The secret success of the reduction in the Norwegian electricity consumption

Abstract

Largely unnoticed by the media and the public, the electricity consumption of Norwegian households has stopped growing and even decreased since 1990. The project, financed by the Norwegian Research Council, aims at defining what factors that might explain this rather unanticipated development. This paper is, however, restricted to accounting for the validation of the existing data and a preliminary list of possible explanations. Such a validation has to take into account if the breaking of the curve really hides a shift of medium; that a decrease in electricity consumption is explained by a corresponding increase elsewhere, or if it follows simply from a reduced average household size, and thus counteracted by an increase in the number of households. The paper concludes that the witnessed reduction in electricity consumption is real.