People may claim to prepare for a once a century event but since it only happens once a century it’s hard to determine if it’s actually prepared for. Half the houses don’t even have gas heat - because it’s never been needed. What we have here is asking to a earthquake hitting the Midwest - sure it’s known it could happen and there are plans for it - but they’ve never been tested.
I just saw something that said these are the lowest temps in the last 30 yrs. That isn't once in a century!
There were 3 'once in 500 year' floods in Houston from 2015-2017. It makes no sense.
Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass. • Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - m…
> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night. How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go? Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?
Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.
Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass. • Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - m…
Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built. I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly neve…
December 1989, there wasn't an unbroken water pipe in Houston. Had to use hammers to break up ice waterfall on steps to apartment.
Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass. • Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - m…
> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night. How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go? Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?
There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.
It’s a field about 600x600 feet. I wouldn’t call that “giant”, it’s about the size of a typical warehouse and certainly smaller than most landfills. And according to some brief searches on the internet, they are indeed being recycled.
Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass. • Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - m…
> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night. How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go? Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?
The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.
The problem here is the high tomorrow in Dallas is supposed to be about 10°F. The typical winter high for Dallas is a bit below 60°F. This means that the demand for heating is about 4-6× what it normally would be for winter.
Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass. • Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - m…
> Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M
Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW last night, before an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to weather and grid conditions.
Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday. The Joke is all the Californians wh…
I was on Griddy for about 9 months a couple of years ago.
Until one very hot August, when the wholesale price hit $10/kWh in the afternoon. My power bill for one day was $130. I didn't even wait till the end of the month. I switched back to my old power company that afternoon. Thankfully they were able to switch me back the next morning.
Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built. I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly neve…
I'll add that up here in the great north - we also use combined air conditioner/heat pumps but in most cases spring for the "low temperature" models with a built in defroster and higher pressure refrigerant - allowing them to heat down to -18°f. This would almost never make sense in a southern climate where it happens once every 20 years. Likewise, investing in any high efficiency/dual-source heating setup would not…
I remember my parents covering my old leaky single-pane windows in our first house with plastic in the winter. It looks goofy, but it's cheap and it really helps. We also had storm windows that we'd replace our screens with in the winter.
We later moved to a house with newer windows that removed this need, and adult me has a ground source heat pump so I'm toasty even with the 15°F weather here.
> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night. How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go? Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and... Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.