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Power Demand From US Homes Expected To Fall For a Decade
We hear all the time that household energy consumption is rising, both in the U.S. and around the world. That's been true in the big picture for several decades at least, but reader captainkoloth, with his first accepted submission, points to an Associated Press article with some encouraging news on this front: the rate of growth in U.S. household energy use, and household energy use itself, is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years. Take it for what you will, but that conclusion is drawn by the Electric Power Research Institute, "a nonprofit group funded by the utility industry."
As the last of the vacuum tubes (incandescent light bulbs and CRTs) get phased out, power consumption goes down. Now if we could just find a way to get rid of (most) fractional horsepower motors.
If you can't afford to pay the light bill, your electricity consumption is going to decrease sharply.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Power demand is not falling, increase in power demand is falling. Or is it increase in the speed of increase in power demand? Some derivative, anyway.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
US energy consumption is falling even where it concerns oil, that's due to the inflation and thus higher prices in dollar amounts, though measured in gold, the oil is cheapest in history.
September 2009 â" Current (US Population 307,006,550)
Total input to refineries 14,600,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude and products 11,721,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude 9,223,000 Barrels per day
Total Domestic Oil Production 5,444,000 Barrels per day
Gasoline Consumed 8,779,000 Barrels per day
Diesel Fuel Consumed 4,099,000 Barrels per day
September 2004 - 5 years ago (US Population 293,045,739)
Registered vehicles: 243,010,539 Passenger Cars: 136,430,651 Comm Aircraft: 8,186
Total input to refineries 15,254,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude and products 13,438,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude 9,697,000 Barrels per day
Total Domestic Oil Production 5,062,000 Barrels per day
Gasoline Consumed 7,993,000 Barrels per day
Diesel Fuel Consumed
Also here is a graph of per-capita consumption.
It's not a surprise that energy consumption is falling in USA, as the population has less and less that it can spend because less and less is produced domestically. Same thing that is applied to oil can be extrapolated to all other forms of energy.
You can't handle the truth.
Stating that the "rate of growth" is going to decline doesn't mean the same thing as saying that the demand will decline. The rate of growth has been declining for years (from 2.5%/yr to 2%/yr over the last decade), but demand has still be rising. What the article claims is that the rate will actually become negative over the next decade, which means an absolute decline in demand.
The headline says that power demand will fall for a decade, and this is correct from the article:
"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."
The summary says that the rate of increase will decline, which would imply that total consumption would still rise.
We've replaced the broken tube TVs with LCD and now LED TVs. The old refrigerator broke and the new one laps it terms of efficiency. And the new furnace is better than the old one.
These things alone took our bills down 30-40%.
Add some switchable powerstrips for all the phantom draws of those power supplies and it gets even better.
Industry group or not, my experience jibes with their report.
Now maybe they can reverse that ridiculous incandescent light ban. CFL bulbs give me seizures and I have no viable alternative to incandescents. I'd rather not live in the dark.
Stop wasting letters on those announcements. It is not what I come here to read.
There's been a big push for more energy efficiency in the corporate/business sector. This stuff tends to trickle down to the consumer level after a bit, so that's what we're seeing here.
Use of devices is probably increasing, but said devices use a fraction of the power they did even a decade ago, so it makes sense that overall consumption per household would fall.
Think about it; how many of you have washers that are 5 years or older? 10? My washer and drier are over 20 years old. I plan on replacing them soon, which will significantly reduce my power draw.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Your electric rates are going up!
This post is LAW where prohibited by VOID. Prosecutors will be violated.
It probably helps to some extent that we're seeing something of a shift towards devices which join multiple technologies in the one object. Our phones are also our daily cameras, our music players, our portable gaming consoles, etc. Instead of charging a crapton of different things, we're charging one little smartphone. Same goes for TV's, especially as they're working on energy efficiency pretty heavily lately.
demographic changes and societal changes are probably at least as responsible, if not more responsible, for the changes. Due to the "great recession" American kids are finally figuring out what their counterparts in other rich countries(Italy and Japan foremost among them) that living with mom and dad after graduation and even employment isn't as bad as either forking out massive amounts of money in rent to someone else every month or buying a house/apartment that is pretty much guaranteed to be worth less than you paid for it the second you sign the lease.
