I have wondered about this actually - it would be amazing to have a single product which is a carport with preinstalled panels, non-grid-tied-inverter and charger. Then there's no electrical component of the installation on site, you just assemble. Most of the complications of installation would go away, you just concrete in four posts.

Thanks. I will try to talk to dealerships. Sounds like a good sales channel.

Can you share some numbers? In Belgium I paid it back in 6 years. In South Africa where I live now, it'll take about 8 years. And as a big bonus it solved load shedding when that happened in 2023-2024.

Nonsense. I've just installed PV in the north of England and my payback is in the order of five years, even with the gloom of our seasons.

Large swathes of the US have hours of uninterrupted sunshine all year round. With a battery, a residential owner may never need to pay an electricity bill for the lifetime of the system.

I’m in Canada, payback on my 7.3kw system will be 7 years.

I got an interest free loan for the full cost, so nothing out of pocket, just putting the money I would have spent on electricity onto the loan for 7 years, the will profit $1000 a year for 20 years.

Worlds biggest no brainer.

If you have a $35 demand charge for an induction stove, the political problem is that people have already voted themselves into very expensive energy.

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.

It doesn’t suit “other people”. It suit every single human in the long run. Problem is, not short term.

Okay, vote to stop giving your tax money to fossil fuel billionaires. Vote yourself richer

Much of Europe is importing fossil gas because they have made themselves dependent on it, because it used to be cheap, because they didn't have to pay the external costs.

50% of your federal tax bill funds foreign wars and military weapons that are then turned on civilian populations including our own.

You don't have to transition. But your furnace will eventually wear out, and your stove will too. Or you'll build a new house, and then you're looking at a major new investment. Make a smart one.

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Peak demand is mostly covered using a home battery. You can then refill the battery overnight when rates and overall demand on the grid are lower.

Smoothing out household demand on the grid is the future.

You can charge your EV at night. My washer is quiet enough that running it at 2AM isn't a big deal, but even then there are modern driers that use heat pumps to dry and don’t even require venting.

Making electricity cheaper is exponentially easier than getting people in a democracy to choose short term pain for themselves on a politicized issue.

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.

A previous calculation was that an all-electric economy makes sense when oil costs ~400 per barrel --- since then increased efficiency in solar panels and so forth and presumably greatly reduced that figure --- anyone got the math and figures to work this out with contemporary technology?

I think you are correct and politicians know this. I.e. why did California not maneuver to save those SoCal refineries? Higher price reduces gas use and is below threshold of flipping the state Republican.

That doesn't math all that well. The coefficient of performance of a heat pump is better when the outdoor temp is higher - did you mean the temp outside is -above- 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)

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The problem is not a brief surge of startup energy; it is the total sustained power you need to heat the water for the shower.

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.

It is unlikely that a heat pump could heat water that quickly to be "tankless."

>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.

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.

I agree it's not common. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone with demand charges on a residential account. That's typically for large industrial and commercial ratepayers.

Where do you live, with what power company?

It sounds like your electric company is straight up corrupt, which would indeed be a barrier to electrification. For reference, the main demand reduction my municipal electric company does is to send text messages on hot days asking us to use less air conditioning.

You could game the crap out of this with a small home battery or a V2H capable EV.

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.

> Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets.

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.

Yep TIL, It’s not a thing anywhere in my country that I am aware of.

Well when talking about induction, ovens aren't super relevant.

But overall, here's average US consumption:

    Heating                  12000 kWh/yr (1400 watts)
    Hot water                 3000 kWh/yr  (340 watts)
    Cooling and refrigeration 1200 kWh/yr  (140 watts)
    Lighting                  1200 kWh/yr  (140 watts)
    Washing and drying        1000 kWh/yr  (110 watts)
    Cooking                   1000 kWh/yr  (110 watts)
    Miscellaneous electric     600 kWh/yr   (70 watts)

Is there an induction oven that is more efficient than a gas oven?

Damn, it’s really difficult to read huh.

If you go back to GP’s comment you’ll see they accounted for generation and transmission.

They clearly separated the efficiency of the engines with the efficiency of generation and transmission.

The point stands. For the same amount of energy, EVs travel 3-4x the same distance. And you were really rude.

Do you have a heat pump? Because it feels like you’re just making this hypothetical up. I have HPs, they are not slow at all, heat up a cold house just fine in a reasonable amount of time.

This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense either. If the heat pump can maintain temperature when the weather is cold, it can also maintain temperature when the weather turns cold. Are you waiting for the interior of your house to become freezing before you turn the heat on? Why? Nobody does that.

There’s a challenge in that different heat pumps have wildly different performance characteristics, and they’re not widely understood by people. Some can’t heat effectively below 47 degrees F, others happily keep pumping out lots at -13 degrees F.

> Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.

Sounds to me like you're the one unwilling to accept reality.

Have you watched the Don't look up movie?

BTU's are BTU's regardless of their source. It sounds like your brand new house was not built to spec, or poorly designed. Any certified ASHRAE technician should be able to meet the required demand load with properly sized equipment. The consequences of fuel type should manifest in differences of up-front and ongoing expense, not comfort.

My heat pump in upstate NY is doing great. Maybe you just had a bad one?

So you got a crappily installed heat pump / furnace and decided the entire technology is flawed based on this one point of anecdata. Got it.

(Also wow does running your kitchen toaster really cost thousands a month? Maybe move somewhere where power company is not trying to gouge you?)

One alternative to a freezing pool of water that I'm intrigued by is using thermochemical heat batteries to transport heat energy from summer to winter.

