Shocker: Power demand from US homes is falling | Hacker News Reader

Shocker: Power demand from US homes is falling

seattlepi.com

54 pointsph0rque39 comments

Energy use has been correlated with economic output for virtually all of human history.

So either this trend is reversing (which seems unlikely to me), we are in for a prolonged recessionary period, or this is just a temporary dip due to new lighting technology, and the trend will revert.

OK, so look ten years ahead into the future. Let's say you're a middle-class American right now. How are you going to double your energy consumption?

Is your home going to take twice as much energy to heat? No. If anything, it'll take less as increasing energy prices make insulation pay off even sooner.

Is your gadget collection going to take twice as much energy? Probably not. TVs are getting more efficient as a side effect of other issues. As your computers go portable they have to consume less energy unless batteries get better in a way they aren't likely to in 10 years. What will a 2021 home computing device do with 200 watts? (Other than "explode".)

Are you going to passively consume energy by, say, buying a new car? For all we bitch about quality, a lot of the big ticket items are lasting longer than ever before. A 100,000 mile car used to be a cantankerous beast, and a sort of badge of honor for the skillful owner who kept it running. Now it might not need replacing for a long time after that if you just feed it oil on the recommended schedule. And in general the acquisition of "stuff" seems to be slowing down and will continue to slow down; media collections that were once walls of books and plastic VCR tapes are now downloads and some bits on a disk.

What would you do with twice the energy budget, if you're already a middle-class American?

It is true that economic activity has been correlated to energy output, and it's a bit soon to start shutting down the oil companies. But there's an ever-increasing amount of economic output being done in the form of knowledge (of how to build better cars, etc), and in just-plain-bits, and we can have a looooot of such output for not very many terawatts. I expect that we are probably going to see the peak mass-energy-resource-environment-consumption per person in the US peak in the next 10 years, then start inexorably trending downwards for a very long time after that. (As others observe, this is not an announcement of that peak, but I think we're going there.)

Incidentally, that's one of the interesting questions to ask of anyone who ever mentions the Kardashev scale... what exactly is the civilization doing with the entire output of the Galaxy, assuming it also basically has perfectly efficient manufacturing and computing processes? It's a mindblowing question. But in the meantime we mere humans don't appear to me to have infinitely unbounded energy desires.

"OK, so look ten years ahead into the future. Let's say you're a middle-class American right now. How are you going to double your energy consumption?"

Wall-to-wall three-D screens, a couple of robots, a 3-D printer that prints new furniture for every season, moving to an area hotter than Phoenix, sn ice rink in your garden next to the swimming pool everybody already has?

I do not think that will happen, but if economic reality would not apply, I guess that is what would happen.

It does not surprise me that house-related power usage per household drops. In the Netherlands it has halved in the past 30 years. The main drivers are better insulation (double glazing, walll and floor insulation) and more efficient heating.

If electric cars take off and everyone starts charging them at home, you can be pretty certain we'll see a huge spike in the electricity usage of the average American home.

We should really be looking at energy usage then and not electricity. (Is heating with electricity even that common in the US?)

He requested an energy audit from his utility, Nstar, to help cut his power use. ... He replaced his electric dryer with a gas-powered one.

Tell me again why electric cars are supposed to be superior to those powered by gasoline?

OK, I'm being snarky, but I really think this underscores the fact that supporting electric cars has become more of a religion than a rational conclusion based on any real evidence.

Regarding energy usage, it drives me crazy that people fixate to such a degree on, e.g., the heat coming off of lightbulbs. In climates that require heating, this isn't waste: it's heating the house. In the winter, there's no reason to go around turning off all your lights and appliances. It all goes into heating your house, so the only cost is the difference in price between electric heat vs. oil/gas. So claiming that a decrease in energy draw for a light of X% translates into an X% improvement in energy usage is just wrong. (granted that in the summer, A/C must work in the other direction; but my complaint is that our discourse never approaches this level of nuance)

It depends on where the electricity and the gasoline come from, clearly.