As such, as more people live in the same household per capita energy consumption tends to fall as there are more "economies of scale" in things like refrigeration and heating/cooling.....
Whether or not this will be a long term trend like it is in Italy and Japan still remains a question and is critical to long term residential energy consumption estimates.
Monstar L
Despite what people are saying. There is an efficiency standard Which may preclude current incandescent bulbs but several major manufacters have plans to make incandescent bulbs that comply with the new efficiency standards. So you will still be able to source incandescent bulbs after the new standards take full effect
Slashdot's title says the power demand will fall; TFA says the rate of increase will fall, i.e. it'll still go up but more slowly. Please fix.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
My Georgia electric bill for June to July was 130, for July to August it was 134. I live in an area zoned for tiered rates, meaning as your usage goes up you pay a lot more. All my lights are either CFL (where they aren't easily noticed) or now LED. There are some good deals on packs of three LED bulbs. The only place without either bulb is the master bathroom because we can't find anything acceptable to replace the clear six inch globes. Suggestions are appreciated on that matter. So we simply have half them off unscrewed enough to not light; those above "my" sink. Common electronics in the house include one iMac and a laptop. Throw in a DLP television and a 32 LED in the exercise area and finally a hot water heater. The reason I posted our monthly electric bills, the house is 3900 square feet.
How is it done, well being militant with the heating and AC helps a lot. Since no one is upstairs after 7 the AC goes up to 82+, it is only below 82 from 8PM to 7AM and then its 75 (a slight cave in but hell who cares). The downstairs is 78 during the day mostly because of pets but goes to 82+ at night though it rarely heats up. Ceiling fans grace every room. Laundry and loads of dishes are done as full loads only. Modern dishwashers are more efficient than washing by hand in most cases. Modern washers (both are less than five years old) are the same. Oh, watch the lights. Its not hard to teach turning out the light when your not in the room (though it can lead to some silliness - as in its ONLY YOU in there"). Toss in a light colored shingles and that might help a bit. I would try white as a story mentioned years ago but HOAs are the law in these parts. Outside the only control I have over the elements was planting Chinese Thuja (very fast growing conical pines) to the S/SW to block direct summer sunlight in evening. Even the orientation of the home benefits, most windows are on the North side.
While I doubt every thing we do would work for most, it works for us. Make it a game. That can get everyone on board. That and have something tangible as reward to do with the savings. Like trips, hell even pizza nights paid for being smart work.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
you need a shrink. it is in your head; you are not some freak of nature who is one in a million. You shouldn't be able to watch TV, movies, play video games, or likely even safely surf the web without going into seizures... How can you drive a car? go to any office building? hospital? dentist? FL bulbs pulse at high rates it is not just CFL.
What about a 120Hz TV? those strobe...
Submit yourself to an institution either to be medically studied or to have your head examined.
Seconded.
This will cause utilities everywhere to raise rates so that they can cover fixed costs
Who cares if it is his first accepted submission
I do. Probably other's do as well. The whole world doesn't just revolve around you. In fact, when I jump, the world moves up to meet my feet!
The bitcoin miners will single-handedly reverse the trend
>"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."
That means the rate that GROWTH is increasing will slow down. That does not mean absolute power usage is going down. That won't happen until total growth is NEGATIVE.
I am quite sure many people are misreading this to mean it is a reduction in energy use, which it is not. We are a loooooong way away from that happening. Still, a reduction in growth of energy usage is a good sign.
As we discussed in an earlier article, incandescent lights are not being banned. Only low efficiency lights are being banned. Higher efficiency incandescents are available now but the cost more (surprise!).
