The energy transition to clean energy is to a cheaper energy future.
Fossil fuels are not only more expensive, they cause tons of health problems from their pollution, in addition to climate change.
1) heat pump appliances are much more energy efficient (they move heat rather than convert it from electronics or molecules, and modern heat pumps work well in most cold climates (and you can also utilize resistive heating for the short period your outside of their optimal operating range)
2) time of use charges can be managed by smart applications and/or a whole home battery (and the battery gives you extra resiliency in case of an outage)
3) this is probably a problem with how your local electricity market is structured. ERCOT (Texas) developed and energy-only and has the cheapest electric rates in the nation (granted lots of this is due to abundant natural gas and renewables in the state) while other markets (say PJM in the north east) have energy + capacity markets and have seen huge (11x) increase in prices on the capacity market side.
Electric utilities are trying to manage not use resource adequacy (having enough generation) but transmission adequacy as well (having enough head room on transmission line to move power around without the lines burning up). But many utilities have been slow to adopt new technologies that would allow the to squeeze more capacity out of their existing infrastructure (things like dynamic line ratings, or distributed energy resources)
We need to do the work to align the economic/market incentives so that using more efficient technologies is actually cheaper.
Suggesting someone spend $25-$30k to transition gas infrastructure to electric ($6k furnace, $2k cooktop, $4k water heater, $15k battery) to offset their $40/month gas bill is also not a winning argument.
Without market pressure, what incentive is there for an electric company to optimize anything? Transitioning away from gas only makes them more entrenched.
30-50yr
> and your stove will too.
10-30yr
>Or you'll build a new house,
Only professionals build houses because the sum total of "strings attached" that have been added create too much overhead for anyone else (save perhaps some guy in some highly favorable jurisdiction in BFE"
Sorry, no. Not unless you're buying them from 1980 and it's a cast-iron boiler. I put in a brand new high-efficiency gas furnace in 2011 and it already needs replacement, because multiple expensive electronic parts have failed and repairing it is no longer a good investment. I was shocked. The explanation is that traditional boilers lasted a lot longer, but modern equipment has a 15-20 year replacement cycle, with 15 years closer to the average. This was a very expensive boiler, too. Contractor-grade equipment put into new non-bespoke builds is often even worse.
To save you the trouble of searching yourself: https://claude.ai/share/e84e4f25-656e-49d9-b58d-65f97e0eeaf7
Demand charges will come to everyone. It's clearly the end game. When everyone is bullied/tricked/enticed into smart meters, the temptation will be too strong.
> time of use charges can be managed
You responded to someone who mentioned dinner. Are people to cook dinner at 2am? People in apartments to ruin their sleep with the washer running at midnight?
Smoothing out household demand on the grid is the future.
Really shows how out of touch HN can be at times
The electricity market up until a decade or so ago worked well for almost every consumer. Fair, equitable prices for everyone, with the energy companies and government owning the concern about how to power a nation.
Now the reality people are trying to make happen is "just invest $10-30k and turn your house into a substation", and they don't see how absurd it is compared to the very recent past. A single mother working 50 hours a week and 2 jobs doesn't have $20k for solar upgrades and can't cook at 12am and doesn't have time to take out the clothes in the morning and doesn't have 3 hours for a heat-pump dryer to eventually dry the clothes
Look, I'm from the UK, I don't need to be told how precarious our (geopolitical) situation is with natural gas. But I don't want people getting screwed in the transition.
Speaking for myself (and I suppose the millions that are on the same utility), the only time when it's cheaper for us to use the heat pump over the gas furnace is from midnight to 6am and when the temp outside is below 20F.
You're also assuming time of use billing, I assume.
I don't disagree, btw - gas is cheaper than a heat pump for me also, which makes me sad. My only point was that you have to compare against them and not resistance heating. (That's slightly wrong - if I were to use a heat pump during the shoulder season and my boiler when it's colder it would be cheaper in operating costs but lose on capex)
The other issue is the for-profit electric monopoly. The elimination of gas will just mean they can extract even more from their customers.
