Why do electric companies promote energy conservation?
From the perspective of an energy supplier, they will incur much higher costs if people do not curb their energy usage and reduce demand. Conservation is much cheaper than building new energy producing infrastructure capacitiy especially if it entails coal-fired plants which create tremendous amount of pollution. The cost to the consumers to reduce energy usage is mostly minor –timers, and other power regulation tools and some behaviour changes to be more conscious of what we waste. The other realization energy companies are finding that maximizing profits can lead to degredation of other parts of our social system. So increasing air pollution, hurting residents in poor communities that cannot prevent impact from bad energy generation practices and generally wasting a limited natural resouces come back to haunt the corporation in the end.