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
The population growth just isn't keeping up with the increases in efficiency that are popping up everywhere.
I'd expect this trend to continue if electric cars weren't starting to become viable. Within 5 years or so, we'll probably see this reversing as more and more people are plugging in their vehicles at night.
Who cares? Im tired of seeing this appear in articles.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
I'm turning off my computer right %!$*%& [NO CARRIER]
Even today's 'high efficiency' halogen lights only produce about 10 lumens per watt. By 2020, all general purpose lights must produce 45 lumens per watt. This effectivly bans all current forms of incandescent lights.
As an act of defiance, I will put all CFLs in the trash and/or recycling bin.
When the rate of growth of a value declines, that value doesn't fall. It continues to rise. When the rate declines slightly, it continues to rise nearly as fast as it did before. It doesn't fall.
How stupid are the people writing these headlines? These are the people giving you news for nerds. Stupid people.
--
make install -not war
I doubt that the economy is to blame, is probably just that for some obscure reason(1), your products are getting more energy efficient.
:) :)
This summer, I was on vacation in California/Nevada/etc. basically driving from hotel to hotel... And oh the horrors we saw (energy wise), every single room had it's own air conditioning, but then again I suppose central systems are for communists, right
Many places they were also "bright" enough to put the fridge in a closet without ventilation holes, granted I couldn't hear it, but I'm certain it was running all the time
(1) I doubt the reason can be environmental taxes, as I noticed your gasoline is half price (compared to the EU).
They are encouraging first time submitters. There has been a dearth of timely submissions lately. I'm for it. A bunch of the most prolific submitters like "twitter" have been harassed away, and somebody's got to submit this stuff.
I wonder if declining power requirements of homes have anything to do with declining power needs of computers, the migration to LCD TVs, proliferation of heat pumps and so on - or if it's just a tough economy finally driving folks to adjust the thermostat.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You were absolutely right to be concerned about the rate of growth metric. Consider 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ...
The 2 represents a doubling of the sum so far (200%). Now the sum is 3, so the 3 represents a 100% increase. Now the sum is 6, so the 4 represents a 67% increase. Now the sum is 10, so the 5 represents a 50% increase. Now the sum is 15, so the 6 represents a 40% increase. And so on.
Now suppose that these numbers represent electricity usage. Although usage is monotonically increasing, the rate of growth is monotonically decreasing. Other commenters have pointed out that "TFA" says actual usage will go down. But you were right to be concerned. If actual usage is expected to go down, why didn't they say that? Why did they say that the rate of growth is expected to go down?? That phrase is a major red flag to identify someone who's trying to lie with statistics.
I heard one estimate that 3% of PG & E's power goes towards indoor grows. There would probably be a lot less indoor growing if it were legal.
Another factor is the ongoing housing mess. Poor people conserve electricity in a variety of ways: Moving back home with the folks, not keeping the lights on in the investment house that they plan to flip (it's decaying instead), and not providing jobs for illegal immigrants who are either moving back or enterring at lower rates.
Then of course there's the CFLs and other devices that do the same thing with less energy.
"If present trends continue" is one of those phrases that will come back to haunt you. If the economy picks up and kids move out of the house, hire illegals to do their outside gardening, use growlights for their indoor gardening, and drive a spiffy new electric car to work then we'll be back to talking about how the grid can't handle it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Why is it that people with giant houses often also have plenty of sanctimony? Do you carpool in your hummer too?
Assuming they're talking about the "growth rate" declining, in 4 years of 0.5% decline, the growth rate will be 0%, and the remaining 6 years will be negative.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Make it a game. That can get everyone on board. That and have something tangible as reward to do with the savings. Like trips, hell even pizza nights paid for being smart work.
Not a bad idea to do the reward thing. We do most of what you talk about. Where I live we have SmartMeters, but they have not yet given access to the data to customers yet. However, I now work for the local utility and can get my usage after I VPN to work and access the AMI system to see hourly usage.
