Home electricity use in the US is falling to 2001 levels

[Redfairen]

The average amount of electricity consumed in U.S. homes has fallen to levels last seen more than a decade ago, back when the smartest device in people's pockets was a Palm pilot and anyone talking about a tablet was probably an archaeologist or a preacher. Because of more energy-efficient housing, appliances and gadgets, power usage is on track to decline in 2013 for the third year in a row, to its lowest point since 2001, even though our lives are more electrified.

In the early 2000s, as energy prices rose, more states adopted or toughened building codes to force builders to better seal homes so heat or air-conditioned air doesn't seep out so fast. That means newer homes waste less energy. Also, insulated windows and other building technologies have dropped in price, making retrofits of existing homes more affordable. In the wake of the financial crisis, billions of dollars in Recovery Act funding was directed toward home-efficiency programs.

Big appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners have gotten more efficient thanks to federal energy standards that get stricter ever few years as technology evolves.

A typical room air conditioner — one of the biggest power hogs in the home — uses 20 percent less electricity per hour of full operation than it did in 2001, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.



http://news.yahoo.com/home-electricity-us-falling-2001-levels-174724499--finance.html?.tsrc=attmp

[cprise]

1. Possible implications:

The after-5PM peak in energy demand may become less pronounced.

[GliderGuider]

2. Unfortunately, there are 10% more homes in the US today than in 2001.

Which renders all the breathlessness moot. Y'all are still using more electricity - consumption is up 8% since 2001.

Here's the problem with the argument that efficiency is helpful:

1. Money is both universal and fungible;
   
   
2. Virtually every significant transaction in the world today is monetized - everything has become a trade commodity: food, raw materials, goods and services, etc;
   
   
3. Improving energy or material efficiency in one particular area like home electricity consumption lowers the cost of operations in that area;
   
   
4. Any monetized operation that is executed at lower cost releases some money that can be used to increase operations in other areas of the economy;
   
   
5. There are few barriers to the global movement of money, at least in its high-volume electronic form;
   
   
6. The result is that when the same amount of activity occurs at lower cost, the money that is released flows to other areas of the local, national and global economies, allowing them to expand.

Jevons.

[kristopher]

4. That would be "Perversion of Jevons"

Extrapolating what is already a very weak premise (Jevons) to the point of absurdity is, I would argue, a perverse act that seeks to distort rather than inform.

Lacking energy efficiency efforts, would the number of people be different?
No, of course not. The only difference would be that instead of an 8% increase (assuming you are accurate) we'd be looking at a far higher increase in consumption.

[GliderGuider]

5. Do you think increasing efficiency plays a role in the expansion of economies?

If not, why not?

[kristopher]

7. I think that discussions with you on this topic are pointless

You are dedicated to distortion, not accurate analysis. In the end it always comes down to the same thing - you claim it is your right to disregard all evidence because you have a raging case of truthiness.

[GliderGuider]

10. Really? You reject the idea but can't explain why?

You appear to have a severe blind spot where efficiency is concerned, my friend.

[NickB79]

11. That statement is clearly not accurate

Lacking energy efficiency efforts, would the number of people be different?
No, of course not. The only difference would be that instead of an 8% increase (assuming you are accurate) we'd be looking at a far higher increase in consumption.

Lacking energy efficiency efforts over the past decade, it is very well possible the number of people would in fact be different in the US. More expensive energy would have caused a greater contraction in the economy, resulting in fewer people immigrating to the US. We already got a small taste of that: http://reason.com/24-7/2013/09/23/illegal-immigration-dropped-during-reces

A sharp drop in the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States that accompanied the start of the Great Recession has leveled off in recent years and could be ticking back upward as the economy improves, according to a report released Monday.

And, faced with higher and higher energy costs and a less robust economy, it's likely more people would have purchased/rented comparatively smaller, cheaper, less energy-hungry apartments, condos and townhomes instead of single-family homes over the past decade.

Clearly there is more than one difference possible if energy efficiency standards were lacking.

[kristopher]

14. So you think that inefficient light bulbs, refrigerators and AC units discourage immigration?

Yeah, Nick. I'm sure that is what is at the top of the list of things that people coming to a new country think about; the total amount of spending on energy in their homes.

