6 ms·

Bedazzled by Energy Efficiency (2018)

30 points by janandonly 3y ago

skellyclock 3y ago
[flagged]
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  The majority are; they just don't post about it on social media for obvious reasons.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Ah yes, that secret majority, that doesn't show up in polls or any other way of measuring sentiment... * The majority of voters in every state and in all but six congressional districts endorsed the goal of a 100% clean energy grid. * Even deep red states such as Mississippi and Alabama showed clear majority support for Biden's goal. And coal-producing states, such as Wyoming and West Virginia, showed narrow majority support (52% and 53%, respectively) https://www.axios.com/2021/07/21/poll-biden-clean-energy https://www.axios.com/2021/07/21/poll-biden-clean-energy
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  And I'm so tired of dealing with the smoke from forest fires, amongst other things.
- popol12 3y ago
  So what do you propose instead ? Just pretend it’s not happening ?
- _hcuq 3y ago
  No need to click on the link then.
casey2 3y ago
Why take the effort to put in a bunch of citations when none of them back up what you say and a few directly contradict your assertion? Is this supposed to be an extended Hacker News comment?
wwarner 3y ago
Fair point -- making a clothes dryer more energy efficient will only result in less energy consumption if the utilization of clothes dryers stays about the same, just as adding lanes to highways to reduce congestion reduces congestion briefly, but also invites more traffic. I do think that a low carbon future demands more imagination from us, a re-envisioning of prosperity, which is already underway. Working from home is one example, as is gaming and electronic social networking.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I think induced demand exists, but also ignores areas of the country (the northeast) where the built infrastructure capacity predates the current inhabitants by generations. For example, the major highways through SW CT were completed by 1940 & 1960 respectively. The population is about 2x what it was then, and most families now have 2 cars instead of 1, as both spouses work whereas that wasn't as much the norm 90 years ago. So you have 2-3x the demand on essentially the same lane capacity built when my grandmother was my age. Along with this there's also been practically zero expansion of mass transit in the area. So damned if you do, damned if you don't in a way. We all just put up with it taking longer to get to/from work, visiting family out of state, etc. One area where our lives truly have gotten worse, and I'm not nostalgia pilled generally speaking.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    I share this sentiment. Induced demand with regard to cars was studied when both population and urbanization were growing. It's easy to imagine that this growth will continue to fill any capacity thrown at it, but that can't hold true ad infinitum, especially that peak car happened in 2017: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter1/the-setting-of-global-transportation-systems/automobile-production-world/ https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter1/the-setting... The Braess paradox is also mostly dead in the age of real-time traffic information. Anyone taking an Uber can see for themselves the sometimes weird paths they take - all because it's truly faster this way with real-time data.
    - 3y ago
twotwotwo 3y ago
So a nasty form of this, referenced in the post but worth calling out, is that efficiency in one part of the economy can be effectively turned into higher usage elsewhere. If your energy production is cheap enough in terms of variable cost, the producer might decide it's worth producing about the same amount at a lower price. If there are other energy users with enough price elasticity, the economy finds a new price where they pick up the slack. So that idea isn't that the individual consumer drives more because they get better MPG, it's that individuals' demand for gas overall decreases, so industry, guided by price signals, uses more gas for cheaper air tickets or faster package delivery or something. You've made the producer a bit less profitable, truly cut consumption in one sector, and provided some non-enviro benefits, but you haven't reduced overall consumption or environmental impact. There are a few things that keep this from leading to total hopelessness: - Elasticity isn't infinite and it doesn't have to always fully eat your efficiencies. People wouldn't take infinite trips if gas were free, and I suspect a huge change like a big country moving to electric cars really does have a net-beneficial effect on carbon emissions. You're just not guaranteed 1-for-1 efficiency-to-carbon-reduction. - Lower demand could reduce production in the long term, as capital allocations get made, more than it does the short term. That is, even if utilities decide to keep existing coal plants going full blast when prices are down because variable costs are low, maybe they'll have reduced appetite to build new ones where they have to factor in fixed+variable costs. - Not everything we're doing is energy efficiency. Gradually replacing our higher-carbon energy generation with lower-carbon methods reduces impact a different way from reducing consumption. But it does make me think a carbon tax, ideally slowly phased in starting a long time ago, was maybe a better approach than it might look like: directly put economic decision-makers to work finding ways to cut the thing you don't want, instead of poking a complex system and hoping for the desired effect. Besides, charging for negative externalities is a better way to raise funds than charging for working or value added anyhow. It's just so hard politically. There is also a place for non-economic policy here, e.g. if you want more everyday travel to use efficient mass transport rather than individuals' vehicles, governments just have to make the first move and put money into making the alternative systems complete, functional, and desirable to use.
hengheng 3y ago
I have wondered if linear marginal pricing is one problem with this. Wealth is not distributed linearly, and growth does not occur linearly either. Wealth is a hyperbola and growth is exponential, and yet marginal prices go linear. Thus, fuel prices have to be affordable enough for poor people, but a moderately wealthy person can tolerate to pay double that to drive the same distance. Those a little further up the hyperbola can drive four times as far. And after a few years of exponential growth, we all can. I've been wanting for taxes and other duties to be exponential shaped. Scale property tax exponential with the energy use of a house. Scale vehicle tax exponential to the car's fuel consumption. (You could require airlines to charge a sort of negative-percentage frequent flyer's discount as a tax, but that would be communism.) My guess is with the right parameters for base and exponent, this system could be very just, ensuring that everyone can fly across the country to visit family, but weekly business flights become prohibitively expensive. And my hunch is that this would be a more effective way to reduce total energy usage without creating disastrous living conditions for anybody.
- benj111 3y ago
  I suppose you could structure a carbon tax like an income tax. Flying, driving etc has a certain carbon cost. You get an annual personal allowance and anything over that is taxed. That way the poorest could live within their annual allowance, the rich could spend money to emit more. Although then there's the danger of essentially giving permission to people to emit more carbon.
  - badtension 3y ago
    You could always make it progressive to effectively disallow spending more than X tonnes per year per person. Additional tax money could be spent in remedying the effects of GW or making the transition faster.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  In the countries that have one (like Canada), the carbon tax is coupled with a rebate. So if you use an average amount of gasoline, you pay $X in taxes and receive a $X rebate resulting in a 0% effective rate. It doesn't have the exponential factor of your proposal, but it does have a similar effect.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