Is that accurate?
They use a tankless water heater so electrical use is ~zero when nobody is using hot water, which is most of the time. If you use a tank - heating ~40 gallons of water 24/7/365 - that's hard to compete with by just being more efficient.
Is there such thing as a heat pump-powered tankless water heater? I expect the challenge is the surge of energy needed to instantly warm heating elements to functioning temperatures.
There are all-electric tankless water heaters but in my limited experience they need ~120A available, which is prohibitively expensive. (Why not just a capacitor that can surge the startup energy?)
Let's say you want to run a single shower at 2.5gpm, the water comes into the home at 55F (12.8C, pretty temperate!) and you want your shower at 100F (37.8C), so a 25C rise. 2.5gpm = 9.463 L/min = 158mL/sec. Water's heat capacity is 4.184* J/mL/degC, so the sustained thermal power you need to deliver is:
4.184 x 158 x 25 = 16.5kJ/s = 16.5kW
At 240V, 16.5kW would be almost 70A.
What makes a heat pump heater more efficient is that it multiplies the electrical power input into a larger thermal power output, by "borrowing" thermal energy from the surroundings. So you could get (for example) 15kW thermal power from 5kW electrical power. In practice the heater will be tanked, rather than tankless, for two reasons:
1. The effective power will probably be less than that.
2. That was an estimate to run just one shower and you might want to run more than that!
So the tank lets you buffer the power draw over time; there will be some thermal loss over time, but insulation is cheap, and it's hard to fight a 3-5x amplification from the heat pump.
* Yes, yes, per gram/K but 1mL of water is close enough to 1g for this.
FWIW, one US govt source attributes ~20% of a typical household's domestic energy usage to water heating, though the source doesn't attribute it to thermal loss or initial heating.
You need to compare this against the average heating days for their location.
Water heaters are a "incandescent lightbulbs are 100% efficient in the winter" situation.
For one meal? For the month? How did you even this? What is your cost per kWh?
I’m being a bit hyperbolic - it’s averaged over the highest 1 hour peak demand period (4pm-7pm, M-F), but it does limit what things can be run simultaneously (no dryer, oven and AC at the same time, for example). We schedule things around that, Our peak demand for this past month was 2.3kW. That single line item charge is higher than our entire gas bill.
There’s a separate use charge as well, but per kWh that’s pretty low. Then, of course, there’s the dozens of other random charges and fees ($86) that have nothing to do with electricity generation and everything to do with being a monopoly (court resolution surcharge: $3.58). The idea of moving more things to electric is nauseating.
That would be correct, I had never heard of this. it seems extremely punishing and something I would hope your government regulators are trying to fix.
The problem for you isn’t electricity it’s your local laws favouring gas and the utility extracting wealth. 86 usd in fees is more then my entire electric bill has been in the summer (the monthly fees here are 15cad a month)
I imagine your per kWh cost is also much higher too
That said I still don’t think on your math entirely holds up. Ovens and electric elements (even more so for induction) do not just draw their rated power continuously. Once they heat up they drop to a much lower duty cycle like 50%. But that is besides the point now.
Where do you live, with what power company?
I do understand that mine lands on the opposite side of not being the most economically optimal, compared to say variable time of use rates. I was just illustrating how out of wack the explained pricing structure is. At that point, why even bother upgrading from a 60A service?
If this is really a modern competitive cost structure with nearly free incremental electricity (great for running computers etc!) then the obvious answer is to get some batteries rather than contorting your life around the POCO's hyper-discretized schedule. But it reads to me like an electric company just putting customers over a barrel because it can. I would have to know the actual $/kWh incremental rate to think otherwise.
They themselves said that such charges aren't common from other providers, and that their POCO acts with unrestrained monopoly power to tack on a bunch of arbitrary fees. My only point was that this is part way to not even having electrical service in the first place, and is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be reigned in if we want more things to be electrified.
