• 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 - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night.
• Heating peak demands tend to be correlated with the longest time since the sun was last shining... This bodes poorly for solar supply and also self generators - even those with battery backup.
• Texas typically imports from neighboring states... Most of which are in a similar irregular climate.
• Heating requirements for a building vs exterior temperature is non-linear, as are heat pump efficiencies. This is especially pronounced with poor insulation factor.
To put it into context, Quebec has ~46,000MW of peak electrical production capacity for a population of 8.4M. during cold winter days (-30°f) it uses all of that capacity and becomes a net-importer. In Summer months, it uses 1/3 of this.
Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M.
What doesn't follow is electricity consumption per BTU produced, ie. if your heating source efficiency is non-linear, such as a heat-pump + resistive fallback heating. You can easily consume 8x the amount of electricity with a delta T of 60 than you do at 15.
In reality, outdoor air temperature alone isn't indicative of the entire building heat loss/requirement - ground temperatures don't respond linearly to air temperatures. Likewise, there are some oddities that come into play with high temperature deltas such as phase-change of materials or outright failure in some cases. Precipitation and wind can also affect thermal efficiencies.
A bitter-sweet example for Texans: The snow can actually provide some insulation. It would be worse if you had no snow and similar air temperatures than getting that 12" of fluffy stuff later this week.
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 never been anywhere NEARLY this cold in the 26 years I've lived here, and the idea that we really won't be above 32F (0C) for a material amount of time until SATURDAY is really really nuts. In a normal Houston winter, by contrast, we MIGHT see 3-4 nights that freeze. We go years without needing to wrap plants, and I've never bothered to wrap outside pipes before. (Outlying areas to the north and especially northwest of the urban core get as much as 10 degrees F colder, but even so it's not a regular thing.)
So yeah, we're all built here for cooling and not heating. Ambient air temp outside is rarely more than 95, so getting your house to 78 is pretty attainable. But when we get cold snaps, WE certainly notice in our house, which is a relatively new (1997) 3-story townhouse (very vertical; it's about 1800 sq. ft. or 167m^2). It's just not set up to heat evenly or well.
The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.
As a consequence, a window in our bedroom is open about 2" all winter.
The other gotcha in our house is the floor in the first level, where I have my office (I work from home). It's a stained concrete floor, which is great in the summer because it helps keep the room nice and cool. Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing in the winter. I'm wearing thick wool socks and long underwear in here now, even though I have a plug-in radiator to supplement the central heating.
Actually, the radiator -- a Delonghi; it works great -- would probably be enough IF the windows were better sealed. My desk is up against a window. My legs feel cold all day in weather like this (well, in cold weather; there hasn't been any weather LIKE THIS before), to the point that last week when it was much warmer (45F during the day) I was wearing sweatpants over jeans.
The house is wonderful and comfortable and attractive. It works GREAT for the vast majority of our weather. It just gets drafty in the winter. And, of course, today I'm concerned that we're going to get rolling outages. Whooo!
At least we have a fireplace. (People laugh about it, but in all honesty having a fire is the easiest way to make the living area comfy without overheating the top floor, just based on where the heat goes. If the house was a little bit bigger, I suspect it would've come with 2 climate control units and proper zoning, which would help a LOT, but as is: just one big zone.)
Any Texans looking for some guerrilla insulation/heating techniques:
Put up some painters plastic on the inside frames of Windows (with dual sided tape) as this acts like a very rudimentary dual-pane window. Kits exist for this also (apologies for the Canadian link: https://www.amazon.ca/3M-2141W-6-Indoor-Window-Insulator/dp/... )
Next I would look into a propane space heater (sometimes referred to as a garage/barn heater). These can be operated on a standard 20lb tank and can keep a house warm for a day or two on a single tank. Co2 levels are minimal but you should still make sure you have a decent co2 sensor nearby.
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.
I figured it was more an example of "must do something" than "activity that will actually help," but I was proven wrong IMMEDIATELY. They've made a material difference (no pun intended), and I'm said I said no when she asked if I wanted some for my office.
Yeah, that's what people often miss. We're not prepared for this, and don't build for it, because it almost never happens.
And it'll be 70F on Sunday.
Every townhouse I've ever lived in had this problem. The thermostat is on the ground floor or 2nd floor, which results in the bedrooms upstairs being oppressively hot. I will drop the temperature by 5+ degrees before retiring for the night. I hear you about the cold office floor - I have hardwood over a slab and I'm thinking of ordering a heating pad like the one the cat has.
There are many intersecting problems here - the main one is that the standard building code in the South requires a minimum of R-15 insulation in the walls, so that's what the builders put in to remain cost-competitive. You can't get much more than that in a wall cavity framed with 2x4's. Builders and owners need to be incentivized to super-insulate. Not necessarily to a "Net Zero" standard, but increasing the minimum to R-21 (which requires going to 2x6 framing) would help in both heating & cooling seasons.
