171–180 of 346 posts
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So the increase was 3.1% and it was "fourth largest in the last decade", which means, "barely above average growth rate". Considering that economy growth rate was the fastest in a decade except 2021 which was a covid recovery year, it doesn't really show anything abnormal at all.
All that work and we still have a broken economy, go figure.
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It's easier to coordinate N electricity suppliers when N is small.
My point is that scaling coordination issues exist for everything, including all sources of energy production. Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
"Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy."
N>100000 is a lot harder to coordinate than the ~15,000 established power plants, which have come online over the last hundred or so years.
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We are indeed living in more comfortable homes. Americans are migrating to the sunbelt because of ample AC in the summer and the winters are pleasant. that’s a big part of why we have many fewer heat deaths per capita than Europe: https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/2025/08/02/opinion-us-heat-...
Europe is so backwards when it comes to annual heat deaths that they manage to have more heat deaths per year than the US has gun deaths + heat deaths combined. You won't hear about that from Europeans though, it'd make them seem barbaric. 175,000 heat deaths per year in Europe according to the WHO. It's a staggering genocide of technological primitiveness. Imagine having millions of people die because you can't be b…
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Solar is highly distributed. At the most basic level with a solar & battery system the production and consumption and CONTROL are all yours. You own it and it's literally on your property. Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you. There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned…
Cost. Useful life. I thought about an off grid system. Batteries are expensive. Also, unless you live in a dry place in the equator, You'll need to account for things like winter, long rainy spells, so either you add more batteries to account for multiple days (weeks? months?) of low generation, or you'll need a diesel/gas generator, or have a hybrid system instead, which basically means you're using the utilities ga…
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What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.
Gas cooktops are good for still being able to cook when the power is out.
I have gas-cooked since I was a kid (living in an area with a lot of natural gas, so houses were connected to gas since the 50ies), but induction is so much nicer that I'm happy to not be able to cook during a once in a ~10-20 year outage. Also a lot safer (it still happens quite frequently that a house blows up because of a gas leak, just this week there was a huge explosion in Utrecht what was presumably a gas leak).
Of course, the equation may change for countries with less stable power.
> the fourth‑largest annual rise of the past decade Really doesn't sound like much of a surge then!
Hey, that still means it's higher than the median annual rise AND higher than most years!
Of that we cannot be sure... Because maybe 6 years saw a fall - so there would only be 4 rises, of which this is the smallest!
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In Vancouver, Canada natural gas was completely phased out as of the beginning of 2025 in most new construction.
What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.
Also, heat pumps do best when the temperature differential is lower. So in older housing without floor heating or duct heating, it is typically not as efficient to use a heat pump when the water to heat has to be above 55 degrees Celsius.
For any new residential construction I think there is very little value in natural gas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.
Gas cooktops are good for still being able to cook when the power is out.
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We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.
Mine bitcoin, run LLM inference, smelt aluminum, make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.