I only now got around to watching the Technology Connections video on renewable energy, I wish I had seen it sooner. Almost feels like it should be required viewing. I definitely thought there were nastier chemicals/compounds in solar panels and hadn't updated my knowledge on them in decades.
I asked before about rooftop solar because it seems so well suited to the US, especially the Southern US. Loads of large single family dwellings => each roof is owned by a single electricity bill payer, even if they're not owned outright because there's a mortgage, surely a lender can be prevailed upon to lend for Solar PV too?
Most of the EU has higher household electricity bills so rooftop solar makes faster economic sense. So that's probably part of it. A capital expenditure now which pays back in 5-10 years is quite different from one which pays back over 20 years.
I am still baffled that no electric car dealership worked out selling a garage covered in solar panels as a financing add-one for a new vehicle purchase --- even as a publicity stunt it seems the sort of thing one could have gotten a good bit of coverage with.
I have wondered about this actually - it would be amazing to have a single product which is a carport with preinstalled panels, non-grid-tied-inverter and charger. Then there's no electrical component of the installation on site, you just assemble. Most of the complications of installation would go away, you just concrete in four posts.
If nothing else, you could maybe get some sales leads (I'm assuming you run a building contractor/solar panel install business?) --- fall-back position buy the new car purchase information for the relevant zip codes? (this must be pretty inexpensive to purchase judging by the junk mail caused by my wife's new car purchase)
Solar’s payback time is poor, and comes close to lifetimes, leaving not much time for pure profit. Plus grid rules are bad and often hostile to individual solar, further breaking the economic model. And few have the extra income to spend on such long term returns.
Can you share some numbers? In Belgium I paid it back in 6 years. In South Africa where I live now, it'll take about 8 years. And as a big bonus it solved load shedding when that happened in 2023-2024.
Nonsense. I've just installed PV in the north of England and my payback is in the order of five years, even with the gloom of our seasons.
Large swathes of the US have hours of uninterrupted sunshine all year round. With a battery, a residential owner may never need to pay an electricity bill for the lifetime of the system.
You'll have to be a bit more specific - is it export restrictions, or connection limits or what?
Even if you go for something that isn't grid tied then you're still breaking even within years if you spec it right.
Obviously if you've got grid electricity that's almost too cheap to meter than I wouldn't bother but for most of the western world the economics to not install solar simply aren't there.
I’m in Canada, payback on my 7.3kw system will be 7 years.
I got an interest free loan for the full cost, so nothing out of pocket, just putting the money I would have spent on electricity onto the loan for 7 years, the will profit $1000 a year for 20 years.
I've been in Japan since 2015, but am from the US so that is where I had gotten most of my information. At the same time, I don't own a house and haven't been in a position where I had to decide solar vs. something else.
That video friggin' radicalised me. It's SO unbelievably goddamned stupid that we don't invest everything in what is essentially free energy that will last for decades right now. It solves SO many problems, and even removes a few of the biggest objections people have to AI datacenters. The tech is there, it's mature, and it would make all of our lives materially better so we could spend our time and money on other things that would make our lives better.
To say nothing of the fact it would end wars over oil, facilitate cheap desalination, and solve so many other resource constraints.
This is the next big revolution we should be focused on - not the mass-IP-theft slop bots.
There never were nasty chemicals in silicon PV. It's not that you needed to update formerly correct information, it's that you've been lied to for decades.
3) Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)
Transportation, heating and cooling, cooking are all 4 - 5X efficient.
Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).
There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra, fossil fuel subsidies, ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water, externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes). Fossil Fuels Are Half the fossil fuels of shipping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619394
I use gas for stovetop cooking, heat, and water heating (tankless). The demand charge for running an induction stove at dinner would be around $36. The an electric tankless water heater would be around $72. An electric furnace would cost $180. If those run at the same time (which may or may not be hard to control) the demand charge stacks.
My natural gas bill for a month is around $40 with no time of use restrictions. Effectively cheaper than turning any one of those things on during peak demand hours.
Per energy unit, all of those may be more efficient. Per dollar, they are not.
Natural gas is very convenient in many places, with sunk cost infrastructure and plenty to tap relatively nearby in the ground. But not in all places, I don’t get why countries like Japan are importing liquified natural gas. Or European, who gets much of it from Russia.
Much of Europe is importing fossil gas because they have made themselves dependent on it, because it used to be cheap, because they didn't have to pay the external costs.
Sounds like you could benefit from some storage. If everyone was able to use their EV for personal energy storage (known as V2H, vehicle-to-house), or even feed into the grid and be paid for it (known as V2G, vehicle-to-grid), that intermittency problem would be greatly mitigated.
1) heat pump appliances are much more energy efficient (they move heat rather than convert it from electronics or molecules, and modern heat pumps work well in most cold climates (and you can also utilize resistive heating for the short period your outside of their optimal operating range)
2) time of use charges can be managed by smart applications and/or a whole home battery (and the battery gives you extra resiliency in case of an outage)
3) this is probably a problem with how your local electricity market is structured. ERCOT (Texas) developed and energy-only and has the cheapest electric rates in the nation (granted lots of this is due to abundant natural gas and renewables in the state) while other markets (say PJM in the north east) have energy + capacity markets and have seen huge (11x) increase in prices on the capacity market side.
Electric utilities are trying to manage not use resource adequacy (having enough generation) but transmission adequacy as well (having enough head room on transmission line to move power around without the lines burning up). But many utilities have been slow to adopt new technologies that would allow the to squeeze more capacity out of their existing infrastructure (things like dynamic line ratings, or distributed energy resources)
We need to do the work to align the economic/market incentives so that using more efficient technologies is actually cheaper.
The incentives under a power monopoly are perverse.
Suggesting someone spend $25-$30k to transition gas infrastructure to electric ($6k furnace, $2k cooktop, $4k water heater, $15k battery) to offset their $40/month gas bill is also not a winning argument.
Without market pressure, what incentive is there for an electric company to optimize anything? Transitioning away from gas only makes them more entrenched.
You don't have to transition. But your furnace will eventually wear out, and your stove will too. Or you'll build a new house, and then you're looking at a major new investment. Make a smart one.
Only professionals build houses because the sum total of "strings attached" that have been added create too much overhead for anyone else (save perhaps some guy in some highly favorable jurisdiction in BFE"
Sorry, no. Not unless you're buying them from 1980 and it's a cast-iron boiler. I put in a brand new high-efficiency gas furnace in 2011 and it already needs replacement, because multiple expensive electronic parts have failed and repairing it is no longer a good investment. I was shocked. The explanation is that traditional boilers lasted a lot longer, but modern equipment has a 15-20 year replacement cycle, with 15 years closer to the average. This was a very expensive boiler, too. Contractor-grade equipment put into new non-bespoke builds is often even worse.
> this is probably a problem with how your local electricity market is structured
Demand charges will come to everyone. It's clearly the end game. When everyone is bullied/tricked/enticed into smart meters, the temptation will be too strong.
> time of use charges can be managed
You responded to someone who mentioned dinner. Are people to cook dinner at 2am? People in apartments to ruin their sleep with the washer running at midnight?
You can charge your EV at night. My washer is quiet enough that running it at 2AM isn't a big deal, but even then there are modern driers that use heat pumps to dry and don’t even require venting.
The electricity market up until a decade or so ago worked well for almost every consumer. Fair, equitable prices for everyone, with the energy companies and government owning the concern about how to power a nation.
Now the reality people are trying to make happen is "just invest $10-30k and turn your house into a substation", and they don't see how absurd it is compared to the very recent past. A single mother working 50 hours a week and 2 jobs doesn't have $20k for solar upgrades and can't cook at 12am and doesn't have time to take out the clothes in the morning and doesn't have 3 hours for a heat-pump dryer to eventually dry the clothes
Look, I'm from the UK, I don't need to be told how precarious our (geopolitical) situation is with natural gas. But I don't want people getting screwed in the transition.
We do have a quite regular Siemens dryer with a self-cleaning heat pump, also quite standard now. It runs for years, we've got it with the apartment, dries most loads in about 2 hours. Yes, it was probably a higher-end model when new but it's worth it - I guess it runs at least once a day on average.
It's interesting that, as of the time of writing, most of the replies to you are to point the blame at the cheap cost of natural gas, and the implied "fix" is to increase the cost of natural gas, rather than suggest ways to make electric cheaper.
Exactly. We already have a for-profit electric monopoly that gets to raise rates 7-10% per year. The elected officials grant them whatever they ask and their solar buyback rate reduces every year (maybe wouldn’t mind if I got a 7% raise each year on the electric I sell back).
I’d rather costs of all energy be reduced than people be priced out.
Natural gas is already more expensive. What people advocate is putting the actual price on the bills so people can make rational decisions.
What isn't on the bills but still affects people's pocketbooks is climate change, military funding (for countries without domestic natural gas), etc. People in Los Angeles don't see the fire damage on their gas bills, but they sure pay for it.
Making gas more expensive is exponentially easier than making electricity cheaper.
It's going to cost everyone money to get off fossil fuels. Everyone needs to understand that. We've all been individually dumping carbon into the atmosphere, and we will all need to pay individually for it.
Making electricity cheaper is exponentially easier than getting people in a democracy to choose short term pain for themselves on a politicized issue.
The difficult part is that as demand for petroleum products drop, they will get cheaper (at least initially). Electricity costs need to fall faster than oil prices as oil demand drops.
Climate change and natural gas's contribution to it are well-established facts. It's too easy for someone to politicize anything at all - climate change, vaccines, etc. - and then part of the population says, 'oh, we can't touch that'.
I think you are asking for the voters to give the government a blank check to solve the issue.
In my opinion, the only way to make this issue, or any other, exempt from voter feedback is having a very high trust in government. This trust probably peaked in the World War II era and was damaged by Vietnam.
Compare how the Salk polio vaccine was received by the public to the COVID vaccine, in spite of the fact there had been errors made with earlier polio vaccines. The trust was strong enough to surmount that.
Yes, I take the term "politicized issues" to mean anything which voters vote on directly. The remainder of issues, non-politicized, are silently handled in the background by bureaucrats and experts, with the mandate of voter trust. In this case, it would be a bureaucrat decision to cut carbon emissions, and the population would comply.
Neither contemporary presidential candidate campaigned against the Salk vaccine. It was a non-politicized issue because the trust was greater.
For scientifically bogus reasons, there is a lack of trust in the experts behind the COVID vaccine, and therefore an opportunity for political exploitation. Hence vaccines have become a political issue.
Believe me, I would rather go back to a time of voter trust.
Aha! What I meant by "politicized" is an issue like climate change, which is mostly an objective matter of evidence and rationality, turned into a political football that is a matter of my-side-vs-your-side.
It's a common technique used when the evidence and rationality are overwhelmingly against someone. Then they harp on (climate change) as (liberal) lies and oppression.
> For scientifically bogus reasons, there is a lack of trust in the experts behind the COVID vaccine, and therefore an opportunity for political exploitation. Hence vaccines have become a political issue.
I think that's backward: Politicization of COVID vaccine, with the ground laid by prior health and scientific issues, causes the distrust. The same was done by the same people to attack every other institution: Science generally, journalism, academia (e.g., elite colleges), healthcare, international relations (the State Dept and Defense Dept), Federal Reserve, 'liberal' judges, etc.
It's intentional - by politicizing the issue, it shifts influence from the institutions to the political group. Reality becomes whatever they say it is - there is no external check on them remaining.
A previous calculation was that an all-electric economy makes sense when oil costs ~400 per barrel --- since then increased efficiency in solar panels and so forth and presumably greatly reduced that figure --- anyone got the math and figures to work this out with contemporary technology?
I think you are correct and politicians know this. I.e. why did California not maneuver to save those SoCal refineries? Higher price reduces gas use and is below threshold of flipping the state Republican.
Because these are bad comparisons, a heat pump water heater and a heat pump house heater use substantially less electricity. Resistance heating sucks and will lose to burning gas locally.
With first hand knowledge I can tell you that gas is so cheap that it offsets all forms of heat pump, at least in a typical metro area (~$0.25kwH)
Speaking for myself (and I suppose the millions that are on the same utility), the only time when it's cheaper for us to use the heat pump over the gas furnace is from midnight to 6am and when the temp outside is below 20F.
That doesn't math all that well. The coefficient of performance of a heat pump is better when the outdoor temp is higher - did you mean the temp outside is -above- 20F?
You're also assuming time of use billing, I assume.
I don't disagree, btw - gas is cheaper than a heat pump for me also, which makes me sad. My only point was that you have to compare against them and not resistance heating. (That's slightly wrong - if I were to use a heat pump during the shoulder season and my boiler when it's colder it would be cheaper in operating costs but lose on capex)
> a heat pump water heater ... use[s] substantially less electricity
Is that accurate?
They use a tankless water heater so electrical use is ~zero when nobody is using hot water, which is most of the time. If you use a tank - heating ~40 gallons of water 24/7/365 - that's hard to compete with by just being more efficient.
Is there such thing as a heat pump-powered tankless water heater? I expect the challenge is the surge of energy needed to instantly warm heating elements to functioning temperatures.
There are all-electric tankless water heaters but in my limited experience they need ~120A available, which is prohibitively expensive. (Why not just a capacitor that can surge the startup energy?)
The problem is not a brief surge of startup energy; it is the total sustained power you need to heat the water for the shower.
Let's say you want to run a single shower at 2.5gpm, the water comes into the home at 55F (12.8C, pretty temperate!) and you want your shower at 100F (37.8C), so a 25C rise. 2.5gpm = 9.463 L/min = 158mL/sec. Water's heat capacity is 4.184* J/mL/degC, so the sustained thermal power you need to deliver is:
4.184 x 158 x 25 = 16.5kJ/s = 16.5kW
At 240V, 16.5kW would be almost 70A.
