A Missing Law and a Looming Paradox

Sep 13 2011, 11:04 AM ET Comment

Over forty years ago, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that processing power on semiconductor chips would double every two years. Known as Moore's Law, this metric has held true over time and evidence of it is everywhere: your smartphone is a great deal more powerful than your old dorm room PC.

Moore's Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy, though: throughout the industry, companies are expected to greatly improve on their computing products at a rate that matches the law. Those that don't tend to disappear.

The Clean Tech industry doesn't have a Moore's Law, perhaps because it doesn't have a Gordon Moore. Moore was (and is) a respected, well-known figure in the semiconductor world. Who in clean tech could postulate such a law? While we conduct a Star Search, GreenBiz points out that there are signs of a clean tech equivalent of a Moore's Law already in effect--though not at a pace matching the computing industry. And, because clean tech requires infrastructure, it requires another kind of law, the government kind, to make any metric hold true.

Looming over this lack of a "law" is a paradox: in 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons observed that while technological improvements in Victorian England led to more efficient use of coal, it didn't lead to less consumption, but more: as coal became easier and cheaper to use, the country didn't save on coal, but instead used more. On a simple level, the Jevons Paradox argues that energy savings leads to increased consumption: as your refrigerator becomes more efficient, you spend those savings in some other energy intensive area, such as air conditioning, heating, or far-flung vacations. After all, why not heat a room at a higher temperature as is becomes more affordable? Why not have more lights on in the house as bulbs become more energy-efficient?

Others argue that the Jevons Paradox is hard to find at a residential level. If your energy cost lowered by a few cents, would you heat your house more? Perhaps, but not at a measurable level. And more importantly, the present-day form of the Jevons Paradox ignores the fact that until recently, the US economy was booming: we used more energy, because we bought bigger houses. And we took more vacations because we had more money. The money we spent didn't come from energy savings, but from the economic boom. And while it probably can't be measured, who's to say that without efficiencies, our energy usage would not have been even higher?

The Jevons Paradox (and it's modern-day corollary, the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate) is real, but environmentalists also say it's also red herring, an excuse to not push forward. After all, there is no paradox, postulate, or even law that says we can't use efficiencies to overcome the effect of worldwide income growth.

The hope: efficiencies will buy us time. That is, until clean tech passes its own Moore's Law and exceeds all imaginable goals.