4 ms·

> The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households, and particularly the transition from incandescent (and compact fluorescent)

by 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.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Jevon's paradox is not some universal law. It's not even clear if it applies very often. One has to separate out different reasons for increasing consumption of some resource as it gets cheaper, and not just observe a correlation and infer causation.
    - ryao 2y ago
      It is related to supply and demand curves. The more supply is available for the same cost, the more demand increases to use it. In any case, technology moves forward stimulating increased electricity usage and we are healthier because of it. My heat pump and electric car eliminate nitrous oxide and sulfur oxide emissions, as well as particulate emissions. Respiratory health is improved because of it.
      - Retric 2y ago
        That’s only true up to a point. PC prices fell dramatically in real terms over time as people didn’t need to spend 2000$ mid 90’s dollars to get vastly more performance at home. But more interesting is the trend to upgraded less frequently.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        > mid 90's dollars To be precise: inflation from then to now is just about 2x. So, that would be $4K in current dollars.
        2y ago
mmooss 2y ago
My power usage has dropped by maybe 50% (a bit of a guess, based partly on electricity bills), and quality of life has increased - I simply didn't consider that these options worked better overall until I tried them for power-saving purposes. It actually taught me a lot about innovation - there is no substitute for just trying things; you just can't know by thinking about them ahead of time. A picture is worth 1,000 words, and an experience is worth 100,000 pictures - you can't really convey it in pictures. As a result, I 'just try things' whenever I have the opportunity, and my learning rate has increased dramatically. There are two questions about efficiency upgrades: How much power do you use compared to the alternative? It may increase, but more efficiency means it increases less than the alternative. How much power do you use absolutely? Physics causes climate change, and doesn't care about the hypothetical alternative.
- ryao 2y ago
  My household energy usage has decreased, but my household electricity usage continues to rise. In the early days, our heating oil usage was 1000 gallons per year. Efficiency initiatives reduced that to about 430 gallons per year. 1000 gallons is about 41MWh. 430 gallons is about 17MWh. Going to the heat pump has me using about 7MWh extra electricity per year, while yearly electricity usage had been around 11 MWh per year (with 10 MWh produced by solar). This does not count the car, for which the numbers would be even more skewed by life changes since I drove about 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more when I was in college. Depending on how you decide to do the accounting, my household’s total energy usage dropped by 65% (if we count the oil usage reductions on top of the heat pump) or by 35% (if we count only the heat pump), without even counting the solar panels. Still, my electricity usage has never been higher. If you were to try to cook my books so to speak, you could say my household’s total energy usage has decreased by 85% with a electricity usage decrease of 27%, by treating the energy from the solar panels as if it were free. I do not think that is a correct way of doing accounting (although it could be a matter of opinion). By the way, remarks on climate change could encourage people to claim unrealistic improvements in personal/household energy usage, such as the figures I gave for what I could claim if we “cooked the books”. Of the various figures I gave, I think the 35% reduction in total energy usage is the most honest figure. It had been achieved in the past 2 years, unlike the other factors I mentioned that are many years old.
aqueueaqueue 2y ago
Yeah I have a couple of 150w leds flooding the yard. No way I'd have done this if I needed a 1kw halogen. Would have made do with a dark garden.
stephen_g 2y ago
Electricity use went up in your case, but switching from oil heat and an internal combustion car to heat pumps and an EV should mean that your overall energy use has gone down fairly significantly (down to 1/3 or 1/4 of the energy used on heating and driving). So that's not quite the Jevons paradox unless you're going to drive three times the distance or expand to heating four times as much space in your house.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  If food gets 10x cheaper I'm sure I'll eat 10x as many calories! /s
  - ryao 2y ago
    Food demand is relatively inelastic.
- ryao 2y ago
  Overall energy efficiency has improved by about 35% in my napkin math, but I find whenever I improve efficiency, my electricity usage increases. This applies to both electric sources of energy and non-electric sources of energy as something new always seems to follow the efficiency gain. The reduction in overall energy usage is a side effect of efficiency difference of the heat pump (although on a dollar basis, costs remain about the same) being huge and is an abnormally.
SilasX 2y ago
Yours seems like an unusual case. Lighting is something that’s least vulnerable to Jevons effects because (after electrification reached maturity) people already use all the artificial light they could ever want and don’t look for ways to use more when it becomes cheaper (more lighting per unit cost). Even if they’re less careful about turning off unused light, LEDs are so much more efficient that they will still use less energy for lighting. In contrast, energy itself is very vulnerable to Jevons effects because there is always a marginal use of energy it can be applied to as more is freed up.
- jcelerier 2y ago
  > people already use all the artificial light they could ever want Huh ? People put LEDs in so many more places than they were putting incandescent lights. Under desks, beds, in closets, all around walls, over furniture, behind TVs...
  - SilasX 2y ago
    Hm, I'd never noticed that phenomenon, but even so, the efficiency gain is so high that, even when you enumerate all those spaces, it doesn't cancel out the energy savings of the shift.
    - crusty 2y ago
      Also, I've noticed that during the transition, when people have a mix of incandescent and LED, they internalize the potential efficiency of the LED, and then use the incandescent bulbs in a similar way. So the incandescent light on the hall table that's more appealing gets left on for longer periods as if it were an LED. I'm guessing this is more common in households with legacy light fixtures and legacy nostalgias, though, and that's its own diminishing set.
- ryao 2y ago
  My thinking is that we should look at the electricity usage rather than the subset of electricity used by lighting, since the bill going down because of lighting means the bill can go up because of something new.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
p0w3n3d 2y ago
I can't understand if this is the same as the Jevons paradox but I can observe that once some economical behaviour is imposed/incentivied on people, government taxes more the object of this economical behaviour. Also once government promises some subside, the cost of subsided good raises by the amount of subside. I would name it the Greedo Paradox
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I highly doubt that Jevons paradox is going to apply much here (and the data in the article seems to show this), simply because lighting was already cheap enough so that most people never gave a second thought to using lightbulbs (indeed, ask any parent that has ever yelled "turn off the lights" to their kids). Jevons paradox applies when there is strong demand for a good, but it is too expensive to be widely deployed, but a decrease in price of that good then allows many more uses of it. While sure there may be some edge cases (a sibling comment mentioned big flood lights for their yard), it's not like most people had dark rooms before where they thought "darn, if only light were cheaper"... > 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 I'm not sure what you mean by "quality of light upgrades". To be honest I hate the quality of light that LEDs give off. It's too "white bright", and I much prefer the quality of incandescent bulbs. I usually have LEDs much less brighter than they can go because otherwise I feel like there are floodlights in my house. Relatedly, I hate the switch to LED headlights. They're much too bright for oncoming drivers, and many car brands position them much too high.
- ryao 2y ago
  It was a pun. It should have been quality of life. Our rooms are better lit now, as the lumen output is higher. On a more serious note, the CRI improved when going from fluorescent lighting to LEDs, when better quality LEDs were used. Thus quality of light is actually meaningful as more than a pun.