What makes a heat pump heater more efficient is that it multiplies the electrical power input into a larger thermal power output, by "borrowing" thermal energy from the surroundings. So you could get (for example) 15kW thermal power from 5kW electrical power. In practice the heater will be tanked, rather than tankless, for two reasons:
1. The effective power will probably be less than that.
2. That was an estimate to run just one shower and you might want to run more than that!
So the tank lets you buffer the power draw over time; there will be some thermal loss over time, but insulation is cheap, and it's hard to fight a 3-5x amplification from the heat pump.
* Yes, yes, per gram/K but 1mL of water is close enough to 1g for this.
> there will be some thermal loss over time, but insulation is cheap
FWIW, one US govt source attributes ~20% of a typical household's domestic energy usage to water heating, though the source doesn't attribute it to thermal loss or initial heating.
>They use a tankless water heater so electrical use is ~zero when nobody is using hot water, which is most of the time. If you use a tank - heating ~40 gallons of water 24/7/365 - that's hard to compete with by just being more efficient.
You need to compare this against the average heating days for their location.
Water heaters are a "incandescent lightbulbs are 100% efficient in the winter" situation.
Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets. Take the highest kW use period of the month, and multiply kW demand by $20. Run the oven; pulls 3kW; $60. Run the oven and the stove top (1.8kW) at the same time $96. Screw up one time during the month and you might as well not care about the rest of the month.
I’m being a bit hyperbolic - it’s averaged over the highest 1 hour peak demand period (4pm-7pm, M-F), but it does limit what things can be run simultaneously (no dryer, oven and AC at the same time, for example). We schedule things around that, Our peak demand for this past month was 2.3kW. That single line item charge is higher than our entire gas bill.
There’s a separate use charge as well, but per kWh that’s pretty low. Then, of course, there’s the dozens of other random charges and fees ($86) that have nothing to do with electricity generation and everything to do with being a monopoly (court resolution surcharge: $3.58). The idea of moving more things to electric is nauseating.
I agree it's not common. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone with demand charges on a residential account. That's typically for large industrial and commercial ratepayers.
It sounds like your electric company is straight up corrupt, which would indeed be a barrier to electrification. For reference, the main demand reduction my municipal electric company does is to send text messages on hot days asking us to use less air conditioning.
Commercial electric rates have long worked that way. The cheap coal power plants that were used commonly 40 years ago did not like to throttle down and so it made sense. Of course things have changed and Peak has a completely different cost structure now and so it no longer makes the sense it did 40 years ago but
Sure? I understand the fundamental problems here, but it's a residential electrical company's job to solve them as best they can with things statistical modeling and buying capacity ahead of time - not to pass them on and leave customers over a barrel!
I do understand that mine lands on the opposite side of not being the most economically optimal, compared to say variable time of use rates. I was just illustrating how out of wack the explained pricing structure is. At that point, why even bother upgrading from a 60A service?
If this is really a modern competitive cost structure with nearly free incremental electricity (great for running computers etc!) then the obvious answer is to get some batteries rather than contorting your life around the POCO's hyper-discretized schedule. But it reads to me like an electric company just putting customers over a barrel because it can. I would have to know the actual $/kWh incremental rate to think otherwise.
I don't quite understand what you're saying, and this seems like a recipe for talking past one another. In general of course there are many ways to individually mitigate a market failure, but this doesn't make it any less of a failure. And as described, OP's rate structure seems like the product of a market failure.
They themselves said that such charges aren't common from other providers, and that their POCO acts with unrestrained monopoly power to tack on a bunch of arbitrary fees. My only point was that this is part way to not even having electrical service in the first place, and is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be reigned in if we want more things to be electrified.
I don't know where OP lives or his situation. I know a few people have chosen to put their house on a rate such as he lives in because by managing of themselves they can get a better better deal overall. Those people though do have a choice and they could go on the slightly higher constant rate per kilowatt hour price that most residential, customers have.
I chose to interpret it as his choice, but if - as you seem to think - he has no choice and this is how his electric is billed, I would agree that his utility is stupid.
OP doesn't sound very happy about the arrangement to me. If it were consensual due to saving money from running a bunch of steady heavy loads (a bunch of computers etc), I wouldn't expect words like "nauseating" but rather more of a recognition that intermittent heavy loads are incompatible with something they've chosen for another reason.
You could game the crap out of this with a small home battery or a V2H capable EV.
Though, at the prices and idiocy you are citing, you could probably just cancel your electrical service and get a big house battery. If they don't allow that, you could just stop paying your electric bill entirely. They'd cut you off the grid eventually, stop billing you. Good riddance, I suppose.
> Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets.
That would be correct, I had never heard of this. it seems extremely punishing and something I would hope your government regulators are trying to fix.
The problem for you isn’t electricity it’s your local laws favouring gas and the utility extracting wealth. 86 usd in fees is more then my entire electric bill has been in the summer (the monthly fees here are 15cad a month)
I imagine your per kWh cost is also much higher too
That said I still don’t think on your math entirely holds up. Ovens and electric elements (even more so for induction) do not just draw their rated power continuously. Once they heat up they drop to a much lower duty cycle like 50%. But that is besides the point now.
A demand charge is a charge based on the highest power drawn during the billing period rather then on the amount of energy drawn.
It is more common with medium to large commercial users than with residential users.
The bill will have both the per kWh energy charge to cover energy usage and the demand charge.
So in his case it means if he cooks one meal on an induction stove that month, with no other high loads at the same time, it sets a floor of $36 on the demand charge.
The whole transition away from gas is a "never waste an opportunity" situation for the energy companies/billionaires. Through smart meters enabling 'peak demand management' (and other similarly innocuous sounding phrases), the masses are going to royally shafted.
I understand the heat pumps and EV part, but how is induction stove so much more efficient than gas stove?
Sure you're putting the heat directly into the pot, OK I get that part. But a gas stove doesn't waste 80+% of the energy to the house. And any pot on an induction stove will also heat up and lose some energy to the house as well. Induction isn't magic that just puts the energy into the food. A quick Google search shows that gas stoves are 30-55% efficient and induction are 80-95%. So maybe 3x at best, and probably more like 2x.
Or maybe I missed something! Very open to that idea.
When I had searched previously, I recall only 20% of a gas stove's energy going to the pan, but now I'm finding <40% of a gas stove's energy goes to the pan, leaving 60% wasted.
In any case the amount of energy used for cooking is dwarfed by other energy use in the home, a rounding error. The real reason to prefer induction is that it's more powerful and easier to control, in addition to being far easier to clean and also keeping the air far safer to breather.
> In any case the amount of energy used for cooking is dwarfed by other energy use in the home, a rounding error.
What? No it isn't. Baking something in an oven could take as much as 5kWh.
That's a lot of energy for 1 day.
In fact when the AC isn't running during mild weather months (September/May), cooking is probably the majority (50%+) of my home's electric use (resistive stovetop).
You presumably mean electric oven? Induction technology makes sense for a hob because what we want to do is heat up the cooking pan, there's no need for the hob itself to heat up like a gas hob, we can just induce the heating in a metal pan - but the whole point of an oven is to heat the air and then food cooks in the hot air, so we don't want induction.
Yes, electric ovens tend to be more efficient. Both the electric and gas oven need to heat air, but the gas oven produces hot waste gases which need to be disposed of, and so it can't efficiently get all of the heat energy. For bakery the even heat of an electric fan oven is a huge benefit. For roasting meat that's not true although you can purchase (my friend has one) specialist electric roasting ovens which produce the moist gradient of air like a gas oven. It's fairly marginal, if you're a great cook and you routinely roast like big chunks of cow or something you might care, otherwise the electric oven is just obviously better as well as more efficient. I do not know anybody with a gas oven, we had one when I was a kid, but that's half a century ago.
Mostly it's about safety though. About 25% of accidents in homes happen around cooking. Having an open flame is a problem, breathing the microparticles and increased CO2 also don't help. However, to be accurate, gas stoves seem to cause less accidents than resistive heating stoves, because the flame is more audible and people seem to be more careful around it. Induction is safest.
The economic efficiency can be increased, if you can get rid of the gas connection. Also, if you can store/ produce electricity, you can optimize costs further.
Compared to heating elements, possible, but that's cause heatpumps do not create heat, but move heat. They come with the disadvantage of being really slow, and would increase baseline load during nighttime.
> Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)
Nope
> Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).
How are you planning on powering all your electric appliances? And before you say solar, you are aware that the sun only shines during daytime, while peak energy usage happens in the morning and late afternoon. It would also mean that car chargers would have to be installed at workplaces for EV's to take advantage of cheap daytime energy. Good luck convincing your employer to eat that cost.
> There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra
Your fighter jets are not going to be powered by batteries any time soon.
> fossil fuel subsidies
The government also taxes fuels, I am too lazy to calculate if they are net taxed, or net subsidized (excluding externalities, of course).
> ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water,
Sure, ethanol sucks.
> externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes)
Energy ain't free, you know. Without an abundance of renewable sources available like Norway or Iceland, there is going to be a cost payed to maintain the lifestyles people have gotten used to. Solar is only a partial solution. I cannot see how grid scale chemical batteries are as clean as people make them out to be.
> How are you planning on powering all your electric appliances? And before you say solar, you are aware that the sun only shines during daytime, while peak energy usage happens in the morning and late afternoon.
You’re aware that levelized power source price comparisons quote “solar+storage”, not just solar, right? And that that price is now cheaper per MWh than combined cycle Nat gas?
Battery prices and solar prices have come down so rapidly that anyone operating on knowledge from even a few years ago are going to have a very inaccurate understanding of the landscape.
This is a good thing, because you’ve shifted usage from a peak time to a low usage time. The more uniform consumption is, the cheaper it is to supply.
Also, it’s rude to be dismissive of people’s comments, but especially so when you’re actually wrong.
They said an EV is 4x more efficient than an ICE car. You dismissed the claim with “not even close”.
Would it surprise you to learn that a 45mpg car takes about 1kwh of energy to run a mile while an EV uses 0.25-0.35 kwh per mile. That’s 3-4x more efficient.
You are not accounting where the energy came from.
Google:
> Fossil fuels generate about 60% of U.S. utility-scale electricity
If we are being generous, these power plants are around 50-60% efficient.
Motor vehicle engines are around 35-45% efficient.
If you actually go do the math and account for all the losses during each step of conversion and transmission, I think you would find that they are much closer to each-other than you think.
You have to compare energy usage all the way back to the source, otherwise you are throwing vital information.
My gotcha point was that they are slow. It would kinda suck to have the weather turn on you and then have to wait hours for the house to heat up, compared to a resistance heater that can instantly provide heat. The resistance heater can also be placed close by, compared to the heatpump that will attempt to heat up the entire room or house.
Do you have a heat pump? Because it feels like you’re just making this hypothetical up. I have HPs, they are not slow at all, heat up a cold house just fine in a reasonable amount of time.
This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense either. If the heat pump can maintain temperature when the weather is cold, it can also maintain temperature when the weather turns cold. Are you waiting for the interior of your house to become freezing before you turn the heat on? Why? Nobody does that.
Or you could die of carbon monoxide poisoning while you're looking for a jerry can because you have to walk to the gas station because your car has no gas and you cannot fill it at home, but first your wife doesn't notice that the stove didn't ignite so the whole house explodes. At night, you welded the safety shut on the hot water heater, and despite the fire taking out the electrical, the natural gas is still running, so the water heater turns into a missile, takes out a passenger plane which crashes into an oil refinery, creating a poison gas cloud that takes out a neighborhood.
You somehow survive all this and are forced to work in a coal mine so they feed you in the terrorist prison you now live in.
To add insult to injury, they make you use whale-blubber lamps for lighting.
You are so conceited. I had to replace a heat pump system at great expense in my brand new house with a gas furnace so my family would not freeze in the winter. This was a direct tax on my home purchase for which the home builder was given tax incentives to install a useless heatpump and electric backup furnace which had an element the size of a kitchen toaster that if it ran enough to heat the house would cost a thousand dollars a month.
This is not Oil and Gas marketing. This is REALITY.
Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.
If you were to confront these lack of choices yourself you would get a chance to live in the prison you see fit for everyone else.
There’s a challenge in that different heat pumps have wildly different performance characteristics, and they’re not widely understood by people. Some can’t heat effectively below 47 degrees F, others happily keep pumping out lots at -13 degrees F.
Even worse is that it seems most HVACs are totally incompetant when it comes to heat pumps too. Bunch of guys who closed the book after getting out of school and never bothered to learn anything new again.
I would be willing to bet OP got bent over by an idiot HVAC and now will never go back thanks to it. Meanwhile with a competent tech they would instead be here glowing about their experience.
Yeah, a lot of HVAC guys don’t install anything but the big chonky outdated single/dual stage domestic brands. I read this comment as he got one built in with the house, and unfortunately, since they tend not to be understood by buyers and therefore command any premium in the sale process, there’s not much of an incentive to install anything but the crappiest pump on the market. This happened to us, the last homeowners wanted to replace their old furnace right before selling, so they installed the lowest efficiency heat pump that’s legal to sell. It’s trash in cold weather. I DIY installed a cold weather rated mini split myself later, it’s incredible in cold weather, and sips power.
I went down a big rabbit hole when I installed it a couple years ago and made a little calculator to compare heat pumps based on the weather in your area and the pump temperature-efficiency curves: https://heatpushers.com
It needs some revisiting, though, I’m guessing half the links are broken by now.
> Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.
Sounds to me like you're the one unwilling to accept reality.
BTU's are BTU's regardless of their source. It sounds like your brand new house was not built to spec, or poorly designed. Any certified ASHRAE technician should be able to meet the required demand load with properly sized equipment. The consequences of fuel type should manifest in differences of up-front and ongoing expense, not comfort.
I decarbonized my 125 year old home this summer. Cold winters here, using mini split heat pumps now for heat. Previously had oil, and 90 years ago it would have used coal. Love thinking this will be the first winter this house ever had where dirty exhaust wont be going up the chimney to keep it warm.
