Information I have learned from reading the Green Building Advisors website over the past two years while building a new house (electric-only although I didn't start with that purpose):
1) Air source heat pumps have become incredibly efficient even in cold climates.
2) Ground source heat pumps are complex and very expensive and probably best suited for large installs like schools.
3) Ductless mini splits are the preferred way to heat and cool most USA (tight) homes.
4) Modern code dictates a tight (measured by air changes per hour) home and making an existing home tighter is usually the best use of time and money.
5) Induction is superior in many ways and air quality points to gas cooking being much worse than previously thought.
6) Heat pump hot water heaters (with tank) are the most efficient way to provide hot water.
7) Tankless electric is difficult because of the huge spikes of power it needs. Maybe if you have a battery with your solar setup, it can work better.
8) Tankless also seems to have more maintenance issues than expected (e.g., it's not maintenance free as I imagined).
9) Once your house becomes very tight (measured by air changes per hour), you will need to bring in fresh air. An ERV is efficient at exchanging stale, temp-regulated air with outside air.
10) Building tight, all-electric, with solar will provide a comfortable, clean, long-lasting house, but it will be quite a bit more expensive. Possibly 30%+ more expensive than using standard contractor choices.
> 3) Ductless mini splits are the preferred way to heat and cool most USA (tight) homes.
In Australia, but we just installed these in our house with in-ceiling cassettes and they're incredibly good. Also initially didn't care too much that they had WiFi control, but we ended up never using the remotes and just using the app. (Since you're typically sitting on the couch when you want to change the setting.)
Every ducted system I've seen is incapable of regulating separate rooms properly. Presumably one would need temp sensors in each room to do that, and that isn't done on cheap installs.
> 5) Induction is superior in many ways and air quality points to gas cooking being much worse than previously thought.
If anyone knows some good arguments to use when your partner is an excellent cook and loves gas for the high heat (searing and wok frying), I'm all ears. With the kitchen upgrade I installed a monster extraction rangehood (external fan, 3x the typical extraction) to hopefully deal with the air quality issue.
> If anyone knows some good arguments to use when your partner is an excellent cook and loves gas for the high heat (searing and wok frying), I'm all ears.
Other comments had some good suggestions, but I'd be sure to also mention:
Ease of cleanup: Induction units only get warm, none of the food or oil that gets spilled or splattered will burn onto the surface. A damp cloth is all the cleanup necessary.
Comfortable kitchen temperatures: You have a tiny fraction as much heat emitted into the room, so the kitchen remains a far more comfortable temperature.
Get an Iwatani 35FW butane stove for the occasions your partner wants to use gas. It uses cheap cans of butane gas, puts out an unexpectedly high amount of BTU due to the burner design, and a heat transfer bar keeps the butane can warm. It can also be moved outside for wok cooking so it doesnt smoke up the house. And you can do things like hotpot/fondue.
I’ve been wondering for a while with the (US) code is around 240V/15A outlets around the countertop along side the 120V. I would think as long as it’s a standard plug and has GFCI it should be ok but haven’t got far enough to ask an electrician.
Then just need to see which appliances i can get to run on it. Seems most kettles, resistance and induction cooktops for the UK (50hz) should work. Anything with a motor is probably out unless it’s an inverter drive.
Searing shouldn't be an issue with induction - the pans heat up very quickly and there will be no hot or cold spots as long as your cooktop has a coil big enough for the cookware that you want to use.
Flat bottomed woks can work with induction however the round bottomed ones won't sit close enough to the coil to heat up properly. An outdoor wok burner could be a good way for your partner to get their wok hei fix without burning gas in the house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpoSvprBJpE.
The main downsides I'd mention:
When I cook with induction I'm not comfortable shaking the pan to sauté or flip food. The surface of the cooktop is supposed to be quite durable but it looks like glass and I tend to baby it against the (even imagined) possibility of scratching.
Only ferrous-based cookware will be heated by the cooker so any aluminum or copper pans in the house become useless.
My take is that most of them are crap. They usually have 10 power levels, which is too few. Some also have temperature-based settings, but I suspect the sensors are too removed from the food surface to be accurate and they're basically ornamental.
I think you need good cookware that can spread the heat. I don't know what cookware is good, but most cookware just scorches your food in a ring-shaped pattern.
