101–110 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still the same concept though. One is a bill you pay and other is free money you receive. There are all sorts of reasons for the bill you pay to be different based upon different criteria, that's not the same as getting free money directly.
Excise taxes on end-user energy don't tend to have exceptions...
I want the nuclear future with practically emission free power that's 'too cheap to meter'. I want to stop caring about SEER ratings and be able to leave windows cracked all seasons to bring in fresh air. I want power companies that keep brush and trees away from their lines. Until that happens, I'll hang onto my gas furnace and water heaters.
I want the nuclear future with practically emission free power that's 'too cheap to meter'. I want to stop caring about SEER ratings and be able to leave windows cracked all seasons to bring in fresh air. I want power companies that keep brush and trees away from their lines. Until that happens, I'll hang onto my gas furnace and water heaters.
These systems can sometimes be retrofit into older buildings (we're doing that for our 1950s SFH), but the necessary piping is often labor intensive to install and hence prices can be insane (we were able to combine it with other measures and significantly reduced costs - I installed pipes while the roof was removed). It's much easier for new buildings of course.
If you want the masses of households to convert to electricity, then electricity should be dirt cheap (and stay cheap) and any solution should be idiot-proof.
Electricity being cheap gives people the confidence to make the large investments in home optimization (i.e. isolation), a heat pump, EV, etc.
The upper middle class will convert regardless but the big masses need this carrot, else it will all move to a grinding halt. I don't care how we make electricity consistently cheap, I'm just saying its a precondition.
As for simplicity. I mostly live around the working class, not the educated glass. They are unable to grasp an energy contract. There's just too many variables at play. They would struggle to understand the article too.
And that's just the conceptual part. The actual custom implementation part can be complicated as well. People are overwhelmed by it and feel they're running an energy central, watching it like a penny stock trader.
The goal is worthy, but when it's expensive, complicated to understand and hard to use, people will resist it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great tip indeed. However, please don't use anybody else's email. (No @example.com) Preferably use the domain of the website itself, or of a SEO spam website.
>(No @example.com) The example.{com,org,net} domain was created for this purpose, of a valid but not real domain.
No it wasn't. IANA is hosting example.com and paying for the traffic.
example.com is a writing convention to provide safe examples in documentation. The reason example.com exists, is to make sure documentation writers can use a domain, make it obvious it is an example, and make sure nothing bad comes up with a user happens to click it.
The fact that example.com is a domain with a DNS record is irrelevant to its intended use. IANA is doing the internet a favor by preventing confusion, and it is rude to send them a bunch of traffic.
See https://www.iana.org/help/example-domains
> While incidental traffic for incorrectly configured applications is expected, please do not design applications that require the example domains to have operating HTTP service.
According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com
> for documentation purposes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> let's not forget that the point of switching to electricity is to be able to use renewables Here in the UK, natural gas is used to provide electricity[1], so switching to a heat pump right now isn't likely to help with the environment and (because gas is vastly cheaper per unit energy) nor the utility bill. You might as well spend the capex on the insulation upgrades required for a heat pump anyway, but then stay o…
> Here in the UK, natural gas is used to provide electricity[1], so switching to a heat pump right now isn't likely to help with the environment Efficiency of a typical combi boiler is 90%. The notional efficiency of a heat pump in UK climate will be around 300-400% (or rather 3-4 COP). Even accounting for transmission losses etc. a heat pump powered from gas turbines is better for the environment than a combi boiler…
We need to turn back to nuclear until we've figured out grid level storage.
I want the nuclear future with practically emission free power that's 'too cheap to meter'. I want to stop caring about SEER ratings and be able to leave windows cracked all seasons to bring in fresh air. I want power companies that keep brush and trees away from their lines. Until that happens, I'll hang onto my gas furnace and water heaters.
The future is now: Modern houses around here often feature a "Ventilation system with heat recovery": You get fresh air that's heated using the air it replaces. And just let the system run 24/7. You can also recover/regulate humidity. These systems can sometimes be retrofit into older buildings (we're doing that for our 1950s SFH), but the necessary piping is often labor intensive to install and hence prices can be i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not a subsidy, but a hold back from taxation. It’s usually in these country’s national security interests, let alone environmental interest, to push away from gas and oil given that they are often imported from hostile nations. America doesn’t really have that same problem, but Denmark and China do.
> It’s not a subsidy, but a hold back from taxation. I like pedantry as much as the next person but that feels like a pointless distinction here.
In America, cars and gasoline are ridiculously cheap, so the EV tax break comes from real tax revenue, rather than a tax designed to actually limit consumption. But in Norway and Denmark, where cars are taxed harshly, I doubt they say much revenue drop at all as EVs probably spurred people to buy cars who otherwise wouldn’t have.
EX: in places with high electric prices and low NG prices or really cold temps, skipping the heatpump might be the right choice.
OTOH, reddit/etc are full of people asking and finding out that their AC installer didn't do this calculation and just set the lockout temp at 40F or some other back of the hand value they have been using for a few decades.
And yes, its possible to get heatpumps that work well below 35F, but they also have defrost cycles which absolutly destroy their efficiency because the defrost cycle is usually just running the heatpump in AC mode, while using the second stage to keep the air temp from falling in the house.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> let's not forget that the point of switching to electricity is to be able to use renewables Here in the UK, natural gas is used to provide electricity[1], so switching to a heat pump right now isn't likely to help with the environment and (because gas is vastly cheaper per unit energy) nor the utility bill. You might as well spend the capex on the insulation upgrades required for a heat pump anyway, but then stay o…
You get more heat out of using a given quantity of gas to generate electricity which is used to to power a heat pump than you do by burning the gas directly for heat, even when considering generation and transmission losses etc. Given that even during a time of low output from renewables we still only rely on 53% gas for electricity generation it's still much more beneficial environmentally to use a heat pump. The mo…
Then on the generation side, its worse if the NG generation isn't a modern combined cycle plant. which also tends to nix places with a lot of renewable generation because the NG plants are just peaker gas turbines with much lower efficiency than plants designed for continuous use. So, its all situational, but at the same time if one has the choice for cheap NG using that as a second stage and setting the crossover heatpump temperature at the cost/BTU intersection between the heatpump and NG second stage is a rough approximation of the enviromental costs as well as the actual cost.