Even without full decarbonization, my parents replaced their many-decades-old oil furnace with, IIRC, a modern gas furnace about 15 years ago. At the same time, they insulated the walls and attic of their ~1830s-era farmhouse (post-and-beam construction, lath-and-plaster interior walls) with spray-foam insulation.
Previously, they had had both an oil bill, and a fair amount of electricity that the oil furnace used to operate. After the replacement, their combined gas and electric bill was less than just their electric bill had been before.
Since then they've also added a couple of sets of solar panels, bringing the overall ongoing cost down even further. (Of course, a large portion of their grid power is already renewable—hydro power—because of where they live.)
Do be careful with the spray foam insulation, I've known a couple of folk who have had to spend a fair bit to put right the side effects caused by poorly done spray foam insulation.
We have a wooden house from 1909, insulated, but not to modern standards and many windows. The heating and hot water is provided via a 10 kW (out) modern heat pump with a 100 meter borehole into the ground. This is a fairly standard installation in Sweden. It provides all the heat needed, except for extremely cold days (-20c or lower) when a 7 kW immersion heater can provide support. This is not needed more than a few days a year where we are.
We have added a small solar installation (7kWp) and a battery pack (18kWh). It provides 90% of power needed in the summer and allows for decent peak shaving in the winter, to lower network costs.
Additionally we are Co-owners in a windpower cooperative that provides more than our share of electricity into the network. So we are essentially operating our home on wind and solar, as well as powering the electric car.
A big problem towards full electrification are those resistive extra heaters, due to their correlation across entire cities and correlation with extremely poor solar yields.
Unless there's a particular good reason to it's actually not too bad of an idea (with a hot water radiator loop in the home at least) to keep a fuel burning radiator loop heater around and just valve it off to not interfere on normal days.
Especially if the heat pump is air source (which the mentioned swedish one isn't).
It's not that I'm against full electrification, but peak cold spell heating in excess of the heat pump capacity is among the last things we ought to "electrify by force."
We'd have massive summer overcapacity at the point where we can generally afford to "just do that".
And chances are that it'd not be a resistive heater but a heat pump freezing a pool worth of water to cap the cold side temperature at just under 0C, or something the like, just because of how grid intensive the correlated load of those resistive heaters is.
It might even be cheaper to use synthetic fuel produced in summer than to 100% electrify that cold spell heating capacity.
Carbon capture is expensive but there are options from e.g. domestic waste incinerators, paper making, and generally waste wood/plant matter decomposition, where hydrogen can cheaply be added to produce methane (pipes) or propane/butane (tanker trucks with liquified gas).
One alternative to a freezing pool of water that I'm intrigued by is using thermochemical heat batteries to transport heat energy from summer to winter.
For example, evaporating a 40,000 L solution of calcium chloride brine can store 4.6 megawatt-hours(*) of thermal energy and release it in the winter by passing water vapour over the solution to dilute it. This can heat geothermal temperatures from 10°C to 27°C which can be used in in-floor heating.
But the big asterisk is that only 11% of that 4.6 megawatt-hours of that thermal energy being "stored" is held in the enthalpy of dilution, and 89% of that heat is coming from the enthalpy of vaporization, and acquiring water vapour in winter isn't so easy.
One would probably need a source of water and use geothermal heat to raise dry cold air temperature to the needed 10°C, while absorbing water vapour from a (relatively small) tank of water. The net result is more of a thermochemical heat pump rather than a thermochemical battery per se. But the point is that, other than some fans, this is not electrically powered.
Then there is the issue of storing such tanks safely underground, and more problems. Still, there might be some innovative solutions lying in this direction. For example, one can replace this open-loop system with a closed-loop vacuum system to boil water, but at the cost of far more complex and dangerous engineering.
Such thermal storage is quite leaky compared to the stability of thermochemical battery. As such it needs a large volume and low surface area, so it only works at scale. But yeah, there is some sufficiently large crossover point where the pile of dirt works better.
Oh, such tactics are still applicable to dehumidify outside air in an air source system (and possibly further extract enthalpy by freezing off the excess water captured in the "wet scrubber").
In general, using heavily salted water (not sodium chloride that's quite ineffective) to dehumidify humid cold air during heating and reject heat with a wet interface without having to source potentially scarce water to evaporate, is quite an intriguing alternative to classic fan-laden AC "condenser" coils.
Incidentally, KOH is also interesting as it dehumidifies down to quite low humidity (at least indoor-facing) before it saturates (and precipitates out), and as a side-gig scrubs CO2 that can be precipitated out with CaO/Ca(OH)2 as CaCO3 (limestone).
This can be thermally recovered at around 800~900 C to essentially "boil" the CO2 off.
IMHO a chemically appropriate wet heat exchanger based on (cross flow: easy) or (counter-flow: harer to prevent droplet formation) with just a simple corrugated structured packing should be able to operate more hygienically than a theoretically dry, practically humidity-condensing classic mini-split AC coil. And allow most dust to be washed off fully automatically from normal operation.
It'd "just" need a regenerator to dry out excess unwanted humidity, but I'd assume there's a reasonable way to boil off the excess humidity from the "salty water". Maybe the common reverse-osmosis filter materials can resist these chemicals; in that case it'd sound like a question of pressurization energy recovery; or it could be put under vacuum and a small heat pump could transfer the enthalpy of vaporization from the condenser [distilled water plus dissolved gasses, vacuum] (that isn't fully flooded due to presence of dissolved gasses in the feed) to the evaporator [salty water, same vacuum]. If the ratio of dissolved gasses relative to the extracted condensate is small enough, I'd guess a water jet "ejector pump" using that very condensate (after it's cooled down enough to not boil in the ejector) would actually work to provide the vacuum for continuously pumping the dissolved gasses that boil out along the humidity... A small centrifugal pump for that can easily be made completely sealed using magnets to transmit the torque to the impeller and a long life ceramic bearing, at least if there's a long enough pipe down to the pump to build minimum inlet pressure (against cavitation).
Also: For vacuum btw. remember the convenience of using gravity to pull a (nearly) 10m column of water down. Dissolved gasses are likely the dominant complication.
I have heard from a couple of different Swedes talking about when this was installed in their childhood/high school years. It must be reasonably common at this point in Sweden. Are there special machines that pull up to your home and bore a deep hole? That seems like very specialised work for the average contractor! Also, does the gov't offer subsidies from this (presumably) expensive home improvement?
Standard well drilling rig. Most farms around the world have their own well, so it isn't uncommon. Self sufficiency magazines used to have ads for DIY drills.
Expect to pay $10-20k for the hole but it is common in large parts of the world.
I'm very confused by the various "heat pumps can't provide enough heat" that keeps coming up in the comments here (less you than others; it's a fine question). Heat pumps can output as much heat as any other heat source. Just pick a heat pump based on BTU that matches your alternative. You can size it up more if you want. You home's electrical limit is probably at least 24kW, which typically gives you plenty to power a good sized heat pump alongside everything else.
If you go heat pump + heat pump water heater + electric washer and dryer + induction stove + electric car, you might want to upgrade, depending on your situation.
Heat pumps lose a lot of efficiency when they need to provide higher temperatures. Fossil fuel often heats the water in the radiators up to 70C in old systems, so that reasonably sized radiators have enough power to heat the poorly insulated building. You can do that with heat pumps too, but you get rubbish COP. Adding insulation or bigger radiators can be necessary to make the heat pump economically viable.
Sure, ground source heat pumps instead of air source heat pumps. You pull the thermal energy from the ground or e.g. a lake. That has almost a constant temperature all year around starting at a certain depth. These can be extremely efficient, you can get 5-6x the heat per unit of electricity consumed from these. Of course the initial investment is high as you have to drill or otherwise bury the pipes/ hoses into the ground.
When We had a whole-house heat pump installed to replace an EoL gas furnace the installation also included an energy efficiency audit. There were some places (like blowing foam at the foundation/house joint to suppress air leaks, and insulating exposed ducts in the attic) that made a significant difference. And this was for a house built 14 years ago.
Easy low-cost low-disruption insulation should be done, typically for the UK draft-proofing, and loft/cavity insulation.
But very high levels of insulation may never repay their carbon (and financial) cost when a home is heated with a heat-pump from a very low-carbon grid. It's the next part of my research programme: "understanding first" vs "fabric first".
Of course, but with a heat pump you get the combo of lower demand and much higher efficiency. In Germany for example due to high electricity prices you really need COP>3 or so to beat fossil fuel for heating economically.
German has made some absolutely brain dead energy policy decisions over the last 30 years. Choosing to decommission their fleet of nuclear reactors, not investing in developing enough wind and solar generation, building a bunch of oil pipelines to Russia.
Depends where you are, and what your start point is.
I've looked at improving old houses in Australia, and you would usually be better off putting the cash in the bank. (After heat pumps, and sometimes a battery).
Real question: As I understand, good insulation in your home helps two ways: Keep the heat inside in the winter, and keep the cold inside in the summer. Do I have that right? If yes, I understand there are lots of places in Australia with very light winters (or none at all), so they are mostly focused on cooling with A/C. Are you saying that installing significantly better insulation is not economically efficient for many Australia homes?
The area I'm in, Victoria, goes from about -4 overnight at the coldest, to 45 at absolute peak (Celcius). Energy wise we are a "more heating" area, but comfort wise I personally prioritise cooling.
It's a big place, the north is essentially a cooling year round climate.
Most of the older places have very little insulation, lots of airflow, single pane leaky windows.
Usually the areas you need to fix are air leakage, better windows (double glazing), then in ceiling insulation. In order of impact.
Our construction industry is pretty much broken, and considers double glazing advanced luxury alien technology... So it can cost so much to replace the old windows that you can run heat pumps as much as you like with the interest on the sum.
And without that the improvement from more diy insulation upgrades don't really achieve much in a monetary sense.
On the other side, we have a much better solar and battery uptake, and the cost to install is fair. So a typical house might be a leaky wooden crate, but with enough solar and battery to be comfortable anyway.
The “Urban mining” part is the most underrated part of the electrification. Few journalists or commentators get the importance of the recycling industry for batteries. First on the geopolitical side, it means that once need are covered, material can stay in the same region, so no continuous dependance to extracting regions. Second, if we manage to do that cleanely enough, it means that the environmental cost is paid only once. Third (and probably not last), it means that used batteries are still valuable assets.
China has focused on "urban mining" in their most recently published 5 year plan so if the pattern holds western journalists will be surprised to learn about the importance of this in a decade or two, probably just after a war restricts some vital supply line.
I don't think it is such a big deal to ship old batteries from rich countries to low income countries for recycling. As long as those low income countries are (long term) friendly with the rich countries. Example: The US could ship old batteries to numerous countries in Central America that would probably be happy to have a factory with good jobs. Also: Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, etc. To be clear: I am not suggesting that rich countries use low income countries to "export their pollution". Rather, I say low income countries because the ROI for battery recycling will probably be low.
I swapped my hvac for an electric heat pump. My energy usage went down. Because electricity is way too expensive and I’m okay sweating a bit in the summers and wearing jackets indoors in the winters.
Wearing jacket indoors is not a problem if your building is built like that.
I live in well insulated house. Big problem is moisture management if I don’t keep indoors fairly warm I will get walls wet especially in bathroom.
Heating up just bathroom is hard as outside is well insulated but then internal air flow cannot be blocked.
It is also not that great in the summer when it is hot outside. Cooking or any bigger screen will heat up inside of the house. But then opening windows might not help when it is high heat.
You can use dehumidifiers at a fraction of the power cost of full air heating, given that you only need to keep the surface pores of the e.g. wallpaper below a humidity that supports mold growth.
Similarly, the bathroom could gain a second insulated door-ish curtain for an airlock effect fairly easily.
I got a CO2 monitor, and noticed that it often went over 1000 ppm CO2. So I started cracking the windows slightly, which resolved it. There are downsides to sealing the house too tight.
About five years ago, I swapped my gas domestic hot water to a heat pump unit and my electric bill actually went down. Just being able to patch and insulate the roof exhaust from the gas unit saved more in spaced conditioning than the added (but minimal) electric load from the new heat pump itself.
I take it that was an indoor gas water heater? Which used your indoor cold air? So it's analogous to a decorative fireplace losing good air up the chimney.
Pretty much all gas water heaters are indoors in the US. I was worried about the electricity consumption of our heat pump water heater, but it's actually minimal.
The coefficient of power is like 5 or something, and, since it's a bit more expensive than a contractor-grade water heater, I think the manufacturer also spent an extra $10 on better internal insulation or something. It uses much less than 1/5th the energy I'd expected, even with the "turn yourself down at night" feature disabled.
Majority of gas water heaters I have seen in Southern California have been exterior in a shed, or in a garage, so not pulling good air from the living space. I can't speak to Northern California.
What kind of article shows you a newsletter pop-up as soon as you load the page? That virtually guarantees not a single person would ever enter their information because they haven't even had a single second's chance to make any sort of determination yet.
That's not quite what this is about. It is the Primary Energy Fallacy, that if you are to replace eg coal, you need to replicate its original energy content.
If 1kg of coal represents 1000 Wh, your generator loses 1/2 to waste heat, you only generate 500 Wh of usable electricity. Some analyses will state that renewable power has to replace the 1000 Wh of embedded energy within the coal, when it only needs to output 500 Wh.
If you use solar panels and generate 500 Wh directly, you have cut your energy use in half, even though the output has remained the same. An EV has a battery of ~80 kWh, equal to 2-3 gallons of gas, yet it can go a few hundred miles, a 3-4x ratio of efficiency, compared to an ICE.
I think your EV example is a better example than your coal one.
I’ve never seen anyone measure coal power by the amount of chemical energy stored inside, unless they are specifically referring to using it as a heating source. For electricity generated by coal it’s always measured as output.
Electric motors have gotten ridiculously efficient. In the right power curve you can hit 95%, which is why we have now moved onto power per unit weight and unit volume. You make the drivetrain lighter you reduce the power needed for 0-60 times, which gets you a few more percent of efficiency.