I do have one friend who spent a boatload of money on a gaggenau induction cooktop he loves. it seems to have elements spread out on the surface and adapts to the size and number of pans.
He also dedicated a 220v circuit to the thing, so it can pump out lots of energy, especially compared to ~1200 watts from a 110v countertop one.
Yes, Europe is pretty fortunate in that respect. They have 2x the power at normal outlets, while US normal outlets are 110v at 15amps.
This means there are some things possible in europe that are underpowered or impossible in the US. Tools like air compressors or garden equipment like electric mowers are smaller.
I don't know if my (electric) stove is unusual in some way, but it goes to crazy high heat immediately. As in hotter than any gas stove I've used, to the point that a minute or two on the max setting will burn all the seasoning off my cast iron pan and fill the house with smoke. Whenever I see a recipe or advice for things like searing steaks, I mentally replace "high heat" with 5, "medium heat" with 3, and "low heat" with 1.
If I ever have enough money to buy a house, I want a kitchen that's isolated anyway. It can still be attached to the main building, but I want to be able to cook in the summers and only heat up one room. I'd also like the kitchen to be on it's own sub-panel anyway since I'd like the option of using 20A appliances at each outlet anyway.
The whole kitchen would have a sub-panel _in_ the kitchen; because EVERY OUTLET would be it's own independent 20A capable circuit, run back to that sub-panel.
I don't expect to use 20A from every outlet all the time, but I don't want to be constrained from any mix-and-match of devices I need within the room's power budget.
My Siemens has a timer per hob on induction, can switch off. Great for wfh, where you put on sth for reheating, on 5 mins, get called and the food is not burned when the call overruns for 5 min extra.
Your best argument might simply be acquire a high end induction burner (volrath mirage pro) and let them try it out. With compatible cookware of course.
(Don’t waste time with the cheap units, 10 or even 20 power levels is not enough)
Is there a technical reason why induction ranges are so expensive?
Out of curiosity I checked the two home improvement stores where I live, and the cheapest ones were $1,500+. An old fashioned smooth top electric range/oven starts around $700.
Putting all the electronics right over the hot oven was apparently a tricky problem. Induction cooktops with no oven have been available and inexpensive for a while - this is probably part of why induction is more popular in Europe, where ranges are less common.
The induction range is coming down in price quickly now, so it may be they’ve made some progress on this issue. Just two years ago the cheapest was $4k.
(Range = cooktop and oven in one freestanding unit)
There again 95% of new houses here have induction, so the price difference you are seeing is probably because market demand is that much lower in the US.
> 10) Building tight, all-electric, with solar will provide a comfortable, clean, long-lasting house, but it will be quite a bit more expensive. Possibly 30%+ more expensive than using standard contractor choices.
I'm just finishing doing a high performance renovation ( <1 ACH50, all electric, heat pumps, HRV, etc.). For new construction, the difference is more like +5-10% - the materials are marginally more expensive, and the labor doesn't require extremely specialized skills. The HVAC equipment is the very expensive part.
For a renovation, it's more like 20% more expensive but it can vary widely depending on the existing house's condition and the original build quality.
I personally saved a boatload by doing the high performance air sealing work myself - it's not that hard once you get the hang of it, just laborious.
I taped all the exterior sheathing joints (including at the foundation with high-performance air-sealing tapes). Then I applied a fully adhered vapor permeable airtight membrane to the entire exterior sheathing surface, and caulked the wall/roof joint, which also provided redundancy for the joint taping.
The general contractor applied a secondary bulk water shedding house wrap, a rain screen, and the finish cladding.
There were other things I did internally during the drywall/plasterboard stage also to minimize air movement through walls and ceilings.
I would add Spray Foam to your list. Increases racking strength of walls, provides an airtight seal and vapor barrier (2lb- Closed Cell Foam), and will eventually pay for itself in Heating and Cooling savings.
We have a a very large cottage in Northern Ontario (3000 sq/ft +) that has been sprayed foamed (Demilic Heatlok) and has in floor radiant heating and forced air AC all supplied by Geo Thermal. The electric bills a year are less than what some people spend at Starbucks. The comfort is incredible in -30F/-34c or +100f/38c and a bomb could go off outside and I doubt you would hear it. The costs to insulate the whole house and to install the Geothermal (including AC) was 55k, less than what some folks spend on kitchen cabinets and counter tops.