If the electricity comes from burning coal, not so great, if it comes from wind turbines, great! You can even use the car batteries as storage.

And if the gasoline is made from biological materials (3rd generation or above, which means that food production doesn't suffer for it) - great! If it's made from oil, however.. never mind global warming, we'll run out of cheap oil soon enough.

All these things are being considered, and the most economic solution will win, I hope. How is this not a rational conclusion base on real evidence?

It's really common in warmer areas like Florida. Most of us have heat pumps with an emergency "heat strip" resistive heating element that's really expensive to run.

Common and recommended. See "heat pump".

How long are cars good for now, realistically? They definitely seem to last longer.

Best way is to drive it until it breaks and then you'll find out. In the meantime, save up some money for your next car.

I don't get why people have this mindset 'I best replace my car before it starts costing me money'. Even an expensive repair of $2000 is a _lot_ cheaper than investing $20,000+ in a new car. Plus it's not as if you're forced to pay the repair. If it is expensive, you can just scrap it and then spend that 20k you've been saving.

I drove my last car into the ground and will do the same with this one.

You are ignoring resale value. I'll walk you through my math using 15,000 miles a year on my Subaru Forester.

I bought my 2004 Forester XS with 70,000 miles on it for $9300 (KBB very good or excellent condition at purchase, but that was actual price paid to seller on Craigslist). I have exactly 100,000 on it right now. In between I've done about $1000 in non-scheduled maitenance & repairs (new A/C compressor, and an O2 sensor) that are related to the age of the car. I will ignore about $1000 in regular maitenance (oil changes, automatic transmission changes, new set of tires, new belts).

Based on the current value on Craigslist, I can get easily $7500 for it. So I will have lost $1800 on the price of the car and $1000 on repairs over 2 years. That's only $1500 a year or $116 a month which is not bad.

But over the next 45,000 miles, the car repairs are going to pick up. Timing belt change and a new exhaust are both looming which is around $1500. Plus what do you get for a car with 150,000 miles on it, $3000? $4000? So lets say over the next 3 years I will spend $2k on maitenance and the price will drop from the current $7500 to $4k. 3.5k in depreciation and $2k in maitenance is $5.5k over 3 years and around $152 a month. Obviously the car is getting more costly, and that is assuming I can get $4000 for the car with 145,000 miles on it which is asking a lot. More likely it will cost more like $180 a month.

So now we're talking about $180 a month for a car with somewhere between 100,000 and 145,000 miles on it. I used to pay $206 a month for a brand new Mazda 6 on lease that I put $500 down on. As a skier I like the Subaru but you'd be hard pressed to convince me a car with 20,000 miles on it is not worth $40 more a month than a car with 120,000 miles on it.

For comparison the original owner had to do basically no repairs and got 70,000 miles for a depreciation from $24,000 to $9300. So he lost around $267 a month. He may have even been better off leasing 2 cars during that time period.

Take your car, pull up the kelly blue book, and graph it out by year in Excel. Everyone knows that depreciation is not linear and that the 1st year is a killer, but a lot of people don't realize there are several plateaus in the price. If you buy and and sell the car on either end of a plateau you will lose very little. I holding a bit too long on this car, I should have sold it 5k miles ago or right now, but I really want it for the winter for skiing and I want to sell it in the spring and have no car at all next summer which is of course the cheapest option of all.

*Note I did the math owning the car start to finish, that would be $24,000 for the car and probably $4k for repairs over the life of the car (lets say 175,000 miles). That's 12 years with the same car and it costs roughly $200 a month. Personally after 12 years I would be quite bored with a car, but you can see it's not always the absolute cheapest option. I personally prefer to keep buying good quality/condition used cars coming off lease or the first owner and hold them for 2-3 years and then sell them.