I chose to interpret it as his choice, but if - as you seem to think - he has no choice and this is how his electric is billed, I would agree that his utility is stupid.
Though, at the prices and idiocy you are citing, you could probably just cancel your electrical service and get a big house battery. If they don't allow that, you could just stop paying your electric bill entirely. They'd cut you off the grid eventually, stop billing you. Good riddance, I suppose.
It is more common with medium to large commercial users than with residential users.
The bill will have both the per kWh energy charge to cover energy usage and the demand charge.
So in his case it means if he cooks one meal on an induction stove that month, with no other high loads at the same time, it sets a floor of $36 on the demand charge.
It's going to cost everyone money to get off fossil fuels. Everyone needs to understand that. We've all been individually dumping carbon into the atmosphere, and we will all need to pay individually for it.
The difficult part is that as demand for petroleum products drop, they will get cheaper (at least initially). Electricity costs need to fall faster than oil prices as oil demand drops.
Climate change and natural gas's contribution to it are well-established facts. It's too easy for someone to politicize anything at all - climate change, vaccines, etc. - and then part of the population says, 'oh, we can't touch that'.
Facts matter, but not nearly as much as emotions do. Talking about problems is important, but the impact is much greater if you can put it in context of a single person or very small group of people that you can name. As soon as the effect is on thousands or millions of people, the impact tapers off.
I agree with you though about politicization. It’s too easy and effective. It can be used for good though. Nixon passed most of the US’ environmental legislation. He created or passed the EPA, the NOAA, the endangered species act, marine mammal protection act, and clean water act. The political influence of hunters and the NRA at the time was a big driver (but not the only or even biggest driver) of those changes.
In my opinion, the only way to make this issue, or any other, exempt from voter feedback is having a very high trust in government. This trust probably peaked in the World War II era and was damaged by Vietnam.
Compare how the Salk polio vaccine was received by the public to the COVID vaccine, in spite of the fact there had been errors made with earlier polio vaccines. The trust was strong enough to surmount that.
Could you tell me what in my comment says or implies that?
Neither contemporary presidential candidate campaigned against the Salk vaccine. It was a non-politicized issue because the trust was greater.
For scientifically bogus reasons, there is a lack of trust in the experts behind the COVID vaccine, and therefore an opportunity for political exploitation. Hence vaccines have become a political issue.
Believe me, I would rather go back to a time of voter trust.
It's a common technique used when the evidence and rationality are overwhelmingly against someone. Then they harp on (climate change) as (liberal) lies and oppression.
> For scientifically bogus reasons, there is a lack of trust in the experts behind the COVID vaccine, and therefore an opportunity for political exploitation. Hence vaccines have become a political issue.
I think that's backward: Politicization of COVID vaccine, with the ground laid by prior health and scientific issues, causes the distrust. The same was done by the same people to attack every other institution: Science generally, journalism, academia (e.g., elite colleges), healthcare, international relations (the State Dept and Defense Dept), Federal Reserve, 'liberal' judges, etc.
It's intentional - by politicizing the issue, it shifts influence from the institutions to the political group. Reality becomes whatever they say it is - there is no external check on them remaining.
I’d rather costs of all energy be reduced than people be priced out.
What isn't on the bills but still affects people's pocketbooks is climate change, military funding (for countries without domestic natural gas), etc. People in Los Angeles don't see the fire damage on their gas bills, but they sure pay for it.
The whole transition away from gas is a "never waste an opportunity" situation for the energy companies/billionaires. Through smart meters enabling 'peak demand management' (and other similarly innocuous sounding phrases), the masses are going to royally shafted.
My natural gas bill for a month is around $40 with no time of use restrictions. Effectively cheaper than turning any one of those things on during peak demand hours.
Per energy unit, all of those may be more efficient. Per dollar, they are not.