Same thing with battery power density - it’s the rocket equation. Heavy batteries don’t go far. To go farther you add battery, then more battery to carry enough power to carry the larger battery. Increase the specific energy rather than the mass, and all the extra power goes into going faster or farther.
> An EV has a battery of ~80 kWh, equal to 2-3 gallons of gas, yet it can go a few hundred miles, a 3-4x ratio of efficiency, compared to an ICE.
Now compare size and weight of the battery with 3 gallons of gas. I can carry hundreds of miles of travel on my person if it's gas, I can't carry much battery though.
A good visualisation for this I think are linked. Petrol/diesel use about 20% of the available energy and electric vehicles use about 80-90% for moving the vehicle.
Modern internal-combustion engines have 35% to 40% efficiency, with even efficiencies of over 50% for the very big 2-stroke Diesel engines used in ships.
Nonetheless that remains about half of the efficiency of electric vehicles and the energy efficiency of the latter can be greatly increased over this ratio by the recovery of the kinetic or gravitational energy, when braking or descending.
Electrical transmission lines lose power, too. So does generating the electricity. So does the electric motors. So does the heavier weight of the EV. Regenerative braking doesn't apply when cruising on the highway.
And so on.
P.S. Since I drive a stick, I coast a lot. I live in a hilly area, and have a pretty good feel for just how and where I can shift into neutral and coast. I also coast towards a red light with the goal of reaching the intersection just when it turns green. (Moving forward from a dead stop uses lots of energy.)
Unless your manual transmission car has a carburetor, "coasting" in neutral is worse for consumption.
Anything with electronic fueling will cut fuel during engine overrun. Staying in gear while coasting uses zero fuel. If you pull the clutch, the engine has to fuel enough to idle instead, which is actually a really inefficient fueling regime.
Meanwhile, fossil fuels are only 'cheap' because the users are pushing the negative externalities off on everyone else in the world. Priced properly they'd be even more costly than they already are.
Why? I didn't start using more energy elsewhere when I switched to an EV or electric lawn maintenance tools. You think companies and people are using exactly as much power as available (or they can afford)?
It's a well-known "paradox" known as Jevons Paradox. Given enough efficient use of a resource, overall usage could actually far outpace the efficiency gains. E.g. use of coal got efficient enough that travel via trains using it became possible, which led to way more usage of coal.
Can confirm Jevons Paradox. But in a more environmentally friendly way.
Just took my house onto off-grid solar, yet my energy consumption now exceeds when I was on utility grid power.
Naturally we ration things when they're expensive. But now I don't feel the need to turn off the lights or appliances when I leave my home, and my EV driving has gone up knowing that "fuel" is essentially free from here on out. And to soak up excess solar, I run multiple computers and servers 24/7 with reckless abandon.
Driving more is not environmentally friendly, even in an EV. You're putting more wear and tear on the tires and brakes, which are not sustainably manufactured. And more road traffic means more repaving, requiring diesel vehicles and massive amounts of tar.
"Free" fuel for you just pushes the externalities elsewhere.
How far does it scale? Because I imagine there must be diminishing returns at some point. And even so, having a lot more renewable energy also means less cancer.
Yes there are diminishing returns, but they're a long way from where you start.
Pre-industrial revolution most people in my country own enough clothing for everyday and then maybe some extra stuff for "best" appearance like church. Making a shirt requires hours of labour from skilled workers. The machines eliminate one of those jobs ("hand" weaving, using a loom that you operate at human scale, replaced by enormous machine looms which produce much more fabric and much faster with far less human labour) and streamline others so that the price of a garment collapses. So people buy a lot more garments. You probably own enough clothes that you can wear different clothes each day for at least a week, likely more, and you think nothing of it.
Most people won't buy so many clothes that they can't even wear items once, but many get pretty close, and so worldwide we produce hugely more clothing per person than before the textile mills were first built.
The crux of Jevon's paradox is that you’re lowering the cost of revenue below the sale price.
If I can generate $10 a sale then I’ll do no sales if it costs me $11 . If gas drops from $4 to $2 then I’ll do as many sales as I can as $9 is less than $10.
I mean, right now, supposedly, we don't have enough energy to run as many AI data centers as everyone wants to build, and so big tech is getting into the power plant business to scale up: they'd love it if you stopped using energy they want to buy!
It kinda depends on where the energy is coming from.
I was brought up to "save energy ". Lights switched off when not in thevroom, that sort of thing.
Now I gave solar on the roof. There's an excess production capability, so now, during most days it doesn't matter if stuff is on or off. That especially applies to AC which I'll happily turn on on hot summer days. In effect I use more "because it's there to be used".
My EV is coming soon and given I can charge it on solar I plan to do a lot more day-trips-out over weekends etc.
So you're right, availability and affordability- but electrifying is great (for me) for both those things.
World energy production is increasing with solar coming to the forefront.
It is something overlooked by various reports of "In X amount of time, Y is projected to consume Z% of electricity" that the average increase in world electricity production is about 3% per year.
And the average increase in world population is about 1% per year, plus the bulk of the existing population is 'developing' i.e industrialization.
As fast as solar, wind, etc electricity production grows, the number of people requiring it grows along-side.
Also, 'renewable' is misleading, 'replaceable' is more accurate, all renewable energy generators wear out as everything does and need to be replaced using non-renewable energy mostly (you can't build solar panels from solar panel energy)
For the same reason there were no solar panels prior to 1800, there was not an excess of societal energy to invent and produce them. Solar panels are not trees.
And relying on trees is not a great idea either, look at Easter Island, lol.
(GPT has all the answers anyway, no need to ask me, I'm an old man with no issue and no stake in this stuff)
There were no solar panels because we didn’t know how to build them until the 20th century. Today you can run the factories that make them on renewable energy without a problem.
You can do the whole process from mining and recycling to installation using solar power. Trucks, furnaces, cargo ships can all be electrified. The only reason we're not doing that today is fossil fuels are still cheaper.
I agree with a lot of what you say, except the bit about "cargo ships can all be electrified". It is more likely that they will use ammonia or hydrogen that are fully produced using only electricity (and some air/water).
and that production of hydrogen (as a base for either ammonia or methanol production) will likely come via electrical cracking .. but it might also come as a result of atmospheric carbon sequestration in ultramafic rock: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-orange-hydrogen-western-austra...
I would guess you've been huffing anti-net-zero stuff which often relies on estimates from 15-20 years ago for the production costs of solar PV and chooses rainy Northern Europe for the insolation curves so as to get an EROEI number that they can trumpet as too low to make sense for generation.
But even then the numbers are positive, they just don't make good economic sense.
Today's numbers embarrass CCGT which is why these same fools will now tell you the problem isn't solar PV it's the batteries, the batteries are too expensive you see, so it's all pointless according to them. Weirdly the answer is always more Fossil Fuels. No matter what the question is, or what the facts suggest, they can assure you that somehow it turns out the answer was Fossil Fuels.
The 'half' figure is mostly primary vs final energy accounting. A heat pump delivers 3-4 kWh of heat per kWh of electricity (COP 300-400%), and an EV turns ~80-90% of stored energy into motion vs ~25-35% for an ICE drivetrain. So electrifying heat and transport shrinks final energy demand even before counting upstream losses (refining, thermal generation - roughly 60% rejected energy in most Sankey diagrams of the current system).
The comment below about electricity prices is the real friction point though. Where time-of-use rates exist, running a heat pump with thermal pre-heating during cheap midday solar hours changes the math entirely - the building itself becomes the battery. I got into tracking my own load against TOU windows and ended up building a small tool for it (energy-iq.app); shifting ~40% of consumption off-peak ended up worth more than any single efficiency upgrade. Electrification halves the energy; rate-aware scheduling is what makes it halve the bill.
Once vehicle to home standardizes (probably not until a competent federal government forces it, at least in the US), then TOU billing becomes a non-issue.
Just reserve 10-20% of your vehicle range to load smoothing, and the entire house can go to negative use during TOU premium windows. (Ideally, with the hypothetical competent gov't the TOU surcharges would be forced to be symmetric, so going slightly negative during peak hours would end up creating a large negative power bill until the surplus charges became obsolete and trended to zero).
The latest tech is using Bitcoin mining to heat water. If you're going to use resistive heating anyway I don't hate it, even though I'm a big crypto currency skeptic.
Global population approximately: 8.44E+09, Energy to heat 1 liter of water in electric kettle: 80 watt hours, 1 Watt hour ~ 2.78E-15 exajoules. Global energy consumption approximately: 600 exajoules.
8.44E+980 watt hours(2.78E-15 exajoules/watthours)= 1.88E-03 exajoules
1.88E-03/600 = 3.12E-6 or .000312% of the global energy use.
In simple words. Banning kettles would do nothing to cut global energy use.
A quick search says 200 TWh for bitcoin mining per year, out of a total of 31 000 TWh of electricity generation, that is, 0.6%, or 600 times more than what you thought.
I only now got around to watching the Technology Connections video on renewable energy, I wish I had seen it sooner. Almost feels like it should be required viewing. I definitely thought there were nastier chemicals/compounds in solar panels and hadn't updated my knowledge on them in decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
The anti-renewables misinformation seems high in some places of the world.
Can I ask if you are in the US?
It seems better in the EU where a lot of people happily embraced residential solar
I asked before about rooftop solar because it seems so well suited to the US, especially the Southern US. Loads of large single family dwellings => each roof is owned by a single electricity bill payer, even if they're not owned outright because there's a mortgage, surely a lender can be prevailed upon to lend for Solar PV too?
Most of the EU has higher household electricity bills so rooftop solar makes faster economic sense. So that's probably part of it. A capital expenditure now which pays back in 5-10 years is quite different from one which pays back over 20 years.
I am still baffled that no electric car dealership worked out selling a garage covered in solar panels as a financing add-one for a new vehicle purchase --- even as a publicity stunt it seems the sort of thing one could have gotten a good bit of coverage with.
I have wondered about this actually - it would be amazing to have a single product which is a carport with preinstalled panels, non-grid-tied-inverter and charger. Then there's no electrical component of the installation on site, you just assemble. Most of the complications of installation would go away, you just concrete in four posts.
Thanks. I will try to talk to dealerships. Sounds like a good sales channel.
If nothing else, you could maybe get some sales leads (I'm assuming you run a building contractor/solar panel install business?) --- fall-back position buy the new car purchase information for the relevant zip codes? (this must be pretty inexpensive to purchase judging by the junk mail caused by my wife's new car purchase)
Solar’s payback time is poor, and comes close to lifetimes, leaving not much time for pure profit. Plus grid rules are bad and often hostile to individual solar, further breaking the economic model. And few have the extra income to spend on such long term returns.
Can you share some numbers? In Belgium I paid it back in 6 years. In South Africa where I live now, it'll take about 8 years. And as a big bonus it solved load shedding when that happened in 2023-2024.
33 months in this corner of India, disregarding tariff rises and increased consumption.
Nonsense. I've just installed PV in the north of England and my payback is in the order of five years, even with the gloom of our seasons.
Large swathes of the US have hours of uninterrupted sunshine all year round. With a battery, a residential owner may never need to pay an electricity bill for the lifetime of the system.
As GP said, "grid rules are bad and often hostile to individual solar". That's the whole story, in my part of the USA.
You'll have to be a bit more specific - is it export restrictions, or connection limits or what?
Even if you go for something that isn't grid tied then you're still breaking even within years if you spec it right.
Obviously if you've got grid electricity that's almost too cheap to meter than I wouldn't bother but for most of the western world the economics to not install solar simply aren't there.
I’m in Canada, payback on my 7.3kw system will be 7 years.
I got an interest free loan for the full cost, so nothing out of pocket, just putting the money I would have spent on electricity onto the loan for 7 years, the will profit $1000 a year for 20 years.
Worlds biggest no brainer.
I've been in Japan since 2015, but am from the US so that is where I had gotten most of my information. At the same time, I don't own a house and haven't been in a position where I had to decide solar vs. something else.
That video friggin' radicalised me. It's SO unbelievably goddamned stupid that we don't invest everything in what is essentially free energy that will last for decades right now. It solves SO many problems, and even removes a few of the biggest objections people have to AI datacenters. The tech is there, it's mature, and it would make all of our lives materially better so we could spend our time and money on other things that would make our lives better.
To say nothing of the fact it would end wars over oil, facilitate cheap desalination, and solve so many other resource constraints.
This is the next big revolution we should be focused on - not the mass-IP-theft slop bots.
There never were nasty chemicals in silicon PV. It's not that you needed to update formerly correct information, it's that you've been lied to for decades.
[dead]
1) EVs are 4 - 5X efficient
2) Heatpumps are 4 - 5X efficient
3) Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)
Transportation, heating and cooling, cooking are all 4 - 5X efficient.
Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).
There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra, fossil fuel subsidies, ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water, externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes). Fossil Fuels Are Half the fossil fuels of shipping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619394
I use gas for stovetop cooking, heat, and water heating (tankless). The demand charge for running an induction stove at dinner would be around $36. The an electric tankless water heater would be around $72. An electric furnace would cost $180. If those run at the same time (which may or may not be hard to control) the demand charge stacks.
My natural gas bill for a month is around $40 with no time of use restrictions. Effectively cheaper than turning any one of those things on during peak demand hours.
Per energy unit, all of those may be more efficient. Per dollar, they are not.
This is a political issue. Fossil fuel is cheaper because consumers doesn't pay the external costs associated with them.
Not all problems can be solved by just telling people to vote themselves poorer because it suits some people.
If you have a $35 demand charge for an induction stove, the political problem is that people have already voted themselves into very expensive energy.
The energy transition to clean energy is to a cheaper energy future.
Fossil fuels are not only more expensive, they cause tons of health problems from their pollution, in addition to climate change.
It doesn’t suit “other people”. It suit every single human in the long run. Problem is, not short term.
