6 ms·

Shocker: Power demand from US homes is falling

54 points by ph0rque 15y ago

sailfast 15y ago
In addition to more energy efficient homes and lightbulbs this is probably also being caused by a huge dearth of demand due to a down economy. Crude Oil prices drop during economic downturns for the same reason - the markets know that demand will be significantly lower. Glass half full - hopefully this is a signal that we're becoming much more efficient in our consumption and we can produce the same economic growth with a lot less energy.
- gregable 15y ago
  The article touches on this briefly and argues that for home usage, it's usually not too correlated with the economy. "Even when the economy is stagnant, people still watch TV and keep their ice cream cold." Oil prices are affected by non-home and non-personal energy use. In a weak economy, less industrial usage to make and transport things we buy and much less personal travel (fewer vacations, fewer flights).
simonsarris 15y ago
That is a bit of a surprise. On the face of it one might expect Jevons paradox[1] to take hold, but I guess a home is a pretty closed system and there aren't too many new places to use power. More gadgets, yes, but a person can only use so many gadgets at once. I for one find myself wanting to install more subtle light now that my power bill is so low (almost completely 10W, 13W and 18W CFLs). I started wondering where I can get creative, such as putting 0.5, 1 or 2 watt under-the-cupboard lights to gently illuminate the kitchen counters. I already have some brass wall-mounted "candles" that use 0.5 watt bulbs; they are nice and subtle night lights, and leaving them on all year round would be less than 8 dollars a year. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox (see especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Khazzoom-Brookes_postulate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Khazzoom-Brookes...)
- andreyf 15y ago
  I've also been thinking of experimenting with subtle LED lighting around my place, and would appreciate any advice/feedback you have about different hardware.
  - sokoloff 15y ago
    I put LED rope lights on top on my kitchen cabinets and the indirect light is great for nighttime dealing with baby bottles, snacks, etc and they also look nice in the day. I just leave them on all the time. Has really cut back on using the halogen under cabinet lights or the 9 overhead CFLs. Also have a small LED lamp in the bath fan/light. Obvious middle of night advantages there: don't need to burn your retinas with the normal lights.
  - tesseract 15y ago
    I just recently bought and installed some LED ribbon lights[1] above my home desk/workbench for task lighting. I got them "raw" so the project involved some soldering and, for appearances' sake, mounting them inside a piece of aluminum channel but I am quite pleased with the result. I don't know your experience with LED lighting or LED flashlights but unless you are very certain you want "cool white", you should probably opt for "warm white" which tends to be in the 2700-3300K range and matches the color temperature of a modern, non-"daylight" CFL. [1] e.g. http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 - or you can go the route I did and order 5-meter reels direct from China on eBay; they run $30-$40
    - Egregore 15y ago
      Are these waterproof ribbon lights safe for in-home use? Here in local market I was told that these are for outdoor use and not designed for indoor.
      - tesseract 15y ago
        You can get them without the silicone waterproofing tube, or remove it if you have ones that came with that. Ideally they should be stuck to a material such as metal that can help with conductive heat dissipation - especially if you get the kind with extra-bright "5050" LEDs rather than the standard "3528" components. However I don't think that is absolutely necessary - and I have also never heard of any kind of warnings against using them indoors, whether waterproof or not.
jmathes 15y ago
Misleading title. Power demand from US homes is rising. The rate at which it's rising is falling, and projected to continue falling.
- Groxx 15y ago
  Thanks, I was just wondering about this. That attribute of the title was essentially the only reason I was thinking I might read it - that would've been a big surprise. edit: skimmed, and actually... >[Utility] executives were particularly surprised by a dip during the first three months of this year, the most recent national quarterly numbers available. Adjusted for the effects of weather, residential power demand fell 1.3 percent nationwide, an unusually sharp drop.
- Bud 15y ago
  Nope. It's projected to ACTUALLY fall, as the article makes quite clear, if you simply read the third paragraph: Over the next decade, experts expect residential power use to fall, reversing an upward trend that has been almost uninterrupted since Thomas Edison invented the modern light bulb. Or, read further down for the actual numbers: From 1980 to 2000, residential power demand grew by about 2.5 percent a year. From 2000 to 2010, the growth rate slowed to 2 percent. Over the next 10 years, demand is expected to decline by about 0.5 percent a year, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group funded by the utility industry.
  - hollerith 15y ago
    It is not falling yet, though, so the title ("Power demand from US homes is falling") is wrong or at least misleading, as grandparent asserts.
icefox 15y ago
As mentioned in the article states are setting up programs to help you save energy. For those that live in MA head over to http://www.masssave.com/ http://www.masssave.com/ and sign up for the free* audit on your house. They give you stuff and will chip in the first $2K on work they find that can improve your house and there is a 0% loan you can get for major improvements like windows, replacing your heater etc. Heard from several friends last year that did it saved a bundle last winter and just had them out on my house and expect my heating bill too be much less this winter. * Well free in the wacky logic that part of your utility bill funds this, but ....