The other problem is that I have had only a single heat pump for the entire house. It would be much better to have a variable-refrigerant-flow (VRF) system where you have multiple "heads" with their own thermostats that run independently (commonly called a Mini-Split although there are differences). And then you can close the doors to rooms that aren't being used, dropping the thermostat in them to reduce usage.
Larger townhouses -- say, 2500sqft & up -- are often zones more reasonably, at least here, such that heating/cooling can be managed with more granularity. But doing it really requires multiple units, not a single big unit.
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-weather/article/Photos-Re...
This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.
And it’s almost inescapable unless you’re interested in custom building or buying an old house.
Wow dude. You decided why people want specific things and let us know that it’s an affront to future generations. I’m glad it tops the list over deep sea drilling, paved suburban road jungles, ocean acidification, and dubstep (they will look back and mourn the loss of our sanity in this age, but it’s so addictive...).
Maybe people just walk into a tall place and feel more comfortable in it? Maybe builders and markets respond to purchasers and their response to something that lots of people find more comforting?
Perhaps a hyper efficient off-grid renewable-driven earthen hovel isn’t for everyone?
I live in a small, modest, low ceiling home with zoned temperature management and comprehensive energy usage monitoring. That’s great for me and my family, but it’s a preference.
And, you know what? Open plan high ceilings are nice, especially when you don’t have kids and can hear each other more easily.
And even worse are houses badly “opened up” - thereby ruining whatever design was originally in place.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/7b/67/947b6734e9ec93809b2c...
It heats and cools far more efficiently than the traditional homes in Houston (mostly pier and beam construction). There's more to home appeal than thermodynamics, especially in a mild climate.
Conditioning an extra 2 to 12ft above your head is absolutely choosing vanity over energy efficiency.
However, most people don’t even have the choice since they’re making trade offs between various neighborhoods of various income levels, and once you get above a certain income, all the houses are made with open foyers and tall ceilings. The builders wouldn’t be able to sell the more energy efficient homes at as high of a price as the non energy efficient ones, so obviously we’re going to end up with a stock of homes where the all the heat downstairs is constantly going upstairs.
The reason the homes with higher ceilings will sell for a higher price is because people feel a certain way about them. A high ceiling has no practical benefits and is purely for aesthetics at the expense of energy efficiency. My intention isn’t to insult, but I think it is accurate. People do many things to project their status.
You are still being insulting, or absurdly reductive. Neither is especially welcome. Normal humans value all sorts of competing concerns when evaluating a home where they may spend many many years. Maybe YOU only value thermodynamics and care nothing for aesthetics, but that doesn't mean people who don't share your POV are only trying to project status or whatever other uncharitable thing you envision.
If anyone wants to see what I'm talking about, I think there are some examples here: https://McMansionHell.com Some of them aren't really that bad, but there are some definite atrocities.
Before COVID were were shopping to upgrade, so we're not going to put any more upgrade money into this house, but if we were going to stay I'd absolutely make changes in this.
Re: the downstairs, unfortunately it warms up quickly on a hot day, and the structure of the house is such that the downstairs room's heat doesn't really have an easy path up.
The other factor is that, in a NORMAL, non-plague year, I'm alone in the house during the work day. If had perfect control of the house climate system, I'd let the upstairs drift to 80 or 82 while keeping my office at 76 or 78, and not start trying to cool the rest of the house until after hours when my wife gets home. Same with heating: just heat down here during the day, and warm the rest of the house in the evening.
There are far-infrared ceramic heaters that don't glow. Less smell and more energy converted into radiation instead of warm air.
The radiator in my office -- which is a normal shaped room with maybe an 8 foot ceiling -- does very well.
Something like this: https://www.retrozone.com/Catalog/flexdamper/Pumps.htm I didn't end up doing it and I don't know anybody who has. And it's probably a lot more expensive than opening your window in the winter.
Still have power here
Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW last night, before an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to weather and grid conditions.
From ERCOT's own Q&A:
-----------
EEA1
When the reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts, Emergency Energy Alert 1 is activated. That’s when ERCOT communicates to the public and to power generators that the situation is deteriorating.
At this time, ERCOT will import power from other states and from Mexico. This regularly happens during peak summer months and is not new. But right now, because prices are so cheap, and unrelated to the weather, ERCOT was already importing power from Mexico and other power grids.
Rotating outages do not happen during this stage.
EEA2
When the electric reserves drop to 1750 megawatts, other steps are taken to bring on additional capacity, but rotating outages are still not yet activated.