Once they roll out customer access to the hourly usage then billing will be switching to Time of Use (ToU) billing as well. The irrigation/power utility is a not-for-profit, so the goal isn't to gauge customers, but to have the net costs of purchasing and maintaining the system be covered by the usage of customers. One way to save money is to have to buy less at peak times (by "shaving the peak"), so using ToU billing helps influence customers to shift their flexible usage (clothes, dishwasher, even pre-cooling/delayed-cooling with A/C) to cheaper times (basically non-business hours) or if they want to use at expensive times they can pay more for it.
Anyway, the point is that I can look at overall power usage and reward when it is the same or less than the previous year's month. Same with water usage as really the only variation is in shower usage. We have a dual-head shower in all three bathrooms, and one head is set to very low-flow, and the other to normal flow, with a real quick 90 degree twist of a dial to switch between. I can tell when the four kids are not using the low-flow for the bulk of the shower (you really only need the normal flow for initial wetting and rinsing at the end, and the low-flow is just so you feel comfortable and don't get cold in the winter). The water bill will jump $20-30 in those cases (we're metered and double-billed accordingly - once for water in and once for water going to the sewer system less our lawn usage).
One thing we have not done as of yet is to replace our dishwasher. The current model is hand-me-down from someone as the one in our home never worked and we just did them by hand. It's been giving us some fits anyway, so I'm going to start price shopping a new dishwasher and see if it makes sense to replace.
Well, to be honest, that issue lies with those picking the stories. I know that I submitted a number of stories long ago and saw them not make it. However, a day or two later, I would see it make it with a different submitter, but even using the same link, and twice with the same grabbed section.
Basically, when the editors are playing favorites, rather than considering the story, there really is not need for us to submit. Hopefully, with taco gone, things will change and they will consider the story and not the submitter.
Windbourne (moderating).
Compared to most European countries, the US electricity is very cheap: :-)
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ElectricityRates3.gif
The US electricity usage would be reduced dramatically if they more than tripled the prices to match my Dutch prices
The same graph also explains why Germany has a huge solar industry: installation cost is recovered 3 times as fast, since electricity prices are 3 times as high.
So we will need 18 new power plants instead of 20, not counting the ones we need to replace that are outdated and dirty.
I'm wondering about that because I thought CA has a lot of brown-outs. That would suggest to me it isn't so much efficiency but simply because they have no choice, the energy just isn't there. I'm also wondering how much of this is people switching from things like their own TV's and stereos to things like smart phones to handle their media.
Electric Car.
The fact is that utility companies will actually do better if they have electric cars that charge all night. That allows them to spread the energy demand around while building up better infrastructure. They will be encouraging electric cars and trucks over this next decade. Oddly, I am surprised that the utilities have not worked closely with USPS to get them electric trucks. They are ideal for this. More than 90% of their vehicles travel less than 30 miles in a day. That is dirt cheap to create a vehicle for them. If several of the power companies worked with Tesla or even A123/UQM, they could get an inexpensive postal truck in under a year. Then help fund it so that they can sell electricity at night.
The problem is the Utility companys still figure out ways to make you pay more regardless of how much you cut back on useage. New fees, rates increases, etc. And there is zero regulation in place to prevent this kind of highway robbery.
Just over 1/3 (33.9%) of my households electrical power has been generated on our own roof this year. With tax rebates and installation credits our solar array should break even about 3 years after installation.
Nice game, but what's the use? First there's the Chinese Axiom. Every unit of energy you save, will be bought by the Chinese, for a lower price thanks to your accomplishments. And by Al Gore, of course. This leaves the savings. Putting in a few extra hours of work will be much more profitable than investing that same amount of time in savings.
This is precisely what has most often happened when politicians promise "a decrease in spending": their projected budget already contains a substantial planned increase. They chop some of that out. But all they have accomplished is actually making the increase smaller than previously planned... and they call that a "decrease".