by ryao 2y ago

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.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Jevon's paradox is not some universal law. It's not even clear if it applies very often. One has to separate out different reasons for increasing consumption of some resource as it gets cheaper, and not just observe a correlation and infer causation.
  - ryao 2y ago
    It is related to supply and demand curves. The more supply is available for the same cost, the more demand increases to use it. In any case, technology moves forward stimulating increased electricity usage and we are healthier because of it. My heat pump and electric car eliminate nitrous oxide and sulfur oxide emissions, as well as particulate emissions. Respiratory health is improved because of it.
    - Retric 2y ago
      That’s only true up to a point. PC prices fell dramatically in real terms over time as people didn’t need to spend 2000$ mid 90’s dollars to get vastly more performance at home. But more interesting is the trend to upgraded less frequently.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        > mid 90's dollars To be precise: inflation from then to now is just about 2x. So, that would be $4K in current dollars.
      - 2y ago

mmooss 2y ago

My power usage has dropped by maybe 50% (a bit of a guess, based partly on electricity bills), and quality of life has increased - I simply didn't consider that these options worked better overall until I tried them for power-saving purposes. It actually taught me a lot about innovation - there is no substitute for just trying things; you just can't know by thinking about them ahead of time. A picture is worth 1,000 words, and an experience is worth 100,000 pictures - you can't really convey it in pictures. As a result, I 'just try things' whenever I have the opportunity, and my learning rate has increased dramatically. There are two questions about efficiency upgrades: How much power do you use compared to the alternative? It may increase, but more efficiency means it increases less than the alternative. How much power do you use absolutely? Physics causes climate change, and doesn't care about the hypothetical alternative.

