[avianlyric]

Until recently total electrical power consumption in developed nations has been practically stalled for decades, despite continued growth in economic output, and greater demand for electricity consuming devices. Mostly because as the usage of electricity has gone up, it’s been entirely offset by endless improvements in efficiency.

So you have two opposed forces in action. Rapidly increasing demand for electricity consuming services, and rapidly increasing efficiency of those services. It also helps that a lot of that additional demand is only possible due to increased efficiency. Imagine if every phone was as power inefficient as an old Pentium 4. They would last about 30 mins and burn your hands in the process.

Even with datacentres and AI, there is huge economic pressure to increase the efficiency of the devices involved, and there’s been no slow down in year-on-year increases of compute/W, even if the total amount compute per chip isn’t as rapid as it used to be.

[M95D]

It's most likely because of deindustrialization of those countries, not efficiency increase [1]. Aluminium production (electrolysis), steel production (arc furnace), heavy manufacturing (lathes, drills, welding, various motors, robots, etc.) were all moved elsewhere.

You may argue that Jevon's paradox might not apply to home power use. I mean, how many lights and how many refrigerators could one house possibly have? But AI use and it's associated power consumption is VERY susceptible to Jevon's paradox.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[avianlyric]

> I mean, how many lights and how many refrigerators could one house possibly have?

Once-upon-a-time a "bright" bulb consumed 80W of power. Today we achieve the same light output with 8W of LEDs, and order of magnitude decrease in power consumption. Multiply that by every home, every street light, every office build, every airport, hospital and stadium. That kinda improvement in efficiency adds up very quickly.

Sure plenty of developed countries have deindustrialised, but most the heavy industry that been lost was lost before mass electrification. Arc furnaces, large scale aluminium production etc. These are all pretty modern technologies. If you look at the UK the only major steel foundry left is a gas fired blast furnace, we basically have zero arc furnaces, because we deindustrialised before the damn things we're being used for large scale steel production.

Electrification of heavy industry is a surprisingly recent trend, and is only really happening in countries that aren't deindustrialising, and view continual process improvement in heavy industry as an important long term activity.

[BobaFloutist]

Also I think climate control is quite susceptible to Jevin's paradox, especially since heavier use of air conditioning requires heavier use of air conditioning by other people in the area.