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Hi Lloyd - the debate continues!
According to the US Energy Information Agency:
• US energy use for residential lighting has plummeted from 130 Terrawatt-Hours per year in 2015 to 62 TWh per year in 2023. That's an LED-propelled energy efficiency savings of 68 TWh per year. (SOURCE: bloomberg.com/news/arti…)
• As you report, the sphere uses…
Hi Lloyd - the debate continues!
According to the US Energy Information Agency:
• US energy use for residential lighting has plummeted from 130 Terrawatt-Hours per year in 2015 to 62 TWh per year in 2023. That's an LED-propelled energy efficiency savings of 68 TWh per year. (SOURCE: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-07/the-incredible-shrinking-energy-use-of-a-light-bulb)
• As you report, the sphere uses 0.078 Terrawatt-Hours, per year according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
• That means that the US would need to build at least 872 Spheres to offset the annual efficiency savings in residential lighting that we've realized just recently, and that doesn't even account for the lighting efficiency savings in non-residential sectors.
The Sphere is a huge energy waste, but it does not prove that there's an LED efficiency backfire at work or, honestly, that we should be spending our time and energy on the Jevons Paradox. The Sphere is a weird, wasteful outlier that is dwarfed by the lighting efficiency gains that we're seeing in millions and millions of homes across the US. Should we decry its waste and conspicuous consumption? Absolutely! But is the "Jevons Paradox" undermining LEDs as a powerful tool to reduce overall energy consumption? No, at least certainly not based on the numbers above.
The reason I find the Jevons Paradox narrative so frustrating is that, in my view:
(a) It falsely leads people to think that efficiency backfires, like your paraphrased quote of Jevons: "It is wholly a confusion to suppose that more efficient lighting leads to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." This statement seems wholly incorrect. Yes, the Sphere is ridiculous, and you could argue that its overconsumption is an efficiency "rebound" where efficiency gains of LED technology are wasted. But the scale really matters here. Even the Sphere's outrageous consumption PALES in comparison to the "diminished consumption" that LED lighting has brought to buildings across the US. Will there be more Spheres or Sphere equivalents? Probably a few. Not 872.
(b) Once you've waded through the "backfire" myth/misunderstanding we're left with this banal insight: "efficiency isn't perfect". Well, of course not! This Energy Journal survey of the literature found a 10-30% rebound in the residential and transportation sectors and a 0-20% rebound in the industrial sector: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421500000215
So, energy efficiency ain't perfect at reducing energy consumption, but it's damned good at it.
Who ever expected any given climate solution to be perfect in the first place? At this point, solutions that get us headed in the right direction with velocity are a good start. As Hannah Ritchie states in "Why Climate Tribalism Only Helps the Deniers", let's be "directionalists" rather than "destinationalists":
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/10/the-big-idea-why-climate-tribalism-only-helps-the-deniers
I think the Jevons paradox is still at play here because if I was still paying for expensive incandescent bulbs I wouldn’t have bought an air fryer. My energy bill has never gone down over time as I switched to leds and I don’t own an electric car or heat my house with electricity either. The larger lcd tvs and other gadgets in addition to the air fryer is the rebound from leds efficiency.
So true! I’ve *never* seen my electric bill go down either despite a full transition to LED’s and, in fact, my utility company here in Phoenix (APS) has made my electric bill gone UP twice within the last ten years. If costs related to generation have gone down (think: solar) and overall demand has gone down thanks to innovation (think: LED’s) then why hasn’t the price paid by customers gone down as well?
Presumably, APS is using the higher revenue to build out infrastructure for the impending “energy revolution” but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the reality of that transition: costs are NEVER going to go down and in fact, thanks to labor costs and inflation, they’re only ever going to go UP. Thus, the whole sales pitch of RE being cheaper than fossil fuels is a myth to convince gullible idiots we must abandon consistent, reliable energy sources and accept intermittent energy availability.
Until and unless renewable energy providers can greatly reduce the cost of energy to the consumer, their reliance on “but wind and solar are so much cheaper than fossil fuels!” as a means for garnering support falls horribly flat.
That's the Great Deception, VB! "Here, buy these new-fangled LED bulbs even though they are 10X the price upfront (or more, in the beginning), they'll save you in the long term. That's the hammer.
Then they construct the anvil - using regulations by unelected and unassailable (but ideologically hooked-at-the-hip) bureaucrats that deliberately cause energy to either be more expense (or unobtainable by limiting its generation).
Hammer, meet anvil. Oh, what's in the middle?
Ayup - us.