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Zero energy ready homes are coming

energy.gov

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Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#181

Post by rootusrootus »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #178
rootusrootus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps since the US is something like 26 times larger than Japan while only having less than 3 times the population, we can avoid making comparisons that don't make sense.

It's non sequitur argument since this 26x land does not magically spawn in middle of land starved urban areas. The fact that Wyoming or Idaho exist does not matter there.

The idea that the US has land starved urban areas is mostly a myth. Or more accurately, it is mostly a self-inflicted problem. Drop the urban growth boundary nonsense and embrace multi-core urban areas instead of trying to build supercities.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#182

Post by xthrown1 »

prottog wrote: post #173
xthrown1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subsidy means you pay less for something than you would on the open market. Cities not only pay the market price for all those products the majority of their taxes go out to the hinterlands on top of that.

Cities pay market price for food coming from the hinterlands but at the same time they pay a subsidy to the same hinterlands that grow that same food? Doesn't sound like market price anymore. It's nonsensical to say that just because the tax receipts of a suburb doesn't pay in full its roads and bridges, its existence is necessarily subsidized by the rest. Does a city pay in full for its share of the US Navy whose pr…

The majority of US taxes come from cities. It's the hinterlands that are free riding on the US armed forces.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#183

Post by swatcoder »

kiba wrote: post #177
swatcoder wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not precedented, wise, or even realistic to expect all of civilization to live in cities surrounded by unspoiled wilderness. Highly efficient low density housing has a place. So does high density housing. Everything you say about improving urban development practices is valid, but doesn’t mean that efforts to improve suburban/exurband/rural development are problematic. They’re all inextricably part of the future…

You can roughly double the volume of a single story building by adding a floor. Taken to extreme, we could make sure a square kilometer is at least two stories tall, but we don't do that. We live mostly a in 2.5d environment. The skyscrappers that we see in our skylines are not even the majority of what we see. A lot of place will benefit from being 3-4 stories tall. A lot of space that is developed is hugely wasted,…

I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying, but those slightly denser and taller districts are historically called villages and they died, tragically, with the rise of national retail chains.

Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead.

At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage.

If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists!

Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#184

Post by wyre »

rootusrootus wrote: post #166
xthrown1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let them pay the $20,000 in rates they will without subsidies from the inner core. The free market will sort it out in short order.

What about those of us who live in suburban towns that are doing just fine for well over a century and not getting any subsidies from this mythical 'inner core'? From where did you pull that $20K number?

How are you sure your suburb is not getting subsidies from the inner core?

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#185

Post by G_z9 »

Syonyk wrote: post #28

When you've confused "per kWh cost" with "energy to the house delivery costs," this sort of stuff sounds good on paper, but it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem that in the winter, homes use a lot more energy than they can generate, and in the spring/fall, they will generate a lot more energy than they need. I've got a large ground mount solar install I put in a few years ago (15.9kW nameplate, though mostly ea…

If you had a modern well insulated house you could heat your house with a hair drier in the dead of winter in climate zone 5. If your stacking up to 4mwh then your house is not really a good example.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#186

Post by johnweldon »

karmelapple wrote: post #176
johnweldon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in…

I disagree that it’s naive. Here is a video talking about why that term is being used: https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0 And the Strong Towns write up that has links to more reading that I believe informed that video: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...

I called it naive because I believe it is an oversimplification.

Strong Towns has an agenda (which I mostly agree with), and in order to promote their agenda they have a straw man argument that broadly categorizes _all_ suburban development as an unsustainable venture that is borrowing against the future.

I agree that there is (in many cases, but not all) some deferred costs and externalities that are not being fully accounted for in new development.

However, I'm not nearly so pessimistic as to think that the people living in those developments won't make changes to account for those deferred costs and even possibly some of the externalities.

I think it's naive to cry "the sky is falling".

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#188

Post by AnthonyMouse »

johnweldon wrote: post #140
xyst wrote: post #64

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in…

> The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there.

A major reason for the preference is the lower price per square foot in the suburbs than in higher density areas. They can't afford that much space in the city, which in turn is so expensive because the amount of high density housing is artificially limited by zoning.

You have to let the market decide how much high density housing there should be before you can score "the market has decided" as a point.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#189

Post by pard68 »

The world has had "zero energy" homes for like fifty years now in the form of earthships, but government entities have prevented them from reaching a wider audience because of laws which prohibit most non-stickframe homes.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#190

Post by johnweldon »

babypuncher wrote: post #179
johnweldon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in…

They are able to make that choice because we pretty heavily subsidize it for them. Rural communities receive a disproportionately large amount of federal aid per capita in order to build and maintain the infrastructure that makes that lifestyle possible. If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.

> pretty heavily subsidize

Is a pretty general term that's hard to respond to.

Yes there are rural subsidies, but I'm unconvinced that the per-capita subsidization of rural and suburban dwellers is so much greater than their urban counterparts.

You may have a very good argument, but I don't know the numbers, and I haven't seen anyone provide the numbers for this yet either.

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