30 points by janandonly 3y ago

skellyclock 3y ago

[flagged]

nathanaldensr 3y ago
The majority are; they just don't post about it on social media for obvious reasons.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Ah yes, that secret majority, that doesn't show up in polls or any other way of measuring sentiment... * The majority of voters in every state and in all but six congressional districts endorsed the goal of a 100% clean energy grid. * Even deep red states such as Mississippi and Alabama showed clear majority support for Biden's goal. And coal-producing states, such as Wyoming and West Virginia, showed narrow majority support (52% and 53%, respectively) https://www.axios.com/2021/07/21/poll-biden-clean-energy https://www.axios.com/2021/07/21/poll-biden-clean-energy
bryanlarsen 3y ago
And I'm so tired of dealing with the smoke from forest fires, amongst other things.
popol12 3y ago
So what do you propose instead ? Just pretend it’s not happening ?
_hcuq 3y ago
No need to click on the link then.

casey2 3y ago

Why take the effort to put in a bunch of citations when none of them back up what you say and a few directly contradict your assertion? Is this supposed to be an extended Hacker News comment?

wwarner 3y ago

Fair point -- making a clothes dryer more energy efficient will only result in less energy consumption if the utilization of clothes dryers stays about the same, just as adding lanes to highways to reduce congestion reduces congestion briefly, but also invites more traffic. I do think that a low carbon future demands more imagination from us, a re-envisioning of prosperity, which is already underway. Working from home is one example, as is gaming and electronic social networking.

steveBK123 3y ago
I think induced demand exists, but also ignores areas of the country (the northeast) where the built infrastructure capacity predates the current inhabitants by generations. For example, the major highways through SW CT were completed by 1940 & 1960 respectively. The population is about 2x what it was then, and most families now have 2 cars instead of 1, as both spouses work whereas that wasn't as much the norm 90 years ago. So you have 2-3x the demand on essentially the same lane capacity built when my grandmother was my age. Along with this there's also been practically zero expansion of mass transit in the area. So damned if you do, damned if you don't in a way. We all just put up with it taking longer to get to/from work, visiting family out of state, etc. One area where our lives truly have gotten worse, and I'm not nostalgia pilled generally speaking.
- Tade0 3y ago
  I share this sentiment. Induced demand with regard to cars was studied when both population and urbanization were growing. It's easy to imagine that this growth will continue to fill any capacity thrown at it, but that can't hold true ad infinitum, especially that peak car happened in 2017: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter1/the-setting-of-global-transportation-systems/automobile-production-world/ https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter1/the-setting... The Braess paradox is also mostly dead in the age of real-time traffic information. Anyone taking an Uber can see for themselves the sometimes weird paths they take - all because it's truly faster this way with real-time data.
  - 3y ago