- trafficlight 15y ago
  Northwestern Energy ran a pilot program last year where they do an energy audit on your house and then pay for whatever the recommendations are. I ended having new, blow-in insulation installed in all of my exterior walls at no cost to me. That was about $1700 worth of work. Then, over the next few years, they will come by and do additional audits to see if saves Northwestern any money by actually paying the work themselves.
hugh3 15y ago
Article could do with some more numbers. Is the huge growth in compact fluorescent lighting sufficient to account for the difference, alone? I'm wondering whether the other factors are sufficient at all.
ars 15y ago
Energy use has been correlated with economic output for virtually all of human history. So either this trend is reversing (which seems unlikely to me), we are in for a prolonged recessionary period, or this is just a temporary dip due to new lighting technology, and the trend will revert.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 15y ago
  OK, so look ten years ahead into the future. Let's say you're a middle-class American right now. How are you going to double your energy consumption? Is your home going to take twice as much energy to heat? No. If anything, it'll take less as increasing energy prices make insulation pay off even sooner. Is your gadget collection going to take twice as much energy? Probably not. TVs are getting more efficient as a side effect of other issues. As your computers go portable they have to consume less energy unless batteries get better in a way they aren't likely to in 10 years. What will a 2021 home computing device do with 200 watts? (Other than "explode".) Are you going to passively consume energy by, say, buying a new car? For all we bitch about quality, a lot of the big ticket items are lasting longer than ever before. A 100,000 mile car used to be a cantankerous beast, and a sort of badge of honor for the skillful owner who kept it running. Now it might not need replacing for a long time after that if you just feed it oil on the recommended schedule. And in general the acquisition of "stuff" seems to be slowing down and will continue to slow down; media collections that were once walls of books and plastic VCR tapes are now downloads and some bits on a disk. What would you do with twice the energy budget, if you're already a middle-class American? It is true that economic activity has been correlated to energy output, and it's a bit soon to start shutting down the oil companies. But there's an ever-increasing amount of economic output being done in the form of knowledge (of how to build better cars, etc), and in just-plain-bits, and we can have a looooot of such output for not very many terawatts. I expect that we are probably going to see the peak mass-energy-resource-environment-consumption per person in the US peak in the next 10 years, then start inexorably trending downwards for a very long time after that. (As others observe, this is not an announcement of that peak, but I think we're going there.) Incidentally, that's one of the interesting questions to ask of anyone who ever mentions the Kardashev scale... what exactly is the civilization doing with the entire output of the Galaxy, assuming it also basically has perfectly efficient manufacturing and computing processes? It's a mindblowing question. But in the meantime we mere humans don't appear to me to have infinitely unbounded energy desires.
sogrady 15y ago
I'm curious how much - if any - of the abating rate is due to shifting patterns of device usage. Our household, for example, is much like Mark Pilgrim's: "My 7-yr-old is sitting in front of a working 42-inch HDTV watching cartoons on an Android phone. The future is now." [1] We have a fully functional 37" Sharp LCD, and yet the majority of our media is consumed via laptops, tablets or phones. All of which draw power, of course, but likely less power than a large television. And even if they were comparable in terms of power consumption, the fact is that the computers would be on even if we were watching TV. Throw in wider trends like the number of people cutting the cord (getting rid of cable) and it makes me curious about whether using smaller devices - particularly those designed to be power efficient - and the absence of others has an impact. The plural of anecdote isn't data, however, so I have no idea if this is relevant or not. [1] http://twitter.com/#!/diveintomark/status/112491024936476672 http://twitter.com/#!/diveintomark/status/112491024936476672
- rhplus 15y ago
  According to Energy Star, electronic devices (TVs, computers, etc) only account for about 4% of home energy consumption, so I'd doubt that device usage patterns is much of a driving factor here. Almost three quarters of our home energy is spent heating things up or cooling things down: Heating: 29%, Cooling: 17%, Water heating: 14%, Appliances: 13%, Lighting: 12%, Electronics: 4% Source: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_save_energy_at_home http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_save_energ...
sandieman 15y ago
Wait till we start plugging our cars into the grid.
bonch 15y ago
It's the economy.
ja27 15y ago
I don't know about the average family but in the past 5-7 years I've replaced almost everything in my house that consumes electricity - HVAC, water heater, dishwasher, fridge, television, computers and light bulbs. Almost all of those went to more energy-efficient models. I think the only thing that's gotten worse is the huge pile of gadget chargers.
- dfxm12 15y ago
  And if you are smart you can outsource charging many of those gadgets. Many probably do without realizing the impact. Charge your laptop as you browse the web in a coffee shop; charge your phone in your car; charge your MP3 player at work; etc...
  - icebraining 15y ago
    > charge your phone in your car That's not really outsourcing, unless you get free gas. When you're using more energy from the battery, you're adding extra load to the alternator which increases the drag and therefore using more gas.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

