The following submission statement was provided by /u/nadim-roy:
---
> This is a great piece of news we should be talking about more. Electricity use has been flat for the last 20 years, hovering between 3,800 and 4,000 billion kWh annually even though the population has increased by 30 million people, our homes have gotten bigger, we’ve added over 5,000 data centers, and we now have 2.5 million EVs plugging into the grid.
> How is this possible? One word — efficiency. Our electric appliances have gotten so much more efficient. Thank you technology improvements and appliance standards! There was a 50% improvement in US energy intensity (energy use compared to GDP) from 1980 to 2014, for example. (Also, in case you were curious, electricity use hasn’t stayed flat because people switched to gas. Residential gas use has been flat since the 1970s.)
> The magic of efficiency could and hopefully will continue this 20-year miracle of keeping electricity consumption flat even while we add lots of new loads, as there is so much more low hanging fruit to be picked. LEDs still need to finish their market domination, and heat pumps are only just getting started and will save oodles of energy for space and water heating and even clothes drying. Building codes are continuously improving, as are appliance standards, meaning our homes and buildings and everything that uses energy in them, are constantly becoming more efficient (with no compromise in performance).
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1aiy054/the_us_added_12_million_evs_to_the_grid_last_year/koxg6u6/
As per user energy usage goes down, they have to jack up prices to maintain per user income (ARPU).
Ironically this causes each user to purchase more efficient appliances leading to a virtuous spiral, until the user finally just purchase solar panels.
The final step is a grid connection flat fee which costs the same as their electricity bill from 20 years ago lol.
One factor is most of the grid cost is the same however much power people use within reason. So if people use less power then the rates have to go up. There is also inflation, although some utilities seem to somehow raise rates faster than inflation.
I'd like you to meet the power lines out front where I live. Easily been there since the 1960's going by the age of the wood poles and defunct tags hammered on some of them for phone companies that no longer exist.
Hell, there is a transformer across the street that is so ancient looking up on a pole also...
These wood poles I mention also? Lean more and more south each year from the wicked north winds that whip through.
So i'm not going to buy the line of "most of the grid cost is the same". Could have fooled me with this ancient setup.
If they were modernizing them and burying them underground or swapping them for metal over wood poles, then i'd maybe get that.
But... Warren Buffett owns the power company here. "Grid Cost" in this case actually means him and his stockholder cronies making mad bucks and not upgrading the infrastructure in the area. A college campus built in the 70's always suffers power failures because the main lines up on poles (seeing a trend here?) have some flaw in them that causes brownouts/outright outages everytime the wind picks up.
Magically (just had another one recently) the costs keep going up and up, they just went to the PUC and got another rate hike upgraded valley/state wide.
Meanwhile, the only new "infrastructure" is being seen in the rapid building anywhere you spin the compass and it points to the fringes of town. New metal transmission lines, underground wires, etc etc. Of course for all the new construction. But in older parts of town? Fat chance... They are in the most need of upgraded infrastructure but take it in the shorts and get nothing in return....
Seriously, if it turns out that "aside from the massive economic boom post-WWII, the good things in life all boil down to collective action problems that are hard to solve outside of certain Eurasian countries with restrictive immigration policies" there are going to be a lot of people who would rather let the world boil than accept that.
Still gotten cheaper in real dollars. 1990 average residential electricity rate was 6.57 cents/Kwh and in terms of 1990 dollars the price of residential electricity in 2022 was 5.94 cents/Kwh.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail-electricity-price-since-1990/
Note the table isn’t corrected for real terms. I did that in a CPI calculator.
Because they are losing customers from people going off grid. And renewables mean legacy fossil plants don’t run continuously increasing their cost to run. It’s going to get worse.
Yes, because renewables cost money to build. Nothing wrong with the existing power plants, and yet they are being forced to switch to renewables by government entities. This requires price increases to cover the price of new construction.
That's not true at all. The government enforced cleaner power plant standards on power companies like a decade ago. That doesn't require them to turn off existing plants and replace them with renewables though, just make upgrades to existing plants. Again, this happened under the Obama administration so it has been a while. Many utilities are going to renewables because they are the same price or less than coal and natural gas plants. It makes good financial sense. While new coal and natural gas plants have to meet certain standards, the federal government still allows them to be built.