I also highly value having a reliable car. If my car breaks once a month and makes me late to a meeting, it's more expensive than leasing a new S4. A 2-7y old Honda Civic, well maintained, is probably the sweet spot for price/reliability for basic transportation.

You would raise more children.

Oh no, wait, this is something only icky brown people and redneck Christian fundamentalists do...

I don't think so. Economic growth != amount of consumption gross. Economic growth can be linked to innovation, luxury, well-being. And using less energy to achieve the same thing as before is economic growth. Also, there, they only measure houses energy consumption: how much energy goes into producing insulation? How much energy goes into producing Prius' batteries and recycling them?

Since insulation costs less than the cost of the energy it saves, the amount of energy used to make insulation must be less as well.

Californias household energy use has been flat since the 70s due to efficiency programs.

This is just HOME energy use. We're still increasing industrial and commercial energy use significantly every year.

That is a bit of a surprise. On the face of it one might expect Jevons paradox[1] to take hold, but I guess a home is a pretty closed system and there aren't too many new places to use power. More gadgets, yes, but a person can only use so many gadgets at once.

I for one find myself wanting to install more subtle light now that my power bill is so low (almost completely 10W, 13W and 18W CFLs). I started wondering where I can get creative, such as putting 0.5, 1 or 2 watt under-the-cupboard lights to gently illuminate the kitchen counters. I already have some brass wall-mounted "candles" that use 0.5 watt bulbs; they are nice and subtle night lights, and leaving them on all year round would be less than 8 dollars a year.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox (see especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Khazzoom-Brookes...)

I've also been thinking of experimenting with subtle LED lighting around my place, and would appreciate any advice/feedback you have about different hardware.

I put LED rope lights on top on my kitchen cabinets and the indirect light is great for nighttime dealing with baby bottles, snacks, etc and they also look nice in the day. I just leave them on all the time. Has really cut back on using the halogen under cabinet lights or the 9 overhead CFLs.

Also have a small LED lamp in the bath fan/light. Obvious middle of night advantages there: don't need to burn your retinas with the normal lights.

I just recently bought and installed some LED ribbon lights[1] above my home desk/workbench for task lighting. I got them "raw" so the project involved some soldering and, for appearances' sake, mounting them inside a piece of aluminum channel but I am quite pleased with the result.

I don't know your experience with LED lighting or LED flashlights but unless you are very certain you want "cool white", you should probably opt for "warm white" which tends to be in the 2700-3300K range and matches the color temperature of a modern, non-"daylight" CFL.

[1] e.g. http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 - or you can go the route I did and order 5-meter reels direct from China on eBay; they run $30-$40

Are these waterproof ribbon lights safe for in-home use? Here in local market I was told that these are for outdoor use and not designed for indoor.

You can get them without the silicone waterproofing tube, or remove it if you have ones that came with that. Ideally they should be stuck to a material such as metal that can help with conductive heat dissipation - especially if you get the kind with extra-bright "5050" LEDs rather than the standard "3528" components. However I don't think that is absolutely necessary - and I have also never heard of any kind of warnings against using them indoors, whether waterproof or not.

Misleading title. Power demand from US homes is rising. The rate at which it's rising is falling, and projected to continue falling.

Nope. It's projected to ACTUALLY fall, as the article makes quite clear, if you simply read the third paragraph:

  Over the next decade, experts expect residential power use to fall, reversing 
  an upward trend that has been almost uninterrupted since Thomas Edison 
  invented the modern light bulb.

Or, read further down for the actual numbers:

  From 1980 to 2000, residential power demand grew by about 2.5 percent 
  a year. From 2000 to 2010, the growth rate slowed to 2 percent. Over 
  the next 10 years, demand is expected to decline by about 0.5 percent a 
  year, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit 
  group funded by the utility industry.

It is not falling yet, though, so the title ("Power demand from US homes is falling") is wrong or at least misleading, as grandparent asserts.

