One fact that most industry professionals can agree upon is that conventional fume hoods require a tremendous amount of energy, since they need to exhaust large quantities of tempered air. As a result, some estimates show that laboratory facilities are four to five times more energy intensive than a typical commercial building. Indeed, a conventional fume hood can consume three times more energy than an average American home.
There are approximately 750,000 fume hoods currently in use in the United States. That translates into an annual operating cost - just for fume hoods - of approximately $3.2 billion, with a corresponding peak electrical demand of 5,000MW, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.