A typical US household, one year
4.3 tonsof CO₂e
10,566 kWh a year at the national average of 812 lb per MWh · 552 lb in Vermont, 10.4 tons in West Virginia
Household electricity from EIA RECS 2020; emission rate from EPA eGRID 2023. Electricity only — not the gas, not the car.
Carbon varies far more than money does
The most repeated finding on this site is that where you live matters more than what you own: electricity costs 4× more in the dearest state than the cheapest. Carbon does not merely repeat that pattern — it dwarfs it. Vermont generates at 52 lb of CO₂e per megawatt-hour and West Virginia at 1,969, which is 37.7×.
The reason is that price and carbon are set by different things. A rate is built from fuel costs, transmission, regulation, and whether the utility has shareholders to pay. An emission rate is built from what is actually burned. Vermont’s grid is 83.5% nuclear, hydro, wind, solar and geothermal; West Virginia’s is 6.9%. Those two facts have almost nothing to do with each other, which is why the cheapest electricity in the country is not the cleanest and the most expensive is not the dirtiest.
What each appliance emits in a year
Same arithmetic as everywhere else on this site — watts × duty cycle × hours × days — with the kilowatt-hours multiplied by an emission rate instead of a price. The two outer columns are the cleanest and dirtiest grids in the country, so they bracket what the same machine does depending only on where it is plugged in.
Annual CO₂e from electricity, on each page’s standard operating assumption. Emission rates are EPA eGRID 2023; the kilowatt-hours are the same ones the cost pages use.
| Appliance | A year | US average | In Vermont | In West Virginia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Central air conditioner | 2,295 kWh | 1,863 lb | 120 lb | 2.3 tons |
| Electric furnace | 9,012 kWh | 3.7 tons | 470 lb | 8.9 tons |
| Electric water heater | 2,720 kWh | 1.1 tons | 142 lb | 2.7 tons |
| Refrigerator | 420 kWh | 341 lb | 22 lb | 828 lb |
| Electric clothes dryer | 682 kWh | 554 lb | 36 lb | 1,343 lb |
| EV charging (Level 2 home) | 3,541 kWh | 1.4 tons | 185 lb | 3.5 tons |
| Electric oven | 336 kWh | 273 lb | 18 lb | 661 lb |
| LED light bulb | 16 kWh | 13 lb | 1 lb | 32 lb |
A pound of CO₂e is hard to picture, so one anchor: burning a gallon of petrol emits about 20 lb. A refrigerator on the US average grid is therefore roughly 17 gallons a year, and the same fridge in West Virginia is about 41.
What actually reduces it
Three things move this number, and they are not equally available. The first is using less, which works everywhere and is what the rest of this site is about: a kilowatt-hour not used emits nothing on any grid, and the largest loads — heating, water heating, cooling — are where the kilowatt-hours are.
The second is efficiency of the machine rather than of the habit. A heat pump against electric resistance heat is the clearest case on this site: it delivers two to four units of heat per unit of electricity, so it cuts both the bill and the carbon by the same proportion, and on a dirty grid the carbon saving is the larger of the two in absolute terms.
The third is the grid itself, which you do not control and which is changing under you regardless. The emission rates here are 2023 and have been falling for two decades as coal has been replaced; a figure on this page will be wrong in a few years in the direction of being too high. That is the one kind of staleness worth having.
Every state, cleanest to dirtiest
The last column is a typical household’s 10,566 kWh a year on that state’s grid. The generation mix is what drives it: the states at the clean end run on hydro, nuclear and wind, and the states at the dirty end still burn coal.
EPA eGRID 2023, state output emission rates, all fuels. Carbon-free generation is nuclear, hydro, wind, solar and geothermal as a share of in-state generation.
