I’ve seen a lot of work on demand side response, whether that’s reducing demand or just shifting it in order to reduce peaks in consumption. For example, the International Energy Agency tracks it annually.
We’d love to see what you seen, if you don’t mind sharing some links. Note that when we talk about ‘demand reduction’ (which honestly isn’t the best term, but we’re still working on that), it doesn’t mean just any work on the demand side. Any kind of efficiency standard is a demand side intervention, but we’ve tried to distinguish ‘demand reduction’ from that sort of work.
Similarly, we wouldn’t consider demand response as falling under ‘demand reduction’, as from what I understand, it’s primarily about shifting consumption which could be viewed as efficiency improvements.
Maybe to put it more clearly, we should distinguish between two types of demand:
1. Demand for goods and services, such as the service received from an appliance or travel over a distance
2. Demand for energy and resources, such as electricity
Work that we’ve seen on the demand side may work on reducing demand #2 by improving the efficiency in which those goods and services are delivered. But we haven’t seen much work on reducing demand #1.
The use of taxes and incentives to shift demand #1 is probably the closest thing we’ve seen, but we think there’s a broader space of policies to be considered for reducing demand #1 that is under-explored.
Yes, I definitely think it’s useful to draw a distinction between reducing demand for the product or service vs making the product or service more efficient.
I’ve seen a lot of work on demand side response, whether that’s reducing demand or just shifting it in order to reduce peaks in consumption. For example, the International Energy Agency tracks it annually.
https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-energy-integration-2019/demand-response
We’d love to see what you seen, if you don’t mind sharing some links. Note that when we talk about ‘demand reduction’ (which honestly isn’t the best term, but we’re still working on that), it doesn’t mean just any work on the demand side. Any kind of efficiency standard is a demand side intervention, but we’ve tried to distinguish ‘demand reduction’ from that sort of work.
Similarly, we wouldn’t consider demand response as falling under ‘demand reduction’, as from what I understand, it’s primarily about shifting consumption which could be viewed as efficiency improvements.
Maybe to put it more clearly, we should distinguish between two types of demand:
1. Demand for goods and services, such as the service received from an appliance or travel over a distance
2. Demand for energy and resources, such as electricity
Work that we’ve seen on the demand side may work on reducing demand #2 by improving the efficiency in which those goods and services are delivered. But we haven’t seen much work on reducing demand #1.
The use of taxes and incentives to shift demand #1 is probably the closest thing we’ve seen, but we think there’s a broader space of policies to be considered for reducing demand #1 that is under-explored.
Yes, I definitely think it’s useful to draw a distinction between reducing demand for the product or service vs making the product or service more efficient.
I’ve seen some interventions to reduce waste—I’m not sure which category you’d put that in. I think providing free smart meters is a nudge in this category. https://www.smartenergygb.org/en/about-smart-meters