The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet

Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet by acidburnNSA on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @01:20PM (#19565200)

There's still the problem of powering the heat pumps with clean energy in winter. It has to come from somewhere. These polar vortices aren't getting any milder. This is a massive slice of the energy pie that requires discipline and planning to decarbonized. I worry because I perceive complacency due to cheap natural gas and I fear we won't come close to decarbonizing enough unless we're serious and quantitative. How many new kW of heat pumps would it take to heat the US Midwest through a winter?

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Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet by ip26 on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @02:08PM (#19565681)

I'm not close enough to the problem to identify the solution with authority, but there are many options. Most significantly to me, long distance transmission lines will hopefully allow sunny Arizona to sell power to wintery Minnesota. But I do agree about the pitfalls of complacency.

The beautiful thing about electrification is its source agnosticism. You can put in heat pumps today, power them off natural gas turbines for now, and switch out to something better in the future at will. As long as your heat pumps can achieve COP of ~2 or better for most of the winter, they should have comparable overall efficiency if we assume the electricity from the natural gas plant is in total about 50% efficient.

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Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet by Scoundreller on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @02:49PM (#19566068)

Or a home natural gas turbine that also runs your heat pump compressor. And condenses the steam for high efficiency.

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Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet by jabl on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @02:28PM (#19565906)

Over here heat pumps are quite popular (both ground source and air). Problem is people size them so they can get through most of the winter, but for cold spells they're not enough and you need supplemental resistive heating.

Sure, cost optimal for the individual consumer, but for the entire grid?

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Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet by Scoundreller on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @02:42PM (#19566015)

Depends where you are: in a lot of places, it only gets cold when a weather system moves in, which means lots of wind power available.

The backup power could be propane, but electric-resistive is still cheaper.

The other issue is that air source heat pumps should really create blocks of ice from municipal water and then dump them in the yard, instead of trying to squeeze heat out of cold air.

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Re:The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet by jabl on Thursday April 04, 2019 @02:43AM (#19569836)

Where I live, cold spells unfortunately tend to coincide with very low winds.

And yeah, adding a supplemental resistive heater to a heat pump is certainly a lot cheaper than adding a separate combustion based backup heating source.

For some reason, we don't really use propane over here, except for running grills in the summer, or for boat stoves etc. Fossil fuel heating for houses tends to be fuel oil, though that is on the way out.

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