For example, evaporating a 40,000 L solution of calcium chloride brine can store 4.6 megawatt-hours(*) of thermal energy and release it in the winter by passing water vapour over the solution to dilute it. This can heat geothermal temperatures from 10°C to 27°C which can be used in in-floor heating.

But the big asterisk is that only 11% of that 4.6 megawatt-hours of that thermal energy being "stored" is held in the enthalpy of dilution, and 89% of that heat is coming from the enthalpy of vaporization, and acquiring water vapour in winter isn't so easy.

One would probably need a source of water and use geothermal heat to raise dry cold air temperature to the needed 10°C, while absorbing water vapour from a (relatively small) tank of water. The net result is more of a thermochemical heat pump rather than a thermochemical battery per se. But the point is that, other than some fans, this is not electrically powered.

Then there is the issue of storing such tanks safely underground, and more problems. Still, there might be some innovative solutions lying in this direction. For example, one can replace this open-loop system with a closed-loop vacuum system to boil water, but at the cost of far more complex and dangerous engineering.

Standard well drilling rig. Most farms around the world have their own well, so it isn't uncommon. Self sufficiency magazines used to have ads for DIY drills.

Expect to pay $10-20k for the hole but it is common in large parts of the world.

It's a specialized job but it's not difficult finding a contractor for it. When my parents did it ~30 years ago I think it cost around $10k. https://www.thermia.se/bergvarme-jordvarme/bergvarme/install...

> A lot of heat pumps don’t work well below -20F / -30C.

I mean, sure, and a tiny one won't work for a mansion. If you're somewhere that cold, you choose a heat pump that works in that temperature range.

When We had a whole-house heat pump installed to replace an EoL gas furnace the installation also included an energy efficiency audit. There were some places (like blowing foam at the foundation/house joint to suppress air leaks, and insulating exposed ducts in the attic) that made a significant difference. And this was for a house built 14 years ago.

Are there a lot of homes that have 125 year old oil heating? Or have they been replaced along with way with more efficient oil furnaces?

German has made some absolutely brain dead energy policy decisions over the last 30 years. Choosing to decommission their fleet of nuclear reactors, not investing in developing enough wind and solar generation, building a bunch of oil pipelines to Russia.

Cool post. I would like to learn more details!

Real question: As I understand, good insulation in your home helps two ways: Keep the heat inside in the winter, and keep the cold inside in the summer. Do I have that right? If yes, I understand there are lots of places in Australia with very light winters (or none at all), so they are mostly focused on cooling with A/C. Are you saying that installing significantly better insulation is not economically efficient for many Australia homes?

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Have to wait for Mr Fusion l

How about antimatter?

20% was the efficiency for very ancient engines.

Modern internal-combustion engines have 35% to 40% efficiency, with even efficiencies of over 50% for the very big 2-stroke Diesel engines used in ships.

Nonetheless that remains about half of the efficiency of electric vehicles and the energy efficiency of the latter can be greatly increased over this ratio by the recovery of the kinetic or gravitational energy, when braking or descending.

Electrical transmission lines lose power, too. So does generating the electricity. So does the electric motors. So does the heavier weight of the EV. Regenerative braking doesn't apply when cruising on the highway.

And so on.

P.S. Since I drive a stick, I coast a lot. I live in a hilly area, and have a pretty good feel for just how and where I can shift into neutral and coast. I also coast towards a red light with the goal of reaching the intersection just when it turns green. (Moving forward from a dead stop uses lots of energy.)

And more every year as the highest quality oil gets used up and we have to work harder to catalyze the rest.

Driving more is not environmentally friendly, even in an EV. You're putting more wear and tear on the tires and brakes, which are not sustainably manufactured. And more road traffic means more repaving, requiring diesel vehicles and massive amounts of tar.

"Free" fuel for you just pushes the externalities elsewhere.

Yes there are diminishing returns, but they're a long way from where you start.

Pre-industrial revolution most people in my country own enough clothing for everyday and then maybe some extra stuff for "best" appearance like church. Making a shirt requires hours of labour from skilled workers. The machines eliminate one of those jobs ("hand" weaving, using a loom that you operate at human scale, replaced by enormous machine looms which produce much more fabric and much faster with far less human labour) and streamline others so that the price of a garment collapses. So people buy a lot more garments. You probably own enough clothes that you can wear different clothes each day for at least a week, likely more, and you think nothing of it.

Most people won't buy so many clothes that they can't even wear items once, but many get pretty close, and so worldwide we produce hugely more clothing per person than before the textile mills were first built.

Really far.

The crux of Jevon's paradox is that you’re lowering the cost of revenue below the sale price.

If I can generate $10 a sale then I’ll do no sales if it costs me $11 . If gas drops from $4 to $2 then I’ll do as many sales as I can as $9 is less than $10.

I mean, right now, supposedly, we don't have enough energy to run as many AI data centers as everyone wants to build, and so big tech is getting into the power plant business to scale up: they'd love it if you stopped using energy they want to buy!

For the same reason there were no solar panels prior to 1800, there was not an excess of societal energy to invent and produce them. Solar panels are not trees.

And relying on trees is not a great idea either, look at Easter Island, lol.

(GPT has all the answers anyway, no need to ask me, I'm an old man with no issue and no stake in this stuff)

Thanks, you're right, I'm off by x365. But still it's a very insignificant value.

A quick search says 200 TWh for bitcoin mining per year, out of a total of 31 000 TWh of electricity generation, that is, 0.6%, or 600 times more than what you thought.