Rochester Will Use a Lot of Electricity Cooking Thanksgiving Dinners
Sure, Thanksgiving dinner is famous for being a big meal, filled with lots of calories. But it turns out the amount of energy we'll use gobbling up all those turkeys is also pretty big!
If you're like me, there's nothing like loading up your plate will all that incredible turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, green bean casserole and more during Thanksgiving dinner. But just how much energy do we use to put on that feast each year?
Rochester Public Utilities and the American Public Power Association did a little research into the amount of electricity needed to cook all that food. According to a post on the RPU Twitter page, it breaks down like this: On average, 88% of Americans will consume over 46 million turkeys this Thanksgiving-- roughly 748 million pounds.
Now, say each of those turkeys (at an average of 16 pounds) needs to cook for around 4-hours at 325-degrees in your oven. That'll run you, on average, about 9.2 kilowatt hours per turkey. Do the math across the U.S. and you get over 430 million kilowatt hours.
And, at an average rate of $13.01 per kilowatt hour, cooking all those Thanksgiving turkeys will cost us a total of... $56 million dollars! Hoo boy-- I'm glad I'm not paying THAT bill!
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