221–230 of 346 posts
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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.
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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…
Weirdly in the UK it seems to be best to charge battery overnight from the grid and sell back during the day alongside any solar generated.
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Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off. It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something du…
TIL. Never used a modern gas stove, so I had not considered that without a pilot light, there must be a way to disable the flow or constantly spew gas into the house. Then again, I have had a pilot light go out for some amount of time without obvious ill effect, so the volume of gas must be low.
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I spoke with two working class people last week who are facing power shutoffs because they got an unexpected $700 power bill. Not sure if it were a sneaky electricity supplier change or if costs have simply gone up. But the problem of consumer rates just always ratcheting up needs addressed.
Electricity prices are heavily regulated. The largest increase I can find from a short search is around 20% for some customers in New Jersey. The average year over year increase is closer to 6% Unexpectedly high electricity bills are almost always from actual usage. Unexpectedly high winter electricity bills are usually from resistive electric heating in one way or another. You didn’t mention their normal December bi…
I suspect they got slammed with an alternative energy supplier that charges abusively high rates.
With that said, the total cost to the consumer of electricity is 3X what it was 20 years ago, and I am in one of the cheapest markets.
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I spoke with two working class people last week who are facing power shutoffs because they got an unexpected $700 power bill. Not sure if it were a sneaky electricity supplier change or if costs have simply gone up. But the problem of consumer rates just always ratcheting up needs addressed.
That happens when people are on variable rate or TOU plans, it's very common. "sneaky" may or not be part of it, since ostensibly there's a contract that defines the terms of the electrical service, so it shouldn't be a surprise. But for a lot of folks it's a lot to keep track of, there can be confusing terminology, and yes, some energy retailers are predatory in their plan marketing or contract terms. It's a double…
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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…
Much of the US is extremely unpleasant without air-conditioning for a substantial portion of the year so of course everyone living in those parts installs it.
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Gas cooktops are good for still being able to cook when the power is out.
I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe). 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 bec…
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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…
You sent me to the books because this is such a fascinating stat. It's true! Heat deaths in the US: 5 per million people. Italy: 500+ per million people. I had no idea.
> In September 2022, a vicious heat wave enveloped much of the western U.S., placing tens of millions of people under heat advisories. Temperatures across California soared into the triple digits. Sacramento broke its heat record by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature hit 116 degrees.
> California death certificates showed that 20 people died as a result of heat-related illness from Aug. 31, 2022 to Sept. 9, 2022.
> But a study last year by California’s Department of Public Health found that death rates increased by about 5 percent statewide during the heat wave, causing 395 additional deaths.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-deaths-from-h...
Excess mortality studies seem to show about 24 per 100,000 excess deaths from heat in Europe vs 6 in US/Canada.
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Some solar inverter systems already have a data connection to get live pricing information from the grid operator. It’s not that big of a problem to implement, although it definitely isn’t pervasive yet. Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.
I think pulling for live pricing by inverters and appliances is not realistic on a grand scale. Using time of day pricing is much simpler imo.
Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.
All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:
price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency + published_offset) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2))
The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...
But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad - demand should be going down, since there is a need to conserve electricity while much of it is provided by CO2-emitting sources. That said - it is not such a huge "surge" that the fact that 61% of it was covered by an increase in Solar capacity is so impressive.
Second, Solar generation is said to have reached 84 TW. But if the increase in demand was 135 TW, and that's just 3.1% of total demand, then total demand is 4355 TW, and Solar accounts for 1.92% of generation. That is _really_ bad. Since we must get to near-0 emissions in electricity generation ASAP to avoid even harsher effects of global warming; and most of the non-Solar generation in the US is by Natural Gas and Coal [1].
You could nitpick and say that the important stat is "total renewables" rather than just Solar, and that the US has a lot of Nuclear, and that's technically true, but it's not as though Nuclear output is surging, and it has more obstacles and challenges, for reasons. So, the big surge to expect in the US is Solar - and we're only seeing very little of that. If you mis-contextualize it sounds like a lot: "60% of new demand! 27% increase since last year!" but that's not the right context.
[1] : https://www.statista.com/statistics/220174/total-us-electric...