> Building tight, all-electric, with solar will provide a comfortable, clean, long-lasting house, but it will be quite a bit more expensive. Possibly 30%+ more expensive than using standard contractor choices.
Maybe a 30% higher price, but likely a lower cost when you factor in externalities.
I'm building a new house like this - in my country the building code is on par with Passive House standards, so we don't have much choice :-) I ran the numbers for heating with gas vs an electric heat pump, and gas actually worked out more expensive.
The house will need around 2000W[0] of heat in the middle of winter. For that usage, the most expensive part of gas would be the network fee, not the gas itself. An electric heat pump is a bit more expensive that a gas boiler, but considering we'd need to have a gas connection introduced to the property, the overall upfront cost is the same. The lifetime of both units is the same (10-15 years).
Someone here mentioned a gas absorption heat pump before, but those units are much more expensive than an electric heat pump in my country, and it still has the same issue of the gas network fee being expensive. We'll also have solar PV, so that will cut the electricity running costs even lower once it's paid off (~7 years).
It's interesting that once you have an efficient building envelope, technologies that you would think would be more efficient such as solar water heaters or ground source heat pumps don't actually make sense financially in the long term. I also ran the numbers for underfloor infrared heating vs electric heat pump + hydronic underfloor heating. Taking into account the higher installation costs, and expected life of the heat pump unit, the infrared heating - which is must less efficient - actually works out costing around the same. The unit we have will also provide DHW and cooling in the summer, so it's apples and oranges, but for a pure heating perspective it's worth considering that option, espeically if you want a lower upfront cost.
[0] For a 160m2 / 1700sqft house. This doesn't take into account 'waste' heat from appliances, so our primary heat source demand will actually be less.
I agree with everything you've said, BUT, I find small tank (10gal or less) electric hot water heaters surprisingly cost-effective options if you are using very low-flow aerators and shower heads (0.5-1.0 GPM). And particularly so if you have a small household where everyone can be taught to hit the button* on the wall to turn-on the hot water 30 min before they want to take a shower.
The installation cost is vastly lower than heat-pump based units, they fit in a cabinet under a sink much better, are easier to wire up to an on-demand on/off button, is even cheaper to operate during summer months, etc. Would work even better with a solar thermal panel for preheating the cold water.
The button in question being a 30-minute auto-shut-off switch, actually.
> 2) Ground source heat pumps are complex and very expensive and probably best suited for large installs like schools.
Looking at prices for the unit, the difference between Ground source heat pumps and air source heat pumps is around 15%. This assume we want heated water. AC-only units are naturally much much cheaper, but since there does not exist ground source AC-only units it is not a very fair comparison.
When it comes to extracting heat from the environment there are a few different choices. Air, solar, borehole, ground, and water. As I understand it, which one is the most cost efficient choice depend more on the environment which it is getting installed than the actually unit.
Big price difference comes from installation of ground loop. They either dig up your back yard and install a horizontal loop or you can have a vertical borehole (you probably need several of those). Boreholes here in NE-EU are about 35EUR per meter and for my house I'd need about 300m of them.
Is this (https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/) the one? I hadn’t heard of this before but it looks excellent. In your view, if I may, what makes this an authoritative source?
I thought it was a good combination of practical while being backed with data. They are big proponents of modeling out energy use with something called Manual J. They advocate for designing based on data instead of hunch which often leads to over-provisioning (less phone calls) and less efficiency. Posters also seem to be practical and focused on cost efficient solutions. This can be more rare than you think when dealing with passive house consultants or with efficiency consultants as I received many recommendations that had >= 50 year pay off times!
I thought ducted central heat pump with zones was the most efficient. Also, it filters the air centrally (and better, higher MERV possibilities), allows you to more easily manage humidity, and allows you to mix and bring in outside air.
>I understand that the ducted systems are less efficient
But they're not less efficient, ducted systems are more efficient. Mini-splits multiply your refrigerant lines, compressors, heat exchanger, condensing coils, etc., so you're multiplying your inefficiencies. A single variable rate, zoned, ducted heat pump is the most efficient, but they definitely cost more.
