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"TVA will sell less electricity in 10 years than it did 10 years ago. That is bonkers." Why is this so crazy to imagine? There are so many drivers to increased

"TVA will sell less electricity in 10 years than it did 10 years ago. That is bonkers." Why is this so crazy to imagine? There are so many drivers to increased energy efficiency. LED lightbulbs, LCD TVs instead of monitors, vastly improved efficiency standards/technologies for various appliances, fact you can do loads of stuff with a smartphone instead of watching a giant TV, etc etc, huge fall in heavy industry, small scale solar/wind generation actually appearing as a reduction in demand on the grid instead of 'increase of supply and corresponding increase in demand'. I'd actually say it was more crazy if we expected it to continue increasing thinking about current trends, and I've heard this story of the utility death spiral for about 5 years so I don't think it is a sudden problem.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
But energy efficiency has been increasing at a fairly steady rate for much longer than the last 10 years. Jevons paradox(1) has previously ensured that increased efficiency resulted in increased demand. What has changed now? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  People are getting older, and use less resources overall as they age. Drive less as well.
  - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
    This is interesting, especially in the areas TVA covers. Would be cool to correlate this usage by average age of the customer base.
- amluto 9y ago
  I would guess that Jevon's paradox doesn't exist for many domestic applications. Most people have all the lights, washing machines, etc that they need. Making lights more efficient won't make people buy more of them.
  - moccachino 9y ago
    I would argue LED lighting does increase the demand for all sorts of lights rather a lot. It is due to increased efficiency, but that is not directly what creates the demand. The increased efficiency means light bulbs are no longer a fire hazard, allowing lights to be strewn just about anywhere and left on indefinitely.
    - wickawic 9y ago
      Ageeed. Also seeing as LED bulbs are ~10x more efficient per lumen than incandescent, people are not installing 10x as much brightness in their homes
      - pouetpouet 9y ago
        Perception of brightness is not linear. The human eye response is not linear. So x10 the luminous flux (power output) will be perceived as brighter but far from x10.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        k. People are still not installing 10x as much light.
        pouetpouet 9y ago
        not in their home, but I can see many more historical and institutionnal buildings being illuminated, commercial use also. It may still not amount to 10x though.
      - lozenge 9y ago
        Streets, offices and shops are now better lit.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- martinald 9y ago
  Good point; perhaps it is not efficiency then but outsourcing of light/heavy industry (simply meaning while TVA et al demand is falling, Chinese power demand is growing even more rapidly), and the fact there is more supply in the form of unmetered local solar/wind generation which looks like a fall in demand on the grid but actually isn't. Interesting.
- SerLava 9y ago
  Intuitively, that only applies when there's actually some pent up demand. At some point, availability of teacups really won't drive more demand.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    Energy is the principal or a major secondary input into food, transportation, housing, consumer and industrial goods, et cetera. In other words, just about everything we spend money on. So unless we start seeing a major drop in the demand for currency, I don't buy this argument.
    - hrie282 9y ago
      Everything we spend money on is being manufactured more power efficiently, is more power efficient on its own, and grid demand drops as adoption of new efficient gadgets and individual solar expands? At home we went all LED lights. My office followed suit. Even my city swapped the night time street lights Sadly we had almost every appliance in the house die in the first 4 yrs we owned it. But they’re all new efficient models now Fewer desktops, more tablets and phones. Our big TV is only on 3-4 hrs a week (but it too is a more power efficient model) A lot of effort has gone into battery storage and efficiency this last decade. Little numbers add up to big ones real fast
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      Finance consuming ever greater proportions of our GDP probably helped keep that in check https://www.bis.org/img/speeches/sp081119_g3.gif https://www.bis.org/img/speeches/sp081119_g3.gif (if your rent doubles and home insurance goes up, your electricity consumption does not go up). Similarly, offshoring of manufacturing likely muted the demand for electricity too.
    - gowld 9y ago
      Economic inequality means that the average person can't afford to keep consuming as much energy as in the past, meanwhile the wealthiest people have saturated demand, they have everything they can imagine wishing for.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  >Jevons paradox(1) has previously ensured that increased efficiency resulted in increased demand. you can only have so many devices and appliances.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > What has changed now? Jevons Paradox is not an immutable natural law. It's does not even have any predictive power. It's just a notice of an interesting thing that can happen but the naivest interpretation of microeconomics assumes it's impossible.
  - jtuente 9y ago
    Just like Moore's law, which is also hitting a wall.
    - ctdonath 9y ago
      Moore's Law has been hitting - and going through - walls for the last 30 years.
      - delecti 9y ago
        True, but you can only handwave away the size of atoms for so long.
        fooker 9y ago
        We are somewhat far away from being restricted by the size of single atoms. A silicon atom is 0.2 nanometers and the smallest single transistors used in recent chips is in the order of 5-10 nanometers. Also, using photons instead of electrons does allow you, almost literally to handwave away he size of atoms. How exactly, is unknown today.
        madengr 9y ago
        That leaves about 13 years left until Moore’s Law hits that 0.2 nm feature. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
        marcosdumay 9y ago
        Silicon lithography has to hit a wall way before single atom sizes. For a start, silicon semiconducting is a probabilistic effect and only happen on populations. Photons at usable frequencies are much larger than atoms. Just notice that lithography is currently moving into what they call "extreme UV" (and most people call X-rays) because the UV photons are much larger than the features of current top of line chips.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Maybe the new things that people would spend electricity on now that it’s cheaper haven’t reached the mass market yet. I’m thinking mostly electric cars, because I live near Tesla, but I am sure there are other opporunities for greater electricity usage around the corner.
- sremani 9y ago
  The Great Recession. The current demand flatness is only temporary, esp. when we are ushering into the world of Electric Cars and 3D printers. There is a hungry beast lurking its called "The Data Center". As the Data Center count increases over the future, we will also see raise in demand. Over all, my bet is Jevons paradox will stand the test of time.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    - Data centers are ridiculously efficient. The latest generation of data centers from the big cloud providers have PUE in 1.07 territory, which would've seemed like pie-in-the-sky ludicrousness even 10 years ago. Every CPU cycle that's done in a data center instead of on someone's client machine or on-prem server is a decrease in power consumption. - 3D printers don't use very much power, and in any case, while 3D printing is going to be an ever-bigger deal in manufacturing, the 3D printing at home fad has already crested and is fading away, like 3D televisions. There's not going to be one in every home. - Electric cars will indeed increase power consumption, but mainly when they are plugged in for the night, where there is already a lot of wasted power from e.g. nuclear plants that can't scale down at night. The total increase in necessary generating capacity and infrastructure upgrades won't be as big as you think.
