Driven by commonsense, people might consciously tend to conserve energy; However, the
surveys presented by this electronic company are not sufficient to bolster that the energy
consumption will decrease accordingly. Even though it might be true that, for the electronic
company, building more new generating plants will be unnecessary in the future, there is no
compelling evidence to corroborate the argument the company makes.
First of all, the major drawback in this argument is the lack of consideration of the latent
relationship between consumers’ demand and price of new technologies. It is undeniable that
updated home insulation and passive solar heating are capable of conserving heating energy to
some extent; Nevertheless, the company ignores the fact that better technologies will come out
with higher prices, which force consumers to reconsider the choice between the benefit of
saving energy and the increased cost of new technologies. Thus, those consumers who can not
afford this advanced heating technology will keep using the current one without hesitancy and
hence the heating energy might not be reduced. In addition to that, common sense tells us that
many homeowners are reluctant to make changes to their houses because they already got
used to everything within their houses. Therefore, those homeowners are not willing to update
their old heating technologies to better ones.
Secondly, the survey introduced in the argument is not statistically reliable. Due to lack of
certain evidence, this survey fails to demonstrate the conclusion drawn by the company, that
more and more homeowners are active to conserve energy. For the first place, the identities
and wealth background of those who participate in this survey are uncertain. If those
respondents are mostly affluent, they are more likely to put their additional property into some
meaningful aspects, such as energy conservation. In contrast, budget-constrained families have
no choice but to put their finite income into necessary parts rather than the one for energy
conservation. Thus, whether the respondents are chosen randomly will affect the accuracy of
the survey results. Moreover, the conclusion of the survey simply implies that homeowners are
prone to save energy, but whether those respondents will finally realize their original thoughts or
not is still uncertain. Therefore, without better evidence that the survey is reliable, the company
cannot rely on it to draw any firm conclusions.
Assuming that the survey is statistically reliable and homeowners are all capable of paying for
their updated heating technologies; However, it is still deficient to certify that the total demand
for electricity in certain areas will not increase. The company regards the electric demand of
households as the same as total demand for electricity, obviously, whereas the electric demand
of households should merely be one of the parts of total demand of the area. Therefore, other
than the valuables assumed previously, the rest of the total electric demand is uncertain. Any
slight changes in electric industries might exceed the energy saved by these households. Thus,
without comprehensive data of the whole electric industry, it is impossible to draw the
conclusion that the total demand for electricity will not increase.
From what has been discussed above, we can safely conclude that construction of new
generating plants might be necessary probably.