Closing the “green gap”: energy savings from the math of the landscape function

&gt; The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households, and particularly the transition from incandescent (and compact fluorescent) light bulbs to LED light bulbs<p>I am reminded of Jevons paradox:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jevons_paradox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jevons_paradox</a><p>I replaced all of my incandescent and fluorescent lighting with LEDs years ago. A decent amount of the hypothetical savings from more efficient lighting was eaten by having even more lumens than previously as quality of light upgrades. Despite that, I did not notice much of a difference since my household had been keeping the lights off unless we needed them.<p>There was a minor dip in the electric bill from other initiatives (e.g. heat pump dryer) and my solar panels started producing more than my household used. I had relatively few computers (general purpose; not counting embedded) running in my home compared to others in computing for years to try to keep this trend. In the past few years, I got an electric car and replaced my oil heat with heat pumps. Now my solar panels only produce about 60% of the electricity I use and I have given up on limiting usage to match what I produce.<p>Anyway, no matter how many efficiency initiatives people adopt, electricity usage is likely to increase rather than drop. That is because we not only find new uses for electricity, but the population keeps growing.

&gt; The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households...<p>The article is an interesting treatment of how lighting is getting more efficient and well worth a read. But pedantically zooming in on this one throwaway phrase for a second... this is a misinterpretation of the data on 2 levels.<p>1) The (badly labelled) graph seems to be displaying a very very slight linear uptrend for &quot;residential&quot;.<p>2) Energy is literally the first example of where we expect to see Jevons paradox [0]. If its use is going down, that is because energy is getting more expensive in real terms. If the only trend here was lighting getting more efficient, households on aggregate would find ways to use more electricity because it is extremely fungible.<p>By default the proper way to interpret the data (if for the sake of argument I say what I would interpret as a slight uptrend is actually a downtrend) is that electricity is getting more expensive real terms. The impact that has on living standards is cushioned somewhat by improvements in lighting efficiency. But if electricity costs were steady and lighting efficiency improved we&#x27;d expect to see an increase in electricity use.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jevons_paradox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jevons_paradox</a>