A recent article on the latest designs of high-rise condominiums illustrates how silly we are now about a focus on energy efficiency. Let’s be careful that all the work we have done to help save money and energy is not just showing up in excesses in other ways. We saw this with electric vehicles and even high mileage gasoline vehicles … people are prone to drive the cars more because it cost less to go anywhere.
Read the Energy Central article.
The temptation however among regulatory thinkers facing these characteristics is to move beyond the EE and DR agendas to moralize about what we should and shouldn’t have in our lives.
Is it right to have hot tubs and home theaters? What right does anyone have to tell each of us whether we should or should not have these luxuries? Should we rethink the gas guzzler taxes of years ago that punished high performance cars for stupidly low mpg?
I think my recent blogs about raising speed limits settles the question. If you believe this is widespread, we are about to see electricity load growth reemerge.