I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).
But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.
If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.
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.
EDIT: actually now that I think about it, 2kWh per-household is probably less than 1kWh per-capita. It's still a good chunk though!
Power management (ACPI) in desktop computers also arrived in the late 1990s. Power saving sleep modes have a big impact.
Computer fleets across a country do not upgrade immediately so the lag may contribute.
And ACPI was just one energy saving initiative of that era.
Street Lighting. Sodium lamps used 250-500W and LEDs are 50-150W. Councils have been replacing the former with the latter ever since it was possible, as the savings were apparent after only a few years (and, the early investors could sell the old bulbs to authorities who did not have the funds to invest)
Notably low pressure sodium is more lumens per watt than a typical LED.
The main energy saver is simply that the newer LED lights are dimmer!
There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.
The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.
There has been a decline heavy industry and the article says industrial consumption has declined a quarter since 2005. Deindustrialisation is the major driver.
In the summer. In the winter the heat from the bulbs would help heating the homes, offices, stores, etc.
Heating the ceiling with the light is an extremely inefficient approach to heating a room.
Recently installed a bunch of incandescent bulbs because I had them at the bottom of a drawer.
I was surprised how the small amount of infrared from them makes rooms feel more pleasant to be in. It's a warmth on the skin, rather like having a fireplace going.
If I weren't paying the electricity bill, I would totally fit them everywhere.
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.
Dying from heatstroke in the summer is a third.
It’s just plain expensive thanks to the shitty price everything by most expensive source method. Of course people minimise use
Currently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
Look into a battery + inverter + optional solar on a time of use tariff, you can be always off peak. Payback probably isn't very long.
Solar is great. I'm highly skeptical that a battery + inverter (w/o solar), using time-of-use for payback would ever make pure financial sense.
In fact, if it DID make financial sense, wouldn't companies already be buying up empty/cheap space and then turning a profit after the payback period? Why aren't they?
There are other reasons to do this, but purely on the financial side, I'd want to see the numbers on this one. Again, this isn't about solar, the claim was about battery + inverter + time-of-use paying for itself.
Grid scale BESS (battery energy storage system) in the UK is growing fast, because it makes financial sense. There's one that just expanded from 100MWh/100Mw to 475MWh/350MW: https://www.pacificgreen.com/energy-parks/energy-park-case-s... . It's easy to run the numbers, easier to make a payback calculator with AI. Take a look at the Anker E5000 / Ecoflow Stream 5000, and run the numbers yourself, I'd be interested to see what the payback would be for you.
In the UK, solar is fairly ineffective in the winter as the sun barely comes over the horizon for not many hours a day.
True, but if you get cheap power from solar for the rest of the year, and charge the battery from the grid off peak when there's no solar to charge, you should end up paying less than just the standard rate.
Balancing auctions are pay-as-bid, the alternative is lights-off.
Capacity auctions are iirc pay as clear. Maybe day ahead as well.
One thing to consider as well is that without some external stimulus scheme all of the fossil/nuclear (even ignoring CFD schemes) would immediately go bust IIRC if the market was solely pay-as-bid because wind and solar are cheap but extremely spotty so the price would either be 0 or 1000, probably not the latter long enough to keep the gas plants we currently rely on in business => no more power on cold calm nights.
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.
It can be good or bad depending on what's driving the change. Improving efficiency, assuming it comes at a reasonable cost, is generally good.
If people are just going without, then that's generally bad.
They arent going without. Blackouts/brownouts are exceptionally rare in the UK.
That's fine for residential customers. But if there isn't cheap, reliable excess capacity then that inhibits industrial growth. Low economic growth rates cause everyone to go without.
The UK deindustrialize themselves they stopped making things that reduced the energy that the used to use.
Right, that's one of the reasons why UK economic growth has been so anemic.
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/...
No it's a catastrophic failure of planning and institutional nerve.
Explain. Nobodys going without power.
We have expensive, potentially unreliable (if an interconnect fails we are completely fucked so certainly fragile), energy.
Energy is what allows modernity to function, we have made it so expensive that no one can make anything in Britain just in time for hard power and manufacturing to be really important again.
Chemicals, metals, pottery, glass,fertiliser etc are all basically impossible to do competitively in Britain.
Energy has only been expensive recently, and there has been zero issue with power supply beyond silly tabloid fear mongering. So between the 70s and lets say 10 years ago, the argument for expensive power really does not hold true.
UK has some of the highest costs of power in the world. There's a lot of demand destruction there, a lot of industries left. due to high costs.
Which industries? If you're going to make that claim be specific. The UK has deindustrialised since the 70s which was nothing to do with electricity costs or availability. Any recent industries leaving are not covered by the stats here so would be pretty irrelevant, which means you're not talking about those, you're talking about something else for it to cover the period between the 70s and now.
What were the prices like relative to the rest of the world 20-40 years ago when most of that industry was offshored?
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
That link is particularly helpful for UK users, "Content not available in your region".
Isn’t most of the housing in the UK from the 1970’s too?
