The amount of energy that the average American requires at home has changed little since the early 1970s -- despite advances in technology that have made many home appliances far more energy efficient.What happens when people start saving money on their energy through efficiency?
Dishwashers use 45 percent less energy than they did two decades ago, according to industry data. Refrigerators use 51 percent less.
But on a per-capita basis, Americans still require about 70 million British thermal units a year to heat, cool and power their homes, just as they did in 1971. (One BTU is the energy required to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.)
A key reason, experts say, is that American homes are getting bigger, which means more space to heat and cool. And consumers are buying more and more power-sucking gadgets -- meaning that kilowatts saved by dishwashers and refrigerators are often used up by flat-screen televisions, computers and digital video recorders.
These trends "have balanced each other out. It's been a wash, basically," said Lowell Ungar of the nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy.
Last year, the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. estimated that by 2020 the United States could cut its projected energy use 23 percent by implementing efficiency measures and that about one-third of that change could happen in homes.Even so, some still think that they can sell asceticism:
But success has remained frustratingly out of reach in American homes. In Northern Virginia, Troy Tanner, president of a company called the Home Energy Detective, has an up-close view of why.
Tanner helps clients add insulation or seal leaks in air ducts, which saves energy needed for heating and cooling -- and money spent on bills. But often, Tanner said, neither the money nor the energy stay saved.
"When they start saving money on their bill, and they get that extra $100 per month," they go out and buy a 96-inch TV that's on sale, said Tanner. "The temptation is too much: They buy it.". . .
Tanner said he doesn't spend much time trying to dissuade customers from indulging their love of gadgets. He said set-top boxes that receive cable signals or record TV shows often suck power all day long.
"You tell them to turn off their cable box or their video box," he said. But then "they crank it on and they lose five minutes when it's warming up. That's the last time they're going to do that."
Steve Nadel of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy said the old idea was that customers would never really have to sacrifice to save. That strategy was born at the end of the energy crisis of the 1970s out of unhappy memories of wearing sweaters indoors.With economic policy makers around the world trying to stimulate economic activity (which means more consumption), messages focused on limiting consumption are going to be hard if not impossible to sell to individuals and policy makers alike.
"Energy prices were going up, and people really did want to do things" to save energy, Nadel said. "But then energy prices moderated, and people said, 'We want to go back to the old things.' "
Now, he said, "Do we tell people that 'Maybe you should consume a bit less?' I think we need to do more of that."
But whether sacrifice can be sold or not, calling for it represents a capitulation to the fact that efficiency gains, as important as they are, cannot carry the lion's share of the burden of decarbonizing the economy. Remember that efficiency means doing the same or more with less energy. Sacrifice, on the other hand, simply means doing less. Arguments for decarbonization that end up calling for limiting economic growth are losing propositions. People can throw tantrums about that fact, but it doesn't make it any less of a boundary condition to policy design.
16 comments:
Lifestyle isn't physics; it's a choice. Currently people are unwilling to change much, which is indeed a constraint on policy. However, it's not a constraint in the same way as the laws of motion and thermodynamics.
If people don't voluntarily change, and technology doesn't cough up as much improvement as needed to mitigate and adapt effortlessly, then people will have to change involuntarily.
To take unwillingness to change as the starting point for policy recommendations is a bit like assuming that a smoker can't quit, and therefore recommending that they give a lot of dough to medical research, in the hope that robotic lungs will arrive before cancer does. The smoker might get lucky, but it's not a robust strategy given the technical and biological uncertainty.
The alternative is to run things the other way: establish a few physical limits, then discover whether the economy can work around them. If technology provides, then great. If not, growth slows or reverses, but not as much as it would have via the involuntary route. There's no mandate for doing such things currently, but that doesn't make it a bad idea.
-1-Tom Fiddaman
Of course, you are correct, in the theoretical ideal the analogy breaks down. But I'm talking about the here and now, not theory.
How about this, I'll spend the next 10 years trying to develop a perpetual motion machine and you spend that same time trying to stop global economic growth. Do you really think that achieving the latter is any more possible than the former? ;-)
You write, " ... then people will have to change involuntarily"
I'd like to see the policy proposal that leads to that outcome.
Finally, the smoking analogy doesn't make any sense in this case. Thanks!
Not only does the smoking analogy make no sense but the policy on smoking is certainly not to try to find a solution for recalcitrant smokers with such things as robotic lungs it is demonization and extortionate taxation. What world are you living in?
It's not a "policy proposal" it's physics. Involuntary change has to happen if environmental side effects overwhelm the technical ability to cope with them while sustaining BAU lifestyle.
Analogies are always limited, but what specifically doesn't make sense?
I think Kendra illuminates one breakdown of the analogy (that there are other remedies for smoking, which don't have a climate analog).
However, you both seem to be assuming either (a) there's a technical fix with certainty or (b) there's no point discussing behavior change because people simply won't do it, so if there isn't a technical fix we're screwed.
The Jevons paradox, known since 1865:
"In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological improvements could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Apparently some ideas take time to get a hold. But to reiterate what a Saudi minister once supposedly said, the age of oil will end but not for lack of oil, just as the stone age ended, but not for lack of stones. In other words, fossil fuels will be replaced once an economically better alternative emerges. But there is little to no hope for actually reduced _energy_ consumption per se, unless per technological and economic regression.