    - sremani 9y ago
      >> Data centers are ridiculously efficient. The latest generation of data centers from the big cloud providers have PUE in 1.07 territory, which would've seemed like pie-in-the-sky ludicrousness even 10 years ago. Every CPU cycle that's done in a data center instead of on someone's client machine or on-prem server is a decrease in power consumption. << Do you know what is the global consumption of energy of data centers in 2016 ? It is same as consumption of energy of global aviation. Think about it, the energy consumed by Data Centers is equal to all commerical planes world wide flying. (source: realclearnergy podcast) They may very well be efficient, that is shit load of energy and that is point.
      - neuromantik8086 9y ago
- rsynnott 9y ago
  I'm not sure that's entirely true, especially for domestic energy consumption. 10 years ago, I had a CRT TV, incandescent bulbs, and a washing machine that was probably about an F on the EC's ratings. At work, I used a computer with a big CRT screen (actually, maybe just an LCD by then) and a processor that used about 40W just sitting there. And 20 years before that, my parents also had a CRT TV, incandescent bulbs, and a similarly inefficient washing machine. These were likely a LITTLE more inefficient, but nothing much. Now I have an LCD TV that uses well under half the power of a CRT, LED bulbs which use about 5% the power of incandescents, and an A-rated washing machine that uses about a half the power of the old-fashioned ones. At work I use a computer with an LED-backlit LCD monitor and a modern processor that idles at practically nothing. For most people who had "all mod cons" 20 years ago, they're using less electricity today than they were then. Electric cars are the one wrinkle, and I think they will drive electricity usage upwards. Other than that, though, domestic use is declining for the middle class, and commercial and industrial use are too in many cases. An awful lot of electricity usage 20 years ago was essentially waste, and we're getting quite good at eliminating that.
  - adventured 9y ago
    Just the switch to smartphones alone is incredibly impressive on efficiency. For average users + average US electricity rates, you're looking at $0.05 to $0.10 per month in cost. Nationally, every hour people are using their phones, instead of watching TV, playing a gaming console, or using a traditional computer, is a big savings.
  - gowld 9y ago
    Electric cars create synthetic electrical demand, since they displace oil demand. It's still energy demand. (The switch from oil to coal vs solar vs hydro vs wind is interesting, but the top-line "electricity demand" number means very little.)
    - floatrock 9y ago
      You're right that it is still energy demand, and you're right that it's substituting oil for electricity. But I don't know what you mean by "synthetic" since charging an EV is very much a real load, which is exactly why utilities should be the biggest fans of EV's. It's a no-brainer... "hey utilities, you know how demand for your product has been stagnant or falling? Well here's a product that can steal gasoline's market share, makes up about a third of your consumers' consumption, AND is cheaper to operate for your consumers." Utilities should be the biggest champions of EV's.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  The efficiency of the devices people use has been increasing but the prices of electricity have been rising during the same period so efficiency from the perspective of the consumer is not increasing. The mechanism by which increasing efficiency would increase consumption is lower prices and if that is missing then consumption won't increase.
- Shivetya 9y ago
  Are we doing less though? Because of efficiency gains we may be doing more work with less electricity so while the outward demand numbers are less that amount of work being done is increased. I do know on a personal scale that LED lighting lets me have far more light hours for an incredibly lower bill. If anything I leave lights on more now. I even ran over a thousand feet of Christmas lights because their cost was so much less than before (like 12/15 to 1)
- nkoren 9y ago
  Simple explanation: Jevons paradox is an observed correlation that has held true for certain notable industries at certain periods of history, but is not a law of nature. Demand for anything is neither infinite nor infinitely elastic. But more specifically in the case of electricity: there is no demand for electricity, and never has been. The actual demand is for what electricity can do. If the slope of the energy efficiency gains of electrical goods is steeper than the slope of the induced demand for those goods, there's no reason why more goods demand (in accordance with Jevons) shuldn't result in less electrical demand (seemingly contrary to Jevons).
  - SilasX 9y ago
    But (manifestations of easily usable) energy should be the most vulnerable to Jevons effects, because it has so many potential uses that that any increase in efficiency will flip some marginal case into profitability. Ditto for lower prices.
    - nkoren 9y ago
      The problem is that energy as energy gets cheaper, it becomes an increasingly marginal part of cost of what uses energy. Eg., let's say you've got some good/service, of which energy is 10% of its lifetime operating cost. If you drop the cost of energy by 50%, then that's only a 5% cost decrease for the good. In order to generate a Jevons rebound from the perspective of the energy supplier, that 5% decrease in price would have to increase demand by more than 100%. Seems unlikely. It was a different story back in Jevons' day, when energy was a genuinely significant component of the overall cost structure of a LOT of things. But in how many goods and services is that still the case? As the cost of energy decreases relative to other cost components (like labour), you'd expect the Jevons effect to produce diminishing and eventually negative returns, no?
      - roenxi 9y ago
        You might want to reflect a bit more closely on what Jevron's paradox actually is. It is not related to the cost of the final product. Take air; it is essentially infinite and free. We use vast quantities of air in every aspect of our life. We use it in cars, in households, in computing, we breath it, we rely on their being a few km of the stuff above us to maintain pressure, etc. It is so abundant it gets a bit silly to talk about how essential it is to our way of life. Use of the stuff is almost certainly growing exponentially with population. Believe it or not, but raw electricity is more useful than air. Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available. As price goes down, usage should be spiking. Rather than Jevron's paradox being broken it is much more likely that some combination of * Supply is tightening * Real prices rising * Something is badly wrong with the economy is affoot.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Jevons paradox(1) has previously ensured that increased efficiency resulted in increased demand. I've always been confused with the labelling of the observation that the common shape of demand curves means lower price (all else being equal) leads to greater market clearing quantity as a “paradox”; what else would you expect? That being said, all else has not been equal over time. Note that what has dropped is consumption of utility-supplied electricity; part of this may be drop in demand for electricity (use efficiency would seem to spur demand with more utility for each unit consumed, but it may suppress it if it means that the point where you hit steeply diminishing returns is hit faster), but an important part is the deployment of customer-owned generation capacity that is a direct substitute for utility-supplied electricity can be expected to hit consumption of utility-supplied electricity hard. And no one has ever labelled the effect “new perfect substitutes reduce consumption of the substituted good” a paradox.
- graeme 9y ago
