17 ms·

Closing the “green gap”: energy savings from the math of the landscape function

111 points by raphlinus 2y ago

roenxi 2y ago
> The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households... The article is an interesting treatment of how lighting is getting more efficient and well worth a read. But pedantically zooming in on this one throwaway phrase for a second... this is a misinterpretation of the data on 2 levels. 1) The (badly labelled) graph seems to be displaying a very very slight linear uptrend for "residential". 2) Energy is literally the first example of where we expect to see Jevons paradox [0]. If its use is going down, that is because energy is getting more expensive in real terms. If the only trend here was lighting getting more efficient, households on aggregate would find ways to use more electricity because it is extremely fungible. By default the proper way to interpret the data (if for the sake of argument I say what I would interpret as a slight uptrend is actually a downtrend) is that electricity is getting more expensive real terms. The impact that has on living standards is cushioned somewhat by improvements in lighting efficiency. But if electricity costs were steady and lighting efficiency improved we'd expect to see an increase in electricity use. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- clcaev 2y ago
  Is Jevons’ applicable here? People only have a fixed square footage in their house that needs to be lit, and often negative utility to having rooms lit all of the time.
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    If electricity were cheaper you might turn the lights higher instead of balancing cost vs. comfort, wouldn't use the eco-mode on the dishwasher that occasionally results in dirty dishes, would probably not think twice about washing clothes at 30 °C instead of 40 °C, maybe use a dryer instead of clothes racks blocking the living room for a day, use the more comfortable tankless warm water heater, properly preheating the oven giving you the results you want etc. pp. ... the list is endless. But electricity often costs upwards of 30 cents/kWh nowadays, so you avoid doing all those comfy things. 'cause they're expensive.
    - mikeyouse 2y ago
      My power is still $0.11/kwh... I haven't turned off my christmas lights in 3 years. There are huge swaths of the US where power is still (relatively) dirt cheap and nobody thinks twice about the heavy soil function on the dishwasher or leaving landscaping lights on. This list matches my experience; https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
    - dworkr 2y ago
      If I have to spend more than 30% of my monthly budget on power, I will not be taking cold showers or living in the cold. Consuming energy replaces other hobbies. High energy prices have been normalized, at least in my state. Same with gas. People had to stop caring, or leave.
  - edflsafoiewq 2y ago
    HOA I know wants every house to have more lights kept on all night (for "safety"). They explicitly say LEDs are what makes this cost effective.
    - dmix 2y ago
      How is that enforced in practice?
- taeric 2y ago
  I think this just doesn't come to terms with how much more efficient modern lights are? I remember when folks were resisting LED lights at the start. Folks would literally promote turning off the lights earlier to save energy. Remember back when making sure the lights were out was a big deal? Turns out, 60-100 watts down to 10 is just ridiculously hard to come terms with. Turn off the lights early just doesn't compete. Not even close. This also ignores how much more efficient other things are. Televisions would be an amusing one. It isn't as dramatic, sure, but it is about a quarter of the energy?
  - dylan604 2y ago
    > I remember when folks were resisting LED lights at the start. At the start, LEDs were horrible. There were early versions that you could point your cell phone camera in video mode at the lights and see them blinking. We did that just to prove that some of us could see these lights strobing. Now they have insane blink rates that you'll never see them except maybe for the highest of high frame rate cameras that mere mortals will never see. I would be curious to which was worse between the early LEDs or CFL. I hated both.
    - taeric 2y ago
      To be sure! Early low flo toilets were also pretty bad. Modern ones are a whole new thing, though. It's a lot like battery technology. It progressed a ton with people not realizing it. If you said I could get a battery powered lawn mower, I'd have assumed you meant as a toy not even a decade ago.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        I feel the same way about all of the generative AI stuff that keeps getting posted here. Some of it is just laughable at how bad it is that you have to seriously ask why would they show it off to people. Maybe in the next decade, we'll find the road out of uncanny valley. There's a risk of people thinking the early stuff is so bad that it must be a joke, but the people working have to promote they are working hoping to name recognition/funding. Sometimes it pays off to be first with low quality that matures, other times it's a death knell
- devwastaken 2y ago
