Another example of how increased efficiency results in increased consumption. From Mother Jones:
Since 1978, household appliances have gotten way better. Most notablly, heating used to account for 66 percent of our collective residential energy use. Nowadays, thanks to cleaner-burning furnaces and energy-efficient construction and window design, that number is closer to 40 percent. Not only that, the total energy devoted to heating houses has dropped by 38 percent, even though we have 45 percent more houses to heat. Hey, impressive!
Yeeeeah, but the thing is, we’re now buying so many of these very-efficient appliances that we suck up as much power as we used to. In other words, we’re channeling all that efficiency into better lifestyles.
Well, also, there are a lot more households in America in 2005 than 1978. If I’m reading this right, that’s total energy use across all of them. So the average use is reduced if the total use stays the same.
Appliances and electronics is pretty vague. I expect a lot of that isn’t so much using the dryer more as it is new electronic devices such as plasma TVs and computers and cell phone chargers that didn’t exist in 1978. So that’s not too surprising, but it’s a slightly different phenomenon than the issue with vehicle efficiency or some other types. After all, it’s not like people are going to choose to heat their house to 30 C instead of 20 C just because it costs the same. That would be pretty silly.
Maybe I am not reading these pie charts correctly, but the figures in the centre, 10.58 and 10.55 would seem to imply a very slight decrease in total consumption from 1978 to 2005. Since there are many more households, consumption per household must be down considerably.