VOLO Beauty & Energy Consumption

When looking at energy consumption in households, hair dryers are among the top energy consumers!

If cordless hair dryers like the VOLO Go Cordless Hair Dryer were widely adopted worldwide, we calculate it would reduce GHG emissions by about 20 million metric tons of CO2. Here is how we arrived at that number-- hang with us, it's about to get a little technical!

Our VOLO Cordless hair dryer consumes about 1/3 of the electricity as a corded hair dryer due to our novel heating element which uses infrared radiant heat instead of the convection heat of traditional hair dryers.

The hair dryer market is enormous at about $16B sold each year (approximately 320M units). Based on this number and the number of adult women on the planet (2.6B), we estimate 500M regularly dry their hair.

We used the above worldwide business market data on hair dryers and populations, and assumed that our new technology were widely adopted, that is, most of the adult woman who use a hair dryer were to switch from a corded hair dryer to a battery-powered hair dryer. We assumed hair dryers are used for about 10 minutes, 5 days a week. Using these potential calculations, that equates to about 2.1 billion hours of use worldwide by hair dryers.

A conventional hair dryer uses about 1875 Watts, while ours uses 600, so this could be a savings of about 26.5 trillion kW-hours per year.

According to the EPA, 26.5 trillion kW-hours is equivalent to about 20M pounds of CO2.

Here is more detail on the exact calculation:

Assume that, of the 2.6 billion adult women worldwide, 500 million use a hairdryer an average of 10 minutes per session 5 days a week, for a total of 20.8 trillion hours. A corded dryer uses 1.875kW, which equals 39 trillion kW-hours of electricity. A VOLO Cordless Hair Dryer uses 0.6kW, which equals 12.5 trillion kW-hours. If the VOLO Go was widely adopted, this would be a savings of 26.6 trillion kW-hours worldwide.

We entered this savings, 26.6 trillion kW-hours, into the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator to arrive at 19.77 million metric tons of reduced CO2 emissions. This is the same as removing 4.2 million cars or 46 million barrels of oil or 5000 wind turbines.

If we use the US average of $0.15 per kWhr, this equates to about $4 trillion in monetary savings.

We love the possibility that together we could make a dramatic difference in the world's energy usage simply by all drying our hair with the VOLO Go!