Energy efficiency—a critical view
By H. Herring. 2006
504 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper challenges the view that improving the efficiency of energy use will lead to a reduction in national energy consumption, and hence is an effective policy for reducing national CO2 emissions. It argues that improving energy efficiency lowers the implicit price of energy and hence make its use more affordable, thus leading to greater use—an effect termed the ‘rebound’ or ‘takeback’ effect. The paper presents the views of economists, as well as green critics of ‘the gospel of efficiency’. The paper argues that a more effective CO2 policy is to concentrate on shifting to non-fossil fuels, like renewables, subsidized through a carbon tax. Ultimately what is needed, to limit energy consumption, is energy sufficiency (or conservation) rather than energy efficiency.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af31535334f6a7df047915eacd6e87c95cd59efe
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In Environmental Engineering
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Positive and negative spillover of pro-environmental behavior: An integrative review and theoretical framework (2014, background): “sometimes follows efficiency improvements (Binswanger, 2001; Herring, 2006).”
- The green economy agenda: business as usual or transformational discourse? (2015, background): “Nonetheless, in a growing economy, absolute decoupling is likely to remain elusive because gains in resource efficiency are almost always absorbed by increases in resource consumption (Herring 2006).”
- Green economy and related concepts: An overview (2016, unknown): “However, striving for dematerialization does not always lead to a relative decrease in the use of resources due to rebound effects; i.e., efficiency gains may lower the prices which may increase consumption (Herring 2006), or they may lead to a regional shift of polluting activities.”
- A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality (2008, unknown): “(Jevons, 1865; Polimeni and Polimeni, 2006; Huesemann, 2003; Herring, 2006; Grossman and Helpman, 1991; Wackernagel and Rees, 1997; Homer-Dixon, 2006)).”
- Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review (2017, background): “…is no one unequivocal quantitative measure of energy efficiency (gain/improvement) (Patterson, 1996), in general, energy efficiency is the ratio of energy unit output to energy input (Herring, 2006), and thereby influences the amount of useful energy required to produce a unit of MCPs (Table 3).”
- Energy Conservation More Effective With Rebound Policy (2011, background): “…in energy journals, mostly in Energy Policy and The Energy Journal Khazzoom 1980, 1987, 1989; Lovins 1988; Brookes 1990, 2000; Saunders 1992, 2000; Herring 1999, 2006; Berkhout et al. 2000; Birol and Keppler 2000; Jaccard and Bataille 2000; Sanne 2000; Grepperud and Rasmussen 2004; Dimitropoulos…”
- Supply Chain Management for Improved Energy Efficiency: Review and Opportunities (2017, methodology): “Since energy efficiency is a generic term and unequivocal definitions and quantitative measures do not exists, we have adopt the more wider approach considering energy efficiency as the way to use lees energy to produce the same amount of useful output [46,47].”
- Improving the energy performance of UK households: Results from surveys of consumer adoption and use of low- and zero-carbon technologies (2008, background): “There may also be rebound effects, such as taking some or all of the benefits of insulation in higher room temperatures; leaving renewable space heating or energy efficient lighting on for longer, or installing extra lighting in the home or garden (Herring, 2005).”