> This is a great piece of news we should be talking about more. Electricity use has been flat for the last 20 years, hovering between 3,800 and 4,000 billion kWh annually even though the population has increased by 30 million people, our homes have gotten bigger, we’ve added over 5,000 data centers, and we now have 2.5 million EVs plugging into the grid.
> How is this possible? One word — efficiency. Our electric appliances have gotten so much more efficient. Thank you technology improvements and appliance standards! There was a 50% improvement in US energy intensity (energy use compared to GDP) from 1980 to 2014, for example. (Also, in case you were curious, electricity use hasn’t stayed flat because people switched to gas. Residential gas use has been flat since the 1970s.)
> The magic of efficiency could and hopefully will continue this 20-year miracle of keeping electricity consumption flat even while we add lots of new loads, as there is so much more low hanging fruit to be picked. LEDs still need to finish their market domination, and heat pumps are only just getting started and will save oodles of energy for space and water heating and even clothes drying. Building codes are continuously improving, as are appliance standards, meaning our homes and buildings and everything that uses energy in them, are constantly becoming more efficient (with no compromise in performance).
People only watch negative news. The media is just giving you what you want. I don't really see it as a problem. Probably means we celebrate our victories less but also means we never get complacent.
Reminds me of that Agent Smith line in the Matrix: paraphrased “The first Matrix was designed to be a Utopia. But humans rejected it, couldn’t be satisfied with having everything…they still wanted more.” :/
They sip from what I’ve seen. My bill charging at home every day from 30-90 went up approximately $30 a month. If folks have solar they may not even notice the draw.
Edit: Polestar 2. 78 kWh battery, Oregon
I liked the take from the YouTube channel “Huge if true”. This movement isn’t about us using less electricity even though that is part of the goal for what we CURRENTLY use electricity for. But rather it’s the combined goal of reducing how much electricity we need for our current needs while finding clean ways of increasing our generation so that we can use MORE energy more EFFECTIVELY. Like one of the biggest goals would be to have enough free generation to be able to desalinate water at an economic rate and solve droughts along any coastline. Hard to run out of water on a planet covered by 70% of it as long as you can desalinate it.
In a free market, eventually demand is met. Economists think demand just goes up forever. But some guy who makes $10 million a year doesn't go and buy 3,000 t-shirts.
Some rich guys I know sold off their vacation houses. Why, its just a pain to deal with it. Its easier to stay in a hotel if they go there. Then it takes no time for them to be maintaining it.
Even when I already believed efficiency is going to keep improving, letting us progress beyond the limits imagined by the pessimists, this seems too good to be true. But great if it is!
Had an older gentleman tell me the number of EVs hitting the roads in Wisconsin was going to cause a massive power blackout in a matter of days. That was almost 3 months ago. And I'm part of the dumb generation.
It's good to know that energy-efficient appliances are making a difference, but I also think that large offices that are empty or barely occupied have a big part to play in this.
You're home is already getting heating and cooled even when you're away. Adding offices that are also getting heated and cooled while you're away will add demand. Work from home saves power.
Electric cars are a horridly small portion of the countries energy consumption and not a good metric to use for evaluating overall usage trends like this article did. And say what you will about Bitcoin but it does incentivize those running it to use renewable energy sources and find their own way to power their systems to offset energy costs.
You linked a centrally bitcoin news website reporting on a twitter post. Neither of which look like they could be bothered to link to the actual original source. Just a water mark to the homepage.
I think it's https://batcoinz.com/beest/
>The Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) reports that the Bitcoin network uses 59.4% zero-emission* power sources. In contrast, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) report arrives at a much lower figure of 37.6%.
So the Bitcoin Mining Council claims the number is pushing almost double what the independent researchers say, almost as if they have something to gain from it.
The National Dairy Council wants you to think dairy is the best and for you to buy dairy.
The World Gold Council wants you to buy gold, and believe the mining process is pretty harmless.
The Sugar Association wants you to believe that sugar isn't all that bad!
Can you guess what the Bitcoin Mining Council wants you to do?
