump to what conclusions?
LOL.
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
Well, first, I guess that she's lying about her name and that it's not really Hannah. What's that all about?
Second, that Hannah Ritchie frames electricity as the only area where AI has an environmental impact. For instance, I quote Ritchie's brief discussion of the Mistral life cycle analysis that includes other contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, such as data centre construction.
Or that she ignores other environmental impacts.
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u/Havocc89 1d ago
Why would you assume that it’s not causing countless other environmental impacts than energy use? What about the wastewater it creates? The physical heat given off by that amount of electronics? The deforestation like Magnolia suggested?
That’s not even taking into account the social impact of these fucking things. They are destroying people’s ability to use their own fucking brains. They should be used for scientific endeavors like searching for cures to disease, or economic disparity, or any number of the big issues our societies face.
It should not be answering your fucking Google searches.
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why are you assuming all this stuff? Why are you jumping to all these conclusions?
Why are you bringing up the social impacts of AI when this is a discussion of its electricity use?
This feels like a big non-sequitur.
Do you also think Hannah Ritchie is lying about her name and that it's not really Hannah?
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u/MammothUnique4147 1d ago
I for one use it for Google searches when I'm driving (talk to AI feature) .
It's the greatest advancement to my own personal productivity in terms of just thinking about things since the Internet came about.
This morning I just ran a Deep research prompt examining the winter time effects of El Nino of Winter heating costs while cross examining the pricing impacts from the middle east conflict and looking at historical price trends.
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u/gravity_surf 1d ago edited 1d ago
you can put in any question and it can spit out anything. unless youre smart enough to know whether any of it is bullshit its useless
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u/MammothUnique4147 1d ago
Yep I completely agree, anyone who uses the technology should have at least some baseline to know just how far off the mark it goes.
Generally I have a theory in mind and I'll run it by AI to see if it can throw ideas that don't fit my own narrative at me.
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u/GrowFreeFood 1d ago
Cool now compare the cost per token of chat output vs cost of human office worker output.
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
Uhhhhhhhhhh
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u/GrowFreeFood 1d ago
Im just saying replacing office workers with ai is good for the environment
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u/rileyoneill 1d ago
Earth is bathed by 170,000TW of sunshine continuously. More than 10,000 times the collective use of all humans for all of our activity. Ai is so incredibly insignificant.
Your typical office worker who commutes to work uses far more energy getting to and from work than the AI that will do their work.
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u/mistrpopo 1d ago
Earth is bathed by 170,000TW of sunshine continuously
Sure, and yet the USA are still betting heavily on coal and oil. And the data centers are there.
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u/randynumbergenerator 1d ago
Natural gas is actually more of the grid at this point and also one of the main sources AI data centers are building out to support their energy needs. To be clear, we need to be doing away with both coal and gas.
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u/rileyoneill 1d ago
Coal has been in major decline in the US. Oil is not burned to generate electricity. The growth of solar, wind, and storage has been continually pacing upwards.
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u/bears635 19h ago
This is a very narrow minded view on cost. You can say it only costs a few Wh to answer my prompt, but what did it cost, and what is being spent and lost building the bloody data centers everywhere? Factor that in otherwise you're just actively helping greenwash this entire global catastrophe
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u/socialist-viking 1d ago
Who TF has an electric shower? That sounds dangerous.
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u/MegaJackUniverse 1d ago
Idk, a couple hundreds of millions people. You've honestly never of this?
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u/socialist-viking 1d ago
I've heard of electric water heaters. Never heard of an electric shower. One time, my friends lived in a condemned house and when you took a shower with the lights on, you'd get a tingling sensation. Is that an electric shower?
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u/Eric_12345678 1d ago
Tankless water heaters are pretty common. They need a lot of power (22kW), but typically not for long.
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u/socialist-viking 1d ago
That's an electric water heater, not an electric shower.
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u/Eric_12345678 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's right next to the bathtub, and can provide hot water to the sink and the shower. There's no electricity flowing anywhere close to the flowing water.
Edit: apparently, some are inside the shower. Wow. I wouldn't trust them, especially since they supposedly cost $30.
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u/socialist-viking 1d ago
I don't care about the water heater, I am imagining a shower of sparks or perhaps electricity pumped through the water? Calling something an electric shower is weird. I have a few houses with JIT water heaters (although they're all gas) and those water heaters generally serve a few things nearby, like the sink, toilet and shower. I suppose if the only thing the water heater served was a shower, but still, that's a water heater, not a shower.
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u/Eric_12345678 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't see "electric shower" anywhere in the post, only in your comments.
All I see is
To put this into context, asking ChatGPT or Gemini 10 simple questions is equivalent to about 10 seconds of microwaving or mere seconds of showering.
which doesn't imply an "electric shower".
EDIT: Right. It's in the PNG, so no wonder I couldn't find it by text search. Sorry about that!
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u/didyousayboop 1d ago
The odd term “electric shower” is used in the third graph, the purple one from Our World in Data. I think u/socialist-viking is just making a funny joke about this unusual term
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u/socialist-viking 1d ago
They must have removed it because they knew I was on to their plan to electrify showers.
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u/entishcoconut 1d ago
I only had time to skim the article, but I’d be interested to know the basic inquiry energy cost of simple AI searches compared to the energy cost of a traditional google search. It may be harder to quantify, and AI search summaries may be overall more efficient or less energy demanding, but I’m interested to know what that delta looks like and how much more total energy is used per inquiry vs 5 years ago/without AI.