How much energy does a household need?

Answer 1

A major push of mine is using wastewater to grow & harvest the biomass to squeeze for biodiesel, near the end the water is almost pure so treated and recycled, the pressed biomass cakes are good soil enhancers and you get about 3-gallons of biodiesel a day per adult living in the home.

Homes can be designed with thermal-mass {water, stone ...} to work with the insulation to hold a room in the comfort zone for 10% of the energy than without.

You can burn the bacon with thermal fluids heated to 550F during the day by parabolic trough collectors storing enough volume for the daily cycle, this supplies everything from laundry to hot-water from solar-thermal.

To have party ice & air-conditioning use a solar-dish collector to get 2,200F for ammonia refrigeration to work, storing -35F all day for use in cooling and freezing. The appliances will look the same, they'll just hook up to insulated pipettes in the wall (flexible so pulled like wiring to install it).

The same fluid does both and has been used in ice-houses for a century, you pipe it around the home where it's needed, the collectors & storage tanks can be any reasonable distance from the home.

With those living needs handled, the electrical needs are more reasonable for PV-battery arrays, and with a 3.5-kw to 5-kw diesel generator for backup & heavy current loads like running power tools, you have the biodiesel from the water system.

So you see how much energy a home "needs" is a matter of design awareness, autonomous housing has engineering textbooks from a decade ago, apartments as well totally off the grid and sewer systems, so, not news, but the push to use it is finally getting tepid ... not really a booming market in sustatinable products for the home at this time.

Answer 2

It could be 5000 kilowatt-hours per year.