35 points karakoram 1 hour ago 11 comments
wood_spirit 28 minutes ago | parent
Seems generally like a good thing? I know the biggest difference I can think of in my lifetime is just how much better insulated houses are. Not on a par with Scandinavia, but still massively improved from even the peak electricity consumption period in the charts of 2005. I wonder how much that contributes to the overall reduction in demand.
advisedwang 22 minutes ago | parent
Only 9% of the UK is electric only heating [1], so I suspect heating is not a large driver here.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
badatnames 14 minutes ago | parent
Just an observation, but my first thought was how energy demand strongly correlates with economic growth and wondered if the article could be cast in that light. Might be fun to overlay that graph with UK gilt rates
edit: helpful robot boyfriend plotted it https://i.imgur.com/Hp199vV.png
pj_mukh 13 minutes ago | parent
Isn’t most of the housing in the UK from the 1970’s too?
barelysapient 24 minutes ago | parent
I wonder if they're paying less than the 70s?
advisedwang 13 minutes ago | parent
The decline in energy from 2003-present lines up nicely with the phase out of incandescent lights in favour of CFLs and of CFLs in favour of LEDs.
Lets say a house typically had 5 60W bulbs on for 8hrs a day, now replaced with an 8W bulb. That would be a 2 kWH reduction, which roughly corresponds to the drop shown in the data.
klelatti 12 minutes ago | parent
The linked iea data shows that the reduction is roughly 50/50 industrial and residential. So the deindustrialisation narrative is part of the story but improved efficiency at home is also a significant factor.