  The article only refers to electricity demand in the US. World demand is stil growing, and I think the energy system is most properly viewed as a global one. I would be interested to know whether the embedded energy consumed by the US has been growing or shrinking. (To calculate this you would add in the energy used to make American imports.)
- andylei 9y ago
  Jevon's paradox isn't really a paradox, its just a description of differing results for differently shaped demand curves. If you have a relatively flat demand curve, then a small shift in price yields a lot change in quantity demanded. I think price has gone down far enough that the shape of the demand curve has steepened. As consumers, there just isn't much we can do with a lot of extra electricity, so even if the price drops a lot, we're not going to consume that much more.
- nitwit005 9y ago
  Jevon's paradox probably only applies to some types of power usage. Industrial consumers will certainly consume more if its cheap, but a more efficient toaster doesn't mean I'll get two toasters, or toast more often. I already have more toaster capacity than I'd ever need.
masklinn 9y ago
And once again fucked incentives are at risk of screwing us over. In fact the article notes exactly that two-thirds down: > To be clear: For both economic and environmental reasons, it is good that US power demand has decoupled from GDP growth. As long as we’re getting the energy services we need, we want overall demand to decline. It saves money, reduces pollution, and avoids the need for expensive infrastructure. > But the way we’ve set up utilities, they must fight that trend. Every time they are forced to invest in energy efficiency or make some allowance for distributed generation (and they must always be forced), demand for their product declines, and with it their justification to make new investments. > Only when the utility model fundamentally changes — when utilities begin to see themselves primarily as architects and managers of high-efficiency, low-emissions, multidirectional electricity systems rather than just investors in infrastructure growth — can utilities turn in earnest to the kind planning they need to be doing. edit: replaced expectations by incentives which is what I meant
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  There's no good reason for networks or last mile infrastructure to be privately run in the first place because competition does not come about naturally. The incentive of a private owner will always be to sit on the network and collect rents and spend as little on maintenance and infrastructural investment as possible.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    Is that because the product is 100% fungible? Electrons are electrons and there’s no such thing as “better electrons” once you hit a certain quality threshold? I’m trying to understand why your characterization doesn’t apply to, say, programming talent. Once I have stable of coders working for me, what’s my incentive to do more than the bare minimum of maintenance work for them, and just collect rent on their productivity? To me, it seems like you’re just describing capitalism: cash seeks rent.
    - cptskippy 9y ago
      > To me, it seems like you’re just describing capitalism: cash seeks rent. He is and pure capitalism is the problem. When shareholders demand growth the companies are forced to cut corners and start charging more for less. Take a look at Verizon and it's copper POTS lines for a great example of capitalism in action.
ksec 9y ago
Then there is also the move of energy intensive industries to abroad. Those that needed huge amount of energy, like Datacenter from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple are setting up JV or their own solar farm. More people going off grid.
digikata 9y ago
How many industrial factories were serviced by the TVA 10 years ago vs today?
jeffnolan 9y ago
HVAC, appliances, and “other” are the major drivers for electricity consumption in commercial and residential customer bases. In industry, 50% of the power is consumed by machinery. I wonder if the decrease in lighting (driven by LEDs) is offset by the increase in electronics in commercial and residential sites.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  My perspective just from being around a good while is savings from LED lighting have been more than offset by excessive gratuitous use of lighting. Dramatically so. No one can build anything at all, even a few paving slabs, without adding "lighting as a feature". Often with colour or brightness cycling effects. This is usually broken a couple of years later. Once businesses turned lights off outside business hours and left a little security lighting. Now everyone lights up the window, sign, and usually car-park, to daylight levels. Even solicitors, and doctor's surgeries. Larger franchises especially annoy by adding a 30' pole with a sign on top. With illumination more suited to anti-aircraft searchlights. It's become an arms race. As a kid, street lights were turned off late at night. I think 2 in 3, but it's a distant memory now. I lived in a major city as a child.
  - gascan 9y ago
    I'm with you. I'm amazed how quickly the concept of "My business has to have a presence at night" has become some kind of non-negotiable rule. Exactly how much business is driven by 3AM drivebys? But, the costs of all that lighting is suddenly a lot lower than it was before. The switch to better streetlights is good, but the sea of commercial lighting seems like an unaddressed issue. I miss the darkness.
    - oldcynic 9y ago
      Better streetlights are OK to a point. Endlessly upgrading lighting such as has happened here seems pointless. I miss the stars. I don't even live in a major city any more. I don't need major road level lighting if one of a tiny number walking at 3am. I don't mind some gloom between lights. I don't mind in the car either when there's few around. I have lights on the car. If I feel unsafe at 3am, chances are I will with or without floodlighting and get a cab anyway. Sure illuminate the city centre around where clubs and restaurants are kicking out, or during winter rush hour, but the rest seems light for the sake of light.
tboyd47 9y ago
Americans expect all major public companies' growth to continue indefinitely because financial advisors have told generations of people that their life's savings is guaranteed to grow on a steady curve forever as long as it's in the stock market, and they leverage their wealth accordingly, because it's the "financially sound" thing to do. This is why any time a major public company can't continue increasing profits, it becomes a national crisis and the government has to step in to save them. I once remarked to an older family member (Boomer generation) that no investment is ever "guaranteed" to make money, and they corrected me immediately, appalled that I would even say such a thing. "Guaranteed" investments are the common sense of their generation. I invest prudently in funds that grow modestly but stably; of course my investments are going to keep growing. Why wouldn't they?
- redial 9y ago
  Why wouldn't they indeed. Isn't the point of a fund to have consistent "infinite" growth? Companies fail all the time, but the job of the fund manager is to anticipate or mitigate those losses with new companies/investments.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- skybrian 9y ago
  Theoretically, in the steady state where revenue and profits are fixed, the stock price wouldn't go up but you could reinvest the dividends. Whether this is a good investment depends on the profit margin. In the real world, the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500 is under 20 years. [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/technology-killing-off-corporations-average-lifespan-of-company-under-20-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/technology-killing-off-corpo...
  - jonknee 9y ago
    You're reading that stat incorrectly: > "The average age of a company listed on the S&P 500 has fallen from almost 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years currently," The reason for that is there have both been a lot of mergers and a lot of new companies that have gotten huge in a small amount of time, especially in tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, NVIDIA, etc).
