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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.
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.
LEDs. They don't strobe (neither does modern CFLs but never mind), you can get them in a range of tones from whitish neutral to mimicking incandescents, and they're getting cheap enough that changing to them as old bulbs burn out is perfectly feasible.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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!
The last white LED bulb I saw was very blue, which was very harsh on my eyes. How have they managed to get round that?
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
By changing the color temperature of the light they produce.
-rd
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.
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!
So why do you buy "white" LED bulbs? Buy the warm-toned ones. Or the ones where you can adjust the color temperature yourself.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The bitcoin miners will single-handedly reverse the trend
There is no incandescent light ban, despite what Joe Barton (who co-sponsored the "ban" in the first place) would like you to believe. There is only a mandate for lights to become more efficient -- there is nothing in the law mandating that a particular lighting technology be phased in or out. In the end, it is likely a moot point anyway as market forces (partly as a result of European regulations, which the US Congress can do nothing about) have been pushing incandescent bulb manufacturers to close factories. In other words, with or without the law, incandescents are on the way out.
Like others, I would suggest LEDs. The prices are coming down fast, and the quality (and directionality, or lack thereof) is improving fast. Right now you still have to be pretty careful about what brand you buy and such -- the cheapest available bulb is likely to disappoint -- but by the time you have a hard time finding the incandescents you need I suspect LEDs will be much more viable.
>"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.
As for CFLs not strobing... everyone says that they flicker at 22 kHz or something ridiculous, but they give me instant seizures anyway, so I'm not quite convinced.
Have you been blind tested for this? I.e. have you been subjected to both CFLs and other forms of illumination at the same color temperature without knowing beforehand which is which (and for double blind testing, the person flicking the switch not knowing either), and you get instant seizures from CFL only?
That would be very interesting, if so.
It's probably because they're crap and while they nominally operate at 22kHz, the 60Hz leaks in as well.
Halogens are a better bet for less-crappy lighting, and are still legal. And their long life claims are less dubious.
On the other hand, winter time use of incandescent bulbs in the North should be encouraged. A not insignificant part of the electricity on the grid is provided by "clean" or renewable sources, while your typical oil heater most certainly isn't. Not to mention nasty and non-renewable stuff like mercury in the cold lights when you inevitably dispose of dead ones.
There are certainly more factors than just comparing wattage.
But if you really want to reduce wattage, get rid of that hot air clothes dryer that pumps hot air out of the building, and get a condensation dryer instead. An added benefit is that they don't wear out your clothes nearly as much, and by changing to hinged windows too, allows you insulate a house well enough to have a pressure differential with the outside. If the politicians were serious about saving electricity in the households, starting by banning hot air dryers and sliding windows would be better steps than banning incandescent bulbs.
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.
The backlights in them often do.
Because "white" should be the same color as daylight.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Of course, there's the fact that CFL efficiency is directly related to the cleanliness of the power grid it's drawing from and when put on the standard dirty grid CFL life isn't any longer than incandescent, and many times shorter.
Indeed. I have some 'daylight', 5500K CFLs, and they are ridiculously blue compared to incandescent.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They do have this effect on some few people. It must be horrible to have that condition. Not everybody needs ramps to get into a public building either, but they're still required on new construction.
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"?
It probably is. Daylight is quite blue. It's just not noticeable at high intensities.
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).
So we will need 18 new power plants instead of 20, not counting the ones we need to replace that are outdated and dirty.
This will cause utilities everywhere to raise rates so that they can cover fixed costs
To anyone thinking the above poster might need to adjust their tinfoil hat: This is not theoretical. Nor is it isolated. Nor is it even particularly new.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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'm sure he is lying because if it were true he would be unable to enter 99% of buildings or use an LCD monitor/tv. If anyone was like that it would be a well known medical condition.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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....
We don't subsidize gas or the highway system, but europe taxes excessively. Infact gas and road taxes subsidize a lot of other things in the US.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
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.