Well, it's no surprise you'd stake out that kind of position - nuclear and coal plants love driving increased consumption and absolutely despise energy efficiency incentives.

[Iterate]

12. Gee, I get to disgree with both of you.

The consumption is built into the infrastructure, and in this case the house is the infrastructure. The biggest factor is the size of the house. That's common enough knowledge I don't think I need a citation.

So cut your house in half, then take a chainsaw to cut the fridge in half; use a cold room half the year. Cut the cord off the freezer, you don't need it. The same with a dryer -air drying is fine. The same with the garbage grinder. Send food waste to the city for biogas, and don't mix it with shit and then use fresh drinking water to pump it all to an overloaded sewage plant. Disconnect the hot water tank, put in a demand system, then take the hot water handles from most of the taps. And quit mowing, put in perennial flowers or apples, with no extra tap water.

In a couple of weeks you will not miss those things at all. None of this is a hardship. And by 'you' in all of this, I don't mean you personally.

That(and a few more things) will cut consumption down to about an OECD average, about half of the current US norm. The next step is more difficult -live very near, as in walking distance, from where you work and play.

Only with that next half to be cut does efficiency matter: lights, computing(45w max) and communication, insulation, and all. It's one of the reasons I cringe with the word 'efficiency'. Taking a streetcar is cutting consumption; getting one more mpg in a car is merely efficiency in a broken infrastructure.

And don't worry where the money goes next, because half as much now goes to Southern Power or the Kochs. The problem isn't so much where money flows as where it concentrates.

[GliderGuider]

16. As you say,

Last edited Mon Dec 30, 2013, 10:21 PM - Edit history (1)

"The problem isn't so much where money flows as where it concentrates."

It concentrates in China, India, Brazil - any place that has a connection to the international banking/finance system, where money is required to finance economic growth.

Efficiency cuts the consumption of individuals. It does not cut the overall, cross-resource consumption growth of the global economic system. The money an individual saves flows into that system, where it funds an expansion of climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, deforestation, and pollution of the land, water and air.

The best that becoming energy efficient in your own home will do is ensure that you remain comfortable a bit longer while the planet's ecological support systems overload and fail around you.

[Iterate]

20. I described it as individualized,

but meant to imply it would need to become be a new cultural norm at the residential level, and a global maximum at that. Given that any spare cash from any source would then need to go to remodeling every dwelling in North America to passive -well it doesn't leave much for Brazil.

Public level infrastructure is correlated in the same way to consumption. Once the road gets built, there will be cars. But put in rail with no other choice, or otherwise make it the automatic choice, and 30% CO2 is cut from then on. Food and ag infrastructure follows the same way. Apples with a boarding pass on a plane from New Zealand gets you one outcome, crates of neighborhood apples delivered after school by kids pushing handcarts quite another. The consumption culture and infrastructure can't be discounted.

Given that no one in North America in particular has stood and given the bad news that the game is over, and that merely changing a light bulb is considered an assault on liberty and civilization, I'm not hopeful. But that doesn't mean I don't see a way out.

[Yo_Mama]

22. Electric & gas utilities appear to have stopped their rise in the economy as a whole since 2007

[kristopher]

3. Aggressive efforts to enhance energy efficiency are essential and easy if we try.

If you want to know whether a politician favors the existing fossil/nuclear energy infrastructure or whether they want to phase it out, just find out how they stand on energy efficiency measures. There is no path that yields more immediate results than 'negawatts'.

[GliderGuider]

6. They are essential if we wish to free up money to keep the rest of the global economy growing.

Efficiency improvements don't stop overall growth. They slow it in some areas, while enabling it to accelerate in others. It's kind of like squeezing a balloon. As long as more air keeps flowing in, it doesn't matter how hard you squeeze one small part of it - the whole thing keeps growing despite your most strenuous efforts.

[kristopher]

8. Dude, you don't even know what economic growth means.

[GliderGuider]

9. That's an odd thing to say.

I use a bog-standard definition, shared by the World Bank, and illustrated by this graph:

[kristopher]

15. Like I said...

You don't know what it means.

