Re:After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat
by dragonwriter on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @12:53PM
(#16475964)
> Jevons paradox(1) has previously ensured that increased efficiency resulted in increased demand.
I've always been confused with the labelling of the observation that the common shape of demand curves means lower price (all else being equal) leads to greater market clearing quantity as a “paradox”; what else would you expect?
That being said, all else has not been equal over time. Note that what has dropped is consumption of utility-supplied electricity; part of this may be drop in demand for electricity (use efficiency would seem to spur demand with more utility for each unit consumed, but it may suppress it if it means that the point where you hit steeply diminishing returns is hit faster), but an important part is the deployment of customer-owned generation capacity that is a direct substitute for utility-supplied electricity can be expected to hit consumption of utility-supplied electricity hard. And no one has ever labelled the effect “new perfect substitutes reduce consumption of the substituted good” a paradox.
I've always been confused with the labelling of the observation that the common shape of demand curves means lower price (all else being equal) leads to greater market clearing quantity as a “paradox”; what else would you expect?
That being said, all else has not been equal over time. Note that what has dropped is consumption of utility-supplied electricity; part of this may be drop in demand for electricity (use efficiency would seem to spur demand with more utility for each unit consumed, but it may suppress it if it means that the point where you hit steeply diminishing returns is hit faster), but an important part is the deployment of customer-owned generation capacity that is a direct substitute for utility-supplied electricity can be expected to hit consumption of utility-supplied electricity hard. And no one has ever labelled the effect “new perfect substitutes reduce consumption of the substituted good” a paradox.