EAF Energy Consumption

The typical US home has a 200A service which means that it can consume as much as approximately 240V * 200A = 28.8KW. However, the circuits are typically laid out with a 20% safety margin which results in 0.8 * 28.8KW = 23KW. This is a maximum used for comparison. The true value oscillates throughout the days and weeks.

It’s tough to say exactly what the “average” EAF power input is because there’s a large variance today. Without going through hundreds of log files, I would informally estimate that the average EAF input in the USA is approximately 70MW.

Using these two numbers we can estimate that an “average” EAF consumes approximately the equivalent energy of 70,000 / 23 = 3043 US homes. These are back of the envelope estimates and do not account for load fluctuations, utilization factors, etc. So very approximately, an average EAF consumes as much energy as 3000 average US homes.

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