antr 9y ago
Energy investor here. This has very little to do with "energy efficiency" and more with the de-industrialisation of the US economy, and a shift to a more service-oriented one. A services-based economy is less energy-hungry, resulting in the decoupling of GDP growth and energy consumption.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  People really gravitate toward the flattering interpretation, don't they? If electricity demand is down, it's because of something we're succeeding at (energy efficiency). If jobs are going away it's because of our success at automating the work.
  - tomtheelder 9y ago
    It's not really automation, it's more outsourcing and competitive advantage. In fact, automation could theoretically make production more viable, which would bring electricity demand back up.
  - gowld 9y ago
    It's not flattering to say the US is moving toward massive low-paying underemployment
    - rdiddly 9y ago
      The flattery comes in when, rather than attributing the fact to the real reason, you chalk it up to our awesome success at automating people out of jobs (a constant drumbeat in the press lately). Now, like magic, instead of having a failed economic policy on our hands and people justifiably upset over it, there's nothing to blame but the steady, noble, and relentless march of Innovation and Progress, and better get with the program, people!
- philipkglass 9y ago
  That may be true over some timeframes of comparison, but it doesn't explain 2007 to now, when the Vox chart shows electricity demand plateauing. Here is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's energy flow chart for the United States in 2007: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2007/LLNL_US_EFC_20071.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/en... And here's the most recent one, from 2016: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/Energy_US_2016.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/... Industrial sector primary energy demand barely declined, from 24.84 quads in 2007 to 24.5 in 2016. That's less than the decline from the residential sector, 11.43 to 11.00.
rsync 9y ago
"TVA will sell less electricity in 10 years than it did 10 years ago. That is bonkers." It's bonkers because it probably won't come to pass. We will find a way to use that surplus electricity. The dip in per-capita usage due to LED lights and so on is really quite tremendous - but Jevon will catch up ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
aje403 9y ago
It is nonetheless a very surprising result - the world GDP has also risen 50% in that time frame (edit: not really an exactly fair comparison to the TVA). Have we really truly offset our usage to -10% in that time frame? What is the right basis of comparison? Specific products like Teslas, shitcoin mining and much more can rebut your examples qualitatively. It would be really interesting to see a more rigorous study on this demonstrating what is going where from when.
saas_co_de 9y ago
Efficiency has been increasing but overall residential and commercial electricity usage is till increasing (very low rate) but industrial usage is actually declining. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Until last year where those figures show a 2.5% decline in residential use, a decline to levels from 2007.
devy 9y ago
But what about the EVolution? In case you missed it, it's booming[1]. [1]: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/GlobalEVOutlook2017.pdf https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...
thaumaturgy 9y ago
I have argued exactly this to a number of people that would consider themselves "environmentally conscious", even bringing graphs along. They've -all- said, "that must be wrong, we have so many more devices now."
c3833174 9y ago
>LCD TVs instead of monitors I don't think it really matters that much (maybe apart from the builtin shutdown timer): Mid-90s 32" Trinitron CRT 120W Mid-00s 32" Bravia LCD 130W
- fludlight 9y ago
  2017 32" Vizio LED 26W https://www.vizio.com/d32fe1.html https://www.vizio.com/d32fe1.html
  - sundvor 9y ago
    My own upgrade took a similar path: Mid 2000s 50" Panasonic Viera plasma: ~500W. Samsung late 2016 65" 8-series flat SUHD: ~200W.
    - fludlight 9y ago
      You bring up an interesting point: most people have a much larger TV than they had in the 90s or 2000s, potentially offsetting any efficiency gains.
kaycebasques 9y ago
The next paragraph explains why it is "bonkers": "Think for a moment about why a big utility like TVA (serving 9 million customers in seven states, with more than $11 billion in revenue) sets out to plan 20 years ahead. It is investing in extremely large and capital-intensive infrastructure like power plants and transmission lines, which cost billions of dollars and last for decades. These are not decisions to make lightly; the utility wants to be sure that they will still be needed, and will still pay off, for many years to come." Utilities and the financial firms that invest in them need some certainty regarding long-term demand in order to justify huge loans. For 100 years, the trend was increasing demand. Bucking a 100-year-trend requires re-thinking some fundamental assumptions. Also, financial firms probably gave out loans 10 or 20 years ago / utilities accepted loans that reasonably assumed increasing demand.
VLM 9y ago
"huge fall in heavy industry" That seems a little extreme. http://theamericanenergynews.com/energy-news/american-energy-consumption-growth-flat-to-2040-study http://theamericanenergynews.com/energy-news/american-energy... The huge fall seems to be from 35 quadrillion BTU all time peak around '97 down to around 33 quadrillion BTU today. They predict a 0.7% growth rate in the future based on the consistent increase since the '07 recession. They expect commercial to keep growing, with the death of brick -n- mortar retail and general economic decline for non-elites, that sounds unrealistically optimistic.
yuhong 9y ago
This reminds me of electric trucks that need a megawatt of electricity per day per truck.
- mnw21cam 9y ago
  Units alert. Megawatt per day makes no sense. Perhaps you meant a megawatt-hour per day? Or, if driven for (say) 10 hours, 100kW. For reference, the average family car engine can generate on the order of 75kW, so 100kW for a truck is quite good, I think.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    I mean driving 500 miles per day for maybe 8 hours might require one megawatt.
    - mnw21cam 9y ago
      A megawatt for 8 hours, so 8 megawatt-hours. That's an obscene amount of energy, and probably out by a factor of 8.
      - yuhong 9y ago
        Yea, I mean 100 megawatt per hour for ten hours equals 1 megawatt per day of driving.
        mnw21cam 9y ago
        100 megawatt per hour is a rate of increase of power that means the total amount of energy proportional to the square of the time. I find it unlikely that a reasonable sized vehicle could sustain that rate of increase for long. After ten hours, the power would be 1GW, which would be sufficient to make the vehicle glow quite brightly. The vehicle would have used 5GWh of energy, the equivalent of 50000 battery packs of a Tesla 2017 Model S 100D. I don't think what you are typing means what you think it means.
zombieprocesses 9y ago
> LED lightbulbs, LCD TVs instead of monitors, vastly improved efficiency standards/technologies for various appliances, fact you can do loads of stuff with a smartphone instead of watching a giant TV, etc etc It's not this. We are getting bigger tvs. Bigger monitors. Residential sector energy use is increasing. Commercial/Industrial sector uses most of the electricity. The decline is a reflection of the stagnation of commercial businesses/industry in the TVA area.
wheresmyusern 9y ago
your age really comes through with the way that you refer to cathode ray tubes as "monitors."
chongli 9y ago
I've heard this story of the utility death spiral for about 5 years so I don't think it is a sudden problem 5 years is sudden in the utility world. Building a new power plant is a huge project that takes a lot of planning and economic forecasting to budget correctly. Do it wrong and you can waste astronomical amounts of money and bankrupt your energy company.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