EEA3
When the reserves get to 1,000 megawatts and they are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, ERCOT will then ask electric suppliers like Oncor and Reliant to begin rotating outages to reduce load on the system.
ERCOT said the location of outages would be determined by each provider like Oncor and Reliant.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-fre...
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
It is not clear to me if these interconnections are normally used, or only used in Emergency scenarios. I think they are used both. However I have no idea what sort of capacity these have, and if that is enough in cases like this.
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.
This matches my experience, FWIW. When I lived in Ottawa, I occasionally looked at houses and apartment across the river in Quebec and nearly all of them had electric heat.
More data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb17...
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr... (see Electricity heading)
https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-l...
Canada is north. In summer, the sun can set round 11PM and in winter at 330PM
That's a lot of hours of electrical light vs natural
The problem is that people who would have otherwise tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the storage.
While it is 10 F outside, the central heating system for my apartment in a 6-story building cannot maintain temperature. It is 66 F and gradually falling. I would guess it would be 2.5kW running 24/7.
That heater probably doesn't run continously.
For a well designed shared system you can get away with less than n x what an individual unit needs.
(That said, I too guess 2.5kW is too small for what GP mentioned.)
Upside to being in Indiana is our furnaces are made for this. I think I can keep my house at 70 down to like -30F outside. It’s a pretty expensive furnace though, wouldn’t make sense in Texas.
Burning gas is insanely thermodynamically active.
Gas furnace burns gas, blows around hot air.
Radiator heats water, and pushes that water around to heat rooms via radiators.
Here in Austin, it's just past midnight, and it's already down to 13°F (-10.5°C). It hasn't been that cold here since December 23, 1989.
Also, a lot of Texas homes have electric heat (except in the northern part of the state). Winters are relatively short and mild.
Many homes use electric heat pumps as the heating source. They're energy-efficient and easy to install in a home which has AC, so generally a good choice. But they get less and less effective as the outside temperature drops, so a backup electric heating coil kicks in, which uses way more electricity.
Edit: Now that the sun is up and shining through our windows, the duty cycle of our (natural gas) furnace has dropped way off. I'm pretty sure our energy usage today will be less than on a 100 degree day.
I've lived in Texas all my life and can't remember the last time that happened.
You won't feel the windchill inside, but it will amplify the impact of draughty buildings/poor insulation.
Luckily I stocked up on soup before all this so I'll last until the freeze breaks.
1. The extreme cold is driving up demand to heat homes which is usually done in part by natural gas but
2. The cold has frozen natural gas pipes and wells, driving up the cost of gas 33x.
3. People are trying to heat their homes with electricity but
4. Wind turbines are frozen, limiting capacity, AND those sky high gas prices are limiting what gas power plants can output.
Everything else you said appears to be spot on.
At many points in a pipeline further water removal can be essential too.
Even when not liquefied like LPG, when passing through a restriction valve or orifice, there is still additional cooling due to the product acting a bit like a refigerant.
The water content may be small but the quantity of cold gas passing through a narrow point which is well below 0C eventually can build up kilos of ice and block the flow until the ambient temperature rises enough to open it back up.
And yes, my wording seemed weird, even to me.
Resilience is an important principle in engineering, we know that from software, but it is even more important in infrastructure. People rely on this for staying alive. It is important to have a diverse set of electrical generators. Atomic energy and coal are very resilient. As someone else pointed out, a lot of green infrastructure is prone to failure in extreme events. The wind turbines froze. When the sun isn't shining the solar doesn't work, and it is coldest at night. It is great to have green infrastructure _with_ other types. This stuff is way to important to play politics with.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
Basically this. Few individuals pay the actual price of electricity. At best, they'll pay time-of-day rates that might change schedules 2x/year. Otherwise, everyone pays the average cost, and couldn't care less if noon-time electricity costs 10x on Monday vs. last Thursday.
That could be achieved for example by instead of setting your space heater to "low heat", "Mid heat" or "high heat", you could just hit the "$1/hour of heat", "$2/hour of heat", or "$3/hour of heat" settings. The heater itself can look at the minute by minute pricing to decide how much heat to output, and the user can decide to turn it up if they want to pay.
Electronics to connect to wifi and check a server for pricing cost under a dollar now (ESP8266).
This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?
Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day.
I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api.
I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things:
- turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do this are available in the $150 - $350 price range
- scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary - showering to low demand times
- maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications to the construction
- or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC)
- not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to allow their vehicles to be used as power banks.
It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current price hike, API access and real time price information helped me to make the jump however.
Conclusion:
Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems like a good idea for companies that are in a position to provide it.
It’s actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during peak demand.
This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.
I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.
For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).
Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.
No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash, another group of people jacked up theirs up.
Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of those 68s are going to get changed to 80.
If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot more will be set 68.
