Morgan Williams taught me about a couple key concepts at Balaton: energy rebounds and energy amplifications.
Increased energy efficiency is an obvious good, allowing us to do more of the things we want to do at less cost and with a smaller ecological footprint. But it turns out that for a variety of reasons, people rarely merely implement improved energy efficiency and get on with their lives. Instead, one of two things often happens: either they end up again using more energy (their energy use "rebounds"), or the start down a path where they use even less energy (their energy efficiency is "amplified"). As Future Currents puts it:
When people save money by improving energy efficiency, or by cutting back their energy use, they have more money to spend. How they spend this money influences whether there is a rebound or an amplification effect, and the size of that effect. For example, if someone spends the money they saved on buying lots of aluminium, which is produced with large amounts of electricity, the rebound effect may be so large that total energy use goes up. However, if that person invested their money into further energy efficiency improvements, the savings would be amplified. Within this spectrum, goods and services vary considerably in the amount of energy needed to provide them. ...Energy use is still growing in many countries despite improvements in energy efficiency.
To use concrete examples, let's say that two people, Ms. R and Ms. A, have both decided to save energy and have taken the big basic steps one does -- replacing their light bulbs with compact florescents, buying energy efficient appliances, putting electronics on power strips to avoid vampire power drains, checking their homes' insulation and the like. Both will usually see significant savings. It's what they do next that makes all the difference.
Ms. R decides that she's been good, and money's looking flush, so she's going to get rid of her efficient little car and buy that SUV she's always secretly wanted. As a result, her gas use skyrockets, and, in fact her total energy could potentially even go up compared to what she was using before she began. This is rebound.
Ms. A, on the other hand, decides that she likes saving money on energy efficiency, and decides to use the extra money she has on buying a zero energy home, knowing that it will, over time, save her even more money though increased energy efficiency. This is amplification.
Since one of our big goals has to be increasing our energy intensity -- getting richer faster using less energy -- figuring out how to encourage more amplification and less rebound is pretty important.
New Zealand is exploring one way to reduce rebound and add amplification, particularly by encouraging people to invest in "cost-effective energy efficiency improvements that have very long payback periods." But this would also seem to be an area where making visible the invisible (perhaps be making the two patterns clearer to people through social marketing) could lead to people consciously deciding to amplify their own behaviors.