54 points by ph0rque 15y ago

In addition to more energy efficient homes and lightbulbs this is probably also being caused by a huge dearth of demand due to a down economy. Crude Oil prices drop during economic downturns for the same reason - the markets know that demand will be significantly lower. Glass half full - hopefully this is a signal that we're becoming much more efficient in our consumption and we can produce the same economic growth with a lot less energy.

gregable 15y ago
The article touches on this briefly and argues that for home usage, it's usually not too correlated with the economy. "Even when the economy is stagnant, people still watch TV and keep their ice cream cold." Oil prices are affected by non-home and non-personal energy use. In a weak economy, less industrial usage to make and transport things we buy and much less personal travel (fewer vacations, fewer flights).

simonsarris 15y ago

That is a bit of a surprise. On the face of it one might expect Jevons paradox[1] to take hold, but I guess a home is a pretty closed system and there aren't too many new places to use power. More gadgets, yes, but a person can only use so many gadgets at once. I for one find myself wanting to install more subtle light now that my power bill is so low (almost completely 10W, 13W and 18W CFLs). I started wondering where I can get creative, such as putting 0.5, 1 or 2 watt under-the-cupboard lights to gently illuminate the kitchen counters. I already have some brass wall-mounted "candles" that use 0.5 watt bulbs; they are nice and subtle night lights, and leaving them on all year round would be less than 8 dollars a year. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox (see especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Khazzoom-Brookes_postulate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Khazzoom-Brookes...)