Okay, vote to stop giving your tax money to fossil fuel billionaires. Vote yourself richer
Natural gas is very convenient in many places, with sunk cost infrastructure and plenty to tap relatively nearby in the ground. But not in all places, I don’t get why countries like Japan are importing liquified natural gas. Or European, who gets much of it from Russia.
Much of Europe is importing fossil gas because they have made themselves dependent on it, because it used to be cheap, because they didn't have to pay the external costs.
Though you can count the tax dollars that go to the military as part of that cost
50% of your federal tax bill funds foreign wars and military weapons that are then turned on civilian populations including our own.
Sounds like you could benefit from some storage. If everyone was able to use their EV for personal energy storage (known as V2H, vehicle-to-house), or even feed into the grid and be paid for it (known as V2G, vehicle-to-grid), that intermittency problem would be greatly mitigated.
Maybe due to subsidies in your area? Or simply the impact on the environment of gas isn't accounted into your bill?
[dead]
A couple responses.
1) heat pump appliances are much more energy efficient (they move heat rather than convert it from electronics or molecules, and modern heat pumps work well in most cold climates (and you can also utilize resistive heating for the short period your outside of their optimal operating range)
2) time of use charges can be managed by smart applications and/or a whole home battery (and the battery gives you extra resiliency in case of an outage)
3) this is probably a problem with how your local electricity market is structured. ERCOT (Texas) developed and energy-only and has the cheapest electric rates in the nation (granted lots of this is due to abundant natural gas and renewables in the state) while other markets (say PJM in the north east) have energy + capacity markets and have seen huge (11x) increase in prices on the capacity market side.
Electric utilities are trying to manage not use resource adequacy (having enough generation) but transmission adequacy as well (having enough head room on transmission line to move power around without the lines burning up). But many utilities have been slow to adopt new technologies that would allow the to squeeze more capacity out of their existing infrastructure (things like dynamic line ratings, or distributed energy resources)
We need to do the work to align the economic/market incentives so that using more efficient technologies is actually cheaper.
The incentives under a power monopoly are perverse.
Suggesting someone spend $25-$30k to transition gas infrastructure to electric ($6k furnace, $2k cooktop, $4k water heater, $15k battery) to offset their $40/month gas bill is also not a winning argument.
Without market pressure, what incentive is there for an electric company to optimize anything? Transitioning away from gas only makes them more entrenched.
You don't have to transition. But your furnace will eventually wear out, and your stove will too. Or you'll build a new house, and then you're looking at a major new investment. Make a smart one.
>But your furnace will eventually wear out,
30-50yr
> and your stove will too.
10-30yr
>Or you'll build a new house,
Only professionals build houses because the sum total of "strings attached" that have been added create too much overhead for anyone else (save perhaps some guy in some highly favorable jurisdiction in BFE"
> 30-50yr
Sorry, no. Not unless you're buying them from 1980 and it's a cast-iron boiler. I put in a brand new high-efficiency gas furnace in 2011 and it already needs replacement, because multiple expensive electronic parts have failed and repairing it is no longer a good investment. I was shocked. The explanation is that traditional boilers lasted a lot longer, but modern equipment has a 15-20 year replacement cycle, with 15 years closer to the average. This was a very expensive boiler, too. Contractor-grade equipment put into new non-bespoke builds is often even worse.
To save you the trouble of searching yourself: https://claude.ai/share/e84e4f25-656e-49d9-b58d-65f97e0eeaf7
[flagged]
> this is probably a problem with how your local electricity market is structured
Demand charges will come to everyone. It's clearly the end game. When everyone is bullied/tricked/enticed into smart meters, the temptation will be too strong.
> time of use charges can be managed
You responded to someone who mentioned dinner. Are people to cook dinner at 2am? People in apartments to ruin their sleep with the washer running at midnight?
Peak demand is mostly covered using a home battery. You can then refill the battery overnight when rates and overall demand on the grid are lower.
Smoothing out household demand on the grid is the future.
You can charge your EV at night. My washer is quiet enough that running it at 2AM isn't a big deal, but even then there are modern driers that use heat pumps to dry and don’t even require venting.
> You can charge your EV at night
Really shows how out of touch HN can be at times
The electricity market up until a decade or so ago worked well for almost every consumer. Fair, equitable prices for everyone, with the energy companies and government owning the concern about how to power a nation.
Now the reality people are trying to make happen is "just invest $10-30k and turn your house into a substation", and they don't see how absurd it is compared to the very recent past. A single mother working 50 hours a week and 2 jobs doesn't have $20k for solar upgrades and can't cook at 12am and doesn't have time to take out the clothes in the morning and doesn't have 3 hours for a heat-pump dryer to eventually dry the clothes
Look, I'm from the UK, I don't need to be told how precarious our (geopolitical) situation is with natural gas. But I don't want people getting screwed in the transition.
We do have a quite regular Siemens dryer with a self-cleaning heat pump, also quite standard now. It runs for years, we've got it with the apartment, dries most loads in about 2 hours. Yes, it was probably a higher-end model when new but it's worth it - I guess it runs at least once a day on average.
Expect that cost to rise as the infrastructure for gas disappears.
Sounds like inventive to not let that infrastructure disappear.
It's interesting that, as of the time of writing, most of the replies to you are to point the blame at the cheap cost of natural gas, and the implied "fix" is to increase the cost of natural gas, rather than suggest ways to make electric cheaper.
Exactly. We already have a for-profit electric monopoly that gets to raise rates 7-10% per year. The elected officials grant them whatever they ask and their solar buyback rate reduces every year (maybe wouldn’t mind if I got a 7% raise each year on the electric I sell back).
I’d rather costs of all energy be reduced than people be priced out.
Natural gas is already more expensive. What people advocate is putting the actual price on the bills so people can make rational decisions.
What isn't on the bills but still affects people's pocketbooks is climate change, military funding (for countries without domestic natural gas), etc. People in Los Angeles don't see the fire damage on their gas bills, but they sure pay for it.
Making gas more expensive is exponentially easier than making electricity cheaper.
It's going to cost everyone money to get off fossil fuels. Everyone needs to understand that. We've all been individually dumping carbon into the atmosphere, and we will all need to pay individually for it.
Making electricity cheaper is exponentially easier than getting people in a democracy to choose short term pain for themselves on a politicized issue.
The difficult part is that as demand for petroleum products drop, they will get cheaper (at least initially). Electricity costs need to fall faster than oil prices as oil demand drops.
> on a politicized issue
Climate change and natural gas's contribution to it are well-established facts. It's too easy for someone to politicize anything at all - climate change, vaccines, etc. - and then part of the population says, 'oh, we can't touch that'.
I think you are asking for the voters to give the government a blank check to solve the issue.
In my opinion, the only way to make this issue, or any other, exempt from voter feedback is having a very high trust in government. This trust probably peaked in the World War II era and was damaged by Vietnam.
Compare how the Salk polio vaccine was received by the public to the COVID vaccine, in spite of the fact there had been errors made with earlier polio vaccines. The trust was strong enough to surmount that.
> I think you are asking for the voters to give the government a blank check to solve the issue.
Could you tell me what in my comment says or implies that?
Yes, I take the term "politicized issues" to mean anything which voters vote on directly. The remainder of issues, non-politicized, are silently handled in the background by bureaucrats and experts, with the mandate of voter trust. In this case, it would be a bureaucrat decision to cut carbon emissions, and the population would comply.
Neither contemporary presidential candidate campaigned against the Salk vaccine. It was a non-politicized issue because the trust was greater.
For scientifically bogus reasons, there is a lack of trust in the experts behind the COVID vaccine, and therefore an opportunity for political exploitation. Hence vaccines have become a political issue.
Believe me, I would rather go back to a time of voter trust.
Aha! What I meant by "politicized" is an issue like climate change, which is mostly an objective matter of evidence and rationality, turned into a political football that is a matter of my-side-vs-your-side.
It's a common technique used when the evidence and rationality are overwhelmingly against someone. Then they harp on (climate change) as (liberal) lies and oppression.
> For scientifically bogus reasons, there is a lack of trust in the experts behind the COVID vaccine, and therefore an opportunity for political exploitation. Hence vaccines have become a political issue.
I think that's backward: Politicization of COVID vaccine, with the ground laid by prior health and scientific issues, causes the distrust. The same was done by the same people to attack every other institution: Science generally, journalism, academia (e.g., elite colleges), healthcare, international relations (the State Dept and Defense Dept), Federal Reserve, 'liberal' judges, etc.
It's intentional - by politicizing the issue, it shifts influence from the institutions to the political group. Reality becomes whatever they say it is - there is no external check on them remaining.
A previous calculation was that an all-electric economy makes sense when oil costs ~400 per barrel --- since then increased efficiency in solar panels and so forth and presumably greatly reduced that figure --- anyone got the math and figures to work this out with contemporary technology?
I think you are correct and politicians know this. I.e. why did California not maneuver to save those SoCal refineries? Higher price reduces gas use and is below threshold of flipping the state Republican.
Because these are bad comparisons, a heat pump water heater and a heat pump house heater use substantially less electricity. Resistance heating sucks and will lose to burning gas locally.
With first hand knowledge I can tell you that gas is so cheap that it offsets all forms of heat pump, at least in a typical metro area (~$0.25kwH)
Speaking for myself (and I suppose the millions that are on the same utility), the only time when it's cheaper for us to use the heat pump over the gas furnace is from midnight to 6am and when the temp outside is below 20F.
That doesn't math all that well. The coefficient of performance of a heat pump is better when the outdoor temp is higher - did you mean the temp outside is -above- 20F?
You're also assuming time of use billing, I assume.
I don't disagree, btw - gas is cheaper than a heat pump for me also, which makes me sad. My only point was that you have to compare against them and not resistance heating. (That's slightly wrong - if I were to use a heat pump during the shoulder season and my boiler when it's colder it would be cheaper in operating costs but lose on capex)
Yes, sorry, should read above 20F
[dead]
> a heat pump water heater ... use[s] substantially less electricity
Is that accurate?
They use a tankless water heater so electrical use is ~zero when nobody is using hot water, which is most of the time. If you use a tank - heating ~40 gallons of water 24/7/365 - that's hard to compete with by just being more efficient.
Is there such thing as a heat pump-powered tankless water heater? I expect the challenge is the surge of energy needed to instantly warm heating elements to functioning temperatures.
There are all-electric tankless water heaters but in my limited experience they need ~120A available, which is prohibitively expensive. (Why not just a capacitor that can surge the startup energy?)
The problem is not a brief surge of startup energy; it is the total sustained power you need to heat the water for the shower.
Let's say you want to run a single shower at 2.5gpm, the water comes into the home at 55F (12.8C, pretty temperate!) and you want your shower at 100F (37.8C), so a 25C rise. 2.5gpm = 9.463 L/min = 158mL/sec. Water's heat capacity is 4.184* J/mL/degC, so the sustained thermal power you need to deliver is:
4.184 x 158 x 25 = 16.5kJ/s = 16.5kW
At 240V, 16.5kW would be almost 70A.
What makes a heat pump heater more efficient is that it multiplies the electrical power input into a larger thermal power output, by "borrowing" thermal energy from the surroundings. So you could get (for example) 15kW thermal power from 5kW electrical power. In practice the heater will be tanked, rather than tankless, for two reasons:
1. The effective power will probably be less than that.
2. That was an estimate to run just one shower and you might want to run more than that!
So the tank lets you buffer the power draw over time; there will be some thermal loss over time, but insulation is cheap, and it's hard to fight a 3-5x amplification from the heat pump.
* Yes, yes, per gram/K but 1mL of water is close enough to 1g for this.
> there will be some thermal loss over time, but insulation is cheap
FWIW, one US govt source attributes ~20% of a typical household's domestic energy usage to water heating, though the source doesn't attribute it to thermal loss or initial heating.
It is unlikely that a heat pump could heat water that quickly to be "tankless."
>They use a tankless water heater so electrical use is ~zero when nobody is using hot water, which is most of the time. If you use a tank - heating ~40 gallons of water 24/7/365 - that's hard to compete with by just being more efficient.
You need to compare this against the average heating days for their location.
Water heaters are a "incandescent lightbulbs are 100% efficient in the winter" situation.
You’re probably right about the furnace and I’ll look into when ours need replacing. At the moment, a tanked heater isn’t practical.
The other issue is the for-profit electric monopoly. The elimination of gas will just mean they can extract even more from their customers.
And an induction cooktop is more expensive than a normal electric one.
Not true everywhere in the world but it is in the US. We need builder grade induction stoves
> The demand charge for running an induction stove at dinner would be around $36.
For one meal? For the month? How did you even this? What is your cost per kWh?
Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets. Take the highest kW use period of the month, and multiply kW demand by $20. Run the oven; pulls 3kW; $60. Run the oven and the stove top (1.8kW) at the same time $96. Screw up one time during the month and you might as well not care about the rest of the month.
I’m being a bit hyperbolic - it’s averaged over the highest 1 hour peak demand period (4pm-7pm, M-F), but it does limit what things can be run simultaneously (no dryer, oven and AC at the same time, for example). We schedule things around that, Our peak demand for this past month was 2.3kW. That single line item charge is higher than our entire gas bill.
There’s a separate use charge as well, but per kWh that’s pretty low. Then, of course, there’s the dozens of other random charges and fees ($86) that have nothing to do with electricity generation and everything to do with being a monopoly (court resolution surcharge: $3.58). The idea of moving more things to electric is nauseating.
I agree it's not common. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone with demand charges on a residential account. That's typically for large industrial and commercial ratepayers.
Where do you live, with what power company?
It sounds like your electric company is straight up corrupt, which would indeed be a barrier to electrification. For reference, the main demand reduction my municipal electric company does is to send text messages on hot days asking us to use less air conditioning.