But energy efficiency has been increasing at a fairly steady rate for much longer than the last 10 years. Jevons paradox(1) has previously ensured that increased efficiency resulted in increased demand. What has changed now? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

toomuchtodo 9y ago
People are getting older, and use less resources overall as they age. Drive less as well.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  This is interesting, especially in the areas TVA covers. Would be cool to correlate this usage by average age of the customer base.
amluto 9y ago
I would guess that Jevon's paradox doesn't exist for many domestic applications. Most people have all the lights, washing machines, etc that they need. Making lights more efficient won't make people buy more of them.
- moccachino 9y ago
  I would argue LED lighting does increase the demand for all sorts of lights rather a lot. It is due to increased efficiency, but that is not directly what creates the demand. The increased efficiency means light bulbs are no longer a fire hazard, allowing lights to be strewn just about anywhere and left on indefinitely.
  - wickawic 9y ago
    Ageeed. Also seeing as LED bulbs are ~10x more efficient per lumen than incandescent, people are not installing 10x as much brightness in their homes
    - pouetpouet 9y ago
      Perception of brightness is not linear. The human eye response is not linear. So x10 the luminous flux (power output) will be perceived as brighter but far from x10.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        k. People are still not installing 10x as much light.
        pouetpouet 9y ago
        not in their home, but I can see many more historical and institutionnal buildings being illuminated, commercial use also. It may still not amount to 10x though.
    - lozenge 9y ago
      Streets, offices and shops are now better lit.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
martinald 9y ago
Good point; perhaps it is not efficiency then but outsourcing of light/heavy industry (simply meaning while TVA et al demand is falling, Chinese power demand is growing even more rapidly), and the fact there is more supply in the form of unmetered local solar/wind generation which looks like a fall in demand on the grid but actually isn't. Interesting.
SerLava 9y ago
Intuitively, that only applies when there's actually some pent up demand. At some point, availability of teacups really won't drive more demand.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Energy is the principal or a major secondary input into food, transportation, housing, consumer and industrial goods, et cetera. In other words, just about everything we spend money on. So unless we start seeing a major drop in the demand for currency, I don't buy this argument.
  - hrie282 9y ago
    Everything we spend money on is being manufactured more power efficiently, is more power efficient on its own, and grid demand drops as adoption of new efficient gadgets and individual solar expands? At home we went all LED lights. My office followed suit. Even my city swapped the night time street lights Sadly we had almost every appliance in the house die in the first 4 yrs we owned it. But they’re all new efficient models now Fewer desktops, more tablets and phones. Our big TV is only on 3-4 hrs a week (but it too is a more power efficient model) A lot of effort has gone into battery storage and efficiency this last decade. Little numbers add up to big ones real fast
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Finance consuming ever greater proportions of our GDP probably helped keep that in check https://www.bis.org/img/speeches/sp081119_g3.gif https://www.bis.org/img/speeches/sp081119_g3.gif (if your rent doubles and home insurance goes up, your electricity consumption does not go up). Similarly, offshoring of manufacturing likely muted the demand for electricity too.
  - gowld 9y ago
    Economic inequality means that the average person can't afford to keep consuming as much energy as in the past, meanwhile the wealthiest people have saturated demand, they have everything they can imagine wishing for.
lawlessone 9y ago
>Jevons paradox(1) has previously ensured that increased efficiency resulted in increased demand. you can only have so many devices and appliances.
marcosdumay 9y ago
> What has changed now? Jevons Paradox is not an immutable natural law. It's does not even have any predictive power. It's just a notice of an interesting thing that can happen but the naivest interpretation of microeconomics assumes it's impossible.
- jtuente 9y ago
  Just like Moore's law, which is also hitting a wall.
  - ctdonath 9y ago
    Moore's Law has been hitting - and going through - walls for the last 30 years.
    - delecti 9y ago
      True, but you can only handwave away the size of atoms for so long.
      - fooker 9y ago
        We are somewhat far away from being restricted by the size of single atoms. A silicon atom is 0.2 nanometers and the smallest single transistors used in recent chips is in the order of 5-10 nanometers. Also, using photons instead of electrons does allow you, almost literally to handwave away he size of atoms. How exactly, is unknown today.
        madengr 9y ago
        That leaves about 13 years left until Moore’s Law hits that 0.2 nm feature. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
        marcosdumay 9y ago
        Silicon lithography has to hit a wall way before single atom sizes. For a start, silicon semiconducting is a probabilistic effect and only happen on populations. Photons at usable frequencies are much larger than atoms. Just notice that lithography is currently moving into what they call "extreme UV" (and most people call X-rays) because the UV photons are much larger than the features of current top of line chips.
mattnewton 9y ago
Maybe the new things that people would spend electricity on now that it’s cheaper haven’t reached the mass market yet. I’m thinking mostly electric cars, because I live near Tesla, but I am sure there are other opporunities for greater electricity usage around the corner.
sremani 9y ago
The Great Recession. The current demand flatness is only temporary, esp. when we are ushering into the world of Electric Cars and 3D printers. There is a hungry beast lurking its called "The Data Center". As the Data Center count increases over the future, we will also see raise in demand. Over all, my bet is Jevons paradox will stand the test of time.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  - Data centers are ridiculously efficient. The latest generation of data centers from the big cloud providers have PUE in 1.07 territory, which would've seemed like pie-in-the-sky ludicrousness even 10 years ago. Every CPU cycle that's done in a data center instead of on someone's client machine or on-prem server is a decrease in power consumption. - 3D printers don't use very much power, and in any case, while 3D printing is going to be an ever-bigger deal in manufacturing, the 3D printing at home fad has already crested and is fading away, like 3D televisions. There's not going to be one in every home. - Electric cars will indeed increase power consumption, but mainly when they are plugged in for the night, where there is already a lot of wasted power from e.g. nuclear plants that can't scale down at night. The total increase in necessary generating capacity and infrastructure upgrades won't be as big as you think.
  - sremani 9y ago
    >> Data centers are ridiculously efficient. The latest generation of data centers from the big cloud providers have PUE in 1.07 territory, which would've seemed like pie-in-the-sky ludicrousness even 10 years ago. Every CPU cycle that's done in a data center instead of on someone's client machine or on-prem server is a decrease in power consumption. << Do you know what is the global consumption of energy of data centers in 2016 ? It is same as consumption of energy of global aviation. Think about it, the energy consumed by Data Centers is equal to all commerical planes world wide flying. (source: realclearnergy podcast) They may very well be efficient, that is shit load of energy and that is point.
    - neuromantik8086 9y ago
rsynnott 9y ago
