17. Rebound Effect and Structural Change

The rebound effect (RE) is an unintended increase in energy usage due to the introduction of an energy-efficient technology and the consequential lower price of the relative energy service (brief intro to the idea helpful). The RE arguably poses serious threats to the ongoing energy conservation and GHG-mitigating policies. This alarming issue is now widely recognized by the scientific community. Last year the European Commission (DG environmental unit C2) commissioned, for the first time, a study on the RE, acknowledging the need of approaching this problem and urging more research on this important topic. Current modeling methodologies of the RE are time- and space limited. In this chapter we show that there are structural changes in the economy, occurring on a long range of time and concerning the whole productive structure, that are energy demanding. We approach structural changes with network theory and statistical mechanics of networks to show to what extent they can be regarded as an increase in complexity of transport systems. We analyze these changes in the light of economic growth theory and more broadly, of growth theory of metabolic processes. We finally advanced a heuristic explanation of structural changes based on saturation and symmetry breaking.