I am pretty sure he's not lying, but firmly believes to a point of certainty what he says. A blind test would undoubtedly be an eye opener for him, if he's only willing to have one arranged. But I fear his conviction might be so deep that he considers it a waste of time which will only cause him more seizures.
Insert appropriate Schiller and Heinlein quotes.
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.
No, daylight isn't white. It is just what you are used to. I personally prefer the cooler colored lights. The warmer color from the incandescent bulbs make me feel like I need a brighter light to be comfortable. The suggestions of buying LEDs that let you adjust the colors are pretty ridiculous. The cost of LED lighting is already prohibitive for general use. The color changing LED lights are 2 to 3 times as much.
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
There is a segment of people like that. There is also a segment of people that thing because a particular item works for them, that it meets the use case of everyone else. Just look through the slashdot posts that suggest 70 year old people ride bicycles in the snow to get to their dialysis treatments.
I tried to be an early adopter of CFL bulbs. I bough some when they were still over $10 each. I switched back to incandescent because they were slow to turn on. I didn't want to stand at the doorway of a dark room for 5 seconds before entering while I waited for the light to turn on and stop flickering. The color was bad, and it had a tendency to produce enough IR interference that it would stop remote controls from working, and would even sometimes change the channel on my TV.
Times have changed. The CFLs being sold now are WAY cheaper, and as far as I can tell, no longer produce IR interference. The people in the first group generally used to have the right answer for the wrong reason. Now, the people in the second group generally have the right answer for the wrong reason. The rest of us fit into a third group where we buy what best meets our cost/functionality sweet spot.
What other power measuring equipment have you used to counteract their claims?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
I never said anything about banning CFLs, I said I should be able to use incandescent lights. The kind of seizure you describe is called a grand mal seizure. There are other kinds of seizures that are also pretty horrible. I do in fact lose consciousness and fall to the ground under these lights. Don't think I've bitten my tongue, but I've hit my head pretty hard. I think my neurologist knows a lot more about this than you do.
I can't enter buildings. I work from home and have to go blindfolded when I see a doctor or dentist. My girlfriend has to lead me into buildings and people constantly stare and ask rude questions. My LCD monitor with a DC-powered LED backlight is just fine.
Mine is one of the many that uses LED backlights. CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent) is on the way out.
The place my neurologist sent me for testing only tested with fluorescents, but it did show up on the EEG. Psychogenic seizures don't show up. Also, I've had seizures when friends accidentally forgot to screw in incandescent lights instead of their normal CFLs when I came to visit. I didn't have any prior knowledge that they were using CFLs and we only discovered it *after* I reacted to them. It's hard enough to get an appointment for testing (let alone getting to the appointment; my girlfriend is the only way I can get there since I can't drive and need to best escorted in with a blindfold), let alone asking them to set up something specific with multiple lamps, different types of lights, lampshades, etc, which may not be all that accurate anyway because the people slamming me on /. would just claim it wasn't truly blind because maybe I could distinguish between the bulbs based on the colour of the light. I don't get why people are attacking me on here. I have a serious health problem and I'm not asking for a ban on CFLs or a change in anyone's lifestyle... I do however want people to be aware of what I'm going through.
As far as the people who say everyone would know about this if I truly had this problem, it's simply not true. The media had no interest in picking this up, I wrote to all of the politicians in my state (California) and only got generic template responses, I tell everyone I meet, but the information just doesn't spread. I'm not looking for handouts, to push some agenda, or anything. I just want to be able to see in my house after dark.
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.
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.
"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.
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).
Who cares? Im tired of seeing this appear in articles.
Then stop reading it or fucking fix it; use AdBlock Plus or Greasemonkey or something. I'm getting tired of reading people's off-topic posts on this matter... The quantity of text used to complain about this issue is greater than the quantity of text being bitched about.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Nice hypocrisy there. Bitching about me bitching. Why not just take some of your own advice asshole?
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".