| State | lb CO₂e/MWh | g CO₂e/kWh | Carbon-free generation | A household a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| West Virginia | 1,969 | 893 g | 6.9% | 10.4 tons |
| Wyoming | 1,833 | 832 g | 22.5% | 9.7 tons |
| Kentucky | 1,747 | 792 g | 6.5% | 9.2 tons |
| Indiana | 1,466 | 665 g | 12.3% | 7.7 tons |
| Missouri | 1,455 | 660 g | 25.4% | 7.7 tons |
| Utah | 1,421 | 645 g | 17.8% | 7.5 tons |
| Hawaii | 1,395 | 633 g | 16.7% | 7.4 tons |
| North Dakota | 1,298 | 589 g | 39.4% | 6.9 tons |
| Wisconsin | 1,164 | 528 g | 23.4% | 6.1 tons |
| Colorado | 1,091 | 495 g | 37.1% | 5.8 tons |
| Ohio | 1,068 | 485 g | 15.7% | 5.6 tons |
| Montana | 1,064 | 483 g | 50.5% | 5.6 tons |
| Nebraska | 1,026 | 465 g | 50.7% | 5.4 tons |
| Arkansas | 998 | 453 g | 30.3% | 5.3 tons |
| Rhode Island | 840 | 381 g | 5.8% | 4.4 tons |
| Massachusetts | 830 | 377 g | 15% | 4.4 tons |
| Mississippi | 828 | 376 g | 17% | 4.4 tons |
| Alaska | 815 | 369 g | 28.2% | 4.3 tons |
| Michigan | 797 | 362 g | 31.7% | 4.2 tons |
| Florida | 789 | 358 g | 17.1% | 4.2 tons |
| New Mexico | 774 | 351 g | 45% | 4.1 tons |
| Texas | 771 | 350 g | 34.6% | 4.1 tons |
| Louisiana | 763 | 346 g | 13.5% | 4.0 tons |
| Minnesota | 752 | 341 g | 50.8% | 4.0 tons |
| Kansas | 733 | 333 g | 64.4% | 3.9 tons |
| Georgia | 717 | 325 g | 36.4% | 3.8 tons |
| Alabama | 714 | 324 g | 39.9% | 3.8 tons |
| Delaware | 704 | 319 g | 3.4% | 3.7 tons |
| Arizona | 689 | 313 g | 41.8% | 3.6 tons |
| Tennessee | 661 | 300 g | 59.6% | 3.5 tons |
| Oklahoma | 649 | 294 g | 43.3% | 3.4 tons |
| Pennsylvania | 648 | 294 g | 34.2% | 3.4 tons |
| Nevada | 644 | 292 g | 36.6% | 3.4 tons |
| Iowa | 634 | 288 g | 61.4% | 3.4 tons |
| North Carolina | 626 | 284 g | 46.2% | 3.3 tons |
| South Carolina | 560 | 254 g | 59.6% | 3.0 tons |
| Connecticut | 541 | 245 g | 35.8% | 2.9 tons |
| Virginia | 540 | 245 g | 38.6% | 2.9 tons |
| Maryland | 522 | 237 g | 50.6% | 2.8 tons |
| Illinois | 474 | 215 g | 68.4% | 2.5 tons |
| New Jersey | 470 | 213 g | 46.5% | 2.5 tons |
| New York | 467 | 212 g | 50.7% | 2.5 tons |
| District of Columbia | 395 | 179 g | 14.3% | 2.1 tons |
| California | 395 | 179 g | 53.5% | 2.1 tons |
| Oregon | 365 | 166 g | 60.6% | 1.9 tons |
| South Dakota | 336 | 152 g | 78.7% | 1.8 tons |
| Maine | 317 | 144 g | 53.5% | 1.7 tons |
| Idaho | 314 | 142 g | 65.3% | 1.7 tons |
| New Hampshire | 276 | 125 g | 68.6% | 1.5 tons |
| Washington | 267 | 121 g | 75.6% | 1.4 tons |
| Vermont | 52 | 24 g | 83.5% | 552 lb |
What this figure is and is not
It is the emissions of generation inside a state divided by that generation. It is not the emissions of the electricity you consume, which differ because power crosses state lines constantly — a state that imports most of its electricity is described here by the plants it happens to own rather than by the ones actually serving it.
It is an annual average and not a marginal rate. It covers CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide combined as CO₂e, and it counts emissions at the plant: it does not include building the plant, mining or transporting the fuel, or the losses between the generator and your meter, which add roughly another 5%. And it is 2023, which on a grid this rapidly is old enough to matter.
For an appliance-sized question — is this thing worth replacing, does this habit matter — it is the right tool and the error bars do not change the answer. For anything consequential, EPA publishes the same rates for 27 eGRID subregions that follow the grid rather than the political map.
Questions
Does using less electricity at night emit less?
Is the cleanest electricity also the cheapest?
Why is my state listed by state and not by grid?
Does buying a green tariff change this number?
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, eGRID2023 Summary Tables (rev 2), Table 3: State Output Emission Rates, 2023. U.S. Government work, public domain.
How every figure here is computed · Where the data comes from