I live in a small one-bedroom apartment with electric (hydropower supplied) heat and light.

I agree.  

Less...always less...

I made this point in another recent post but I'll make it again.

Residents and business owners in CA have a greater incentive to conserve energy due to high prices. I'm not sure though if the 40,000 Gwh figure you quote is supposed to be directly from EE programs or just in general.

I do know that from 2000-2004 in CA revnues from the manufacturing sub-sector dropped off significantly as did demand for retail electricity from the larger industrial sector.

Obviously getting rid of or otherwise driving out energy intensive industries makes the consumption numbers work great but not so good for the people who may have had to find lower paying work. Well, except for the fact that with less financial resources they will also probably start consuming less electricity.

What I want to know is if people believe it is possible to create changes in demand similar to CA without their ridiculously high prices?

California's regulations enabled big reductions in per capita consumption of electricity in California. That is true and incontrovertable.  It hasn't reduced the consumption of energy by Californians. Californians are the just as or more consumptive as the rest of the nation, however we shipped our manufacturing to Nevada, Arizona, Korea, India and China. Up until the 60's, Southern California was the center of military aircraft production; now California only produces parts. The Tucker, Studebaker, and Hudson automobiles started here; now only a few Toyota trucks are produced here. Our steel is not produced here. Even our cement comes from foreign countries. And the biggest irony is that our solar panels come from China!  California shipped out manufacturing jobs to foreign countries where environmental, public health, employment, and personal freedoms are not an issue. Instead of better efficiency in these jobs, they now produce more pollution and enable one of the most repressive nations to prosper. I don't give California a high five for that shortsighted and arrogant set of policies.

The fact that California is cutting peak demand at the same time as its population is growing merits some attention. It's an example of how to pinpoint the biggest demand areas and design policy to target those points. From what I understand about efficiency (and I'm not the biggest expert on that issue, I admit), commercial buildings are a big and easy-to-manage point source for reduction. California has had some of the most progressive efficiency coding for new buildings in the nation. San Fransisco is one of the cities that has implemented LEED requirements for all new construction. That's pretty darn important. Here in MN we just passed the Architecture 2030 guidelines as law. I can still hardly believe we managed to pull it off.

However...once the commercial sector is well in hand, I can foresee a plateau coming with efficiency standards in residential buildings...and a huge fight with the individual property rights types.