  LED lighting is both better and worse. - purposefully made with line frequency (60hz) refresh which means its actually constantly blinking. you can see this with led Christmas lights by moving them. - pack liquid capacitors designed to fail well before the rest of the board. - thermals are too hot and fry the diodes or the rectifier IC’s. - wrong colors sold everywhere. a proper 4000K 90+ CRI led is hard to find and more expensive. the two most often available are 2700K (yellow) and 5000K (blue)
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    Why do you want 4000K? Incandescent/halogen are 2700k/3000k, and sunlight is 5000k. 4000k is flourescent, and I don't think anyone wants lighting to look like that. That said, if that's what you want Lowes has it (technically 3500k at CRI 90) https://www.lowes.com/pd/GE-Pro-60-Watt-EQ-A19-Bright-White-Medium-Base-E-26-Dimmable-LED-Light-Bulb-16-Pack/5013821257 https://www.lowes.com/pd/GE-Pro-60-Watt-EQ-A19-Bright-White-... Also, only the absolute cheapest LEDs have noticeable flicker. Decent ones have big enough capacitors to make it un-noticable.
  - HankB99 2y ago
    Wasn't planned obsolescence invented with the incandescent bulb? The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
- hansvm 2y ago
  > Jevons paradox That depends on the demand elasticity of the thing in question. If everyone already had about all the lights they wanted in their homes (a somewhat reasonable assumption, give or take a proportion of families turning off lights religiously), making them cheaper wouldn't make you go out and buy more lights -- certainly not enough to make up for the cheaper cost. Stated somewhat differently, when you switched from incandescents to LEDs, did you add more or less than 8x the total lumens to your home? I'm guessing quite a bit less. My apartment is a little small, but I couldn't manage 8x if I doubled the brightness in every room and always left every light on. No lighting efficiency improvements are going to convince me to go beyond that threshold. The point about households on aggregate finding ways to use more electricity doesn't apply because it's not power those houses now have in comparative excess, but rather dollars -- you don't have to buy as much power to do the things you want, so you have more dollars and can choose to spend them on additional electricity consumption or massively inflated rent or a vacation or whatever. The _unit cost_ of electricity (note that Jevons paradox applies to unit costs, not substituted goods or alternative sources of income or savings) didn't change by making lighting more efficient (and, as you've noted, has gotten more expensive), so you're not incentivized more than you already were to spend those dollars on electricity consumption instead of other things you could buy instead.
ryao 2y ago
> The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households, and particularly the transition from incandescent (and compact fluorescent) light bulbs to LED light bulbs I am reminded of Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox I replaced all of my incandescent and fluorescent lighting with LEDs years ago. A decent amount of the hypothetical savings from more efficient lighting was eaten by having even more lumens than previously as quality of light upgrades. Despite that, I did not notice much of a difference since my household had been keeping the lights off unless we needed them. There was a minor dip in the electric bill from other initiatives (e.g. heat pump dryer) and my solar panels started producing more than my household used. I had relatively few computers (general purpose; not counting embedded) running in my home compared to others in computing for years to try to keep this trend. In the past few years, I got an electric car and replaced my oil heat with heat pumps. Now my solar panels only produce about 60% of the electricity I use and I have given up on limiting usage to match what I produce. Anyway, no matter how many efficiency initiatives people adopt, electricity usage is likely to increase rather than drop. That is because we not only find new uses for electricity, but the population keeps growing.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  > Anyway, no matter how many efficiency initiatives people adopt, electricity usage is likely to increase rather than drop. That is because we not only find new uses for electricity, but the population keeps growing. It seems that energy use in the US peaked in 2007, though I do wonder how much of that is down to moving manufacturing abroad. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ In general energy use in the US, Canada, and Europe looks to be declining: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=OWID_AFR~OWID_EUR~OWID_OCE~OWID_SAM~USA~OWID_ASI&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=entityName&hideControls=false&Total+or+Breakdown=Total&Energy+or+Electricity=Primary+energy&Metric=Annual+consumption https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&time=2...
  - ryao 2y ago
    Energy use applies to far more than just electricity. It includes petroleum used in automobiles and heating. While the total energy pie is decreasing (for now), the marketshare of electricity should be increasing. When there is no more energy usage to move to electric cars and heat pumps (and no more production to move to China), I would expect energy usage to start increasing again. Jevons paradox cannot be avoided forever.