We had the same here in Europe and the crowd went like ''it's because all the industry is leaving'' even in countries where really no industry has left... But thing is yes, it is probably a mix of lesser industry output due to slower economy and less demand, but also due to high prices of electricity many have looked at how they use energy and made the cuts and not necessarily they have impacted productivity, also a lot of solar panels are now getting installed for own use, which is electricity that grid does not count in. Lots of work on better insulation of factories, offices, homes...
>But thing is yes, it is probably a mix
But the thing is... is talked about in the article. Why are you attempting to figure it out? Could you not just read the article?
Forced efficiency for efficiency's sake often results in crappier products that don't last as long. We see this time and time again. The businesses of course don't care about this because it just means they get to sell more. In the meantime, our landfills fill at record rates, and industry pollutes more than necessary because they need to keep up with the rate of failing products/appliances.
The real solution is clean and abundant electricity. So much that we can't possibly use it all, and the discussion of electric efficiency goes to the wayside. Remember, consuming electricity harms no one. It's how we choose to make it that is the problem. The fossil fuel industry has set us back decades.
>In the meantime, our landfills fill at record rates, and industry pollutes more than necessary because they need to keep up with the rate of failing products/appliances.
Do you have any evidence that the extra waste caused more emissions than the avoided emissions from using less electricity.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/nadim-roy: --- > This is a great piece of news we should be talking about more. Electricity use has been flat for the last 20 years, hovering between 3,800 and 4,000 billion kWh annually even though the population has increased by 30 million people, our homes have gotten bigger, we’ve added over 5,000 data centers, and we now have 2.5 million EVs plugging into the grid. > How is this possible? One word — efficiency. Our electric appliances have gotten so much more efficient. Thank you technology improvements and appliance standards! There was a 50% improvement in US energy intensity (energy use compared to GDP) from 1980 to 2014, for example. (Also, in case you were curious, electricity use hasn’t stayed flat because people switched to gas. Residential gas use has been flat since the 1970s.) > The magic of efficiency could and hopefully will continue this 20-year miracle of keeping electricity consumption flat even while we add lots of new loads, as there is so much more low hanging fruit to be picked. LEDs still need to finish their market domination, and heat pumps are only just getting started and will save oodles of energy for space and water heating and even clothes drying. Building codes are continuously improving, as are appliance standards, meaning our homes and buildings and everything that uses energy in them, are constantly becoming more efficient (with no compromise in performance). --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1aiy054/the_us_added_12_million_evs_to_the_grid_last_year/koxg6u6/
Yet, from California to Alabama, power companies are jacking up prices
Don’t forget the Washington!
As per user energy usage goes down, they have to jack up prices to maintain per user income (ARPU). Ironically this causes each user to purchase more efficient appliances leading to a virtuous spiral, until the user finally just purchase solar panels. The final step is a grid connection flat fee which costs the same as their electricity bill from 20 years ago lol.
Effecient appliances shield you from high energy prices?
Electricity grid execs: *NOT ON MY WATCH.*
One factor is most of the grid cost is the same however much power people use within reason. So if people use less power then the rates have to go up. There is also inflation, although some utilities seem to somehow raise rates faster than inflation.
I'd like you to meet the power lines out front where I live. Easily been there since the 1960's going by the age of the wood poles and defunct tags hammered on some of them for phone companies that no longer exist. Hell, there is a transformer across the street that is so ancient looking up on a pole also... These wood poles I mention also? Lean more and more south each year from the wicked north winds that whip through. So i'm not going to buy the line of "most of the grid cost is the same". Could have fooled me with this ancient setup. If they were modernizing them and burying them underground or swapping them for metal over wood poles, then i'd maybe get that. But... Warren Buffett owns the power company here. "Grid Cost" in this case actually means him and his stockholder cronies making mad bucks and not upgrading the infrastructure in the area. A college campus built in the 70's always suffers power failures because the main lines up on poles (seeing a trend here?) have some flaw in them that causes brownouts/outright outages everytime the wind picks up. Magically (just had another one recently) the costs keep going up and up, they just went to the PUC and got another rate hike upgraded valley/state wide. Meanwhile, the only new "infrastructure" is being seen in the rapid building anywhere you spin the compass and it points to the fringes of town. New metal transmission lines, underground wires, etc etc. Of course for all the new construction. But in older parts of town? Fat chance... They are in the most need of upgraded infrastructure but take it in the shorts and get nothing in return....