Would you prefer to be poor and have a large electricity bill because bob up the street uses power at the worst time of day, or would you prefer to at least have the option to save money by heating your house when power is cheaper and let bob pay extra for not being considerate about his power use times?
It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why is there so little empathy on here?
- the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty
- we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die?
- the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years
And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.
Dishwashers come into it when the parent poster arguing in favour of markets-fix-everything said their plan was not for poor people to become human icicles, but for everyone to be pushed by prices to adjust non-essential power use such as washing to other times. Such a plan doesn’t depend on a smart anything - ERCOT twitter feed is suggesting people don’t do laundry on Valentine’s Day to reduce power use, the suggested price influence is that people don’t do laundry by their own choice because it costs more.
Pricing isn’t demand based, so everyone does laundry and uses heat, then the grid collapses - do you think the rich and poor are equally affected by rolling blackouts? That they’re more egalitarian? I suspect not, as rich people will have more and fancier clothing, more money for impromptu propane purchases, more insulated houses, more luxurious vehicles and more money for gas, etc.
There is no current way to provide enough electricity to keep people alive while not providing any for rich people’s luxuries. If demand-based pricing can reduce overall use so the grid doesn’t collapse and there isn’t a huge price surge and people can afford to survive, isn’t that better?
Fixing wealth inequality or assisting the poor could come outside this system - UK has a winter fuel payment for the elderly and poor, for example: https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment
That isn’t a temperature you can reasonably describe as “freezing”. I’m not used to having a thermostat that high even in winter, it’s getting hot and stuffy that warm.
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/sta...
20°C isn't cold at all unless you're soaking wet or there's some serious draft going on in your house.
Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead."
Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.
Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.
rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.
Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.
Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)
If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)
This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable.
Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year.
It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.
It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.
Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug it in this afternoon instead of right now".
I have an app where I can check the price, and set up alerts for when there are price spikes and such.
I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into changing your behavior gradually.
For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.
Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.
> Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled
>
> Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled.
> In order to save money, please send us money.
> P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak.
> thank you for your consideration.
>
> Mike at GE
It depends on what you replace it with. If you switch to a resistive heater, yeah, that's pointless, but if you switch to a heat pump or natural gas-based heating it'd help.
You pretty much can’t buy them anymore at stores except for specialty bulbs like oven lamps, but that might vary state-to-state.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/climate/trump-light-bulb-...
Agreed that some research can also help find a good light. There are plenty of "full spectrum" light solutions out there which may work for the original poster.
Compare Incandescents (A) vs LED (D) at https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-diff...
I find LEDs look much better, particularly if you have chandelier type lights.
The best bet is switching to Hue or other smart bulbs that manage their own dimming. It's generally cheaper too unless you have a dozen bulbs on one dimmer.
> In 2014, the Department of Energy issued regulations that would extend the efficiency standards of the 2007 EISA law to some specialty bulbs, effective January 2020.[91] The new standards would apply to Edison, globe, and candelabra bulbs among others. In February 2019, the Department of Energy announced a proposal to withdraw this change. In September 2019 the Trump administration rolled-back these energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs with the Energy Department's publication of regulations in the Federal Register.[92][93] The Energy Department announced the reversal of the 2014 regulation that would have taken effect on January 1, 2020 and implemented the last round of energy-saving light bulb regulations outlined by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.[94]EISA law to some specialty bulbs, effective January 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...
In the abstract, they’re bad when you’re cooling a Texas house and they’re putting more heat into it; on a cold night a 100W resistance heater is a 100W resistance heater and if you’d banned them, the people with them would need 100W heat from another source for every bulb replaced. That wouldn’t save power or money or reduce demand now as you seem to be suggesting.
Or it’s day time and the bulbs are off, or nighttime and the bulbs are off for sleep. They seem the least relevant thing to gripe about in this specific context?
This is about Texas though where high efficiency gas furnaces. In the north natural gas is the normal way to heat. I'm not sure about Texas.
But since the system is shared, it affects everyone.
Insulation and heat pump equipped spot price aware water heaters etc could probably help a lot.
Insulation helps in the summer too though - it's not just something you need in cold climates. If it's hot outside and you are running AC there's a temperature differential. Insulation will reduce the equalisation of that, and reduce the amount of energy you are using to cool your home. It's epecially important if you are in a stick framed home where there's basically no thermal mass (as opposed to masonry).
1) People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it
2) When you need the energy, it's too late to make the equipment/house more efficient, and when you don't need it, people don't think it's important to make it more efficient
3) Mandating that people upgrade their equipment is unpopular, they vote against it, yet when they get hit with the bill for the energy later, they're unhappy with government for not having done more to control it.
It's a thankless job, to be sure. Good thing taking away people's incandescent bulbs was recognized as a threat to democracy and stopped.