I'm not sure that's entirely true, especially for domestic energy consumption. 10 years ago, I had a CRT TV, incandescent bulbs, and a washing machine that was probably about an F on the EC's ratings. At work, I used a computer with a big CRT screen (actually, maybe just an LCD by then) and a processor that used about 40W just sitting there. And 20 years before that, my parents also had a CRT TV, incandescent bulbs, and a similarly inefficient washing machine. These were likely a LITTLE more inefficient, but nothing much. Now I have an LCD TV that uses well under half the power of a CRT, LED bulbs which use about 5% the power of incandescents, and an A-rated washing machine that uses about a half the power of the old-fashioned ones. At work I use a computer with an LED-backlit LCD monitor and a modern processor that idles at practically nothing. For most people who had "all mod cons" 20 years ago, they're using less electricity today than they were then. Electric cars are the one wrinkle, and I think they will drive electricity usage upwards. Other than that, though, domestic use is declining for the middle class, and commercial and industrial use are too in many cases. An awful lot of electricity usage 20 years ago was essentially waste, and we're getting quite good at eliminating that.
- adventured 9y ago
  Just the switch to smartphones alone is incredibly impressive on efficiency. For average users + average US electricity rates, you're looking at $0.05 to $0.10 per month in cost. Nationally, every hour people are using their phones, instead of watching TV, playing a gaming console, or using a traditional computer, is a big savings.
- gowld 9y ago
  Electric cars create synthetic electrical demand, since they displace oil demand. It's still energy demand. (The switch from oil to coal vs solar vs hydro vs wind is interesting, but the top-line "electricity demand" number means very little.)
  - floatrock 9y ago
    You're right that it is still energy demand, and you're right that it's substituting oil for electricity. But I don't know what you mean by "synthetic" since charging an EV is very much a real load, which is exactly why utilities should be the biggest fans of EV's. It's a no-brainer... "hey utilities, you know how demand for your product has been stagnant or falling? Well here's a product that can steal gasoline's market share, makes up about a third of your consumers' consumption, AND is cheaper to operate for your consumers." Utilities should be the biggest champions of EV's.
saas_co_de 9y ago
The efficiency of the devices people use has been increasing but the prices of electricity have been rising during the same period so efficiency from the perspective of the consumer is not increasing. The mechanism by which increasing efficiency would increase consumption is lower prices and if that is missing then consumption won't increase.
Shivetya 9y ago
Are we doing less though? Because of efficiency gains we may be doing more work with less electricity so while the outward demand numbers are less that amount of work being done is increased. I do know on a personal scale that LED lighting lets me have far more light hours for an incredibly lower bill. If anything I leave lights on more now. I even ran over a thousand feet of Christmas lights because their cost was so much less than before (like 12/15 to 1)
nkoren 9y ago
Simple explanation: Jevons paradox is an observed correlation that has held true for certain notable industries at certain periods of history, but is not a law of nature. Demand for anything is neither infinite nor infinitely elastic. But more specifically in the case of electricity: there is no demand for electricity, and never has been. The actual demand is for what electricity can do. If the slope of the energy efficiency gains of electrical goods is steeper than the slope of the induced demand for those goods, there's no reason why more goods demand (in accordance with Jevons) shuldn't result in less electrical demand (seemingly contrary to Jevons).
- SilasX 9y ago
  But (manifestations of easily usable) energy should be the most vulnerable to Jevons effects, because it has so many potential uses that that any increase in efficiency will flip some marginal case into profitability. Ditto for lower prices.
  - nkoren 9y ago
    The problem is that energy as energy gets cheaper, it becomes an increasingly marginal part of cost of what uses energy. Eg., let's say you've got some good/service, of which energy is 10% of its lifetime operating cost. If you drop the cost of energy by 50%, then that's only a 5% cost decrease for the good. In order to generate a Jevons rebound from the perspective of the energy supplier, that 5% decrease in price would have to increase demand by more than 100%. Seems unlikely. It was a different story back in Jevons' day, when energy was a genuinely significant component of the overall cost structure of a LOT of things. But in how many goods and services is that still the case? As the cost of energy decreases relative to other cost components (like labour), you'd expect the Jevons effect to produce diminishing and eventually negative returns, no?
    - roenxi 9y ago
      You might want to reflect a bit more closely on what Jevron's paradox actually is. It is not related to the cost of the final product. Take air; it is essentially infinite and free. We use vast quantities of air in every aspect of our life. We use it in cars, in households, in computing, we breath it, we rely on their being a few km of the stuff above us to maintain pressure, etc. It is so abundant it gets a bit silly to talk about how essential it is to our way of life. Use of the stuff is almost certainly growing exponentially with population. Believe it or not, but raw electricity is more useful than air. Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available. As price goes down, usage should be spiking. Rather than Jevron's paradox being broken it is much more likely that some combination of * Supply is tightening * Real prices rising * Something is badly wrong with the economy is affoot.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Jevons paradox(1) has previously ensured that increased efficiency resulted in increased demand. I've always been confused with the labelling of the observation that the common shape of demand curves means lower price (all else being equal) leads to greater market clearing quantity as a “paradox”; what else would you expect? That being said, all else has not been equal over time. Note that what has dropped is consumption of utility-supplied electricity; part of this may be drop in demand for electricity (use efficiency would seem to spur demand with more utility for each unit consumed, but it may suppress it if it means that the point where you hit steeply diminishing returns is hit faster), but an important part is the deployment of customer-owned generation capacity that is a direct substitute for utility-supplied electricity can be expected to hit consumption of utility-supplied electricity hard. And no one has ever labelled the effect “new perfect substitutes reduce consumption of the substituted good” a paradox.
graeme 9y ago
The article only refers to electricity demand in the US. World demand is stil growing, and I think the energy system is most properly viewed as a global one. I would be interested to know whether the embedded energy consumed by the US has been growing or shrinking. (To calculate this you would add in the energy used to make American imports.)
andylei 9y ago
Jevon's paradox isn't really a paradox, its just a description of differing results for differently shaped demand curves. If you have a relatively flat demand curve, then a small shift in price yields a lot change in quantity demanded. I think price has gone down far enough that the shape of the demand curve has steepened. As consumers, there just isn't much we can do with a lot of extra electricity, so even if the price drops a lot, we're not going to consume that much more.
nitwit005 9y ago
Jevon's paradox probably only applies to some types of power usage. Industrial consumers will certainly consume more if its cheap, but a more efficient toaster doesn't mean I'll get two toasters, or toast more often. I already have more toaster capacity than I'd ever need.