ryao 2y ago
My household energy usage has decreased, but my household electricity usage continues to rise. In the early days, our heating oil usage was 1000 gallons per year. Efficiency initiatives reduced that to about 430 gallons per year. 1000 gallons is about 41MWh. 430 gallons is about 17MWh. Going to the heat pump has me using about 7MWh extra electricity per year, while yearly electricity usage had been around 11 MWh per year (with 10 MWh produced by solar). This does not count the car, for which the numbers would be even more skewed by life changes since I drove about 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more when I was in college. Depending on how you decide to do the accounting, my household’s total energy usage dropped by 65% (if we count the oil usage reductions on top of the heat pump) or by 35% (if we count only the heat pump), without even counting the solar panels. Still, my electricity usage has never been higher. If you were to try to cook my books so to speak, you could say my household’s total energy usage has decreased by 85% with a electricity usage decrease of 27%, by treating the energy from the solar panels as if it were free. I do not think that is a correct way of doing accounting (although it could be a matter of opinion). By the way, remarks on climate change could encourage people to claim unrealistic improvements in personal/household energy usage, such as the figures I gave for what I could claim if we “cooked the books”. Of the various figures I gave, I think the 35% reduction in total energy usage is the most honest figure. It had been achieved in the past 2 years, unlike the other factors I mentioned that are many years old.

aqueueaqueue 2y ago

Yeah I have a couple of 150w leds flooding the yard. No way I'd have done this if I needed a 1kw halogen. Would have made do with a dark garden.

stephen_g 2y ago

Electricity use went up in your case, but switching from oil heat and an internal combustion car to heat pumps and an EV should mean that your overall energy use has gone down fairly significantly (down to 1/3 or 1/4 of the energy used on heating and driving). So that's not quite the Jevons paradox unless you're going to drive three times the distance or expand to heating four times as much space in your house.

pfdietz 2y ago
If food gets 10x cheaper I'm sure I'll eat 10x as many calories! /s
- ryao 2y ago
  Food demand is relatively inelastic.
ryao 2y ago
Overall energy efficiency has improved by about 35% in my napkin math, but I find whenever I improve efficiency, my electricity usage increases. This applies to both electric sources of energy and non-electric sources of energy as something new always seems to follow the efficiency gain. The reduction in overall energy usage is a side effect of efficiency difference of the heat pump (although on a dollar basis, costs remain about the same) being huge and is an abnormally.

SilasX 2y ago

Yours seems like an unusual case. Lighting is something that’s least vulnerable to Jevons effects because (after electrification reached maturity) people already use all the artificial light they could ever want and don’t look for ways to use more when it becomes cheaper (more lighting per unit cost). Even if they’re less careful about turning off unused light, LEDs are so much more efficient that they will still use less energy for lighting. In contrast, energy itself is very vulnerable to Jevons effects because there is always a marginal use of energy it can be applied to as more is freed up.

jcelerier 2y ago
> people already use all the artificial light they could ever want Huh ? People put LEDs in so many more places than they were putting incandescent lights. Under desks, beds, in closets, all around walls, over furniture, behind TVs...
- SilasX 2y ago
  Hm, I'd never noticed that phenomenon, but even so, the efficiency gain is so high that, even when you enumerate all those spaces, it doesn't cancel out the energy savings of the shift.
  - crusty 2y ago
    Also, I've noticed that during the transition, when people have a mix of incandescent and LED, they internalize the potential efficiency of the LED, and then use the incandescent bulbs in a similar way. So the incandescent light on the hall table that's more appealing gets left on for longer periods as if it were an LED. I'm guessing this is more common in households with legacy light fixtures and legacy nostalgias, though, and that's its own diminishing set.
ryao 2y ago
My thinking is that we should look at the electricity usage rather than the subset of electricity used by lighting, since the bill going down because of lighting means the bill can go up because of something new.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

p0w3n3d 2y ago

I can't understand if this is the same as the Jevons paradox but I can observe that once some economical behaviour is imposed/incentivied on people, government taxes more the object of this economical behaviour. Also once government promises some subside, the cost of subsided good raises by the amount of subside. I would name it the Greedo Paradox

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I highly doubt that Jevons paradox is going to apply much here (and the data in the article seems to show this), simply because lighting was already cheap enough so that most people never gave a second thought to using lightbulbs (indeed, ask any parent that has ever yelled "turn off the lights" to their kids). Jevons paradox applies when there is strong demand for a good, but it is too expensive to be widely deployed, but a decrease in price of that good then allows many more uses of it. While sure there may be some edge cases (a sibling comment mentioned big flood lights for their yard), it's not like most people had dark rooms before where they thought "darn, if only light were cheaper"... > 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 I'm not sure what you mean by "quality of light upgrades". To be honest I hate the quality of light that LEDs give off. It's too "white bright", and I much prefer the quality of incandescent bulbs. I usually have LEDs much less brighter than they can go because otherwise I feel like there are floodlights in my house. Relatedly, I hate the switch to LED headlights. They're much too bright for oncoming drivers, and many car brands position them much too high.

ryao 2y ago
It was a pun. It should have been quality of life. Our rooms are better lit now, as the lumen output is higher. On a more serious note, the CRI improved when going from fluorescent lighting to LEDs, when better quality LEDs were used. Thus quality of light is actually meaningful as more than a pun.