Closing the "green gap": energy savings from the math of the landscape function

I recently returned from the 2025 Annual Meeting of the “Localization of Waves” collaboration (supported by the Simons Foundation, with additional related support from the NSF), where I learned (from Svitlana Mayboroda, the director of the collaboration as well as one of the principal investigators) of a remarkable statistic: net electricity consumption by residential customers in the US has actually experienced a slight decrease in recent years: The decrease is almost entirely due to gains in lighting efficiency in households, and particularly the transition from incandescent (and compact fluorescent) light bulbs to LED light bulbs: Annual energy savings from this switch to consumers in the US were already estimated to be $14.7 billion in 2020 – or several hundred dollars per household – and are projected to increase, even in the current inflationary era, with the cumulative savings across the US estimated to reach $890 billion by 2035. What I also did not realize before this meeti ... Read full article.