You ever wonder why despite the efforts of thousands of engineers and politicians over the past decades we haven't yet solved the energy problem? Have you ever heard of the rebound effect?

People noticed that travelling to work takes a long time. So they invent faster means of travel. Now nobody has to travel so long for work anymore! It's a noble idea... but it didn't work... because it doesn't work. What happened is that people now have to travel further to work which negates the speed gain thus the average travel time remains more or less constant. In some cases - probably a whole lot of cases - once you increase the supply the demand will also rise.

But then what's the problem? Suppose we realise that we are in a scenario where our energy consumption is about to reach the amount of energy we produce. How do we solve that problem? Easy. We use an approach consisting of two parts: We increase energy production and we make devices that are more energy efficient. Problem solved! Yeah... if only. As we've learnt from the example above: such strategies don't necessarily work as expected. Suppose a - I don't know - 14" TV Screen consumed 196 units of energy. Now we make it more energy efficient: we half it's energy consumption. Now the new 14" TV only needs 98 units of energy. Hooray! But now TVs are just getting bigger. Now we use 20" TV screens which in the past would have consumed 400 units of energy - which is partly why nobody was using them. But now with the new technology we only consume half as much energy which for a 20" TV screen would result in a consumption of 200 units of energy. Oh shit! Despite our efforts of making devices more energy efficient we're now actually using 4 units of energy more. Which isn't a lot on an individual scale but for a million of devices? That's 4 Million more units of energy we need? Oh well... I guess we need to ramp up energy production afterall somehow.

The only way this can work in my opinion is if you either set a hard cap on energy consumption or a soft cap on energy consumption. A hard cap would mean that the government tells you "You can use THIS much energy". A soft cap for example could be implemented by not having linear prices. So if 100 units of energy cost 1$ then 1000 units of energy could cost 15$ instead.