"1) Air source heat pumps have become incredibly efficient even in cold climates.
2) Ground source heat pumps are complex and very expensive and probably best suited for large installs like schools.
"
This is not really accurate on the complexity/etc side. Expense we'll get to later.
A. The GSHP is not complex at all, and often much easier to understand than the equivalent air source machinery.
I could repair my GSHP.
B. The efficiency of air source heat pumps vary a ton in the field. This is not conjecture. This is backed up by years of research. Of course, unlike ground source heat pump (which usually contain tons of sensors and can tell you exactly how well they are operating in a lot of ways), air source heat pumps rarely contain any of the performance measurement sensors necessary to validate their efficiency in practice for your install, and they are rarely accessible. So you are limited to a small number of studies that bother to test them in the field by adding that kind of metering. Oh and manufacturer "self-reporting" about how good they are.
EER or COP of air source heat pumps in-situ can be easily 50% or less of claimed efficiency depending on real climate and how well designed they were for the situation.
GSHP are 85-99% of designed performance over a much wider climate range (again backed up by research, and with much larger sample sizes, since most GSHP have the monitoring sensors built in).
That's on top of usually much higher efficiency of GSHP over ASHP.
C. GSHP not amenable to the random "don't want to have to care about real engineering" HVAC contractors that most people deal with.
IE not even willing to do basic manual j load calcs.
They are only complex in this sense - most air source heat pump folks don't really have to know what they are doing, and it will often work okayish in terms of ability to heat/cool when they size it wrong. It will just be very inefficient.
If your ground source heat pump folks don't actually bother to do the work right and enter the calcs into the loop design program, it can fail.
Just about 100% of failed GSHP installs i've seen were done by air source contractors badly trying to moonlight because they thought they margin would end up better (and who were bad at ASHP as well).
Any good loop design program will give you the EER/COP of the system in your case based on historical temperature, along with actual yearly cost/etc.
So you don't have to guess whether it will work out for you (and it will be very close to reality).
It's also obvious if your contractor is giving you bullshit if you have a loop design report - IE if the page with the assumptions/data show clear nonsense.
As performance standards increase (IE California), or any form of real in-situ efficiency testing of air source heat pumps was ever required, you would see this "really efficient" argument disappear really quick.
(Heating has definitely gotten a lot better in lower temps, not gonna argue with that).
D. It is true that GSHP is expensive to install, but that's mostly a factor of scale for drilling, and not size of install or unit cost. It's never going to be an effective way to deal with a single 2000sqft house. It will be a much more effective (and space efficient) at serving multi-unit complexes, regardless of individual house size.
For example, when they do GSHP for a new construction community (out here they are doing 200 new homes for examples), it's not a lot more expensive than installing air source pumps.
For single houses, again, it depends on your real in-practice performance of an ASHP, which is rarely ever measured.
For a house i owned in MD, and compared to two ASHP's that were properly sized (and properly sized/sealed duct work/house/etc with actual leakage/r-value/perf testing), but just a really bad in-practice fit for my climate (neighbors had same issues, etc), it only took 5 years to pay back the GSHP cost (after tax credits, etc).
This is uncommon case, obviously. But i'll also say being able to set the house at 72 and leaving it that way forever is worth something too.
Ductless i've got no qualms with :)
I think most folks with tight homes would be much better off in practice with lots of ductless wall/ceiling units than standard ASHP/GSHP.
> * More of the energy we use will come from the electric socket. And we aren’t ready.*
I don’t get this argument that increasing electricity generation is going to be particularly hard. From 1950 to 1959, the US more than doubled electricity generation.
The article says by 2050 we’ll need about double current electricity production. That’s three times as long! From 1950 to 1973, just 23 years, electricity production increased by over 450%.
People trying to make it sound like this will be unprecedentedly hard either forgot about the time when America used to grow electricity quickly, or they’re pessimistic about modern America’s ability to build anything big any more.
> modern America’s ability to build anything big any more.
The first transcontinental railroad took 6 years to 1,900 miles. All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle. Black powder was used for the tunnels, but the holes to put the power in were bored by hand.