No? It would be pretty remarkable if the majority of all UK housing was built in a single decade. If you meant to say 'from before the 1970s' then that might be a more defensible claim. But old houses can be upgraded with double glazing, insulation, etc.
jevon's paradox says that improved efficiencies would increase consumption
I see a lot of comments here see "per capita" and think "residential consumption" - but the decrease is more indicating of general deindustrialization
If houses get more efficient that doesn’t mean we build more houses? A case where jevons paradox doesn’t apply?
houses using less energy means energy is cheaper for everyone else, f.e. industry
The incandescent to LED switch is a major factor, but most things have become more efficient, a Sky box uses 30x less power than the 90s.
I wonder if they're paying less than the 70s?
In the '70s you weren't guaranteed to get the electricity you paid for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
> From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Services deemed essential (e.g. hospitals, telephone switchboards, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses) were exempt. Television companies were required to cease broadcasting at 22:30 to conserve electricity [...] The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974.
But nonetheless: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...
Year Avg consumer price in today's money
1975 13p/kWh
1985 15p/kWh
1995 n/a
2005 11p/kWh
2015 17p/kWh
2025 26p/kWh
1) we have to pay off operators for the billions of foreign investment they put into new wind and solar farms and grid storage batteries. If we didn't tempt them with a good RoI, they'd invest elsewhere, and we'd still be burning coal. The cost of this is going down year on year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
2) we're paying for new transmission capacity and replacing worn out transmission route. The fact we don't already have it, which we could've had by charging more for electricity in the 2000s and building it out decades ago, is why today we face enormous curtailment costs today, as we can't get all this wind power from where it's generated to where it's consumed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/05/the-bottlene...
3) our market arrangement is based on everyone bidding to supply power, and we pay everyone who generates the same rate as the highest necessary bidder. Thus the moment that there isn't enough wind power, or there is but it can't get to the region it's needed (see point 2), in come the gas turbines and given that Russia's trying to destroy Ukraine, gas is astronomically expensive. The sooner we solve our bottlenecks and decommission all the gas turbines, the better.
Only for three months, and then only due to a labor dispute.
Are those numbers already corrected for inflation?
Electricity in the UK has been reliable my entire life. Lived in the UK for 30 of the last 50 years and can remember four or five power cuts.
Isn't this a good thing? I mean, is there a direct correlation between electricity usage and country = better?
Over the 20th century, people switched from fuel based lighting, heating and cooking to electric, and acquired laundry machines, dishwashers, fridges, TVs, air conditioning etc etc. So electricity was a pretty good proxy for a certain aspect of quality of life. It might be a less useful measure in the developed world in the 21st century as we have kind of plateaued on energy-intensive appliances and are more focused on efficiency, and because other aspects of quality of life like pollution, work, mental health etc may be more salient.
We may genuinely have the worst energy market in the developed world. It's going to get cheaper and reliable any day soon - George monbiot told me so it must be true.
There's a weird "degrowth" mindset that has taken hold in progressive circles in many countries lately. I don't understand them at all, trying to communicate with them is like dealing with an alien species.
> There's a weird "degrowth" mindset
Matching demand to production where possible strikes me as a sane approach. Western nations have become very used to an incredibly high standard of living largely powered by disproportionately massive energy consumption per person. If it uses power more efficiently to dry one's clothes at night or run the dishwasher overnight, rather than during the day alongside AC and computers and whatnot, that seems eminently reasonable to do.
This sharp resistance to minor personal inconvenience is bananas to me. If the alternative is to bring massive battery storage or nuclear plants online, vs "hey, maybe charge your car overnight" or "hey, timeshift your AC use and add some insulation to your house," why wouldn't we do that?
You seem to be missing the human element in your calculation. It's not just power plants and the machines that use the electricity from them. The machines are built for humans, who want their clothes washed today so they can be folded today and ready for tomorrow. They want the dishes washed today so they can be put back on the shelves before tomorrow's breakfast. And, by the way, grime on dishes gets more difficult to remove once it has sat drying, waiting for the machine to start.
Why not bring massive energy storage and nuclear plants online? Because it's expensive? Or because we let oil companies and land owners make the rules?
Making peoples lives worse to save money is a capitalist mindset and I don't understand why so many left wing people believe in it. The promise of socialism was always higher living standards for the working class (99 percent) at the expense of millionaires.
Today's leftists seem to not have any coherent philosophy at all. It's not better on the other side. Everything seems to be about grievances and assigning blame rather than rationally discussing practical solutions.
There's two things that are simultaneously true: 1) improving efficiency of electricity use is often the most cost effective use of a dollar. Better insulation, more efficient appliances, etc. are choices made purely on financial merits. 2) We're going to need to greatly increase electricity consumption in order to decarbonize.
People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.
I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.
Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.
But, climate change!
Climate changeis a reason to produce more not less. Ac isnt energy free
> But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.
I've seen proposals that are less intermittent availability and more incentivized pushing of consumption towards periods of lower demand. We already have all these computers in our appliances, might as well let them do reasonable things ... your freezer probably does a self-defrost cycle triggered by a timer and/or a door open counter, but why not wait up to X hours for off-peak pricing to do it. Or push the set points down a degree or two during off-peak pricing, to reduce energy use during on-peak. Also works for HVAC subject to user comfort, and water heaters if you're careful and avoid high temperatures that cause injury or low temperatures that allow microorganism growth.
Of course, that's science fiction... all the communication in appliances is designed to collect data and serve targeted ads. :( So very few appliances know if current pricing is peak/off peak or when it will change.
Can you provide a source for either of your claims?