[GliderGuider]

17. And what, o bearded sage, does it mean to you?

[kristopher]

18. It isn't a line on a graph.

Why do you think you understand what you are saying? You admit no one "sees" what you see. You justify that to yourself by insisting you possess some sort of special insight into fundamentals that no one else can wrap their head around. I'd suggest that the answer to that is far more prosaic - you've built a house of cards on truthiness and self-delusion where you really don't get the import of most of the basic concepts you're working with. I told you as much when you went on a lovefest with the writings of Harris and claimed he meant a series of things that he had explicitly rejected. You didn't care.

Is there a reason I should think your approach to learning has changed?

[GliderGuider]

19. OK, try this

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicgrowth.asp

Definition of 'Economic Growth'

An increase in the capacity of an economy to produce goods and services, compared from one period of time to another. Economic growth can be measured in nominal terms, which include inflation, or in real terms, which are adjusted for inflation. For comparing one country's economic growth to another, GDP or GNP per capita should be used as these take into account population differences between countries.

The rising lines in my graph represent the global production of goods and services in real terms (constant dollars adjusted for inflation). The production is rising over time, so the global economy is growing. Not sure what's rocket science about that. Likewise, there is nothing mysterious about energy and material efficiency improvements contributing to that process.

Regarding Harris, the wiki entry says,

Within this division of culture, cultural materialism argues for what is referred to as the principle of probabilistic infrastructural determinism. The essence of its materialist approach is that the infrastructure is in almost all circumstances the most significant force behind the evolution of a culture. Structure and superstructure are not considered "insignificant, epiphenomenal reflexes of infrastructural forces". The structure and symbolic/ideational aspects act as regulating mechanisms within the system as a whole.

That's not rocket science either.

[GliderGuider]

21. Some education for you, on the topic of energy efficiency and economic growth

Since you can blithely deny something as simple as energy efficiency stimulating economic growth, I though you could use a bit of help.

http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/verve/_resources/Vivid_Economics_-_Energy_efficiency_and_economic_growth_June_2013.pdf

The analysis shows that improvements in energy efficiency have an effect on economic growth for the whole group of countries. There is statistical evidence that energy efficiency positively contributes to economic growth. A 1 per cent increase in the level of energy efficiency causes a 0.1 percentage point increase in the rate of economic growth in that year.

Greentech: Report: Efficiency Is a More Important Economic Driver Than Energy Supply

John Laitner, a visiting fellow at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, wanted to know how much America spends on energy efficiency upgrades each year. That's not an easy goal. While it's a bit easier to quantify how much was spent on equipment and infrastructure upgrades for explicit efficiency reasons, it's harder to quantify the economy-wide impact of natural upgrades that might simply feature incrementally efficient equipment.

When analyzing both categories, Laitner found that in 2010 (the most recent year for which full data is available), America spent roughly $574 billion on energy efficiency improvements across a range of sectors, including utilities, manufacturing, construction, appliances, and automobiles. That's an 80 percent increase in spending since 2004. It's also three and a half times the amount of money spent in 2010 on new infrastructure for energy production, according to the analysis.

The actual "cost premium" -- or the additional cost to upgrade to more efficient technologies -- was about $90 billion in 2010. That's a little over half of the $170 billion spent on infrastructure for energy production.

Whatever the exact yearly investment figure, the historical economic impact of efficiency is quite clear. As the graph below shows, efficiency has provided three times more of the economic services than new production since 1970:

The blue line illustrates demand for energy services (the economic activity associated with energy use) since 1970; the solid red line shows energy use; and the green line illustrates the gain in energy efficiency. While demand for energy services has tripled in the last four decades, actual energy consumption has only grown by 40 percent. Meanwhile, the energy intensity of our economy has fallen by half.

The area between the solid red line and the blue line represents the amount of energy we did not need to consume since 1970; the area between the dashed red line and the solid red line indicates how much energy we consumed since 1970. The chart shows that energy efficiency met nearly three quarters of the demand for services, while energy supply met only one quarter.

[quadrature]

13. fewer people with full time jobs

the ongoing recession.