The call for energy conservation is one of the most absurd things to come out of the green movement.
We're supposed to further development, not halt it, we need more energy to do so, any conservation efforts will naturally come with economy of scale and practical considerations (for instance, when it becomes cheaper to make stuff use less energy than it is to build better cooling) and lots of other factors.
For the future, we need faster, better, cheaper energy, everything else will follow.
Spending more energy would also encourage re-use of waste-heat, for instance, we could have industry mandatory connections to a waste-heat system where they'd dump the waste heat, which could in turn be used for heating homes and other relevant infrastructure.