Commercial electric rates have long worked that way. The cheap coal power plants that were used commonly 40 years ago did not like to throttle down and so it made sense. Of course things have changed and Peak has a completely different cost structure now and so it no longer makes the sense it did 40 years ago but
Sure? I understand the fundamental problems here, but it's a residential electrical company's job to solve them as best they can with things statistical modeling and buying capacity ahead of time - not to pass them on and leave customers over a barrel!
I do understand that mine lands on the opposite side of not being the most economically optimal, compared to say variable time of use rates. I was just illustrating how out of wack the explained pricing structure is. At that point, why even bother upgrading from a 60A service?
If this is really a modern competitive cost structure with nearly free incremental electricity (great for running computers etc!) then the obvious answer is to get some batteries rather than contorting your life around the POCO's hyper-discretized schedule. But it reads to me like an electric company just putting customers over a barrel because it can. I would have to know the actual $/kWh incremental rate to think otherwise.
You have more options to manage this and so can get a lower total cost.
I don't quite understand what you're saying, and this seems like a recipe for talking past one another. In general of course there are many ways to individually mitigate a market failure, but this doesn't make it any less of a failure. And as described, OP's rate structure seems like the product of a market failure.
They themselves said that such charges aren't common from other providers, and that their POCO acts with unrestrained monopoly power to tack on a bunch of arbitrary fees. My only point was that this is part way to not even having electrical service in the first place, and is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be reigned in if we want more things to be electrified.
I don't know where OP lives or his situation. I know a few people have chosen to put their house on a rate such as he lives in because by managing of themselves they can get a better better deal overall. Those people though do have a choice and they could go on the slightly higher constant rate per kilowatt hour price that most residential, customers have.
I chose to interpret it as his choice, but if - as you seem to think - he has no choice and this is how his electric is billed, I would agree that his utility is stupid.
OP doesn't sound very happy about the arrangement to me. If it were consensual due to saving money from running a bunch of steady heavy loads (a bunch of computers etc), I wouldn't expect words like "nauseating" but rather more of a recognition that intermittent heavy loads are incompatible with something they've chosen for another reason.
You could game the crap out of this with a small home battery or a V2H capable EV.
Though, at the prices and idiocy you are citing, you could probably just cancel your electrical service and get a big house battery. If they don't allow that, you could just stop paying your electric bill entirely. They'd cut you off the grid eventually, stop billing you. Good riddance, I suppose.
> Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets.
That would be correct, I had never heard of this. it seems extremely punishing and something I would hope your government regulators are trying to fix.
The problem for you isn’t electricity it’s your local laws favouring gas and the utility extracting wealth. 86 usd in fees is more then my entire electric bill has been in the summer (the monthly fees here are 15cad a month)
I imagine your per kWh cost is also much higher too
That said I still don’t think on your math entirely holds up. Ovens and electric elements (even more so for induction) do not just draw their rated power continuously. Once they heat up they drop to a much lower duty cycle like 50%. But that is besides the point now.
A demand charge is a charge based on the highest power drawn during the billing period rather then on the amount of energy drawn.
It is more common with medium to large commercial users than with residential users.
The bill will have both the per kWh energy charge to cover energy usage and the demand charge.
So in his case it means if he cooks one meal on an induction stove that month, with no other high loads at the same time, it sets a floor of $36 on the demand charge.
Yep TIL, It’s not a thing anywhere in my country that I am aware of.
Since they are comparing to the cost for a month of gas, I would assume it’s per month.
Winter gas bills soar to $200+/mo for a small house.
Those dollar figures, ouch.
The whole transition away from gas is a "never waste an opportunity" situation for the energy companies/billionaires. Through smart meters enabling 'peak demand management' (and other similarly innocuous sounding phrases), the masses are going to royally shafted.
I understand the heat pumps and EV part, but how is induction stove so much more efficient than gas stove?
Sure you're putting the heat directly into the pot, OK I get that part. But a gas stove doesn't waste 80+% of the energy to the house. And any pot on an induction stove will also heat up and lose some energy to the house as well. Induction isn't magic that just puts the energy into the food. A quick Google search shows that gas stoves are 30-55% efficient and induction are 80-95%. So maybe 3x at best, and probably more like 2x.
Or maybe I missed something! Very open to that idea.
When I had searched previously, I recall only 20% of a gas stove's energy going to the pan, but now I'm finding <40% of a gas stove's energy goes to the pan, leaving 60% wasted.
In any case the amount of energy used for cooking is dwarfed by other energy use in the home, a rounding error. The real reason to prefer induction is that it's more powerful and easier to control, in addition to being far easier to clean and also keeping the air far safer to breather.
> In any case the amount of energy used for cooking is dwarfed by other energy use in the home, a rounding error.
What? No it isn't. Baking something in an oven could take as much as 5kWh.
That's a lot of energy for 1 day.
In fact when the AC isn't running during mild weather months (September/May), cooking is probably the majority (50%+) of my home's electric use (resistive stovetop).
Well when talking about induction, ovens aren't super relevant.
But overall, here's average US consumption:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_energy_consumptionIs there an induction oven that is more efficient than a gas oven?
You presumably mean electric oven? Induction technology makes sense for a hob because what we want to do is heat up the cooking pan, there's no need for the hob itself to heat up like a gas hob, we can just induce the heating in a metal pan - but the whole point of an oven is to heat the air and then food cooks in the hot air, so we don't want induction.
Yes, electric ovens tend to be more efficient. Both the electric and gas oven need to heat air, but the gas oven produces hot waste gases which need to be disposed of, and so it can't efficiently get all of the heat energy. For bakery the even heat of an electric fan oven is a huge benefit. For roasting meat that's not true although you can purchase (my friend has one) specialist electric roasting ovens which produce the moist gradient of air like a gas oven. It's fairly marginal, if you're a great cook and you routinely roast like big chunks of cow or something you might care, otherwise the electric oven is just obviously better as well as more efficient. I do not know anybody with a gas oven, we had one when I was a kid, but that's half a century ago.
Mostly it's about safety though. About 25% of accidents in homes happen around cooking. Having an open flame is a problem, breathing the microparticles and increased CO2 also don't help. However, to be accurate, gas stoves seem to cause less accidents than resistive heating stoves, because the flame is more audible and people seem to be more careful around it. Induction is safest.
The economic efficiency can be increased, if you can get rid of the gas connection. Also, if you can store/ produce electricity, you can optimize costs further.
2-3x sounds correct, but I'd also account for a more precise heat control being a factor as well.
Even being very experienced with a given range I'm still tempurature surfing for the most part where with induction I can set it to an exact 165F.
> defense budget to protect oil infra
If there were no oil, the defense budget would likely be the same.
The defense budget spend will continue with nuclear, storage, transmission, and solar sites.
I hope a case could be made that there is less supply chain to defend though at a lower cost.
> EVs are 4 - 5X efficient
Not even close
> Heatpumps are 4 - 5X efficient
Compared to heating elements, possible, but that's cause heatpumps do not create heat, but move heat. They come with the disadvantage of being really slow, and would increase baseline load during nighttime.
> Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)
Nope
> Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).
How are you planning on powering all your electric appliances? And before you say solar, you are aware that the sun only shines during daytime, while peak energy usage happens in the morning and late afternoon. It would also mean that car chargers would have to be installed at workplaces for EV's to take advantage of cheap daytime energy. Good luck convincing your employer to eat that cost.
> There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra
Your fighter jets are not going to be powered by batteries any time soon.
> fossil fuel subsidies
The government also taxes fuels, I am too lazy to calculate if they are net taxed, or net subsidized (excluding externalities, of course).
> ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water,
Sure, ethanol sucks.
> externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes)
Energy ain't free, you know. Without an abundance of renewable sources available like Norway or Iceland, there is going to be a cost payed to maintain the lifestyles people have gotten used to. Solar is only a partial solution. I cannot see how grid scale chemical batteries are as clean as people make them out to be.
> > EVs are 4 - 5X efficient > Not even close
Cybercab is supposedly >200 mpge.
> How are you planning on powering all your electric appliances? And before you say solar, you are aware that the sun only shines during daytime, while peak energy usage happens in the morning and late afternoon.
You’re aware that levelized power source price comparisons quote “solar+storage”, not just solar, right? And that that price is now cheaper per MWh than combined cycle Nat gas?
Battery prices and solar prices have come down so rapidly that anyone operating on knowledge from even a few years ago are going to have a very inaccurate understanding of the landscape.
> would increase baseline load during nighttime.
This is a good thing, because you’ve shifted usage from a peak time to a low usage time. The more uniform consumption is, the cheaper it is to supply.
Also, it’s rude to be dismissive of people’s comments, but especially so when you’re actually wrong.
They said an EV is 4x more efficient than an ICE car. You dismissed the claim with “not even close”.
Would it surprise you to learn that a 45mpg car takes about 1kwh of energy to run a mile while an EV uses 0.25-0.35 kwh per mile. That’s 3-4x more efficient.
You are not accounting where the energy came from.
Google:
> Fossil fuels generate about 60% of U.S. utility-scale electricity
If we are being generous, these power plants are around 50-60% efficient. Motor vehicle engines are around 35-45% efficient.
If you actually go do the math and account for all the losses during each step of conversion and transmission, I think you would find that they are much closer to each-other than you think.
You have to compare energy usage all the way back to the source, otherwise you are throwing vital information.
Damn, it’s really difficult to read huh.
If you go back to GP’s comment you’ll see they accounted for generation and transmission.
They clearly separated the efficiency of the engines with the efficiency of generation and transmission.
The point stands. For the same amount of energy, EVs travel 3-4x the same distance. And you were really rude.
> but that's cause heatpumps do not create heat, but move heat.
Are you seriously using this as some kind of gotcha? Who the hell cares whether it creates heat or merely moves it?
My gotcha point was that they are slow. It would kinda suck to have the weather turn on you and then have to wait hours for the house to heat up, compared to a resistance heater that can instantly provide heat. The resistance heater can also be placed close by, compared to the heatpump that will attempt to heat up the entire room or house.
Do you have a heat pump? Because it feels like you’re just making this hypothetical up. I have HPs, they are not slow at all, heat up a cold house just fine in a reasonable amount of time.
This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense either. If the heat pump can maintain temperature when the weather is cold, it can also maintain temperature when the weather turns cold. Are you waiting for the interior of your house to become freezing before you turn the heat on? Why? Nobody does that.
[flagged]
Or you could die of carbon monoxide poisoning while you're looking for a jerry can because you have to walk to the gas station because your car has no gas and you cannot fill it at home, but first your wife doesn't notice that the stove didn't ignite so the whole house explodes. At night, you welded the safety shut on the hot water heater, and despite the fire taking out the electrical, the natural gas is still running, so the water heater turns into a missile, takes out a passenger plane which crashes into an oil refinery, creating a poison gas cloud that takes out a neighborhood.
You somehow survive all this and are forced to work in a coal mine so they feed you in the terrorist prison you now live in.
To add insult to injury, they make you use whale-blubber lamps for lighting.
I’m continually amazed by how well the O&G marketing and propaganda has worked on people. It’s the only way I can explain comments like this
https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54
You are so conceited. I had to replace a heat pump system at great expense in my brand new house with a gas furnace so my family would not freeze in the winter. This was a direct tax on my home purchase for which the home builder was given tax incentives to install a useless heatpump and electric backup furnace which had an element the size of a kitchen toaster that if it ran enough to heat the house would cost a thousand dollars a month.
This is not Oil and Gas marketing. This is REALITY. Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.
If you were to confront these lack of choices yourself you would get a chance to live in the prison you see fit for everyone else.
There’s a challenge in that different heat pumps have wildly different performance characteristics, and they’re not widely understood by people. Some can’t heat effectively below 47 degrees F, others happily keep pumping out lots at -13 degrees F.
Even worse is that it seems most HVACs are totally incompetant when it comes to heat pumps too. Bunch of guys who closed the book after getting out of school and never bothered to learn anything new again.
I would be willing to bet OP got bent over by an idiot HVAC and now will never go back thanks to it. Meanwhile with a competent tech they would instead be here glowing about their experience.
Yeah, a lot of HVAC guys don’t install anything but the big chonky outdated single/dual stage domestic brands. I read this comment as he got one built in with the house, and unfortunately, since they tend not to be understood by buyers and therefore command any premium in the sale process, there’s not much of an incentive to install anything but the crappiest pump on the market. This happened to us, the last homeowners wanted to replace their old furnace right before selling, so they installed the lowest efficiency heat pump that’s legal to sell. It’s trash in cold weather. I DIY installed a cold weather rated mini split myself later, it’s incredible in cold weather, and sips power.
I went down a big rabbit hole when I installed it a couple years ago and made a little calculator to compare heat pumps based on the weather in your area and the pump temperature-efficiency curves: https://heatpushers.com
It needs some revisiting, though, I’m guessing half the links are broken by now.
> Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.
Sounds to me like you're the one unwilling to accept reality.
Have you watched the Don't look up movie?
BTU's are BTU's regardless of their source. It sounds like your brand new house was not built to spec, or poorly designed. Any certified ASHRAE technician should be able to meet the required demand load with properly sized equipment. The consequences of fuel type should manifest in differences of up-front and ongoing expense, not comfort.
My heat pump in upstate NY is doing great. Maybe you just had a bad one?
So you got a crappily installed heat pump / furnace and decided the entire technology is flawed based on this one point of anecdata. Got it.
(Also wow does running your kitchen toaster really cost thousands a month? Maybe move somewhere where power company is not trying to gouge you?)
Haha I mean of course if you do shitty installs you’ll suffer but that’s also true with combustion-based appliances.
> my wife burns my food on a bad stove.
This reads like something from The Honeymooners.
I decarbonized my 125 year old home this summer. Cold winters here, using mini split heat pumps now for heat. Previously had oil, and 90 years ago it would have used coal. Love thinking this will be the first winter this house ever had where dirty exhaust wont be going up the chimney to keep it warm.
