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US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

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Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#281

Post by eichin »

maxerickson wrote: post #102
HWR_14 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then a storm hits texas and without realizing it you run up a $30,000 electricity bill in a single night of not freezing.

The whole gimmick with that supplier was that they exposed their customers more or less directly to grid pricing. You don't need to do that to charge different prices during different parts of the day.

My (very-)local utility will give you an overall rate discount if you send them a screen shot of your car charging app showing it's only charging in a certain range of hours. Surprisingly, this works fine, though supposedly they've got eventual integration plans, "nah, we'll trust you for now" is a viable MVP...

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#282

Post by hippo22 »

endoblast wrote: post #271
adventured wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The temperature a few metres below ground level is consistently cool (approx. 15 celcius) year round. Could this be made the basis of an efficient cooling system?

It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. People often go into their basement and think "wow, it's cool down here. If only I could make my house this cool." But, as soon as you moved the air from your basement to your house, the air in your basement would be replaced by ambient air and would take time to be cooled by the Earth. And so you quickly realize you need a lot of thermal mass and an efficient way to move heat in order to keep up with removing the heat from your house.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#283

Post by TurdF3rguson »

zer00eyz wrote: post #253
wasabi991011 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a lot of assumptions in your takeaways. > Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households. Or rich people owning more vacation homes. > Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity. What? It could easily be the population getting older and/or sicker. Even if it was a structural shift, it could be i…

> Or rich people owning more vacation homes. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S Home ownership rates have a 6 percent variance over the last ~50 years. We dont have a housing problem in America, we have a utilization problem: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... as an example. There is a conversation that needs to be had about housing, but no one is going to LIKE the medicine…

There's some historical stuff happening in that graph that it's easy for young people to not have context for, like the fact that the peak home ownership around 2005 was caused by a subprime mortgage fiasco.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#284

Post by TurdF3rguson »

hylaride wrote: post #270
nightski wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own an induction stove, and overall really enjoy it. But there are certain types of cooking it's not nearly as well suited to (still possible, but not as good). One of those is cooking on a wok. But really it comes down to heating. Heat pumps are not universally better. We are currently sitting at -25C or so which is pretty common in the winter (it can even get a fair bit colder at times). Hardly any of the contrac…

I also own an induction range and love it, but I keep a portable butane stove around for random things gas is better for like woks or cooking that involves a lot of lifting the frying pan. Just make sure things are well ventilated (which should be the case with gas stoves, too).

Lifting the frying pan is fine if you don't mind the fucker beeping at you.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#285

Post by TurdF3rguson »

diego_moita wrote: post #164
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153

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.

> What is NG good for? Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster" or "heats with a better distribution of heat". It is foolish, but many still think so. I personally believe that the only kind of cooking that benefits from NG are round-bottom woks. But they can be substituted by flat-bottom pans without problems.

I don't know about that. I like my induction cooker but I can't use cast iron on it (I've ruined other ones trying). I will use it for 90% of my cooking though.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#286

Post by dzhiurgis »

vlovich123 wrote: post #215
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153

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.

Perform better as in more efficient electrically, not necessarily more pleasant or efficient in the cooking process. For example, when cooking an omelette, a recommended technique is to angle the pan so the liquid part flows towards the hot part of the pan touching the flame as you slowly scrape the curds up to rest at the cooler part of the pan. AFAIK an induction cooktop is unable to simulate this technique. Now ma…

How is filling your living space with poisonous gas pleasant at all?

P.S. basting works on induction if I crank up to boost mode.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#287

Post by kyboren »

buckle8017 wrote: post #213
Aurornis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand. Also the move to electric heat pumps is increasing electricity rates but reducing natural gas usage and improving overall efficient. The GP comment was trying to do snarky doomerism but accidentally hit upon a lot of truths. It’s amazing how…

> You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand. Most of Europe is poor. AC is expensive. It's actually that simple. There's AC in Switzerland.

I have lived and worked in Switzerland. My office (shared with 2 other people) was the only space in the entire floor with AC due to some obscure archaic reason.

That air conditioning worked great for years, but a few months before I left that position, the facilities management people suddenly came in and ripped it out. No justification given.

Thank God TPTB didn't notice I had AC for all those years; it really would have been miserable without it. But despite the misery I noted all around me, there was an extremely strong disdain for air conditioning that permeated the culture. When I talked to friends and colleagues about the AC situation I was regularly ribbed for being a gluttonous American wasting electricity on such a triviality. They were legitimately proud to suffer. Baffling.

I've come to the conclusion that most Western and Central Europeans--yes, including Swiss--have a masochistic superiority complex around AC. They see suffering without AC as core to the European identity and sweating it out in unproductive misery (or taking a whole month off of work) as virtuous. They willingly kill thousands of people and leave hundreds of millions more in misery every year simply to feel superior and European.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#288

Post by dzhiurgis »

Aurornis wrote: post #140
trollbridge wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can I interject regarding resistive heating? I’ve recently added one for my bedroom using home assistant and PID control, 22.5c during day, 18c at night, shuts off when nobody home (radar presence detector should be next step and likely save another 30%). It cost me 150kwh per month in NZ winter (single glazing, but got decent ceiling insulation).

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#289

Post by unethical_ban »

diego_moita wrote: post #164
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153

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.

> What is NG good for? Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster" or "heats with a better distribution of heat". It is foolish, but many still think so. I personally believe that the only kind of cooking that benefits from NG are round-bottom woks. But they can be substituted by flat-bottom pans without problems.

I have a duxtop induction burner and I notice it gets hotspots where the coils are. I wonder if the breville control freak is worth the money or it has better granularity of its heating element.

But yeah if I built a new house, I would have an induction top.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#290

Post by 93po »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #151
jakobnissen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you are reading the article wrong. It is indeed 60% of new electricity generation that is from solar, not capacity

Then shy doesn't the article literally say that? Why does it take three carefully-crafted sentences to say it? Because they're fooling you.

electrik is notoriously pretty horrible and not real journalism
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