The problem is that energy as energy gets cheaper, it becomes an increasingly marginal part of cost of what uses energy.
Eg., let's say you've got some good/service, of which energy is 10% of its lifetime operating cost. If you drop the cost of energy by 50%, then that's only a 5% cost decrease for the good. In order to generate a Jevons rebound from the perspective of the energy supplier, that 5% decrease in price would have to increase demand by more than 100%. Seems unlikely.
It was a different story back in Jevons' day, when energy was a genuinely significant component of the overall cost structure of a LOT of things. But in how many goods and services is that still the case? As the cost of energy decreases relative to other cost components (like labour), you'd expect the Jevons effect to produce diminishing and eventually negative returns, no?
You might want to reflect a bit more closely on what Jevron's paradox actually is. It is not related to the cost of the final product.
Take air; it is essentially infinite and free. We use vast quantities of air in every aspect of our life. We use it in cars, in households, in computing, we breath it, we rely on their being a few km of the stuff above us to maintain pressure, etc. It is so abundant it gets a bit silly to talk about how essential it is to our way of life. Use of the stuff is almost certainly growing exponentially with population.
Believe it or not, but raw electricity is more useful than air. Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available. As price goes down, usage should be spiking. Rather than Jevron's paradox being broken it is much more likely that some combination of
> [Jevons Paradox] It is not related to the cost of the final product.
I don't believe that's correct. From the Wikipedia article:
"Goods and services generally use more than one type of input (e.g. fuel, labour, machinery), and other factors besides input cost may also affect price. These factors tend to reduce the rebound effect, making the Jevons paradox less likely to occur."
So the rebound effect is explicitly related to price elasticity, with the critical term being "price". If the cost of an input contributes less and less to the price of the final output, why would one expect it to have any effect?
> Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available.
I really don't see any evidence for that statement (and indeed the parent article is providing clear evidence to the contrary). Humans want their needs attended to, and to the degree that electricity correlates to that, they'll have an appetite for electricity. To the degree that it doesn't, they won't. Nobody actually wants to use vast amounts of electricity simply for its own sake. Moreover, there are human desires that are inversely correlated with electricity usage, such as quiet, dark skies, etc. One would expect those desires to exert a downward pressure on electricity demand even if it were completely free.
It seems obvious to me that what is happening here is that in essentially any good or service you can name, non-energy costs (labour, materials, land, etc.) are becoming a much more significant component of price, both due to decreasing energy costs and increasing energy efficiency, as well as intrinsic rises in the cost of labour and materials. This in turn limits the ability for the cost of electricity to significantly stimulate or repress demand. Seems pretty straightforward.
The last device invented which is used by almost any household and consumes non-negligible amount of electricity is home PC. Which will turn 40 years soon.
In the meantime, even older devices, invented earlier, such as fridges, washing machines, etc. became much more efficient.
Naturally, the average amount of consumed electricity goes down.
If someone invents a a robot which will clean my apartment, do dishes and iron my shirts, and double my electricity bill, I will buy this device tomorrow.
Unforunately, for the last 30 years we made no progress in inventing something that can consume non-trivial amount of electricty and bring non-trivial value to an average household.
There are however a number of innovations that are poised, or could potentially be poised, to increase electrical demand, from electric vehicles to interstellar laser propulsion. But in every case I can think of -- with one exception -- the cost of electricity isn't a significant barrier to their mass adoption. Which is why in addition to falling electricity prices not stimulating the consumption of existing goods, they also aren't stimulating the production of new goods.
The one exceptional use-case is crypto mining, which obviously does elastically respond to falling energy prices. But it's an unusual kind of demand in that in places where the electricity is higher than some threshold value, demand for this will be zero. Also, fucking hell, what a stupid use-case. Can we think of nothing better to do with our resources than come up with new ways to put a price on scarcity?
I think cloud computing deserves a mention. An increasingly large part of each person's demand for computation is satisfied by servers in AWS, Azure, Google, etc. due to the increase in popularity and complexity of online services. Depending on whether the technology sticks, Blockchain (PoW) could also drive a significant increase in energy.
Good point. For a number of years every few years there have been something that requires a lot more power. Offhand I can think of e.g. heating, fridges, televisions, microwaves, cooling, PC desktops and consoles (over many generations).
If you could drive the unit costs of electricity low enough for it to be cheaper than natural gas for heating, you could see major growth from that.
Obviously, not likely to happen anytime soon, but if the cost-reduction progression of renewables continues, it could become viable in the medium-term.
Currently it's far more expensive to heat with electric than natural gas, so most people with access to it don't use electric.
> Humans would happily use vast amounts of electricity 24x7x365 our entire lives if it is available.
That assumption could be false, though.
I only want to fill my house with a certain amount of lumens before it starts hurting my eyes, and it only takes a certain amount of electricity to produce those many lumens. Maybe I could get a bigger house, but that ends up being limited by housing costs instead of electricity costs, so the cost of houses limits how much electricity I burn on lights.
Or maybe TV's? Sure, a bigger TV would eat more electricity, but I can't afford an infinitely large TV, so the price of TV's limits how much electricity I use. Computers are the same way TV's are.
I guess your second bullet point is true? Electricity costs are falling, but the total cost of doing stuff with electricity is going up because the gadgets are getting more expensive relative to how much power they pull.
Eg., let's say you've got some good/service, of which energy is 10% of its lifetime operating cost. If you drop the cost of energy by 50%, then that's only a 5% cost decrease for the good. In order to generate a Jevons rebound from the perspective of the energy supplier, that 5% decrease in price would have to increase demand by more than 100%. Seems unlikely.
It was a different story back in Jevons' day, when energy was a genuinely significant component of the overall cost structure of a LOT of things. But in how many goods and services is that still the case? As the cost of energy decreases relative to other cost components (like labour), you'd expect the Jevons effect to produce diminishing and eventually negative returns, no?