Electricity sales in 2016 fell, the sixth year in the past ten in which America’s electricity users managed to do with less. Industrial firms made the sharpest cuts in their electricity usage. Their consumption fell in seven of the past ten years. The 1.3 percent drop in total consumption in 2016 looks small but it comes despite economic growth and lower real price of electricity. Okay, economic growth has not been robust and the real decline in price small, but electric sales always used to go up when the price of electricity declined and the economy grew. In economic parlance, electricity had a negative price and positive income elasticity. In the old days a 1.6 percent improvement in real gross domestic product (GDP) and a 2.5 percent real price decrease together should have spurred consumers to use at least 1-2 percent more electricity. But, with similar conditions in both […]