Even without full decarbonization, my parents replaced their many-decades-old oil furnace with, IIRC, a modern gas furnace about 15 years ago. At the same time, they insulated the walls and attic of their ~1830s-era farmhouse (post-and-beam construction, lath-and-plaster interior walls) with spray-foam insulation.
Previously, they had had both an oil bill, and a fair amount of electricity that the oil furnace used to operate. After the replacement, their combined gas and electric bill was less than just their electric bill had been before.
Since then they've also added a couple of sets of solar panels, bringing the overall ongoing cost down even further. (Of course, a large portion of their grid power is already renewable—hydro power—because of where they live.)
Do be careful with the spray foam insulation, I've known a couple of folk who have had to spend a fair bit to put right the side effects caused by poorly done spray foam insulation.
Did you have to improve insulation or do the heat pumps provide enough power?
We have a wooden house from 1909, insulated, but not to modern standards and many windows. The heating and hot water is provided via a 10 kW (out) modern heat pump with a 100 meter borehole into the ground. This is a fairly standard installation in Sweden. It provides all the heat needed, except for extremely cold days (-20c or lower) when a 7 kW immersion heater can provide support. This is not needed more than a few days a year where we are.
We have added a small solar installation (7kWp) and a battery pack (18kWh). It provides 90% of power needed in the summer and allows for decent peak shaving in the winter, to lower network costs.
Additionally we are Co-owners in a windpower cooperative that provides more than our share of electricity into the network. So we are essentially operating our home on wind and solar, as well as powering the electric car.
A big problem towards full electrification are those resistive extra heaters, due to their correlation across entire cities and correlation with extremely poor solar yields.
Unless there's a particular good reason to it's actually not too bad of an idea (with a hot water radiator loop in the home at least) to keep a fuel burning radiator loop heater around and just valve it off to not interfere on normal days. Especially if the heat pump is air source (which the mentioned swedish one isn't).
It's not that I'm against full electrification, but peak cold spell heating in excess of the heat pump capacity is among the last things we ought to "electrify by force."
We'd have massive summer overcapacity at the point where we can generally afford to "just do that". And chances are that it'd not be a resistive heater but a heat pump freezing a pool worth of water to cap the cold side temperature at just under 0C, or something the like, just because of how grid intensive the correlated load of those resistive heaters is.
It might even be cheaper to use synthetic fuel produced in summer than to 100% electrify that cold spell heating capacity. Carbon capture is expensive but there are options from e.g. domestic waste incinerators, paper making, and generally waste wood/plant matter decomposition, where hydrogen can cheaply be added to produce methane (pipes) or propane/butane (tanker trucks with liquified gas).
One alternative to a freezing pool of water that I'm intrigued by is using thermochemical heat batteries to transport heat energy from summer to winter.
For example, evaporating a 40,000 L solution of calcium chloride brine can store 4.6 megawatt-hours(*) of thermal energy and release it in the winter by passing water vapour over the solution to dilute it. This can heat geothermal temperatures from 10°C to 27°C which can be used in in-floor heating.
But the big asterisk is that only 11% of that 4.6 megawatt-hours of that thermal energy being "stored" is held in the enthalpy of dilution, and 89% of that heat is coming from the enthalpy of vaporization, and acquiring water vapour in winter isn't so easy.
One would probably need a source of water and use geothermal heat to raise dry cold air temperature to the needed 10°C, while absorbing water vapour from a (relatively small) tank of water. The net result is more of a thermochemical heat pump rather than a thermochemical battery per se. But the point is that, other than some fans, this is not electrically powered.
Then there is the issue of storing such tanks safely underground, and more problems. Still, there might be some innovative solutions lying in this direction. For example, one can replace this open-loop system with a closed-loop vacuum system to boil water, but at the cost of far more complex and dangerous engineering.
Heating up a pile of dirt to a few hundred degrees sounds easier and more energy efficient.
Such thermal storage is quite leaky compared to the stability of thermochemical battery. As such it needs a large volume and low surface area, so it only works at scale. But yeah, there is some sufficiently large crossover point where the pile of dirt works better.
Oh, such tactics are still applicable to dehumidify outside air in an air source system (and possibly further extract enthalpy by freezing off the excess water captured in the "wet scrubber").
In general, using heavily salted water (not sodium chloride that's quite ineffective) to dehumidify humid cold air during heating and reject heat with a wet interface without having to source potentially scarce water to evaporate, is quite an intriguing alternative to classic fan-laden AC "condenser" coils.
Incidentally, KOH is also interesting as it dehumidifies down to quite low humidity (at least indoor-facing) before it saturates (and precipitates out), and as a side-gig scrubs CO2 that can be precipitated out with CaO/Ca(OH)2 as CaCO3 (limestone).
This can be thermally recovered at around 800~900 C to essentially "boil" the CO2 off.
IMHO a chemically appropriate wet heat exchanger based on (cross flow: easy) or (counter-flow: harer to prevent droplet formation) with just a simple corrugated structured packing should be able to operate more hygienically than a theoretically dry, practically humidity-condensing classic mini-split AC coil. And allow most dust to be washed off fully automatically from normal operation. It'd "just" need a regenerator to dry out excess unwanted humidity, but I'd assume there's a reasonable way to boil off the excess humidity from the "salty water". Maybe the common reverse-osmosis filter materials can resist these chemicals; in that case it'd sound like a question of pressurization energy recovery; or it could be put under vacuum and a small heat pump could transfer the enthalpy of vaporization from the condenser [distilled water plus dissolved gasses, vacuum] (that isn't fully flooded due to presence of dissolved gasses in the feed) to the evaporator [salty water, same vacuum]. If the ratio of dissolved gasses relative to the extracted condensate is small enough, I'd guess a water jet "ejector pump" using that very condensate (after it's cooled down enough to not boil in the ejector) would actually work to provide the vacuum for continuously pumping the dissolved gasses that boil out along the humidity... A small centrifugal pump for that can easily be made completely sealed using magnets to transmit the torque to the impeller and a long life ceramic bearing, at least if there's a long enough pipe down to the pump to build minimum inlet pressure (against cavitation).
Also: For vacuum btw. remember the convenience of using gravity to pull a (nearly) 10m column of water down. Dissolved gasses are likely the dominant complication.
Standard well drilling rig. Most farms around the world have their own well, so it isn't uncommon. Self sufficiency magazines used to have ads for DIY drills.
Expect to pay $10-20k for the hole but it is common in large parts of the world.
It's a specialized job but it's not difficult finding a contractor for it. When my parents did it ~30 years ago I think it cost around $10k. https://www.thermia.se/bergvarme-jordvarme/bergvarme/install...
I'm very confused by the various "heat pumps can't provide enough heat" that keeps coming up in the comments here (less you than others; it's a fine question). Heat pumps can output as much heat as any other heat source. Just pick a heat pump based on BTU that matches your alternative. You can size it up more if you want. You home's electrical limit is probably at least 24kW, which typically gives you plenty to power a good sized heat pump alongside everything else.
If you go heat pump + heat pump water heater + electric washer and dryer + induction stove + electric car, you might want to upgrade, depending on your situation.
Heat pumps lose a lot of efficiency when they need to provide higher temperatures. Fossil fuel often heats the water in the radiators up to 70C in old systems, so that reasonably sized radiators have enough power to heat the poorly insulated building. You can do that with heat pumps too, but you get rubbish COP. Adding insulation or bigger radiators can be necessary to make the heat pump economically viable.
They may need some kind of backup, depending on where they are in the world. A lot of heat pumps don’t work well below -20F / -30C.
> A lot of heat pumps don’t work well below -20F / -30C.
I mean, sure, and a tiny one won't work for a mansion. If you're somewhere that cold, you choose a heat pump that works in that temperature range.
Do they exist?
Sure, ground source heat pumps instead of air source heat pumps. You pull the thermal energy from the ground or e.g. a lake. That has almost a constant temperature all year around starting at a certain depth. These can be extremely efficient, you can get 5-6x the heat per unit of electricity consumed from these. Of course the initial investment is high as you have to drill or otherwise bury the pipes/ hoses into the ground.
Better insulation makes cost savings sense regardless of what type of energy is used for heat
It does, but modern heat pumps are so efficient compared to an oil-based system from the 1900's it'll save more energy than new insulation.
Had the house been uninsulated it'd be another story, but such houses are very rare in the Nordics.
When We had a whole-house heat pump installed to replace an EoL gas furnace the installation also included an energy efficiency audit. There were some places (like blowing foam at the foundation/house joint to suppress air leaks, and insulating exposed ducts in the attic) that made a significant difference. And this was for a house built 14 years ago.
Are there a lot of homes that have 125 year old oil heating? Or have they been replaced along with way with more efficient oil furnaces?
Easy low-cost low-disruption insulation should be done, typically for the UK draft-proofing, and loft/cavity insulation.
But very high levels of insulation may never repay their carbon (and financial) cost when a home is heated with a heat-pump from a very low-carbon grid. It's the next part of my research programme: "understanding first" vs "fabric first".
Of course, but with a heat pump you get the combo of lower demand and much higher efficiency. In Germany for example due to high electricity prices you really need COP>3 or so to beat fossil fuel for heating economically.
German has made some absolutely brain dead energy policy decisions over the last 30 years. Choosing to decommission their fleet of nuclear reactors, not investing in developing enough wind and solar generation, building a bunch of oil pipelines to Russia.
~62% renewable share of electricity generation last year. https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
Could be better, could be worse.
Depends where you are, and what your start point is.
I've looked at improving old houses in Australia, and you would usually be better off putting the cash in the bank. (After heat pumps, and sometimes a battery).
Cool post. I would like to learn more details!
Real question: As I understand, good insulation in your home helps two ways: Keep the heat inside in the winter, and keep the cold inside in the summer. Do I have that right? If yes, I understand there are lots of places in Australia with very light winters (or none at all), so they are mostly focused on cooling with A/C. Are you saying that installing significantly better insulation is not economically efficient for many Australia homes?
The area I'm in, Victoria, goes from about -4 overnight at the coldest, to 45 at absolute peak (Celcius). Energy wise we are a "more heating" area, but comfort wise I personally prioritise cooling.
It's a big place, the north is essentially a cooling year round climate.
Most of the older places have very little insulation, lots of airflow, single pane leaky windows.
Usually the areas you need to fix are air leakage, better windows (double glazing), then in ceiling insulation. In order of impact.
Our construction industry is pretty much broken, and considers double glazing advanced luxury alien technology... So it can cost so much to replace the old windows that you can run heat pumps as much as you like with the interest on the sum.
And without that the improvement from more diy insulation upgrades don't really achieve much in a monetary sense.
On the other side, we have a much better solar and battery uptake, and the cost to install is fair. So a typical house might be a leaky wooden crate, but with enough solar and battery to be comfortable anyway.
[dead]
The “Urban mining” part is the most underrated part of the electrification. Few journalists or commentators get the importance of the recycling industry for batteries. First on the geopolitical side, it means that once need are covered, material can stay in the same region, so no continuous dependance to extracting regions. Second, if we manage to do that cleanely enough, it means that the environmental cost is paid only once. Third (and probably not last), it means that used batteries are still valuable assets.
China has focused on "urban mining" in their most recently published 5 year plan so if the pattern holds western journalists will be surprised to learn about the importance of this in a decade or two, probably just after a war restricts some vital supply line.
I don't think it is such a big deal to ship old batteries from rich countries to low income countries for recycling. As long as those low income countries are (long term) friendly with the rich countries. Example: The US could ship old batteries to numerous countries in Central America that would probably be happy to have a factory with good jobs. Also: Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, etc. To be clear: I am not suggesting that rich countries use low income countries to "export their pollution". Rather, I say low income countries because the ROI for battery recycling will probably be low.
One thing that wasn't clear to me until recently (and maybe isn't widely known) is that the battery degradation is just corrosion.
I swapped my hvac for an electric heat pump. My energy usage went down. Because electricity is way too expensive and I’m okay sweating a bit in the summers and wearing jackets indoors in the winters.
Wearing jacket indoors is not a problem if your building is built like that.
I live in well insulated house. Big problem is moisture management if I don’t keep indoors fairly warm I will get walls wet especially in bathroom.
Heating up just bathroom is hard as outside is well insulated but then internal air flow cannot be blocked.
It is also not that great in the summer when it is hot outside. Cooking or any bigger screen will heat up inside of the house. But then opening windows might not help when it is high heat.
We solved our humid air in the bathroom with an active extraction fan that starts when it registers humidity and light (I think) in the room.
You can use dehumidifiers at a fraction of the power cost of full air heating, given that you only need to keep the surface pores of the e.g. wallpaper below a humidity that supports mold growth. Similarly, the bathroom could gain a second insulated door-ish curtain for an airlock effect fairly easily.
An electric dehumidifier in winter keeps moisture in check and you get the energy of evaporation back as heat.
I got a CO2 monitor, and noticed that it often went over 1000 ppm CO2. So I started cracking the windows slightly, which resolved it. There are downsides to sealing the house too tight.
"Build tight, but ventilate right"
Heat recovery ventilators are one possible solution. You can hook them up to home assistant humidity sensors and open a vent for example.
https://youtu.be/wJB3dyHDa-8
https://youtu.be/zSxyUFLwFbc
https://www.openerv.ca/
About five years ago, I swapped my gas domestic hot water to a heat pump unit and my electric bill actually went down. Just being able to patch and insulate the roof exhaust from the gas unit saved more in spaced conditioning than the added (but minimal) electric load from the new heat pump itself.
I take it that was an indoor gas water heater? Which used your indoor cold air? So it's analogous to a decorative fireplace losing good air up the chimney.
Pretty much all gas water heaters are indoors in the US. I was worried about the electricity consumption of our heat pump water heater, but it's actually minimal.
The coefficient of power is like 5 or something, and, since it's a bit more expensive than a contractor-grade water heater, I think the manufacturer also spent an extra $10 on better internal insulation or something. It uses much less than 1/5th the energy I'd expected, even with the "turn yourself down at night" feature disabled.