In contrast, Seattle Transit will take 30 years to build 22 miles of track, with modern construction equipment, and that's in the remote possibility they'll be on schedule.
Seattle used to have rail networks. The right-of-ways are still there, but Sound Transit very carefully avoids using them. Nobody is ever able to explain why. Some even still have rusting rail on them, while the ST crews are blasting new right of way a block over.
The build out of the Sound Transit light rail is taking 30 years for the following reasons:
1. ST only has the funds to build out a small % of the project at any one time. The work has to be staged because they can't take out all the $ at once.
2. Project managing the build out of the whole thing at once would require a much larger organization, which would be more expensive
3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.
4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.
The railroad wasn't built all at once, either. It was two teams, one going east, the other west. The companies were paid as work progressed, they did not have access to all the funds in advance. They didn't even know the route to be taken, they had survey crews working ahead of the construction, marking the best route.
If you don't think they had a much larger logistics problem, consider the problems with supplying the crews with food, water, clothing, rails, ties, horses, wagons, everything they need, from a thousand miles away.
The most important thing, though, was the companies were paid by the mile. The faster they built, the more money they made, because that would push the meeting point further away. They had ENORMOUS incentive to move fast. And it worked.
ST, however, has no incentive whatsoever to move things along. They have every incentive to delay, invent problems, all so they can go back and demand more money.
At a company I used to work for, they hired a team of old software engineers to write a piece of software for a good customer. It took them 3 months, and arrived on time and under budget. Want to know the secret? They had a huge bonus for being on time (I think it was ten grand apiece), which would shrink away for every day late.
I asked if that was what motivated them to be on time, and they all denied it with "we're professionals". I openly laughed at that.
It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)
After the Northridge earthquake destroyed several bridges the contractors hired to perform the repairs earned millions in bonuses by finishing the job in just a few months. In one case they got an extra $150K bonus per day early. Financial incentives work.
> It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)
I agree with this point in general, and have some experience with government contracts, but think you’re over-simplifying a complex situation. The big thing which incentives got was zero holding back on capacity: I would say that was by far Trump’s best call in office because there’s no way to claw back that time later at any cost - the mRNA process is both highly specialized and new so there are bottlenecks all the way down. The other thing which saved time, however, was that testing time could be compressed because the disease was running rampant — that didn’t have much to do with incentives and couldn’t be predicted in advance. We also got lucky that the first vaccines were so effective: that was the primary concern with the first batch, that they might not be effective enough - instead, we had a Nobel-worthy unqualified success where the worst performing vaccines were at the warned level but the top candidates were some of the best vaccines ever made. That was welcome but we also got lucky.
Saying incentives work is a pretty banal economic insight.
However, the primary reason Moderna and Pfizer they were able to get to market so fast was because the FDA agreed to a compressed testing schedule, Moderna’s preexisting investments in mRNA technology, and publicly funded research around stabilising spike proteins.
The primary contribution of Trump (and other world leaders) was the willingness to commit to purchasing large amounts of the vaccine and to accept much of the risk of the attempt failed. This accelerated the roll out as they were able to begin manufacturing before being given emergency approval.
However, it’s worth noting that many other successful vaccines were developed by charitable foundations and government research institutions in roughly the same period of time as the American efforts.
> Saying incentives work is a pretty banal economic insight.
It should be banal, but it isn't generally recognized by government planners, who expect that self-sacrifice and altruism governs peoples' behavior rather than selfishness.
Seattle is experiencing this as recent onerous regulations placed on landlords supposedly to protect renters is causing rents to rise and landlords to exit the business.
I feel like you didn't really respond to my point.
Anyway, people of course respond to incentives. However, that doesn't always means that the outcomes will be positive. There is such a thing as a perverse incentive, even in a free market utopia.
Perverse incentives in a free market are often the unintended result of regulation. For example, regulations to make it harder to fire people have the result of making employers pickier about who they hire.
The problem with you Murray Rothbard types is that you all too readily descend to panglossianism when evaluating market outcomes.
It's no great insight that markets are generally the most efficient means of allocating resources. However, it's also no secret that greedy individuals will gleefully extract economic rents from their monopoly over resources when they feel free to do so.
> The urgency to create a vaccine for COVID‑19 led to compressed schedules that shortened the standard vaccine development timeline, in some cases combining clinical trial steps over months, a process typically conducted sequentially over years.