111 points by raphlinus 2y ago

> The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households... The article is an interesting treatment of how lighting is getting more efficient and well worth a read. But pedantically zooming in on this one throwaway phrase for a second... this is a misinterpretation of the data on 2 levels. 1) The (badly labelled) graph seems to be displaying a very very slight linear uptrend for "residential". 2) Energy is literally the first example of where we expect to see Jevons paradox [0]. If its use is going down, that is because energy is getting more expensive in real terms. If the only trend here was lighting getting more efficient, households on aggregate would find ways to use more electricity because it is extremely fungible. By default the proper way to interpret the data (if for the sake of argument I say what I would interpret as a slight uptrend is actually a downtrend) is that electricity is getting more expensive real terms. The impact that has on living standards is cushioned somewhat by improvements in lighting efficiency. But if electricity costs were steady and lighting efficiency improved we'd expect to see an increase in electricity use. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
clcaev 2y ago
Is Jevons’ applicable here? People only have a fixed square footage in their house that needs to be lit, and often negative utility to having rooms lit all of the time.
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  If electricity were cheaper you might turn the lights higher instead of balancing cost vs. comfort, wouldn't use the eco-mode on the dishwasher that occasionally results in dirty dishes, would probably not think twice about washing clothes at 30 °C instead of 40 °C, maybe use a dryer instead of clothes racks blocking the living room for a day, use the more comfortable tankless warm water heater, properly preheating the oven giving you the results you want etc. pp. ... the list is endless. But electricity often costs upwards of 30 cents/kWh nowadays, so you avoid doing all those comfy things. 'cause they're expensive.
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    My power is still $0.11/kwh... I haven't turned off my christmas lights in 3 years. There are huge swaths of the US where power is still (relatively) dirt cheap and nobody thinks twice about the heavy soil function on the dishwasher or leaving landscaping lights on. This list matches my experience; https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
  - dworkr 2y ago
    If I have to spend more than 30% of my monthly budget on power, I will not be taking cold showers or living in the cold. Consuming energy replaces other hobbies. High energy prices have been normalized, at least in my state. Same with gas. People had to stop caring, or leave.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  HOA I know wants every house to have more lights kept on all night (for "safety"). They explicitly say LEDs are what makes this cost effective.
  - dmix 2y ago
    How is that enforced in practice?
taeric 2y ago
I think this just doesn't come to terms with how much more efficient modern lights are? I remember when folks were resisting LED lights at the start. Folks would literally promote turning off the lights earlier to save energy. Remember back when making sure the lights were out was a big deal? Turns out, 60-100 watts down to 10 is just ridiculously hard to come terms with. Turn off the lights early just doesn't compete. Not even close. This also ignores how much more efficient other things are. Televisions would be an amusing one. It isn't as dramatic, sure, but it is about a quarter of the energy?
- dylan604 2y ago
  > I remember when folks were resisting LED lights at the start. At the start, LEDs were horrible. There were early versions that you could point your cell phone camera in video mode at the lights and see them blinking. We did that just to prove that some of us could see these lights strobing. Now they have insane blink rates that you'll never see them except maybe for the highest of high frame rate cameras that mere mortals will never see. I would be curious to which was worse between the early LEDs or CFL. I hated both.
  - taeric 2y ago
    To be sure! Early low flo toilets were also pretty bad. Modern ones are a whole new thing, though. It's a lot like battery technology. It progressed a ton with people not realizing it. If you said I could get a battery powered lawn mower, I'd have assumed you meant as a toy not even a decade ago.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      I feel the same way about all of the generative AI stuff that keeps getting posted here. Some of it is just laughable at how bad it is that you have to seriously ask why would they show it off to people. Maybe in the next decade, we'll find the road out of uncanny valley. There's a risk of people thinking the early stuff is so bad that it must be a joke, but the people working have to promote they are working hoping to name recognition/funding. Sometimes it pays off to be first with low quality that matures, other times it's a death knell
devwastaken 2y ago
LED lighting is both better and worse. - purposefully made with line frequency (60hz) refresh which means its actually constantly blinking. you can see this with led Christmas lights by moving them. - pack liquid capacitors designed to fail well before the rest of the board. - thermals are too hot and fry the diodes or the rectifier IC’s. - wrong colors sold everywhere. a proper 4000K 90+ CRI led is hard to find and more expensive. the two most often available are 2700K (yellow) and 5000K (blue)
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  Why do you want 4000K? Incandescent/halogen are 2700k/3000k, and sunlight is 5000k. 4000k is flourescent, and I don't think anyone wants lighting to look like that. That said, if that's what you want Lowes has it (technically 3500k at CRI 90) https://www.lowes.com/pd/GE-Pro-60-Watt-EQ-A19-Bright-White-Medium-Base-E-26-Dimmable-LED-Light-Bulb-16-Pack/5013821257 https://www.lowes.com/pd/GE-Pro-60-Watt-EQ-A19-Bright-White-... Also, only the absolute cheapest LEDs have noticeable flicker. Decent ones have big enough capacitors to make it un-noticable.
- HankB99 2y ago
  Wasn't planned obsolescence invented with the incandescent bulb? The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
hansvm 2y ago
> Jevons paradox That depends on the demand elasticity of the thing in question. If everyone already had about all the lights they wanted in their homes (a somewhat reasonable assumption, give or take a proportion of families turning off lights religiously), making them cheaper wouldn't make you go out and buy more lights -- certainly not enough to make up for the cheaper cost. Stated somewhat differently, when you switched from incandescents to LEDs, did you add more or less than 8x the total lumens to your home? I'm guessing quite a bit less. My apartment is a little small, but I couldn't manage 8x if I doubled the brightness in every room and always left every light on. No lighting efficiency improvements are going to convince me to go beyond that threshold. The point about households on aggregate finding ways to use more electricity doesn't apply because it's not power those houses now have in comparative excess, but rather dollars -- you don't have to buy as much power to do the things you want, so you have more dollars and can choose to spend them on additional electricity consumption or massively inflated rent or a vacation or whatever. The _unit cost_ of electricity (note that Jevons paradox applies to unit costs, not substituted goods or alternative sources of income or savings) didn't change by making lighting more efficient (and, as you've noted, has gotten more expensive), so you're not incentivized more than you already were to spend those dollars on electricity consumption instead of other things you could buy instead.

