Building codes that require more energy efficiency haven’t done anything to lower energy consumption in California despite adding thousands of dollars to the purchase price of a new house, according to a new report.
In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Arik Levinson said energy codes enacted there in 1978 were supposed to reduce energy consumption by 80%.
But homes built since then actually don’t use less energy even as codes added thousands of dollars to to the cost of construction.
The full text of Levinson’s paper is behind a pay wall, but it was summarized in an article published by the Washington Examiner.
Levinson, an economics professor at Georgetown University, weighed a variety of factors in analyzing energy use, the Examiner said, to avoid skewing the results.
“Levinson did not only correct for issues that would bias results toward showing how ineffective green-energy codes are,” the newspaper said. “Recently built homes actually use more electricity than homes built prior to the 1978 building codes, but these homes are larger, built in warmer climates and have more residents than the pre-1978 homes.”
He concluded there’s “no evidence that homes constructed since California instituted its building-energy codes use less electricity today than homes built before the codes came into effect.”
Is this the Jevons Paradox?
More efficiency but more consumption? Turns out that’s not a new idea.
GBA senior editor Martin Holladay wrote about this phenomenon back in 2009 in reporting on a book called The Myth of Resource Efficiency.
The origins of this theory, however, go back much further than that, all the way to a book called The Coal Question published in 1865 by an economist named William Stanley Jevons.
“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption,” Jevons wrote. “The very contrary is the truth.”
Holladay said the Jevons Paradox is evident in any number of ways–more efficient refrigerators leading to bigger refrigerators, better fuel economy prompting drivers to pile on more miles, better windows and insulation techniques pushing homeowners to build bigger houses.
Evidence also can be found with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency reported last year that newer homes in the U.S. are nearly one-third bigger than they used to be while using 2% more total energy–a confirmation of sorts that increased efficiencies leads not to lower consumption but to bigger dwellings.
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Bigger houses use more energy. This chart from the U.S. Energy Information Administration compares residential energy consumption in houses built before 2000 to those built between 2000 and 2009. Newer houses were more energy efficient, but an average of 30% bigger. Total energy consumption went up.