Over a year ago, I suggested this very process for vaccine development here, in HackerNews. This was strongly dismissed by people who told me I knew nothing about vaccine development (true) and that it couldn't be done (false).
At that time I was paying attention to people actually knew something about vaccine development. They said it would take at least 18 months. Being a practical pessimist I decided to take the under and say 12 months.
The guys that knew what they were talking about were mostly right, most vaccines making it are taking about 18 months to make it to distribution. But I bet that out of ~100 vaccine programs a couple of them beat that by six months.
I believe those are the reasons in the sense that they are result of [thing-we-can't-change] + [best-decision-under-the-circumstances]. But it's an example of the "a bunch of reasonable seeming decisions adding up to something preposterous" system that is quite common today.
Notably, if Seattle wanted a light rail could spend what it cost. Spending over thirty clearly has all sorts of problems - their supplies could go out of business in the middle of the process etc, etc.
I'm sure I find someone who could make the 3 billion dollars of planning money that went the California high speed rail sound sensible too.
>2. Project managing the build out of the whole thing at once would require a much larger organization, which would be more expensive
>3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.
This doesn't work out in a linear model. You either hire N people for 2T years, or you hire 2N people for T years, either way a total cost of 2STN for a mean salary of S per year. It works the same way with project management. With equipment you might have something of a point, but not if the equipment is leased.
You can point to nonlinearity, but then that looks like a weakness of the system.
>4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.
The city is a moving target; details you work out today may not be true tomorrow. Worse, the different pieces of the system are interdependent: changing conditions may invalidate work already done, incurring additional costs.
Ultimately, it seems like the only compelling reason on this list is (1), which itself points to a lack of overall strategy on the part of the government.
Life was generally more dangerous and harder those days, and medical practice was terrible. Horses, for example, regularly killed people in those days (more than cars do), and their use is not the romantic image we have of them today.
If you can show that the railroad was built on blood, I'd be interested.
Exactly. It was a high dollar construction project. If anything it was safer than a mundane bottom dollar "cut whatever corners we need to be the lowest bidder" project. Everything was just that much more dangerous then.
If I recall correctly, the Central Pacific had to resort to advertising for railroad labor in China to get sufficient labor force (so not merely able to recruit from recent immigrants, but having to induce immigration to get labor). The Union Pacific, for its part, relied heavily on Irish immigrants and ex-soldiers from the Union and Confederate armies.
That's hardly people flocking to the railway jobs.
That's not the point, the point is people weren't flocking to these jobs as you claimed.
> The Central Pacific hired some Canadian and European civil engineers and surveyors with extensive experience building railroads, but it had a difficult time finding semi-skilled labor. Most Caucasians in California preferred to work in the mines or agriculture. The railroad experimented by hiring local emigrant Chinese as manual laborers, many of whom were escaping the poverty and terrors of the war in the Sze Yup districts in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province in China
It's like saying Bangladeshi workers flock to hard labour in Qatar because, sure because working in Bangladesh might be worse, not because the terrible conditions of working on infrastructure in Qatar as a Bangladeshi is some kind of standard for labour conditions or rights we should all aspire to.
> the point is people weren't flocking to these jobs as you claimed
Of course they were. Otherwise they simply couldn't have built it. They could not round people up, chain them together, and force march them to the construction site.
Sure, just like there's girls flocking to become prostitutes in parts of Thailand, and Bangladeshi to become construction workers in Qatar. Not because of desperation, no, out of free will in search for great jobs, they're not slaves you see... The way you completely miss this point and imply we should compare today's construction standards to that of the past and look at the past favourably due to all the potential efficiencies in taking shortcuts on labour conditions ("after all, desperate immigrant impoverished workers showed up freely, it must not be a problem) makes me glad you're not driving public policy today. I'm sure you're just as eager to give up your own comfy labour conditions for the sake of the project. I'm quite done arguing with someone who's not discussing in good faith.
This combative assertion of race-based victimization is not as productive toward the conversation as people may think. Indeed, it tends to drive a great many people into defensive positions where they hunker down.