This same trick is what was just pulled in the latest budget agreement between Rebuplicans and Democrats. Their vaunted "decrease in spending" is actually an overall increase: the budget for the next several years is actually higher than ever before. It's just not as much increase as they were originally planning.
If you can, replace the light fixture with one that allows for more directional lights (spot lights). There are some globe LED's but they're not as good. I use CFL's there as well.
Hot water heater on electricity? Unless you live in Europe or you generate your own electricity, it's going to be more expensive. You can get one of those more expensive electric water heaters (or add-ons) that use the hot air in your house to heat the water.
As far as the lights go, I put our outside lights on X10 as well as most of our downstairs lights. It is now regulated by dusk/dawn and X10 controls (turn it on and off randomly throughout the night). If the alarm goes on, I have a script running that turns everything else off.
TV's (even LED) sometimes vary wildly in power usage. You may save $50-150 on the cheaper units but their energy usage is often 50% higher as well. Also use fans instead of air conditioners during cool nights. I replaced all my air conditioners with one large 220V unit, a lot more BTU and less power usage (and more balanced as well) and put in fans in the bedrooms. If the air is cool enough at night, you just turn on the fans, the lower levels pulling air in, some pushing air out (heat rises) and it can easily drop 3-4 degrees in an hour in the middle of summer.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I wish since our local utility switch to electronic 'smart' meters, power usage supposedly TRIPLED. We went from $240~ to over $800 a month for a 2 person, never home single residential house. When we complained we were told the new meters are 99.9% accurate, and that old analog meters are 2 to 3% inaccurate. Ok, how does 2% equal 300% increase. The analog meter they replaced was 6 years old, the previous meter we had for about 20 years. Our electric usage remained the same for 25 years, then the same month electronic meter put in our usage increased 300%.
We had to fight and fight to get them to come put in another new (electronic) meter, same thing $800 a month. Impossible, as I run a 3,000 sq ft. commerical building (higher rates) with 24/7/365 air conditioning with 20~ servers 24/7/365, and with 30+ workstations running 10 hours a day, with 30 banks of 4 x 34watt florescent light fixtures 10 hours a day, etc all for $750 a month.
We have replaced our water pump, & refridgerator after the spike. We have had our hvac units checked out by 3 different companies. We've put amp meter on water heater. Been fighting for 9 months, still can't find the problem. We have another electrician coming to put our own usage meter on entire house to see how accurate meters are. Research online finds that lots of people report problems with these 'smart meters'.
So far we've lost nearly $9,000 because of smart meters.
We're already in the process of switching to 125% solar, along with a couple additional wind turbines, so we can tell our electric co-op to go f*k themselves, as they treat us like we're criminals and have been no help whatsoever.
I switched to CFLs years ago, and had an immediate savings of roughly $20/month on my power bill.
Then one catastrophically failed, shot out flames, melted things, and nearly caught my (rented) house on fire.
Fuck you, Al Gore.
Thankfully, LED lightning has finally reached the point where it's actually usable, albeit still expensive - I type this from under two glowing, cool white orbs of beautiful, low-power, imperceptible-heat-producing light. Glorious light, not that dirty yellow shit that peasants seem to love so much. (:
This presentation is pretty enlightening.
part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9cReuRThxY
part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3V-TCpX40c
part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNk1S0w8q-Y
part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxg33Swcz5A
The experts' guesses are compared to "random darts thrown by monkeys". Guess who is more accurate....
There are several million homes foreclosed and therefore not using power. Of course that will bring it down. Economic problems also lower electricty as average users are more willing to put their thermostats to 76 rather than 68 during the summer to save money.
http://saveie6.com/
I am surprised that the utilities have not worked closely with USPS to get them electric trucks.
They're trying it. Buses too. Trains are being looked at for storage. There's a huge amount of different pilots being looked at around the world with some really cool ideas. BOMA doing large scale DR in Chicago. And on and on.
but a key part of reducing CO2 emissions is electrifying transport and heating. so electricity usage will go back up.
