After Rising For 100 Years, Electricity Demand is Flat (vox.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The US electricity sector is in a period of unprecedented change and turmoil. Renewable energy prices are falling like crazy. Natural gas production continues its extraordinary surge. Coal, the golden child of the current administration, is headed down the tubes. In all that bedlam, it's easy to lose sight of an equally important (if less sexy) trend: Demand for electricity is stagnant. Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became "decoupled." This historic shift has wreaked havoc in the utility industry in ways large and small, visible and obscure. Some of that havoc is high-profile and headline-making, as in the recent requests from utilities (and attempts by the Trump administration) to bail out large coal and nuclear plants.

Comments

LEDs I think.

[Major_Disorder]

The price on LED lighting has come down so much, that I have just finished converting my entire house to LED lighting. It has made a big difference in my electric bill. Also big power sucking CRT TVs are being replaced rapidly with LED backlit flat screens.
I would expect the electric use to start a downward trend from this point.

Re:LEDs I think.

[jellomizer]

LED have a longer life, Can be dimmed, A wide verity of color hues, brighter bulbs can be put into lamps that normally would have cause a fire problems.

There are a lot of Benefits from LEDs over Incandescent or CF. It isn't just greenies who use them. They are a practical light source. It just took the invention of the Bright Blue LED in 1995 (23 years ago) to help make it a reality. Otherwise we would be having Red-Yellow-Green lights with them, Which are not overly useful for normal lighting.

Very interesting development

[Okian Warrior]

...but in developing countries.

While TFA did point out, "US", it seems rather pointless because the demand, and thus the generation, and thus the pollution is occurring overseas.Just because it's not here doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

  It's like you cleaned up your back yard by throwing all the trash over the fence. Coming soon, we will be bitching at our neighbors about all the trash in their yard.

So before the Enviro's celebrate, they should consider that they have successfully pushed the pollution into countries that are ill equipped to handle it from regulatory and societal standpoints, yet the US and other western countries are still benefiting from it.

This is a *very* interesting development, for the following reason:

All modern theories of economics ("schools of thought" as they are called) assume infinite demand, either by infinitely increasing population or infinitely increasing demands per person, or both.

So for example, theory has it that you can double your sales income if you double your sales outlets - by opening stores in other states, for instance. Problem with this is that the world is finite and eventually you reach diminishing returns. Many companies found this out the hard way when they started selling through WalMart - once your jeans (or pickles) are sold at Walmart, you're done. You can no longer increase sales *at all*.

We know that population begins to level off and decline when countries become modernized, and now it looks like demand itself has a fixed upper limit.

If consumption is fixed, then lots of macro economic theory is simply incorrect. If efficiency per-worker reaches a level where half the available workers can fulfill the demands of the population, what do you do with the other half that can't find work?

It's these sorts of observations and extrapolations that lead people to think of possible solutions like reduced-hours work week (for the same pay), or UBI.

Re: Obligitory Trump Bashing

[peragrin]

The only reason Trump won is because Democrats underestimated the raw hatred people have of Hillary. I am a liberal and I can't stand her. She stands for nothing but power for herself.

Democratic leadership is just as corrupt and incompetent as Republican.

Re:EVs will change that

[nonBORG]

supercapacitors at present are more sci-fi than fact if they are thought of as competing (in capacity) to batteries.
The formula for a capacitor has in its formula A/d
A is the area (of the plates)
d is the distance (between the plates)

so a small distance and big area is how to make super capacitors. The problem comes when you want to charge the capacitor because the d distance sets the limit of the voltage (due to the breakdown the the diametric, which is whatever material is between the plates) the charge stored on a capacitor is

0.5 (CV^2) so the charge is proportional to the square of the voltage meaning you need lots of voltage to get a big charge (or amount of stored energy) so what makes the capacitor value large makes the amount of charge you can store small. This is the issue currently with super capacitors just because of the basic physics of capacitors. So unless an amazing dielectric is found that has super incredibly high breakdown voltage and is easy to form onto the plates we probably will have to keep looking to batteries.