A Hunger for Digital-Quality Power

Since 1940 the percentage of U.S. energy consumed in electric form has quadrupled! Today nearly every new product that comes to market requires electricity. And our appetite for electricity is only growing.

Americans purchased more than $161 billion in consumer electronics products in 2007, with the average adult spending $1,405 annually on these products. The number of U.S. households with electronics products is quite impressive:

	98% of households have televisions
	84% of households have DVD players
	82% of households have cordless telephones
	76% of households have at least one cell phone
	62% of households have digital cameras
	32% of households have MP3 players
	25% of households have high-definition TVs1

 

The typical U.S. household’s consumption of electricity has evolved over the last 25 years. American homes are bigger and use 21 percent more electricity today than they did in 1978, with a larger portion of the electricity powering digital and electric appliances.²

Most modern electric products are more energy efficient than their older counterparts. Unlike older appliances though, many of today’s digital devices are highly sensitive to even the slightest interruption of power, and an outage of less than a fraction of a single cycle can disrupt their performance. Digital-quality power now represents 10 percent of total electrical load in the United States and is expected to reach 30 percent by 2020.³

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