andreyf 15y ago
I've also been thinking of experimenting with subtle LED lighting around my place, and would appreciate any advice/feedback you have about different hardware.
- sokoloff 15y ago
  I put LED rope lights on top on my kitchen cabinets and the indirect light is great for nighttime dealing with baby bottles, snacks, etc and they also look nice in the day. I just leave them on all the time. Has really cut back on using the halogen under cabinet lights or the 9 overhead CFLs. Also have a small LED lamp in the bath fan/light. Obvious middle of night advantages there: don't need to burn your retinas with the normal lights.
- tesseract 15y ago
  I just recently bought and installed some LED ribbon lights[1] above my home desk/workbench for task lighting. I got them "raw" so the project involved some soldering and, for appearances' sake, mounting them inside a piece of aluminum channel but I am quite pleased with the result. I don't know your experience with LED lighting or LED flashlights but unless you are very certain you want "cool white", you should probably opt for "warm white" which tends to be in the 2700-3300K range and matches the color temperature of a modern, non-"daylight" CFL. [1] e.g. http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 - or you can go the route I did and order 5-meter reels direct from China on eBay; they run $30-$40
  - Egregore 15y ago
    Are these waterproof ribbon lights safe for in-home use? Here in local market I was told that these are for outdoor use and not designed for indoor.
    - tesseract 15y ago
      You can get them without the silicone waterproofing tube, or remove it if you have ones that came with that. Ideally they should be stuck to a material such as metal that can help with conductive heat dissipation - especially if you get the kind with extra-bright "5050" LEDs rather than the standard "3528" components. However I don't think that is absolutely necessary - and I have also never heard of any kind of warnings against using them indoors, whether waterproof or not.

jmathes 15y ago

Misleading title. Power demand from US homes is rising. The rate at which it's rising is falling, and projected to continue falling.

Groxx 15y ago
Thanks, I was just wondering about this. That attribute of the title was essentially the only reason I was thinking I might read it - that would've been a big surprise. edit: skimmed, and actually... >[Utility] executives were particularly surprised by a dip during the first three months of this year, the most recent national quarterly numbers available. Adjusted for the effects of weather, residential power demand fell 1.3 percent nationwide, an unusually sharp drop.
Bud 15y ago
Nope. It's projected to ACTUALLY fall, as the article makes quite clear, if you simply read the third paragraph: Over the next decade, experts expect residential power use to fall, reversing an upward trend that has been almost uninterrupted since Thomas Edison invented the modern light bulb. Or, read further down for the actual numbers: From 1980 to 2000, residential power demand grew by about 2.5 percent a year. From 2000 to 2010, the growth rate slowed to 2 percent. Over the next 10 years, demand is expected to decline by about 0.5 percent a year, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit group funded by the utility industry.
- hollerith 15y ago
  It is not falling yet, though, so the title ("Power demand from US homes is falling") is wrong or at least misleading, as grandparent asserts.

icefox 15y ago

As mentioned in the article states are setting up programs to help you save energy. For those that live in MA head over to http://www.masssave.com/ http://www.masssave.com/ and sign up for the free* audit on your house. They give you stuff and will chip in the first $2K on work they find that can improve your house and there is a 0% loan you can get for major improvements like windows, replacing your heater etc. Heard from several friends last year that did it saved a bundle last winter and just had them out on my house and expect my heating bill too be much less this winter. * Well free in the wacky logic that part of your utility bill funds this, but ....

trafficlight 15y ago
Northwestern Energy ran a pilot program last year where they do an energy audit on your house and then pay for whatever the recommendations are. I ended having new, blow-in insulation installed in all of my exterior walls at no cost to me. That was about $1700 worth of work. Then, over the next few years, they will come by and do additional audits to see if saves Northwestern any money by actually paying the work themselves.

hugh3 15y ago

Article could do with some more numbers. Is the huge growth in compact fluorescent lighting sufficient to account for the difference, alone? I'm wondering whether the other factors are sufficient at all.