Nowhere in the article did I see any mention about plug in electric vehicles. As the Volt and others become more popular they may cause an significant increase in energy usage. I read somewhere that a plug-in car is equivalent in energy use to a small house.
This is my issue with the "zero emission" spin that electric car companies are touting; the car may have zero emissions but they cause the electric company to emit more. It is just shifting emissions and not eliminating them. I would agree with decreased emissions as electricity producers are more efficient than IC engines.
Here's what happens to cause the decrease in demand for a utility. It happens quite often, seemingly.
1) Utility (water, sewage, gas, power) is cheap, available, and highly consumed.
2) Public service announcement goes out saying "please conserve!"
3) People who already do not carefully conserve their utilities (due to excess cash) respond and do their civic duty, throttling their use.
4) Utility company (whether public or private) realizes "hey, people are using less, but we're getting less revenue as a result, too".
5) Due to the need to maintain a certain level of infrastructure to make the utilities available, rates must be increased to pay for costs. (A healthy profit is retained as well, of course.) Certainly, the added cost of operating their facilities at reduced efficiency has something to do with things as well.
6) People are suddenly paying the same amount as before for the utility, but using less.
I'm sure less power use is partially impacted by more efficient electronics, to be sure. The demand for those more efficient electronics is largely driven, however, by increased utility costs.
What I have to ask is: how is this going to impact the economy? My guess is "poorly". Energy rates in California, where this seems a common practice, are significantly higher than elsewhere in the US. This makes the base level of business operation markedly more expensive: you've got to pay your employees more, you've got to pay more for daily operations energy, and everyone else does as well.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What kind of LED are you using to replace a standard 100 watt incandecent? I don't seem to find any that are an actual replacement. I am not a big fan of CFL bulb quality, but the cost/quality ratio has me using them for pretty much my entire home. I keep waiting for LED to become a replacement so that I can get to thinking of the CFLs as a transition technology.
Considering how many jillions of people got thrown out of their house in the crisis, this is a no brainer. Less people in houses == less electricity use.
The system has and does support a computer lab (about 10 machines back when I ran a consultancy here), a machine shop - big tools, welders, and now a physics lab in addition to all the usual home entertainment stuff and lighting -- mostly CCFL, but other types too (even good old halogens for reading and the stereo microscope where they rule). Freezer in an unheated room, freezes two liter bottles of water to put in coolers used as refrigerators in the houses. Saves a ton. In fact, nearly all we do could be done in an on-grid house, whereupon you'd find out why they are called the power company -- they find a way to increase all the other non-electricity charges till you pay the same anyway -- same thing as is called Cramming when the phone companies do it.
As I started with bare land, and built on that, I found out something really interesting. In most counties, including mine, the county has delegated the issuance and enforcement of building permits to guess who, the aptly named "power company". Ha! So all four of my dwellings needed no permits, and are "barns" insofar as taxes go. Now, think how much money that saves yearly -- and now recalculate the payoff time for solar. Laughing all the way to the bank on that one!
More on my forums, link below.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
What has happened is we've reached a point where you can have everything you want, and yet the new technologies will reduce usage. It isn't a matter of being more efficient by having less, you get to have everything you had before, but it just takes less energy.
I'm in the same situation, my energy bills keep trending downward. All my lights are LED or CFL, my A/C broke and was replaced with a much higher efficiency dual-stage model (that made a big difference), my washer and dryer broke and have been replaced with high efficiency models, and things continue.
Next thing is my front door is in bad shape. Doesn't sit well in the frame and is warped. It's an old, wooden, door. I want a new one, which in addition to sitting properly, will be made of steel and fiberglass, with good insulation. That'll mean it doesn't warp, has very tight seals, and keeps heat out much better, further lowering climate control costs.
