Cathrine Dyer & Bernard Hickey chat about the week's big climate news, including research into our "weirdly hot" oceans, and why we should be funding solar in developing countries.
It gives relatable examples of where Jevon's paradox has held e.g. lighting, combustion engines, refrigeration. Jevon's seems to be extremely relevant when it comes to energy use, with the weight of 00's of years of history and technology (efficiency) improvements to back it up.
Yeah Jevon’s paradox seems to always catch up with so called efficiencies. The most efficient thing for us to do would be to reduce consumption levels entirely, but sadly when people talk about energy transitions they assume it’s from hydrocarbons to ‘renewable’ (aka mineral energy), would be nice if we could collectively strive for the transition to be reduction and not just a swap from bad energy source to a slightly less bad energy source.
Solar panels may be useful as fences. In higher latitudes vertically positioned panels can have good levels of efficiency and where bi-facial panels are east/west facing and vertical they can produce similar overall power to inclined panels but have the advantage of generating power during periods of higher demand (i.e. morning and afternoon). See Sophia Reker, Jens Schneider, Christoph Gerhards, Integration of vertical solar power plants into a future German energy system,
We have to be very careful with expectations that more efficient use of energy will lead to reduced consumption, in the absence of regulation.
This was written 14 years ago but it is the most interesting thing I've ever read about efficiency:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/the-efficiency-dilemma
It gives relatable examples of where Jevon's paradox has held e.g. lighting, combustion engines, refrigeration. Jevon's seems to be extremely relevant when it comes to energy use, with the weight of 00's of years of history and technology (efficiency) improvements to back it up.
Yeah Jevon’s paradox seems to always catch up with so called efficiencies. The most efficient thing for us to do would be to reduce consumption levels entirely, but sadly when people talk about energy transitions they assume it’s from hydrocarbons to ‘renewable’ (aka mineral energy), would be nice if we could collectively strive for the transition to be reduction and not just a swap from bad energy source to a slightly less bad energy source.
Solar panels may be useful as fences. In higher latitudes vertically positioned panels can have good levels of efficiency and where bi-facial panels are east/west facing and vertical they can produce similar overall power to inclined panels but have the advantage of generating power during periods of higher demand (i.e. morning and afternoon). See Sophia Reker, Jens Schneider, Christoph Gerhards, Integration of vertical solar power plants into a future German energy system,
Smart Energy, Volume 7, 2022 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666955222000211?ref=pdf_download&fr=RR-7&rr=7fe60eadeb7088bb#tbl2