masklinn 9y ago

And once again fucked incentives are at risk of screwing us over. In fact the article notes exactly that two-thirds down: > To be clear: For both economic and environmental reasons, it is good that US power demand has decoupled from GDP growth. As long as we’re getting the energy services we need, we want overall demand to decline. It saves money, reduces pollution, and avoids the need for expensive infrastructure. > But the way we’ve set up utilities, they must fight that trend. Every time they are forced to invest in energy efficiency or make some allowance for distributed generation (and they must always be forced), demand for their product declines, and with it their justification to make new investments. > Only when the utility model fundamentally changes — when utilities begin to see themselves primarily as architects and managers of high-efficiency, low-emissions, multidirectional electricity systems rather than just investors in infrastructure growth — can utilities turn in earnest to the kind planning they need to be doing. edit: replaced expectations by incentives which is what I meant

crdoconnor 9y ago
There's no good reason for networks or last mile infrastructure to be privately run in the first place because competition does not come about naturally. The incentive of a private owner will always be to sit on the network and collect rents and spend as little on maintenance and infrastructural investment as possible.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Is that because the product is 100% fungible? Electrons are electrons and there’s no such thing as “better electrons” once you hit a certain quality threshold? I’m trying to understand why your characterization doesn’t apply to, say, programming talent. Once I have stable of coders working for me, what’s my incentive to do more than the bare minimum of maintenance work for them, and just collect rent on their productivity? To me, it seems like you’re just describing capitalism: cash seeks rent.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    > To me, it seems like you’re just describing capitalism: cash seeks rent. He is and pure capitalism is the problem. When shareholders demand growth the companies are forced to cut corners and start charging more for less. Take a look at Verizon and it's copper POTS lines for a great example of capitalism in action.

ksec 9y ago

Then there is also the move of energy intensive industries to abroad. Those that needed huge amount of energy, like Datacenter from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple are setting up JV or their own solar farm. More people going off grid.

digikata 9y ago

How many industrial factories were serviced by the TVA 10 years ago vs today?

jeffnolan 9y ago

HVAC, appliances, and “other” are the major drivers for electricity consumption in commercial and residential customer bases. In industry, 50% of the power is consumed by machinery. I wonder if the decrease in lighting (driven by LEDs) is offset by the increase in electronics in commercial and residential sites.

oldcynic 9y ago
My perspective just from being around a good while is savings from LED lighting have been more than offset by excessive gratuitous use of lighting. Dramatically so. No one can build anything at all, even a few paving slabs, without adding "lighting as a feature". Often with colour or brightness cycling effects. This is usually broken a couple of years later. Once businesses turned lights off outside business hours and left a little security lighting. Now everyone lights up the window, sign, and usually car-park, to daylight levels. Even solicitors, and doctor's surgeries. Larger franchises especially annoy by adding a 30' pole with a sign on top. With illumination more suited to anti-aircraft searchlights. It's become an arms race. As a kid, street lights were turned off late at night. I think 2 in 3, but it's a distant memory now. I lived in a major city as a child.
- gascan 9y ago
  I'm with you. I'm amazed how quickly the concept of "My business has to have a presence at night" has become some kind of non-negotiable rule. Exactly how much business is driven by 3AM drivebys? But, the costs of all that lighting is suddenly a lot lower than it was before. The switch to better streetlights is good, but the sea of commercial lighting seems like an unaddressed issue. I miss the darkness.
  - oldcynic 9y ago
    Better streetlights are OK to a point. Endlessly upgrading lighting such as has happened here seems pointless. I miss the stars. I don't even live in a major city any more. I don't need major road level lighting if one of a tiny number walking at 3am. I don't mind some gloom between lights. I don't mind in the car either when there's few around. I have lights on the car. If I feel unsafe at 3am, chances are I will with or without floodlighting and get a cab anyway. Sure illuminate the city centre around where clubs and restaurants are kicking out, or during winter rush hour, but the rest seems light for the sake of light.

tboyd47 9y ago

Americans expect all major public companies' growth to continue indefinitely because financial advisors have told generations of people that their life's savings is guaranteed to grow on a steady curve forever as long as it's in the stock market, and they leverage their wealth accordingly, because it's the "financially sound" thing to do. This is why any time a major public company can't continue increasing profits, it becomes a national crisis and the government has to step in to save them. I once remarked to an older family member (Boomer generation) that no investment is ever "guaranteed" to make money, and they corrected me immediately, appalled that I would even say such a thing. "Guaranteed" investments are the common sense of their generation. I invest prudently in funds that grow modestly but stably; of course my investments are going to keep growing. Why wouldn't they?

redial 9y ago
Why wouldn't they indeed. Isn't the point of a fund to have consistent "infinite" growth? Companies fail all the time, but the job of the fund manager is to anticipate or mitigate those losses with new companies/investments.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
skybrian 9y ago
Theoretically, in the steady state where revenue and profits are fixed, the stock price wouldn't go up but you could reinvest the dividends. Whether this is a good investment depends on the profit margin. In the real world, the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500 is under 20 years. [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/technology-killing-off-corporations-average-lifespan-of-company-under-20-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/technology-killing-off-corpo...
- jonknee 9y ago
  You're reading that stat incorrectly: > "The average age of a company listed on the S&P 500 has fallen from almost 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years currently," The reason for that is there have both been a lot of mergers and a lot of new companies that have gotten huge in a small amount of time, especially in tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, NVIDIA, etc).

antr 9y ago

Energy investor here. This has very little to do with "energy efficiency" and more with the de-industrialisation of the US economy, and a shift to a more service-oriented one. A services-based economy is less energy-hungry, resulting in the decoupling of GDP growth and energy consumption.