ars 15y ago

Energy use has been correlated with economic output for virtually all of human history. So either this trend is reversing (which seems unlikely to me), we are in for a prolonged recessionary period, or this is just a temporary dip due to new lighting technology, and the trend will revert.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jerf 15y ago
OK, so look ten years ahead into the future. Let's say you're a middle-class American right now. How are you going to double your energy consumption? Is your home going to take twice as much energy to heat? No. If anything, it'll take less as increasing energy prices make insulation pay off even sooner. Is your gadget collection going to take twice as much energy? Probably not. TVs are getting more efficient as a side effect of other issues. As your computers go portable they have to consume less energy unless batteries get better in a way they aren't likely to in 10 years. What will a 2021 home computing device do with 200 watts? (Other than "explode".) Are you going to passively consume energy by, say, buying a new car? For all we bitch about quality, a lot of the big ticket items are lasting longer than ever before. A 100,000 mile car used to be a cantankerous beast, and a sort of badge of honor for the skillful owner who kept it running. Now it might not need replacing for a long time after that if you just feed it oil on the recommended schedule. And in general the acquisition of "stuff" seems to be slowing down and will continue to slow down; media collections that were once walls of books and plastic VCR tapes are now downloads and some bits on a disk. What would you do with twice the energy budget, if you're already a middle-class American? It is true that economic activity has been correlated to energy output, and it's a bit soon to start shutting down the oil companies. But there's an ever-increasing amount of economic output being done in the form of knowledge (of how to build better cars, etc), and in just-plain-bits, and we can have a looooot of such output for not very many terawatts. I expect that we are probably going to see the peak mass-energy-resource-environment-consumption per person in the US peak in the next 10 years, then start inexorably trending downwards for a very long time after that. (As others observe, this is not an announcement of that peak, but I think we're going there.) Incidentally, that's one of the interesting questions to ask of anyone who ever mentions the Kardashev scale... what exactly is the civilization doing with the entire output of the Galaxy, assuming it also basically has perfectly efficient manufacturing and computing processes? It's a mindblowing question. But in the meantime we mere humans don't appear to me to have infinitely unbounded energy desires.

sogrady 15y ago

I'm curious how much - if any - of the abating rate is due to shifting patterns of device usage. Our household, for example, is much like Mark Pilgrim's: "My 7-yr-old is sitting in front of a working 42-inch HDTV watching cartoons on an Android phone. The future is now." [1] We have a fully functional 37" Sharp LCD, and yet the majority of our media is consumed via laptops, tablets or phones. All of which draw power, of course, but likely less power than a large television. And even if they were comparable in terms of power consumption, the fact is that the computers would be on even if we were watching TV. Throw in wider trends like the number of people cutting the cord (getting rid of cable) and it makes me curious about whether using smaller devices - particularly those designed to be power efficient - and the absence of others has an impact. The plural of anecdote isn't data, however, so I have no idea if this is relevant or not. [1] http://twitter.com/#!/diveintomark/status/112491024936476672 http://twitter.com/#!/diveintomark/status/112491024936476672

rhplus 15y ago
According to Energy Star, electronic devices (TVs, computers, etc) only account for about 4% of home energy consumption, so I'd doubt that device usage patterns is much of a driving factor here. Almost three quarters of our home energy is spent heating things up or cooling things down: Heating: 29%, Cooling: 17%, Water heating: 14%, Appliances: 13%, Lighting: 12%, Electronics: 4% Source: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_save_energy_at_home http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_save_energ...

sandieman 15y ago

Wait till we start plugging our cars into the grid.

bonch 15y ago

It's the economy.

ja27 15y ago

I don't know about the average family but in the past 5-7 years I've replaced almost everything in my house that consumes electricity - HVAC, water heater, dishwasher, fridge, television, computers and light bulbs. Almost all of those went to more energy-efficient models. I think the only thing that's gotten worse is the huge pile of gadget chargers.

dfxm12 15y ago
And if you are smart you can outsource charging many of those gadgets. Many probably do without realizing the impact. Charge your laptop as you browse the web in a coffee shop; charge your phone in your car; charge your MP3 player at work; etc...
- icebraining 15y ago
  > charge your phone in your car That's not really outsourcing, unless you get free gas. When you're using more energy from the battery, you're adding extra load to the alternator which increases the drag and therefore using more gas.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]