twotwotwo 3y ago

So a nasty form of this, referenced in the post but worth calling out, is that efficiency in one part of the economy can be effectively turned into higher usage elsewhere. If your energy production is cheap enough in terms of variable cost, the producer might decide it's worth producing about the same amount at a lower price. If there are other energy users with enough price elasticity, the economy finds a new price where they pick up the slack. So that idea isn't that the individual consumer drives more because they get better MPG, it's that individuals' demand for gas overall decreases, so industry, guided by price signals, uses more gas for cheaper air tickets or faster package delivery or something. You've made the producer a bit less profitable, truly cut consumption in one sector, and provided some non-enviro benefits, but you haven't reduced overall consumption or environmental impact. There are a few things that keep this from leading to total hopelessness: - Elasticity isn't infinite and it doesn't have to always fully eat your efficiencies. People wouldn't take infinite trips if gas were free, and I suspect a huge change like a big country moving to electric cars really does have a net-beneficial effect on carbon emissions. You're just not guaranteed 1-for-1 efficiency-to-carbon-reduction. - Lower demand could reduce production in the long term, as capital allocations get made, more than it does the short term. That is, even if utilities decide to keep existing coal plants going full blast when prices are down because variable costs are low, maybe they'll have reduced appetite to build new ones where they have to factor in fixed+variable costs. - Not everything we're doing is energy efficiency. Gradually replacing our higher-carbon energy generation with lower-carbon methods reduces impact a different way from reducing consumption. But it does make me think a carbon tax, ideally slowly phased in starting a long time ago, was maybe a better approach than it might look like: directly put economic decision-makers to work finding ways to cut the thing you don't want, instead of poking a complex system and hoping for the desired effect. Besides, charging for negative externalities is a better way to raise funds than charging for working or value added anyhow. It's just so hard politically. There is also a place for non-economic policy here, e.g. if you want more everyday travel to use efficient mass transport rather than individuals' vehicles, governments just have to make the first move and put money into making the alternative systems complete, functional, and desirable to use.

hengheng 3y ago

I have wondered if linear marginal pricing is one problem with this. Wealth is not distributed linearly, and growth does not occur linearly either. Wealth is a hyperbola and growth is exponential, and yet marginal prices go linear. Thus, fuel prices have to be affordable enough for poor people, but a moderately wealthy person can tolerate to pay double that to drive the same distance. Those a little further up the hyperbola can drive four times as far. And after a few years of exponential growth, we all can. I've been wanting for taxes and other duties to be exponential shaped. Scale property tax exponential with the energy use of a house. Scale vehicle tax exponential to the car's fuel consumption. (You could require airlines to charge a sort of negative-percentage frequent flyer's discount as a tax, but that would be communism.) My guess is with the right parameters for base and exponent, this system could be very just, ensuring that everyone can fly across the country to visit family, but weekly business flights become prohibitively expensive. And my hunch is that this would be a more effective way to reduce total energy usage without creating disastrous living conditions for anybody.

benj111 3y ago
I suppose you could structure a carbon tax like an income tax. Flying, driving etc has a certain carbon cost. You get an annual personal allowance and anything over that is taxed. That way the poorest could live within their annual allowance, the rich could spend money to emit more. Although then there's the danger of essentially giving permission to people to emit more carbon.
- badtension 3y ago
  You could always make it progressive to effectively disallow spending more than X tonnes per year per person. Additional tax money could be spent in remedying the effects of GW or making the transition faster.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
In the countries that have one (like Canada), the carbon tax is coupled with a rebate. So if you use an average amount of gasoline, you pay $X in taxes and receive a $X rebate resulting in a 0% effective rate. It doesn't have the exponential factor of your proposal, but it does have a similar effect.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]