rdiddly 9y ago
People really gravitate toward the flattering interpretation, don't they? If electricity demand is down, it's because of something we're succeeding at (energy efficiency). If jobs are going away it's because of our success at automating the work.
- tomtheelder 9y ago
  It's not really automation, it's more outsourcing and competitive advantage. In fact, automation could theoretically make production more viable, which would bring electricity demand back up.
- gowld 9y ago
  It's not flattering to say the US is moving toward massive low-paying underemployment
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    The flattery comes in when, rather than attributing the fact to the real reason, you chalk it up to our awesome success at automating people out of jobs (a constant drumbeat in the press lately). Now, like magic, instead of having a failed economic policy on our hands and people justifiably upset over it, there's nothing to blame but the steady, noble, and relentless march of Innovation and Progress, and better get with the program, people!
philipkglass 9y ago
That may be true over some timeframes of comparison, but it doesn't explain 2007 to now, when the Vox chart shows electricity demand plateauing. Here is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's energy flow chart for the United States in 2007: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2007/LLNL_US_EFC_20071.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/en... And here's the most recent one, from 2016: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/Energy_US_2016.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/... Industrial sector primary energy demand barely declined, from 24.84 quads in 2007 to 24.5 in 2016. That's less than the decline from the residential sector, 11.43 to 11.00.

rsync 9y ago

"TVA will sell less electricity in 10 years than it did 10 years ago. That is bonkers." It's bonkers because it probably won't come to pass. We will find a way to use that surplus electricity. The dip in per-capita usage due to LED lights and so on is really quite tremendous - but Jevon will catch up ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

aje403 9y ago

It is nonetheless a very surprising result - the world GDP has also risen 50% in that time frame (edit: not really an exactly fair comparison to the TVA). Have we really truly offset our usage to -10% in that time frame? What is the right basis of comparison? Specific products like Teslas, shitcoin mining and much more can rebut your examples qualitatively. It would be really interesting to see a more rigorous study on this demonstrating what is going where from when.

saas_co_de 9y ago

Efficiency has been increasing but overall residential and commercial electricity usage is till increasing (very low rate) but industrial usage is actually declining. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Until last year where those figures show a 2.5% decline in residential use, a decline to levels from 2007.

devy 9y ago

But what about the EVolution? In case you missed it, it's booming[1]. [1]: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/GlobalEVOutlook2017.pdf https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...

thaumaturgy 9y ago

I have argued exactly this to a number of people that would consider themselves "environmentally conscious", even bringing graphs along. They've -all- said, "that must be wrong, we have so many more devices now."

c3833174 9y ago

>LCD TVs instead of monitors I don't think it really matters that much (maybe apart from the builtin shutdown timer): Mid-90s 32" Trinitron CRT 120W Mid-00s 32" Bravia LCD 130W

fludlight 9y ago
2017 32" Vizio LED 26W https://www.vizio.com/d32fe1.html https://www.vizio.com/d32fe1.html
- sundvor 9y ago
  My own upgrade took a similar path: Mid 2000s 50" Panasonic Viera plasma: ~500W. Samsung late 2016 65" 8-series flat SUHD: ~200W.
  - fludlight 9y ago
    You bring up an interesting point: most people have a much larger TV than they had in the 90s or 2000s, potentially offsetting any efficiency gains.

kaycebasques 9y ago

The next paragraph explains why it is "bonkers": "Think for a moment about why a big utility like TVA (serving 9 million customers in seven states, with more than $11 billion in revenue) sets out to plan 20 years ahead. It is investing in extremely large and capital-intensive infrastructure like power plants and transmission lines, which cost billions of dollars and last for decades. These are not decisions to make lightly; the utility wants to be sure that they will still be needed, and will still pay off, for many years to come." Utilities and the financial firms that invest in them need some certainty regarding long-term demand in order to justify huge loans. For 100 years, the trend was increasing demand. Bucking a 100-year-trend requires re-thinking some fundamental assumptions. Also, financial firms probably gave out loans 10 or 20 years ago / utilities accepted loans that reasonably assumed increasing demand.

VLM 9y ago

"huge fall in heavy industry" That seems a little extreme. http://theamericanenergynews.com/energy-news/american-energy-consumption-growth-flat-to-2040-study http://theamericanenergynews.com/energy-news/american-energy... The huge fall seems to be from 35 quadrillion BTU all time peak around '97 down to around 33 quadrillion BTU today. They predict a 0.7% growth rate in the future based on the consistent increase since the '07 recession. They expect commercial to keep growing, with the death of brick -n- mortar retail and general economic decline for non-elites, that sounds unrealistically optimistic.

yuhong 9y ago

This reminds me of electric trucks that need a megawatt of electricity per day per truck.

mnw21cam 9y ago
Units alert. Megawatt per day makes no sense. Perhaps you meant a megawatt-hour per day? Or, if driven for (say) 10 hours, 100kW. For reference, the average family car engine can generate on the order of 75kW, so 100kW for a truck is quite good, I think.
- yuhong 9y ago
  I mean driving 500 miles per day for maybe 8 hours might require one megawatt.
  - mnw21cam 9y ago
    A megawatt for 8 hours, so 8 megawatt-hours. That's an obscene amount of energy, and probably out by a factor of 8.
    - yuhong 9y ago
      Yea, I mean 100 megawatt per hour for ten hours equals 1 megawatt per day of driving.
      - mnw21cam 9y ago
        100 megawatt per hour is a rate of increase of power that means the total amount of energy proportional to the square of the time. I find it unlikely that a reasonable sized vehicle could sustain that rate of increase for long. After ten hours, the power would be 1GW, which would be sufficient to make the vehicle glow quite brightly. The vehicle would have used 5GWh of energy, the equivalent of 50000 battery packs of a Tesla 2017 Model S 100D. I don't think what you are typing means what you think it means.

zombieprocesses 9y ago

> LED lightbulbs, LCD TVs instead of monitors, vastly improved efficiency standards/technologies for various appliances, fact you can do loads of stuff with a smartphone instead of watching a giant TV, etc etc It's not this. We are getting bigger tvs. Bigger monitors. Residential sector energy use is increasing. Commercial/Industrial sector uses most of the electricity. The decline is a reflection of the stagnation of commercial businesses/industry in the TVA area.

wheresmyusern 9y ago

your age really comes through with the way that you refer to cathode ray tubes as "monitors."

chongli 9y ago

I've heard this story of the utility death spiral for about 5 years so I don't think it is a sudden problem 5 years is sudden in the utility world. Building a new power plant is a huge project that takes a lot of planning and economic forecasting to budget correctly. Do it wrong and you can waste astronomical amounts of money and bankrupt your energy company.