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Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

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Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#681

Post by naijaboiler »

bluGill wrote: post #290
david422 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are back to where you started. If it was cheaper to use gas to run a heat pump then everybody would just run generators in their houses off of gas instead of using electrical lines.

That has been proposed. Well the proposal was to run a small engine powering a generator, then you cool the engine to heat the house, while the electric is sold (or otherwise powers the house). However modern gas furnaces are > 90% efficient and it is hard to get an engine that efficient for heat (remember the engine will be running indoors so it needs to not fill the house with noise of CO). I think no matter how yo…

Instead it everyone rubbing their own little power plant. Economies of scale suggests that’s it probably cheaper to centralize that electricity generation in a highly efficient large plant, which brings us back to exactly what we have been found got that 100 years

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#682

Post by xp84 »

nxm wrote: post #481
bagels wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A combination of: mismanagement and corruption. To pay for all the people that PGE murdered with their negligence? Why do you think electricity prices are high? Why should the rates be 4x the rest of the country?

Because of regulations and higher costs (labor)

I’m curious if there’s a big regional difference in cost of the pretty skilled labor involved in power generation and delivery.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#683

Post by lazide »

g8oz wrote: post #569
lazide wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out they were right about that one though.

Are you sure? I still see them around in some local shopping malls.

If your criteria as to if something is actually long term useful/the best tradeoff is if you can find it at your local shopping mall, you might want to rethink that a bit.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#684

Post by kenmacd »

simonjgreen wrote: post #672

For those complaining of the cost of electricity vs natural gas, consider if the cost matters when you are comparing to burning something you shouldn’t be burning in the first place. It’s a bit like complaining it’s cheaper to steal food from a store instead of pay for it. And I know electricity production is not renewable everywhere in the world yet, but at least it’s on a path and possible. Burning natural gas does…

> I know electricity production is not renewable everywhere in the world yet, but at least it’s on a path and possible

And somewhat counter-intuitively, even if you are going to consume that natural gas, it still works out better for the power plant to use it to generate electricity that's used to run a heat pump than to burn it directly for heat.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#685

Post by naijaboiler »

Reason077 wrote: post #501
jhallenworld wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a big problem for electric cars too... Here are the current prices per kwh for me in MA: Electricity = $.26 / kwh Propane (LPG) = .134 / kwh Heating oil = .095 / kwh Gasoline = .091 / kwh Natural Gas = .082 / kwh

You still need to account for efficiency of the various fuels when working out which one is cheapest. An electric vehicle is on the order of 5X more efficient than a gasoline vehicle per kWh (that is, an EV that will go 5 km on 1 kWh of electricity would be lucky to get 1 km per kWh if it were running on gasoline). So in this case, it's still cheaper to operate an EV than a gasoline vehicle in MA, even if electricity…

Enough of this theory. I live in Boston area. I have rented an EV and a gas vehicle and covered the same distance. The EV cos more to cover the same distance. Like 2x more. And that’s before the inconvenience of hunting for places to recharge and the time wasted at charging stations, and range anxiety.

Maybe the math is different for those who can charge at home. I’m tired of people waving abstract thermodynamics math at me when talking about real life economics I faced

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#686

Post by naijaboiler »

tomschlick wrote: post #272
bagels wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? It's $0.52/kwh here, and before that rate increase, we were paying (edit) $278/mo in the summer for similar (70 year old 3 bedroom house), and slightly lower temepratures.

For context of how crazy that is... here in OH we pay ~$0.12/kwh

My mom in Indiana pays $0.11/kwh.

I pay $0.35/kwh here outside of Boston. The electricity generation part of my bill alone $0.19/kwh dwarfs her entire bill

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#687

Post by naijaboiler »

kenmacd wrote: post #684
simonjgreen wrote: post #672

For those complaining of the cost of electricity vs natural gas, consider if the cost matters when you are comparing to burning something you shouldn’t be burning in the first place. It’s a bit like complaining it’s cheaper to steal food from a store instead of pay for it. And I know electricity production is not renewable everywhere in the world yet, but at least it’s on a path and possible. Burning natural gas does…

> I know electricity production is not renewable everywhere in the world yet, but at least it’s on a path and possible And somewhat counter-intuitively, even if you are going to consume that natural gas, it still works out better for the power plant to use it to generate electricity that's used to run a heat pump than to burn it directly for heat.

Your response is only true if using electricity to heat is cheaper than using gas to heat. It isn’t for resistive heating. For heat pumps it can, but it has to be high efficiency heat pumps that start efficient even at cold winter temps

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#688

Post by slavik81 »

sgerenser wrote: post #361
UncleOxidant wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had exactly the same experience recently. It seems like there are plenty of good mini-split heatpump systems that will work down to 0F (or even lower) without any kind of backup heat source. But if you're replacing a forced air furnace that feeds an existing ducts the only options are heatpumps that need to have backup heat under 30F. So essentially you're buying 2 furnaces in one which increases the cost. I'm in the…

There's plenty of central split heat pumps that can function just fine below 30F. Look for ones marked "hyper heat" or advertised for use in cold climates. As long as the heatpump can handle down to 0F or so, then your backup heat only really needs to be an electric resistance heat strip (inefficient, but very cheap) since it would be used so infrequently. OTOH, if you're replacing a gas furnace and already have A/C,…

Imagine the electrical demand on the grid during a cold snap if everyone switched to heat pumps with resistive heating as a backup. At the time of largest demand, the largest electrical appliance in each home would be reduced to a fraction of its normal efficiency. And all the homes in the region would be experiencing that same thing at the same time.

Electric resistive heating is not a suitable backup. If adopted at scale, it would tend to amplify demand spikes when the grid is at its most vulnerable.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#689

Post by leg100 »

elihu wrote: post #647
jbarham wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason that natural gas prices in Australia have gone up in the past 10 years is that gas producers in the eastern states were able to start exporting gas as LNG. As of 2023, Australia is the world's second largest LNG exporter (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1262074/global-lng-expor... ) after the US (take that Russia!) and ahead of Qatar. Great for the gas exporting cartel but not so great for…

What you seem to be saying is that Australians had gas that was artificially cheap because it wasn't being bought and sold at international market rates, and once that started happening and the market was no longer distorted by trade limitations, the fair market price was not longer attractive to Australian customers. (Personally, I think all countries, to the extent that they can, ought to both reduce domestic fossi…

It wasn't "artifically" cheap nor was the market "distorted". It was merely the physical reality prior to the innovation of LNG.

It would only be fair to say it was artifically cheap, say, if the Australian government was imposing tariffs or subsidising production. I don't think it was doing that, and as it was, the producers were sufficiently incentivised by the market to produce and sell gas domestically.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#690

Post by demondemidi »

Fuut wrote: post #630
demondemidi wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reply made no point, so what exactly stands? Reply just said I don't know what I'm talking about, so I explained where my knowledge came from, which is more than the reply did. And somehow that's a better "point"? kids these days.

[flagged]

This whole thread is people who don’t own a house or heat pump screaming they are right and people who do own a house just shrugging because they’ve experienced reality.
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