I came across this 150-year-old proposition in this recent New Yorker article, which is basically a love letter to the idea.  Basically, the Jevons paradox states that any increases in energy efficiency will result in increased demand, which will in turn erase any energy saved, and may actually increase energy use.  This is an easy thought experiment once you’ve thought of the idea, and it’s also easy to track through history.

For example, miles traveled via automobile have skyrocketed since the Model T in the 1920′s.  Also, air conditioning is much more common today than before.  Theoretically, these increases in consumption can be traced back to the fact that these items became more efficient.

My first issue with this theory is that this seems to only be true if the demand for an good can be substantially altered with its energy cost.  Think of air conditioning for example.  It stands to reason that if it cost you $2000 to cool your house in July, most people probably wouldn’t do it.  Alternatively, if it cost $200 dollars a lot of people would.  In other words, a large portion of the basis for demand of air conditioning is how much energy it uses.

As a counterpoint, how about a washing machine?  Is the demand for use of a washing machine correlate well to its energy efficiency?  I would say no.  I would think it would correlate better with how much dirty laundry you have.  There is an issue of scale here as well, which brings me to my next point of contention.

Surely this effect is must be an exponential decay.  In other words, as efficiencies continue to increase, or most importantly increase faster then demanded by the economy (*wink* government *wink*), this trend must slow down.

Let’s take the air conditioning example from above.  I gave some pretty extreme examples, but let’s look at the other end of the scale.  What’s the difference in demand between a $100 electric bill and a $50 one?  $50 and $25?  At what point do you stop caring about the cost?  It’s not like you’ll now want to cool your house to 50 degrees.  There is a boundary condition here.

This is similarly true for cars.  There’s a big difference between 15 MPG and 30 MPG, in terms of your wallet, but how about 30 MPG and 60 MPG?  Probably some behavior will change, but how about 60 MPG and 120 MPG?  At some point, the new limiter to how much you drive will be the time it takes you to get from A to B, not how much it will cost you in fuel.

These examples are all at the micro level, which there’s some debate as to whether this is even reliably detectable at the micro level.  But the problem with looking at the macro level is that it’s impossible to decouple this effect with general economic growth (chicken or egg?).

What does this mean for policy?  It certainly doesn’t mean we should stop pushing efficiency gains.  In my view, it means we should push them harder, until we can meet some of these boundary conditions.

In the mean time, what it really points to is the need for a price on carbon.  Most proponents of the Jevons paradox will agree that efficiency gains coupled with a carbon tax eliminates this effect.

We need a comprehensive carbon pricing scheme, and we needed it 10 years ago.

In the vein of keeping this discussion on technology going, I wanted to bring up an article I read in The New Yorker a few weeks back that raised some interesting questions about the limits of technology in solving certain global challenges.

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I heard this on the way home today:

Now some energy businesses are starting to apply the research on peer influence. Alex Laskey heads Positive Energy, a company that helps utilities cut their customers’ energy use. He’s read the latest studies and he’s a believer.

Alex Laskey: Despite the fact that your mother and my mother told us countless times that it doesn’t matter what the neighbors do — “I set the rules in this house” — it turns out at the end of the day, we are all driven by our perceptions of what the neighbors are doing.

One of Laskey’s clients is Puget Sound Energy, a utility in suburban Seattle.

Andy Wappler: We know today that if our customers in western Washington did pretty attainable energy efficiency measures — going to CFL’s, doing some upgrades around the house — we wouldn’t have to build two 250-megawatt gas-fired power plants.

That’s PSE’s Andy Wappler. He says the utility just started a pilot program: It’s telling 40,000 of its customers how much energy they use compared to neighbors in similar-sized houses.

Here’s the homepage for the program.

I think this is a great idea for 2 reasons.  1) It fosters a little competition and peer pressure in regards to energy usage.  2) Neighbors can start to trade tips on how they are using less energy.  I mean just think of it – “Hey, Bob’s using XX% less energy than us and he’s saving $YY! I wonder what he’s doing over there.”

I’ve always hated environmentalist framings.  They completely miss the point.  It’s always “Do this, and save the environment.”  How about we say, “Do this, and save a bunch of money on your energy bill,” or “Do this, so that your house isn’t under water in 30 years,” or “Do this, so your kids won’t have to fight with people in Colorado for water rights.”

Those seem way more effective.

(PS – I beat Zelda, so my blogging rate should resume to normal levels.  That is, unless Paper Mario sucks me in.  No gaurantees.)

For quite some time Google has or has been rumored to be dabbling in the energy business. People have whispered in corners, wondering whether Google would pop out with some as-yet-unknown magic solution to all our energy problems. The truth, it seems, may not be so grand, but I think it may still seem pretty far-fetched to most.

As Times Online is reporting (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4753389.ece), along with quite a few other stories touching on the subject, Google is at least investigating the option of installing data centers off shore. That means there would be a floating platform bobbing on the waves serving you search results and cached web pages.

Is it the freedom from any one country’s laws and regulations? The fact that it might be possible to make the system entirely self-sustainable by using the motion of the waves to generate electricity? For whatever their reasons, Google faces very unique challenges and is demonstrating a lot of creativity in their solutions.