> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
Decreasing time for lights on has a linear impact on power usage. Increasing the efficiency of the lights has a constant factor impact on power usage. It is a big constant, but stopping particularly egregious wastes of electricity can overcome it. That said, both at once is the best of both worlds.
I get what you are aiming at, but strictly, both have a linear relationship here?
More, you can only cut out so much of the time, and since you can run modern lights for the full day before you burn the energy you would save by turning off the lights an hour early, it is kind of silly at a personal level to think that will work out. (City level and larger, sure?)
Pulling it back to this article, the assertion is that getting more efficient with energy use for lights would just be offset by us using more lights. Which, I think it is fair to say that we do. Considerably more lights, in many instances. It doesn't completely negate the energy savings, but largely because of how big that energy savings was.
The Jevons effect has nothing to do with how efficient something gets. Lightbulbs could be free to build & operate and it'd still trigger Jevons. Electricity use won't drop unless it got more expensive to produce electricity. Or, ironically, unless electric goods suddenly become much less efficient for some reason.
It is built into the laws of supply and demand. If you want to argue that the Jevons effect won't apply you basically have to argue that the supply/demand curves are funky. In this case there is no reason to believe they are.
Why would the demand curve for lighting not be “funky”?
If someone offered to pay for all of your home lighting, no matter how much power your lighting took, how much lighting would you get? Presumably a bounded amount! But in this case, the price you are paying for power for lighting is zero. So, reducing the energy use per amount of lighting would presumably not increase the amount of lighting you use beyond this limit, and therefore would decrease the energy you use for lighting.
The unrealistic assumptions - the argument started by assuming that resources are unlimited. Most of economics is expected to break down from that starting point. The point of all the models is theorising about how people will distribute limited resources.
It is like talking about the market for air or trying to measure its supply/demand curves. They are completely degenerate because it is too abundant for anything meaningful to be said.
I mean, the Jevons paradox is that increased efficiency can lead to increased use? No?
So, the idea would be that being able to more efficiently use electricity for running lights might still see us use more electricity for lights as we use them in more and more places. And, at a personal level, that kind of tracks. We don't hesitate to put lights in places that we used to accept as dark.
You certainly see this with televisions. The dramatic increase in efficiency afforded by new television technologies has seen us both start having screens everywhere, and in larger televisions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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)
> 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
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.
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.
> 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/
In general energy use in the US, Canada, and Europe looks to be declining:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&time=2...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
Decreasing time for lights on has a linear impact on power usage. Increasing the efficiency of the lights has a constant factor impact on power usage. It is a big constant, but stopping particularly egregious wastes of electricity can overcome it. That said, both at once is the best of both worlds.
I get what you are aiming at, but strictly, both have a linear relationship here?
More, you can only cut out so much of the time, and since you can run modern lights for the full day before you burn the energy you would save by turning off the lights an hour early, it is kind of silly at a personal level to think that will work out. (City level and larger, sure?)
Pulling it back to this article, the assertion is that getting more efficient with energy use for lights would just be offset by us using more lights. Which, I think it is fair to say that we do. Considerably more lights, in many instances. It doesn't completely negate the energy savings, but largely because of how big that energy savings was.
The Jevons effect has nothing to do with how efficient something gets. Lightbulbs could be free to build & operate and it'd still trigger Jevons. Electricity use won't drop unless it got more expensive to produce electricity. Or, ironically, unless electric goods suddenly become much less efficient for some reason.
It is built into the laws of supply and demand. If you want to argue that the Jevons effect won't apply you basically have to argue that the supply/demand curves are funky. In this case there is no reason to believe they are.
Huh?
Why would the demand curve for lighting not be “funky”?
If someone offered to pay for all of your home lighting, no matter how much power your lighting took, how much lighting would you get? Presumably a bounded amount! But in this case, the price you are paying for power for lighting is zero. So, reducing the energy use per amount of lighting would presumably not increase the amount of lighting you use beyond this limit, and therefore would decrease the energy you use for lighting.
Where’s the hole in this argument?
> Where’s the hole in this argument?
The unrealistic assumptions - the argument started by assuming that resources are unlimited. Most of economics is expected to break down from that starting point. The point of all the models is theorising about how people will distribute limited resources.
It is like talking about the market for air or trying to measure its supply/demand curves. They are completely degenerate because it is too abundant for anything meaningful to be said.
I mean, the Jevons paradox is that increased efficiency can lead to increased use? No?
So, the idea would be that being able to more efficiently use electricity for running lights might still see us use more electricity for lights as we use them in more and more places. And, at a personal level, that kind of tracks. We don't hesitate to put lights in places that we used to accept as dark.
You certainly see this with televisions. The dramatic increase in efficiency afforded by new television technologies has seen us both start having screens everywhere, and in larger televisions.
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.
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.
How is that enforced in practice?
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.
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/
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.
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)