Thanks, I was just wondering about this. That attribute of the title was essentially the only reason I was thinking I might read it - that would've been a big surprise.

edit: skimmed, and actually...

>[Utility] executives were particularly surprised by a dip during the first three months of this year, the most recent national quarterly numbers available. Adjusted for the effects of weather, residential power demand fell 1.3 percent nationwide, an unusually sharp drop.

I'm curious how much - if any - of the abating rate is due to shifting patterns of device usage. Our household, for example, is much like Mark Pilgrim's: "My 7-yr-old is sitting in front of a working 42-inch HDTV watching cartoons on an Android phone. The future is now." [1]

We have a fully functional 37" Sharp LCD, and yet the majority of our media is consumed via laptops, tablets or phones.

All of which draw power, of course, but likely less power than a large television. And even if they were comparable in terms of power consumption, the fact is that the computers would be on even if we were watching TV.

Throw in wider trends like the number of people cutting the cord (getting rid of cable) and it makes me curious about whether using smaller devices - particularly those designed to be power efficient - and the absence of others has an impact.

The plural of anecdote isn't data, however, so I have no idea if this is relevant or not.

[1] http://twitter.com/#!/diveintomark/status/112491024936476672

According to Energy Star, electronic devices (TVs, computers, etc) only account for about 4% of home energy consumption, so I'd doubt that device usage patterns is much of a driving factor here.

Almost three quarters of our home energy is spent heating things up or cooling things down:

Heating: 29%, Cooling: 17%, Water heating: 14%, Appliances: 13%, Lighting: 12%, Electronics: 4%

Source: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_save_energ...

As mentioned in the article states are setting up programs to help you save energy. For those that live in MA head over to http://www.masssave.com/ and sign up for the free* audit on your house. They give you stuff and will chip in the first $2K on work they find that can improve your house and there is a 0% loan you can get for major improvements like windows, replacing your heater etc. Heard from several friends last year that did it saved a bundle last winter and just had them out on my house and expect my heating bill too be much less this winter.

* Well free in the wacky logic that part of your utility bill funds this, but ....

Northwestern Energy ran a pilot program last year where they do an energy audit on your house and then pay for whatever the recommendations are. I ended having new, blow-in insulation installed in all of my exterior walls at no cost to me. That was about $1700 worth of work. Then, over the next few years, they will come by and do additional audits to see if saves Northwestern any money by actually paying the work themselves.

In addition to more energy efficient homes and lightbulbs this is probably also being caused by a huge dearth of demand due to a down economy. Crude Oil prices drop during economic downturns for the same reason - the markets know that demand will be significantly lower.

Glass half full - hopefully this is a signal that we're becoming much more efficient in our consumption and we can produce the same economic growth with a lot less energy.

The article touches on this briefly and argues that for home usage, it's usually not too correlated with the economy. "Even when the economy is stagnant, people still watch TV and keep their ice cream cold."

Oil prices are affected by non-home and non-personal energy use. In a weak economy, less industrial usage to make and transport things we buy and much less personal travel (fewer vacations, fewer flights).

Wait till we start plugging our cars into the grid.

I don't know about the average family but in the past 5-7 years I've replaced almost everything in my house that consumes electricity - HVAC, water heater, dishwasher, fridge, television, computers and light bulbs. Almost all of those went to more energy-efficient models. I think the only thing that's gotten worse is the huge pile of gadget chargers.

And if you are smart you can outsource charging many of those gadgets. Many probably do without realizing the impact. Charge your laptop as you browse the web in a coffee shop; charge your phone in your car; charge your MP3 player at work; etc...

> charge your phone in your car

That's not really outsourcing, unless you get free gas. When you're using more energy from the battery, you're adding extra load to the alternator which increases the drag and therefore using more gas.

Article could do with some more numbers.

Is the huge growth in compact fluorescent lighting sufficient to account for the difference, alone? I'm wondering whether the other factors are sufficient at all.

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