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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

USA electricity use over the past 20 years has been flat.

In general, people aren't sitting around wishing they had more electricity. If they wanted to use more it's right there and available.

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> If they wanted to use more it's right there and available.

But they'd have to pay more. We're postulating a scenario in which electricity prices fall precipitously. As far as I'm aware, any time the prices fall for any resource, society consumes it with increasing inefficiency. For example, broadband Internet becomes readily available and people start streaming cat videos, CPU clock speeds skyrocket and Microsoft releases Windows Vista. If renewable energy prices decline thus driving down costs for all energy prices, I suspect we'll find something equally stupid (e.g., mining more bitcoins) to do with the extra capacity rather than decommissioning fossil fuels.

Ultimately we have to choose to decommission fossil fuel plants at the expense of our frivolities, but at least in America we seem to be disappointingly bad at this kind of impulse control (in aggregate).

It has name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

The population of the US has increased by 40 million in the past 20 years. If the country isn't using more electricity, that's pretty remarkable.

People don't directly consume very much energy; most of our energy footprint is derived from the processes to manufacture the things we consume. Much of that has been outsourced in the last several decades.

Moreover, looking at overall energy isn't particularly informative without also analyzing energy costs--according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail..., the energy costs have increased 60% in the last 20 years which would obviously suppress consumption.

We're talking about the opposite--how does our energy use change if prices fall dramatically. Are we really going to replace fossil fuels or do we just find other uses for this new electricity? For one, we're going to be electrifying other applications--all of these new electric cars are going to place new demand on the electrical grid (previously they were energized by gasoline and as such didn't burden the grid). But beyond that, are we going to actually use any excess energy capacity well, or are our applications just going to get less efficient (why should a factory invest in a more efficient machine if energy prices drop precipitously? economics favor the less efficient solution in the same way the economics of plummeting data storage and transfer prices favor bulky electron apps over streamlined native apps).

They don't want to use more at current prices[1], but if a MWh costs an average of $5 instead of $50, I would expect behaviour to start to change significantly. For example, at some point I would expect (perhaps naively) that things like desalination and long-distance water redistribution become a lot more viable.

[1] Not strictly flat, but not exactly a short-term precipitous drop either:

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-...

There are quite a few billion people around the world who are wishing they had more electricity aspiring to USA living standards who will pick up the slack in demand.

They will leapfrog fossil fuels though and go straight to renewables, micro grids, battery storage, etc.

Ideally, but even in the US, I feel like any reduction in fossil fuel prices will be offset by increased usage such as purchase of bigger cars or flying more as history has shown.

I would like to research this, I imagine the death of American heavy industry must be a significant reason for the stability despite population growth.

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