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| Fig. 1: A common incandescent lightbulb. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
People will be people. Controlling human behavior is a notoriously difficult task, and in more liberal societies, even the notion of controlling a citizen's decisions is heretical. Consequently, some people will choose to adopt unsustainable behaviors. Due to a lack of knowledge, concern, financial motivation and or willpower, some people will not turn their lights off when leaving the room. They will not choose to commute to work or buy electric cars, and they will not separate recyclables and compostables from landfill garbage. Absent drastic and unfeasible changes in public policy, parts of human behavior will have a negative effect on the sustainability of human society. The question becomes to what extent does human misbehavior negatively affect sustainability.
For the typical 60 W incandescent lightbulb such as seen in Fig. 1, maximally sustainable usage is 0 hours per day (infeasible for a modern lifestyle, but theoretically possible). Average usage is about 1.5 hours per day, and maximally unsustainable usage is 24 hours per day. [1] Although a person's usage profile depends on many factors including personal values and social norms, analyzing the underlying economics is much more straightforward than considering value systems. Therefore, the following analysis will emphasize the economics of sustainability as a factor of human behavior. The rigorous investigation of other behavioral determinants is slightly out of reach, unfortunately.
If a person switches from average usage to unsustainable usage, that person will increase their consumption by about 493 kWh per year. At 15 cents per kWh, the maximally unsustainable person pays $6.16 more on their monthly bill than the average person. [2] If the same average person becomes maximally sustainable, the energy saved per year is about 33 kWh, and money saved per year is only $4.93. For the sake of comparison, a 1 GW power plant running constantly at full capacity throughout the year produces about 8.76 × 109 kWh per year. The decisions of an individual have negligible effect on the sustainability of the power system as a whole. Furthermore, the financial incentives for being more sustainable than the average person are quite low.
However, society does not consist of one sole individual. As of November 2018, the U.S. population is about 329 million people. If each U.S. citizen switched their usage pattern from average to maximally unsustainable, the extra resulting demand on the power system would be about 162 TWh per year. Net generation in the U.S. for 2017 was 4,015 TWh, so the mass behavioral change from average to maximally unsustainable would require a 4% increase in net generation. [3] Although 4% may seem small, since 2005, net generation has only fluctuated by about 1% annually. The California ISO requires 15% ancillary services, so the 4% increase in demand would not break California's grid. However, after a 4% increase in demand, the total capacity of the electric grid including ancillary services would have to eventually increase by 4% as well. The 4% increase could be covered by the construction of 9 new coal plants operating at 1 GW. At $3,500 per kW of capacity, the resulting cost would be about $31 trillion, or about 1.5 times the annual U.S. GDP. Furthermore, because the hypothetical lightbulbs are on all year, base-load power would have to increase by 4%, so seasonal peaks would be 4% higher as well. 4% seems small, but at the scale of a national electric grid, the difference is massive.
Conversely, if all Americans switched from average usage to maximally sustainable, they would save only 10.8 TWh per year, or about 0.3% of current net generation. The effect is less pronounced considering that the average usage is much closer to sustainable than unsustainable, but the effect is still appreciable. The decisions of society as a whole have a massive impact on the sustainability of the power system.
Granted, energy usage profiles are significantly more complex than how a single light bulb is used, and the calculations presented are first order calculations at best. Furthermore, the analysis completely bypassed the effects of personal values and social norms. However, the evidence presented suggests that an individual's sustainability decisions are negligible, and the behavior of society is much more important. In this respect, sustainable energy usage is quite similar to voter participation. No single vote matters, but a democracy without voters ceases to be a democracy. Similarly, the sustainability decisions of an individual are negligible, but a society of waste very quickly depletes its natural resources.
Therefore, sustainability campaigns that promote more sustainable individual decisions are incredibly difficult. Campaigns do not change the underlying economics, and value systems are mostly rigid. Human behavior may be difficult to control, but fortunately, a high-level analysis shows that the economic factors of behavior seem to discourage maximally unsustainable behavior. There may be more room for improvement in behavioral sustainability, but feasible, cost-effective methods for doing so are not clear.
© Paul Walter. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] K. Johnson, "Residential Lighting Technologies in the United States: An Assessment of Programs, Policies, and Practices," Intermountain Energy, July 2004.
[2] "Electric Power Monthly, with Data for August 2018," U.S. Energy Information Administration, October 2018.
[3] "Electric Power Annual 2017," U.S. Energy Information Administration, October 2018.