ryao 2y ago

> The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households, and particularly the transition from incandescent (and compact fluorescent) light bulbs to LED light bulbs I am reminded of Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox I replaced all of my incandescent and fluorescent lighting with LEDs years ago. A decent amount of the hypothetical savings from more efficient lighting was eaten by having even more lumens than previously as quality of light upgrades. Despite that, I did not notice much of a difference since my household had been keeping the lights off unless we needed them. There was a minor dip in the electric bill from other initiatives (e.g. heat pump dryer) and my solar panels started producing more than my household used. I had relatively few computers (general purpose; not counting embedded) running in my home compared to others in computing for years to try to keep this trend. In the past few years, I got an electric car and replaced my oil heat with heat pumps. Now my solar panels only produce about 60% of the electricity I use and I have given up on limiting usage to match what I produce. Anyway, no matter how many efficiency initiatives people adopt, electricity usage is likely to increase rather than drop. That is because we not only find new uses for electricity, but the population keeps growing.

roywiggins 2y ago
> Anyway, no matter how many efficiency initiatives people adopt, electricity usage is likely to increase rather than drop. That is because we not only find new uses for electricity, but the population keeps growing. It seems that energy use in the US peaked in 2007, though I do wonder how much of that is down to moving manufacturing abroad. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ In general energy use in the US, Canada, and Europe looks to be declining: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=OWID_AFR~OWID_EUR~OWID_OCE~OWID_SAM~USA~OWID_ASI&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=entityName&hideControls=false&Total+or+Breakdown=Total&Energy+or+Electricity=Primary+energy&Metric=Annual+consumption https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&time=2...
- ryao 2y ago
  Energy use applies to far more than just electricity. It includes petroleum used in automobiles and heating. While the total energy pie is decreasing (for now), the marketshare of electricity should be increasing. When there is no more energy usage to move to electric cars and heat pumps (and no more production to move to China), I would expect energy usage to start increasing again. Jevons paradox cannot be avoided forever.