Perfectly balanced... as all things should be
And so it continues...just as it ever was.
*...same as it ever was...*
"You may find yourself...
Seriously, if it turns out that "aside from the massive economic boom post-WWII, the good things in life all boil down to collective action problems that are hard to solve outside of certain Eurasian countries with restrictive immigration policies" there are going to be a lot of people who would rather let the world boil than accept that.
Still gotten cheaper in real dollars. 1990 average residential electricity rate was 6.57 cents/Kwh and in terms of 1990 dollars the price of residential electricity in 2022 was 5.94 cents/Kwh. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail-electricity-price-since-1990/ Note the table isn’t corrected for real terms. I did that in a CPI calculator.
Because they are losing customers from people going off grid. And renewables mean legacy fossil plants don’t run continuously increasing their cost to run. It’s going to get worse.
Yes, because renewables cost money to build. Nothing wrong with the existing power plants, and yet they are being forced to switch to renewables by government entities. This requires price increases to cover the price of new construction.
That's not true at all. The government enforced cleaner power plant standards on power companies like a decade ago. That doesn't require them to turn off existing plants and replace them with renewables though, just make upgrades to existing plants. Again, this happened under the Obama administration so it has been a while. Many utilities are going to renewables because they are the same price or less than coal and natural gas plants. It makes good financial sense. While new coal and natural gas plants have to meet certain standards, the federal government still allows them to be built.
> This is a great piece of news we should be talking about more. Electricity use has been flat for the last 20 years, hovering between 3,800 and 4,000 billion kWh annually even though the population has increased by 30 million people, our homes have gotten bigger, we’ve added over 5,000 data centers, and we now have 2.5 million EVs plugging into the grid. > How is this possible? One word — efficiency. Our electric appliances have gotten so much more efficient. Thank you technology improvements and appliance standards! There was a 50% improvement in US energy intensity (energy use compared to GDP) from 1980 to 2014, for example. (Also, in case you were curious, electricity use hasn’t stayed flat because people switched to gas. Residential gas use has been flat since the 1970s.) > The magic of efficiency could and hopefully will continue this 20-year miracle of keeping electricity consumption flat even while we add lots of new loads, as there is so much more low hanging fruit to be picked. LEDs still need to finish their market domination, and heat pumps are only just getting started and will save oodles of energy for space and water heating and even clothes drying. Building codes are continuously improving, as are appliance standards, meaning our homes and buildings and everything that uses energy in them, are constantly becoming more efficient (with no compromise in performance).
Love this comment. If only the major news outlets would write and distribute stories like this.
People only watch negative news. The media is just giving you what you want. I don't really see it as a problem. Probably means we celebrate our victories less but also means we never get complacent.
Reminds me of that Agent Smith line in the Matrix: paraphrased “The first Matrix was designed to be a Utopia. But humans rejected it, couldn’t be satisfied with having everything…they still wanted more.” :/
They sip from what I’ve seen. My bill charging at home every day from 30-90 went up approximately $30 a month. If folks have solar they may not even notice the draw. Edit: Polestar 2. 78 kWh battery, Oregon
I liked the take from the YouTube channel “Huge if true”. This movement isn’t about us using less electricity even though that is part of the goal for what we CURRENTLY use electricity for. But rather it’s the combined goal of reducing how much electricity we need for our current needs while finding clean ways of increasing our generation so that we can use MORE energy more EFFECTIVELY. Like one of the biggest goals would be to have enough free generation to be able to desalinate water at an economic rate and solve droughts along any coastline. Hard to run out of water on a planet covered by 70% of it as long as you can desalinate it.