Tom:
The smoking analogy is a non-starter. If I do not turn off my cable box because I do not want to wait for it to power up, there is little that you can do outside of coercion to change that preference - save a long term shift to new technology like the replacement for BIOS on PCs. You attach a zero value to people's time and convenience when it is very clear that people attach a relative high value to their time and convenience. This latter fallacy is at the heart of many of the really silly public policy options that we are busy wasting money on.
I think the smoking analogy is pretty strong, with an important weakness. As a species, we are actively participating in practices that will very likely harm our future health. The behavior is the emissions of gases which increase the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere and acidify the oceans. There may be dire consequences to our and other species as a result. A good precautionary doctor would advise stopping the practice, much as they do with smoking. That we want to delay changing an addictive behavior is no surprise to the doctor or our mothers - we can see similar procrastination all around us. It feels good and it is easy to continue. The breakdown in the analogy is that there are economic and human health upsides to many of the causes of GHG emissions. We generate electricity to provide positive benefits, but an undesired consequence of many generation methods is the erosion of the health of the ecosystem. So we do need to reduce the emissions of GHGs (quit smoking), without necessarily (but possibly required) slowing the rat of improvement in human health. The fact that this is a very difficult proposition with lots of vested interests in the tobacco sales (fossil fuel) industry does not change the fact that smoking (emitting GHGs) is unhealthy.
Bernie et al. Again, the mental model here seems to be that either energy externalities (e.g., climate) don't matter, or that technology is certain to solve them, or that behavior is so immutable that it's impossible to contemplate lifestyle change as a component of a solution.
It seems to me that the job of the doctor (Roger) is to give the smoker (decision makers) all options, not to size them up and conclude that since they won't quit (price externalities or "sacrifice"), he'll only tell them about medical options that might work down the road (technology investment).
The public can't really assess choices that analysts don't even report, so excluding them on the basis of lack of public interest becomes a nice self-fulfilling prophecy.
Incidentally, the definition of efficiency (doing same or more with less) isn't consistent with the economic use of the term (neither is wrong, but there's a language gap).
Might the Saudi minister have a slight conflict of interest?
Re value to time and convenience - who said I told you to turn off your set top box? My preference would be to price the externalities we care about, and let you decide whether to turn it off or not.
Re "extortionate taxation" - there's a legitimate component of taxation, which is to recover externalities that smokers impose on others.
Tom Fiddaman said... 4
"Involuntary change has to happen if environmental side effects overwhelm the technical ability to cope with them while sustaining BAU lifestyle."
A government that doesn't have the consent of the people needs a minimum of 20 security personnel per thousand residents to maintain order.
The average police density in the US is 2.3/1000 population.
If you'd like to govern the US without the consent of the people you will need at least another 5 million police that are loyal to you and your policies.
Harry - The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you think that by "involuntary" I mean imposed by some authority.
That's not what I mean at all. By "involuntary" I mean that environmental feedbacks erode the physical ability to supply goods and services at the desired BAU level. The enforcing authority would be the laws of physics, not police.
Roger: I think the real world is more complicated than this discussion captures. There may be cases where there are rebound effects that overwhelm efficiency increases, and there may be cases where they don't. I would suggest taking a look at the example of California. Starting about 40 years ago, California began enacting a wide array of building energy efficiency requirements, and has had pretty consistent policy direction over that time period. My memory is that 40 years ago per capita energy use was pretty close to the national average, and that it is now more like half the national average. So an interesting question might be about how the policy design in California achieved this outcome.
A number of other thoughts on this question:
1) When we have adopted new building codes in Boulder County, they have generally been designed
to achieve the maximum level of energy efficiency that is cost neutral - so that the savings in utility bills should, for most consumers, be approximately equal to the financing costs of the capital investment required. Under this policy approach, there are significant reductions in energy use, at no net cost to the consumer, but there is not money being freed up to invest in other energy consuming activities.
2) The implication in the article that increased energy efficiency has lead to savings that then allow people to build larger homes, get larger appliances, etc may be true, but is nothing more than an assertion with no evidence presented. The cost of energy is too low for energy savings due to efficiency improvements to finance anything near the increase in average home sizes that we have seen - I think you have to look for other explanations for that trend. Do people who weatherize their homes actually buy more large screen TVs than the population as a whole? I doubt it.
-Will Toor
@Will Toor: I suspect the main reason per capita energy use in California has declined is because any energy-intensive industry has moved interstate or overseas. If you have data based on domestic-only energy use, I'd be interested to see it.
@hayworth
good questions. de-industrialization has certainly played a role but is not the only driver. Other factors include higher electricity prices relative to other states, building and appliance efficiency standards, demographic shifts and energy efficiency programs (aka DSM). see below for a couple of resources that may be of interest...
http://piee.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/docs/behavior/becc/2007/posters/Mitchell_1.pdf
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2009_energypolicy/documents/2010-02-17_workshop/comments/TURN_Comments_TN-55704.pdf
Thanks, FB. I notice that the second document confirms that a reduction in energy-intensive industry is a significant factor. The other contributors seem to be higher retail electricity prices, larger households, more multi-dwelling residences and a "conservation ethic". But I see you've already said all that ...
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