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  cm2187
  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.
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  advisedwang
  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!
• anon
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• time4tea
  This is great, maybe!There are lots of factors that feed into this: lots of solar, batteries, more efficiency, improved insulation.Some others: increase of heat pumps, energy poverty, reduction in industrial energy (both due to good and bad reasons)Ultimately though, its not about how much energy per capita, its about the sources of energy, and how effectively they are used... my heat pump uses infinity more electricity than my boiler, but far more effectively uses the underlying energy source.
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  klelatti
  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.
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  Havoc
  It’s just plain expensive thanks to the shitty price everything by most expensive source method. Of course people minimise useCurrently paying 0.33 usd a unit.
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  wood_spirit
  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.
• a_paddy
  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.
• philipallstar
  If you import 12 million people in 20 years, your energy generation, water provision, and housing affordability are all going to fall off a cliff vs demand.
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  barelysapient
  I wonder if they're paying less than the 70s?
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  saberience
  Isn't this a good thing? I mean, is there a direct correlation between electricity usage and country = better?
• dyauspitr
  I mean, what do you expect out of a resource poor island? The only reason the UK was on the map is because it has intelligent, well spoken people that could make deals and exploit the resources of their colonies. That’s not enough when you don’t have colonies. It’s reverting to the mean.
• mhh__
  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.