None of these things have required quality of life concessions on my part. On the contrary, the new devices are even better. The washer and dryer take much less time to clean clothes, they just also happen to use a lot less water and power to do it. The A/C maintains a more consistent temperature since it has longer run times in its low stage, it just also requires less energy.
My demand for energy is not increasing because I already have everything that uses energy that I could want. I just find that new technologies are more efficient than old ones, so my usage drops overall.
What's more they aren't hard sells. It isn't as though I have to make a major sacrifice, financial or otherwise, to get them. They are worth it on their own merits, efficiency aside. Like the LED dimmable lights in my living room. They use like 15% of the incandescents they replace but that isn't what makes them worth it. What makes them worth it is they last 10-20 years, so I don't have to get out my ladder to change the lights but once every couple decades. They are better than the technology they replace, even ignoring the energy savings.
Given things like this, we'll probably see more increases even if people don't go out of their way to improve. As they replace old things with newer ones, they'll get more efficient without trying.
In TFA, they predict an increase in the efficiency of (electric) space heaters. A space heater is a portable device with no connection to the outdoors. It is inherently 100% efficient. There is no opportunity to improve efficiency, because lacking a connection outside of the heated area, there is no way to run a heat pump. Idiots.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I heard a utility company say on tv that because of declined use, they would have to start charging MORE for electricity. LOL Must be getting ideas from the oil companies & such ;)
thirded-ed.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Stop wasting letters on comments on those announcements. It is not what I come here to read.
I couldn't believe this nonsense.
With plug-in cars just around the corner, and with the power hungry bigger TV screens, you have to be an ostrich to believe home electric usage will go down.
And more of us use computers everything, putting aside the pen and paper, even for basic note taking.
And things like this: My cable company just announced that ALL my TV's must have their own cable box...and they use big, large(bigger than any of my laptops) power hungry Cisco boxes that heat up quite a bit, and are always on. So even my little TV in the kitchen will probably must have a big computer on all the time.
I've noticed in my office that where I once had 2 or 3 little lights, from electronics, on at night, I now have over 25! And that's if I turn off all my computers and screens.
Fourth-ified.
Especially since members may have submitted many times, even been voted *way* up in the firehose, yet blocked by editors. "first time" simply has no useful meaning.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
APS in Arizona wants a 6% rate increase. But consumption is going down and is expected to for the next 10 years. Riiiight. Reminds me of a 2008 interview with the county property tax assessor who said and I quote "I don't see home values going down in the near future." APS is also on a tear to install smart meters with the ultimate goal of being able to charge a higher rate during peak periods. If you think that's fine and dandy then you should have no problem with killing Net Neutrality.
"Giant" houses? GP mentioned the home described was 3900 sq feet. This is hardly "giant", though it might be fair to call it roomy as compared to the average. The average home size (in the US) was 2700 sq feet in 2009, up from 1400 square feet in 1970. Which isn't to say that 2700 square feet is "large", either... it's just the average. In order to create that 2700 sq foot average, there have to be plenty of homes on the high side of that number.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If less power is used then the electric companies will charge more and our bills will increase. They will have to maintain their grid just as they do now. Then with people losing their homes I suppose those empty homes need little power supply. Next we have a few people going off grid and there will be more and more. That means that the supply lines will hop scotch around the non paying homes and that will drive the prices over the edge. The message is get of grid and make it a priority. Traditional power service is a dying service just as wired telephones will soon be extinct. No, they don't care if they kill you. Look around. I can show you vast urban and suburban areas where an accident at night will turn lethal as there are no longer pay phones anywhere. No cell phone equals no cops, no fire engine and no ambulance. So if you are driving home and see a crime in progress, a fire, or a bleeding body in the road good luck.
My parents say our monthly electricity bills are going up especially with my desktop computers with fancy stuff for computer games, upgrades, and other stuff. :( Yes, I can get laptops/notebooks but I rarely go out and travel, and I want power (gaming, HTPC, etc.) and cheap prices.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Given that quite a few Americans are now residing in tents and underpasses - this is a natural conclusion.