Energy Efficiency: Towards the End of Demand Growth.

AuthorLively, Mark B.

Energy Efficiency: Towards the End of Demand Growth, edited by FEREIDOON SIOSHANSI (Oxford, UK and Waltham, MA, USA: Academic Press 2013), 631 pages, ISBN: 978-0-12397879-0

During the post WWII economic boom, residential customers greatly expanded their capacity to consume electricity. In California this capacity to consume electricity hit a ceiling in about 1970 as the growth in demand slowly ended. The limit to growth was likely to be a saturation of the market for central air conditioning. The stagnant market for residential electricity consumption has allowed the California electric industry to become refocused into being the government's instrument for social change. Inverted residential rates transfer wealth from high income consumers. Net metering rules provide for a similar transfer of wealth to those who install on site generation. Utility costs now include conservation programs for a few customers paid for by the entire customer base.

Fereidoon Sioshansi and his peers take a contrarian view to California being one of the first states to be saturated in residential AC. Sioshansi's anthology Energy Efficiency: Towards the End of Demand Growth addresses the approaches taken in California to prevent the resumption of the growth in utility provided electric energy. Thus, there is praise for the net zero energy buildings that have non-utility sources of electric energy but presumably still rely on the local utility for expensive reliability. Sioshansi's anthology presents other conservation programs that serve to reduce the use of electricity, especially utility supplied electric energy.

The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome dealt with the issue of supply, how much resources the world has available to meet the presumably insatiable demand for goods. But as somewhat demonstrated by Sioshansi's anthology, the demand for electric energy had been sated in California by the early 1970's (see the graphic on p. 44), perhaps because the state's higher average income allowed it to achieve saturation levels of central air conditioning prior to the rest of the nation. Given that the demand for electric energy has been satisfied, Sioshansi's anthology then follows California's quest to rein in the electric utilities that had worked so hard to meet the demands of the populace.

Part I of Energy Efficiency: Towards the End of Demand is "End of Demand Growth is within Reach," which includes the graphic showing that the demand for electric...

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