You can bank on energy consumption rising year over year for the next lifetime or so. We have completely run out of low hanging fruit in terms of cutting back like moving from incandescent to LED lighting, installing heat pumps to replace resistive heaters…ect. Solar, wind and other green sources ARE very much the future (assuming we want to have a future at all), but their variable output doesn’t mesh super well with how electrical grids are handled today. Batteries and other storage options are no where near ready and may never be for grid scale. This is where nuclear shines, that steady trickle over many, many decades as a bridge to a future with a redesigned distribution network and other technologies we can’t even conceive of yet. The thing is it’s a long term play, there’s a massive upfront cost and the people involved the project today may not even be alive or seeking any sort of political office in 20 years when it’s completely validated. Even if these plants can’t get online fast enough to meet the peak demands in the near-term, there’s nothing stopping them from scaling out solar and/or wind farms to pick up the slack.
You’re thinking too small with LED lights and heat pumps.
Overall energy consumption still has a long way to drop if we continue to electrify transport. Oil is consumed very inefficiently in internal combustion engines and electric motors are far more efficient. That’s even before you account for the energy consumption of refining and transporting oil, all of which would vanish. Even if you just took oil out of the ground and pumped it into a furnace to generate electricity, then use that electricy to move everyone around, we’d drop our consumption significantly.
The setup with have now is desperately inefficient.