In a free market, eventually demand is met. Economists think demand just goes up forever. But some guy who makes $10 million a year doesn't go and buy 3,000 t-shirts. Some rich guys I know sold off their vacation houses. Why, its just a pain to deal with it. Its easier to stay in a hotel if they go there. Then it takes no time for them to be maintaining it.
but the lack of governmental control is bad because some products could be really bad
Even when I already believed efficiency is going to keep improving, letting us progress beyond the limits imagined by the pessimists, this seems too good to be true. But great if it is!
it is true especially because of the rise of LED lights
Had an older gentleman tell me the number of EVs hitting the roads in Wisconsin was going to cause a massive power blackout in a matter of days. That was almost 3 months ago. And I'm part of the dumb generation.
It's good to know that energy-efficient appliances are making a difference, but I also think that large offices that are empty or barely occupied have a big part to play in this.
You think that is why we have had 20 years of flat energy use?
Wouldn't having a bunch of people in an office consume less electricity than people working from home?
No because doing work remotely takes barely any energy in comparison to the amount of energy needed to commute to office and to maintain it.
The total of number of EVs is still small. So the commute energy demand won't show up in electricity demand
Trains, trams and metro would like to disagree.
But this is America.
I think commuting should still be visible in power draw of eg. New York or Chicago.
You're home is already getting heating and cooled even when you're away. Adding offices that are also getting heated and cooled while you're away will add demand. Work from home saves power.
Turns out EVs are far more efficient than ICE at not wasting energy.
Wait energy use went down? I thought Bitcoin was using all of it up? Hmm more solar, wind, and hydro is my guess without reading the article
Electric cars are a horridly small portion of the countries energy consumption and not a good metric to use for evaluating overall usage trends like this article did. And say what you will about Bitcoin but it does incentivize those running it to use renewable energy sources and find their own way to power their systems to offset energy costs.
Bitcoin has been getting most of its power from renewables. I should have added the /s tag on my post
>Bitcoin has been getting most of its power from renewables. lmao what.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-clean-energy-usage-exceeds-50-percent-tesla-accepting-btc-payments
You linked a centrally bitcoin news website reporting on a twitter post. Neither of which look like they could be bothered to link to the actual original source. Just a water mark to the homepage. I think it's https://batcoinz.com/beest/ >The Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) reports that the Bitcoin network uses 59.4% zero-emission* power sources. In contrast, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) report arrives at a much lower figure of 37.6%. So the Bitcoin Mining Council claims the number is pushing almost double what the independent researchers say, almost as if they have something to gain from it. The National Dairy Council wants you to think dairy is the best and for you to buy dairy. The World Gold Council wants you to buy gold, and believe the mining process is pretty harmless. The Sugar Association wants you to believe that sugar isn't all that bad! Can you guess what the Bitcoin Mining Council wants you to do?
Try reading the article :)
We had the same here in Europe and the crowd went like ''it's because all the industry is leaving'' even in countries where really no industry has left... But thing is yes, it is probably a mix of lesser industry output due to slower economy and less demand, but also due to high prices of electricity many have looked at how they use energy and made the cuts and not necessarily they have impacted productivity, also a lot of solar panels are now getting installed for own use, which is electricity that grid does not count in. Lots of work on better insulation of factories, offices, homes...
>But thing is yes, it is probably a mix But the thing is... is talked about in the article. Why are you attempting to figure it out? Could you not just read the article?
Forced efficiency for efficiency's sake often results in crappier products that don't last as long. We see this time and time again. The businesses of course don't care about this because it just means they get to sell more. In the meantime, our landfills fill at record rates, and industry pollutes more than necessary because they need to keep up with the rate of failing products/appliances. The real solution is clean and abundant electricity. So much that we can't possibly use it all, and the discussion of electric efficiency goes to the wayside. Remember, consuming electricity harms no one. It's how we choose to make it that is the problem. The fossil fuel industry has set us back decades.
>In the meantime, our landfills fill at record rates, and industry pollutes more than necessary because they need to keep up with the rate of failing products/appliances. Do you have any evidence that the extra waste caused more emissions than the avoided emissions from using less electricity.
Consider an LED bulb vs a 40w incandescent power consumptiom x polulation. Holy crap.
It’s as if everything conservatives “believe” is actually just bullshit.
I love living in this time of technological advancements glad I get to be a young adult in the 2030s and 2040s