Majority of gas water heaters I have seen in Southern California have been exterior in a shed, or in a garage, so not pulling good air from the living space. I can't speak to Northern California.
Discovered in https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-10-31/europe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jSqcwxpd14
What kind of article shows you a newsletter pop-up as soon as you load the page? That virtually guarantees not a single person would ever enter their information because they haven't even had a single second's chance to make any sort of determination yet.
> What kind of article shows you a newsletter pop-up as soon as you load the page?
One that knows the more you read, the less inclined you are to want more.
Holy crap, they actually use delve. That's hilarious.
For the energy transition , making renewables , RELIABLE ( at large scale) for a country is the very challenging part.
Fortunately, making them reliable at small scale is easy, so, problem solved, unless you really like paying corrupt utility companies.
Misleading phrasing of the point, maybe “electrification could double energy efficiency”
Globally, we barely use any energy. What we need is to do is solve geoengineering and cooling the planet so we can use much MORE energy.
No matter how efficient we get we won't be able to offer future generations a better quality of life if we don't use more.
Unlikely. We'd just use the leftover energy for new things.
That's not quite what this is about. It is the Primary Energy Fallacy, that if you are to replace eg coal, you need to replicate its original energy content.
If 1kg of coal represents 1000 Wh, your generator loses 1/2 to waste heat, you only generate 500 Wh of usable electricity. Some analyses will state that renewable power has to replace the 1000 Wh of embedded energy within the coal, when it only needs to output 500 Wh.
If you use solar panels and generate 500 Wh directly, you have cut your energy use in half, even though the output has remained the same. An EV has a battery of ~80 kWh, equal to 2-3 gallons of gas, yet it can go a few hundred miles, a 3-4x ratio of efficiency, compared to an ICE.
I think your EV example is a better example than your coal one.
I’ve never seen anyone measure coal power by the amount of chemical energy stored inside, unless they are specifically referring to using it as a heating source. For electricity generated by coal it’s always measured as output.
Electric motors have gotten ridiculously efficient. In the right power curve you can hit 95%, which is why we have now moved onto power per unit weight and unit volume. You make the drivetrain lighter you reduce the power needed for 0-60 times, which gets you a few more percent of efficiency.
Same thing with battery power density - it’s the rocket equation. Heavy batteries don’t go far. To go farther you add battery, then more battery to carry enough power to carry the larger battery. Increase the specific energy rather than the mass, and all the extra power goes into going faster or farther.
> An EV has a battery of ~80 kWh, equal to 2-3 gallons of gas, yet it can go a few hundred miles, a 3-4x ratio of efficiency, compared to an ICE.
Now compare size and weight of the battery with 3 gallons of gas. I can carry hundreds of miles of travel on my person if it's gas, I can't carry much battery though.
> I can carry hundreds of miles of travel on my person if it's gas, I can't carry much battery though.
Particularly handy if heading off in a straight line, I to the wilderness.
Most of us are running errands around town.
That's true, we should clearly be powering our cars with uranium, or perhaps plutonium.
Have to wait for Mr Fusion l
How about antimatter?
The battery loses 10% just by charging it.
I figured an EV is worth about 60mpg with a fair comparison to a gas car.
A good visualisation for this I think are linked. Petrol/diesel use about 20% of the available energy and electric vehicles use about 80-90% for moving the vehicle.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles...
20% was the efficiency for very ancient engines.
Modern internal-combustion engines have 35% to 40% efficiency, with even efficiencies of over 50% for the very big 2-stroke Diesel engines used in ships.
Nonetheless that remains about half of the efficiency of electric vehicles and the energy efficiency of the latter can be greatly increased over this ratio by the recovery of the kinetic or gravitational energy, when braking or descending.
35-40 is peak. Real world usage (stop, starts, city driving, traffic) averages are 20-25. From easily available data.
A litter of petrol is about 34MJ or about 9.5kWh
It propels a car about 10 miles. About 1 mile per kWh
Charging my electric car via AC at 7kW to replace the power used to drive 90 miles in autumn takes 26kWh according to the meter, so 3.5 miles per kWh.
Oil also loses quite a bit during refining and transport.
Electrical transmission lines lose power, too. So does generating the electricity. So does the electric motors. So does the heavier weight of the EV. Regenerative braking doesn't apply when cruising on the highway.
And so on.
P.S. Since I drive a stick, I coast a lot. I live in a hilly area, and have a pretty good feel for just how and where I can shift into neutral and coast. I also coast towards a red light with the goal of reaching the intersection just when it turns green. (Moving forward from a dead stop uses lots of energy.)
Unless your manual transmission car has a carburetor, "coasting" in neutral is worse for consumption.
Anything with electronic fueling will cut fuel during engine overrun. Staying in gear while coasting uses zero fuel. If you pull the clutch, the engine has to fuel enough to idle instead, which is actually a really inefficient fueling regime.
And more every year as the highest quality oil gets used up and we have to work harder to catalyze the rest.
It doesn't say it would cut energy costs in half.
Meanwhile, fossil fuels are only 'cheap' because the users are pushing the negative externalities off on everyone else in the world. Priced properly they'd be even more costly than they already are.
Why? I didn't start using more energy elsewhere when I switched to an EV or electric lawn maintenance tools. You think companies and people are using exactly as much power as available (or they can afford)?
It's a well-known "paradox" known as Jevons Paradox. Given enough efficient use of a resource, overall usage could actually far outpace the efficiency gains. E.g. use of coal got efficient enough that travel via trains using it became possible, which led to way more usage of coal.
Can confirm Jevons Paradox. But in a more environmentally friendly way.
Just took my house onto off-grid solar, yet my energy consumption now exceeds when I was on utility grid power.
Naturally we ration things when they're expensive. But now I don't feel the need to turn off the lights or appliances when I leave my home, and my EV driving has gone up knowing that "fuel" is essentially free from here on out. And to soak up excess solar, I run multiple computers and servers 24/7 with reckless abandon.
Driving more is not environmentally friendly, even in an EV. You're putting more wear and tear on the tires and brakes, which are not sustainably manufactured. And more road traffic means more repaving, requiring diesel vehicles and massive amounts of tar.
"Free" fuel for you just pushes the externalities elsewhere.
If you think driving EVs are bad, wait til you hear about internal combustion engine vehicles!
How far does it scale? Because I imagine there must be diminishing returns at some point. And even so, having a lot more renewable energy also means less cancer.
Yes there are diminishing returns, but they're a long way from where you start.
Pre-industrial revolution most people in my country own enough clothing for everyday and then maybe some extra stuff for "best" appearance like church. Making a shirt requires hours of labour from skilled workers. The machines eliminate one of those jobs ("hand" weaving, using a loom that you operate at human scale, replaced by enormous machine looms which produce much more fabric and much faster with far less human labour) and streamline others so that the price of a garment collapses. So people buy a lot more garments. You probably own enough clothes that you can wear different clothes each day for at least a week, likely more, and you think nothing of it.
Most people won't buy so many clothes that they can't even wear items once, but many get pretty close, and so worldwide we produce hugely more clothing per person than before the textile mills were first built.
Really far.
The crux of Jevon's paradox is that you’re lowering the cost of revenue below the sale price.
If I can generate $10 a sale then I’ll do no sales if it costs me $11 . If gas drops from $4 to $2 then I’ll do as many sales as I can as $9 is less than $10.
I mean, right now, supposedly, we don't have enough energy to run as many AI data centers as everyone wants to build, and so big tech is getting into the power plant business to scale up: they'd love it if you stopped using energy they want to buy!
It kinda depends on where the energy is coming from.
I was brought up to "save energy ". Lights switched off when not in thevroom, that sort of thing.
Now I gave solar on the roof. There's an excess production capability, so now, during most days it doesn't matter if stuff is on or off. That especially applies to AC which I'll happily turn on on hot summer days. In effect I use more "because it's there to be used".
My EV is coming soon and given I can charge it on solar I plan to do a lot more day-trips-out over weekends etc.
So you're right, availability and affordability- but electrifying is great (for me) for both those things.
World energy production is increasing with solar coming to the forefront.
It is something overlooked by various reports of "In X amount of time, Y is projected to consume Z% of electricity" that the average increase in world electricity production is about 3% per year.
And the average increase in world population is about 1% per year, plus the bulk of the existing population is 'developing' i.e industrialization.
As fast as solar, wind, etc electricity production grows, the number of people requiring it grows along-side.
Also, 'renewable' is misleading, 'replaceable' is more accurate, all renewable energy generators wear out as everything does and need to be replaced using non-renewable energy mostly (you can't build solar panels from solar panel energy)
> you can't build solar panels from solar panel energy
... Why?
For the same reason there were no solar panels prior to 1800, there was not an excess of societal energy to invent and produce them. Solar panels are not trees.
And relying on trees is not a great idea either, look at Easter Island, lol.
(GPT has all the answers anyway, no need to ask me, I'm an old man with no issue and no stake in this stuff)
There were no solar panels because we didn’t know how to build them until the 20th century. Today you can run the factories that make them on renewable energy without a problem.
You can do the whole process from mining and recycling to installation using solar power. Trucks, furnaces, cargo ships can all be electrified. The only reason we're not doing that today is fossil fuels are still cheaper.
I agree with a lot of what you say, except the bit about "cargo ships can all be electrified". It is more likely that they will use ammonia or hydrogen that are fully produced using only electricity (and some air/water).
For pragmatic reasons methanol is more probable: https://methanol.org/what-fuels-shipping
and that production of hydrogen (as a base for either ammonia or methanol production) will likely come via electrical cracking .. but it might also come as a result of atmospheric carbon sequestration in ultramafic rock: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-orange-hydrogen-western-austra...
I could try and explain 'energy return on energy invested' (EROEI) but what's the point? it won't make any difference.
I would guess you've been huffing anti-net-zero stuff which often relies on estimates from 15-20 years ago for the production costs of solar PV and chooses rainy Northern Europe for the insolation curves so as to get an EROEI number that they can trumpet as too low to make sense for generation.
But even then the numbers are positive, they just don't make good economic sense.
Today's numbers embarrass CCGT which is why these same fools will now tell you the problem isn't solar PV it's the batteries, the batteries are too expensive you see, so it's all pointless according to them. Weirdly the answer is always more Fossil Fuels. No matter what the question is, or what the facts suggest, they can assure you that somehow it turns out the answer was Fossil Fuels.
> EROEI
Modern PV typically has an EROEI of ~ 15-30, depending on tech, location, system lifetime, and accounting methodology.
From what I've read, coal might still beat that, but modern oil no longer does. Gas is generally also worse than PV in this regard.
Coal is however also very expensive, which is why e.g. the UK completely stopped using it for electricity.
> Unlikely. We'd just use the leftover energy for new things.
You mean data centers. Can't ever have enough of those!
The 'half' figure is mostly primary vs final energy accounting. A heat pump delivers 3-4 kWh of heat per kWh of electricity (COP 300-400%), and an EV turns ~80-90% of stored energy into motion vs ~25-35% for an ICE drivetrain. So electrifying heat and transport shrinks final energy demand even before counting upstream losses (refining, thermal generation - roughly 60% rejected energy in most Sankey diagrams of the current system).
The comment below about electricity prices is the real friction point though. Where time-of-use rates exist, running a heat pump with thermal pre-heating during cheap midday solar hours changes the math entirely - the building itself becomes the battery. I got into tracking my own load against TOU windows and ended up building a small tool for it (energy-iq.app); shifting ~40% of consumption off-peak ended up worth more than any single efficiency upgrade. Electrification halves the energy; rate-aware scheduling is what makes it halve the bill.
We got rid of our gas furnace and got a heat pump. We also got 7.3kw of solar on the roof. Our entire energy bill for a year for everything is $500.
In Canada I’m a deep valley where it snows a ton.
Once vehicle to home standardizes (probably not until a competent federal government forces it, at least in the US), then TOU billing becomes a non-issue.
Just reserve 10-20% of your vehicle range to load smoothing, and the entire house can go to negative use during TOU premium windows. (Ideally, with the hypothetical competent gov't the TOU surcharges would be forced to be symmetric, so going slightly negative during peak hours would end up creating a large negative power bill until the surplus charges became obsolete and trended to zero).
No more bitcoin cryptocurrency and will solve this issue. it has been wasting electric energy.
The latest tech is using Bitcoin mining to heat water. If you're going to use resistive heating anyway I don't hate it, even though I'm a big crypto currency skeptic.
https://heatbit.com/
It’s easy to justify on paper and websites. I doubt it actually works out that way in practice.
What about instead a talk about datacenters energy usage?
Or no more hot drinks. Ban kettles.
Global population approximately: 8.44E+09, Energy to heat 1 liter of water in electric kettle: 80 watt hours, 1 Watt hour ~ 2.78E-15 exajoules. Global energy consumption approximately: 600 exajoules.
8.44E+980 watt hours(2.78E-15 exajoules/watthours)= 1.88E-03 exajoules 1.88E-03/600 = 3.12E-6 or .000312% of the global energy use.
In simple words. Banning kettles would do nothing to cut global energy use.
Isn't that only the energy of 1 liter per person per year? I think most people heat more water than that.
(Also I think bitcoin energy usage is also on the order of 0.001% of global energy use.)
Thanks, you're right, I'm off by x365. But still it's a very insignificant value.
A quick search says 200 TWh for bitcoin mining per year, out of a total of 31 000 TWh of electricity generation, that is, 0.6%, or 600 times more than what you thought.
The Comment above used energy consumption of 600 exajoule.
200 twh = 0.72 exajoule
0.72/600 = 0.0012
Which is off by 100 because I forgot to multiply by 100 for percent, so 0.1%.
But if we are in twh we can get the tea numbers as well: ~300 billion liters per year, with ~100Wh/litre that would be ~30TWh.
So 30 vs 200 is about as close as I expected.
But this is all just for fun.