Digital Billboard Power Use

Bad information dies hard.  Last week Manhattan, Kansas commissioner Jerred McKee explained his opposition to digital billboards to The Collegian:

“Character is my biggest concern,” McKee said. “In a study I read, digital billboards have a bigger carbon footprint and use 30 times more energy than the average home in a year.”

The 30X figure comes from a 2010 study by Gregory Young which appears on the Scenic America website.    The 2010 study wildly overstates digital billboard power use.  Billboard Insider’s March 2016 analysis found that a typical digital billboard face uses about twice as much power as a house.

Insider owns a 10′ by 30′ single sided digital billboard in Texas.  The billboard uses an average of 20,440 kilowatt hours of electricity a year versus average electricity use of 10,766 for the average us house.  So Insider’s billboard uses 1.9 times the energy of an average house.   Most cities require you to take down 2-4 static billboard faces for every new digital face which is constructed.  In this scenario a new digital billboard will have only a limited net additional electricity use.

Insider’s take:   Know your electricity consumption facts in case a poorly informed politician tries to cite a 9 year old discredited Scenic America study to make a case against digital billboards.

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