The Impact Of Alternative Settlement Patterns On Household Energy Consumption: An Application To The Lansing, Michigan Metropolitan Area

During the last several years there has been significant development in the energy situation. The present shortages and the resultant problems were not widely anticipated by the American public nor its elected leaders. Recognition of the current and possible future impacts of the energy shortage upon personal lifestyles and community structure is spreading, however, as individuals, businesses, and whole communities increasingly become directly affected by the present shortage. The results of ongoing public and private efforts to solve this shortage at the national and international levels will clearly be the primary determinants of how long the present shortage lasts, and of how severe it becomes. These efforts to a large extent have in the past primarily addressed the supply side of our energy problem. They have attempted to find ways to continue the flow of cheap energy that our society has been built on. Unfortunately, at this time it is impossible to predict with much reliability the actual outcome and the effects of these efforts. More recently, many people familiar with the energy situation have come to the realization that our energy problem does not lie exclusively on the supply side, but results also from the demand side. That is, present rates of growth of energy consumption can effectively hamper any efforts to solve the energy shortage from the supply side. The reasoning behind this is that the type and quantity of energy presently being demanded puts constraints on the ability of alternate energy systems to meet our energy needs. These constraints stem from the practice of using high quality energy to do tasks that only call for a low quality energy input, and from the need for these alternate energy systems to grow very quickly to keep up with increasing demand. In consideration of these issues, this paper will focus on one aspect of the demand for energy and the means of managing this demand so that supply efforts are less hampered. The purpose of this paper is not to undertake any new research, but rather to take what is known, outline how it can be applied, and how the results can be presented in a form which is meaningful to decision makers. It is thought that the results of such a study could prove to be useful in providing one basis by which the reasonableness of public decision making is measured. As such it is meant to be an extension document: while the particular results are not thought to be generalizable to other Michigan communities, the process by which these results were formulated can be easily done in other settings.