Green Inc. has an interesting post looking into the reasons behind the flat per capita growth of electricity use in California, suggesting it wasn’t simply “efficiency.”
- Higher prices played a role, since California’s electricity costs rose “35 percent between 1970 and 2005, as compared with 4 percent across the nation. Higher prices will, of course, prompt people to use less electricity.”
- “A second possible reason is the nice weather. Because California’s climate is mild compared with most other states, it has not seen an equivalent surge in air-conditioning usage as families became wealthier.”
- Third, the number of people per home rose (perhaps the result of immigration), which cut per capita electricity use.
- Finally, there’s “conservation chic,” you know, Hollywood stars turning off the lights in their mansions, etc.
So what’s the take away? That you can create incentives to change behavior. Higher prices will cause people to conserve, whether we’re talking electricity or gasoline, even if it means going back to grad-school style housing arrangements. Not sure how much stake I put in the Green chic factor among the gliteratti, though the PR effect might be measurable.
Finally, although per capita use is flat, the state’s consumption of electricity is growing at 2% a year due to population growth — not a great picture for reducing overall demand.