Comments on: Efficiency debate: The pros and cons of consumer electronics

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Sun, 17 May 2009 01:09:17 +0000

[...] Efficiency debate: The pros and cons of consumer electronics [...]

By: Stephen J.

Stephen J. — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:45:12 +0000

It would probably be fair to say that if your goal is an overall absolute reduction in amount of energy used, efficiency improvements will probably not help much. If your goal is to minimize the inevitable increase in the amount of energy used, however, efficiency is a valuable element in one’s plan.

By: mattbg

mattbg — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:22:25 +0000

To add… those “efficiency savings” arguments can be a bit like the ones about computer piracy, where piracy represents some massive amount of revenue loss. The truth is, many people who pirate would not have bought the software under any circumstance and use it just because they can.

Efficiency creates new avenues of consumption as well as reducing the power used by existing consumption (and this is delayed, especially if the efficiencies are in something as durable as a refrigerator, furnace, automobile, or washer/dryer).

In the case of efficiency, where electricity is concerned, except for a few special-case appliances like dryers and stoves for which most houses have special outlets, we are limited by the power output of a standard 120V, 15A electrical outlet. As soon as “efficiency” allows something to be plugged into such an outlet, you create a whole new market. What if efficiency had not allowed us to plug window AC units into a standard outlet?

And you can say the same for most common power sources — the ability to be powered by a couple of AA batteries, for example, or to run from a car’s power supply. Both require improved efficiency to make it possible.

By: mattbg

mattbg — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:59:53 +0000

In some cases, as you make things more efficient, the good old Jevons paradox comes into play. For example, cell phones were not attractive to the masses until they were small enough and had a long-enough standby time that they were very convenient. To do this, we needed smaller, more efficient batteries, and very efficient software and processing hardware. We built it, and now more and more people are getting their own personal phones when one in the home would have sufficed. They are leaking power all day long waiting for a phone call, their AC adapters leak power, and they must be charged regularly. And efficiency led to an overall increase in consumption.

You can imagine the same thing with cars, I think. There is a certain segment in society — and it might be large in developing countries with huge populations — that can’t afford today’s cars and the fuel required to operate them. But if you cut the cost of the car in half and the cost of the fuel bill in half, it might open up a whole new market… and there’s no guarantee that many of the existing users would convert to the new vehicle.

It seems like we will find a way to use up the fuel supply, one way or another. If one use becomes more efficient, it lowers demand and therefore price, and a new application that was previously too expensive comes along to stand in its stead.

By: Stephen J.

Stephen J. — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:22:23 +0000

I’d have to say the first thing that occurs to me is, if the IEA expects ICT/consumer electronics’ power needs to double in ten years and triple in twenty, it’s probably almost solely because they are expecting the sheer volume of those devices to proliferate, probably in non-First World markets like China, India or Africa. In that kind of market situation I can’t help but wonder exactly how much difference a reasonably achievable increase in efficiency can actually make — suppose you could reasonably achieve 10% efficiency gains on the electronics over that period; is it really so much better to have to build only 207 new nuclear reactors rather than 230 (230 – 23)?

And it should be remembered that in practice, in the market, efficiency gains don’t result in actual reductions in energy use as often as one might expect; end users have a strong and demonstrated tendency simply to use the more efficient product more often or for longer periods (like the more fuel-efficient car, people don’t spend less on gas or use less gas, they simply go farther for what they already spend and consume).

Efficiency is definitely a worthwhile goal, but I think it has its own curve of diminishing returns in terms of practical achievement vs. investment of effort and development. Concentrating on things like entertainment/ICT technology at the end of the distribution trees, rather than on the power plants at their source, seems like a bit of a red herring to me. Solve the big problems first.