Summary

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the: (1) amount of electricity used in federal buildings and facilities; and (2) costs of this electricity from fiscal year (FY) 1986 through FY 1995. GAO did not verify the data obtained from the Department of Energy.

GAO noted that: (1) the federal government used about 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in FY 1995, the latest year for which data were available, in its buildings and facilities; (2) electricity use in the federal government is highly concentrated in a few agencies; (3) the Department of Defense (DOD) used about 50 percent of the total in FY 1995, and the five next largest consuming agencies, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Energy, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, accounted for about another 34 percent; (4) electricity costs in federal buildings and facilities in FY 1995 totalled about $3.5 billion; and (5) electricity costs were similarly concentrated, with DOD and the five other agencies accounting for about 87 percent of the total cost.