Will LEDs Trigger Rebound Effects? Examining the Key Evidence

It was a pleasant surprise to see Rob Day’s thoughtful critique of a 2010 article on the energy consumption implications of new solid state lighting technologies – of which one of us (Saunders) was a co-author – evidently incited by a recent op-ed piece published in the New York Times by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. To our knowledge, no one, aside from the reviewers for the Journal of Physics, has probed these results so deeply. Refreshingly, Day reveals that he holds himself to an exacting standard of intellectual objectivity, the hallmark of scholarly discourse at its finest. We took Day’s critique seriously and as a result, devoted many hours to reassessing the evidence and analysis in the Tsao et al. “Solid-state lighting: an energy economics perspective” paper, and it is in this spirit that we offer a reply to Day’s analysis. We first lay out a picture of the issue considered in the large, and then enumerate four specific responses to Day’s stated objections.