I grew up in Omaha, the end of the transcontinental railroad that Californians tend to forget about. I'm very sorry that so many Chinese immigrants died working on the railroad. I am also saddened by the many others who died, even though they were not immigrants of Chinese extraction. I'm also saddened by the atrocious conditions these immigrants escaped in China and compelled them to the US (I assume they did not desire to come to the US, and it's worth noting many no doubt landed elsewhere).
While the CRPP may have preferred Chinese labor, I do not find evidence that they did "most of the work". Indeed, the main employer of the Chinese was the CRPP, which laid 690 miles of the 1912 miles of track. The Union Pacific labor was primarily sourced from the remains of the Union and Confederate armies.
It is correct that 80% of the CRPP labor force was eventually (not initially) Chinese. It is also correct that the CRPP laid 36% of the rail by distance. First order approximation would suggest that the Chinese fraction of the built distance is between 15 and 29%.
Pretty normal accident rates are found worldwide for modern HSR construction that doesn't take two decades to build a single line like CA HSR. Look at what China or Spain can build in that time span for less money.
Which Seattle transit of 22 miles? The Line T took 3 years to construct, Line 1 is 22 miles but it's already built, it took 6 years of construction. Indeed it took longer to plan, but we're talking building in a major metropolitan area, not empty land.
> All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle.
It's both an argument to applaud efforts of the past, as well as criticise the nature of the past. I certainly wouldn't want to be a labourer in 1865, when life expectancy in the US was less than half (37) of today's 78 or so. It's not all labour standards of course, but it certainly must have played a role.
Boring through two mountain ranges, crossing many rivers (including the Mississippi). Endless bridges for ravines, creeks, and rivers. Lots of snow sheds, the longest was 29 miles, using 29,000,000 board feet of lumber.
> Boring through two mountain ranges, crossing many rivers (including the Mississippi).
The First Transcontinental Railroad started from Omaha, Nebraska, so it crossed neither the Missouri nor the Mississippi. Indeed, it only crosses the North Platte River, not the main stem itself, and this is the river famously described as "too thick to drink, too thin to plow," i.e., not quite the same challenge as crossing the broader and much deeper Missouri, Mississippi, or Ohio rivers.
Yes, Chinese muscle, many of whom died in the process. And I think we covered the 37 years of life expectancy during that time in the US, let alone for a Chinese immigrant doing heavy labour at a fraction of white people's salaries. I for one would not have preferred being born in 1865 to work on this railroad. But feel free to voluntarily give up all your privileges at your current job, it's definitely easier to get things done at the labour standards of 1860, using underpaid immigrant labour to do dangerous work. Let's all just give up our rights!
But my point was, the land was empty, i.e. not void of nature, but empty of people making political claims, e.g. like when building a transit line through Seattle. They're not remotely similar projects. The Seattle line of 22 miles you mentioned was built in the same 6 years, with need for far less 'muscle'.
At least empty of political claims if we forget about the de facto genocide of the native Americans that had to go at some point to make the US what it is today. I'm not sharing any nostalgia you may have of construction in this time.
> Chinese muscle, many of whom died in the process.
There were many thousands of others. The eastern team did not employ any Chinese.
> rights
Nobody gave up any rights to work on the railroad. None were conscripts or forced labor. Any could walk away anytime they pleased.
> They're not remotely similar projects.
Nothing resembling the project had ever been done before. Lots of people thought it was infeasible. It was a triumph, exceeding even the wildest expectations. It arguably was the lynch pin that created the modern America.
The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
> Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
"Railroad travel was dangerous in the early years. Train wrecks and derailments were common killing and injuring countless passengers and railroad men. Boilers blew up, bridges collapsed under the weight of trains, brittle iron tracks cracked, primitive breaks overheated and failed. The lack of a signal system sometimes caused two trains to be accidentally switched onto the same track and sent speeding into each other. The wood passenger car seemed almost to self-destruct on impact."
"Passengers could be crushed and thrown out. Windows would shatter because there was no safety plate glass in that day. Stoves would overturn spilling hot coals through the crushed and broken wood and instantly trains were set on fire. Cars would fall into rivers off of bridges."
"In the race to build the line there was naturally a long list of defects, unsafe bridges, tunnels too narrow, road bed not properly level. Poor rail alignment and carelessly laid cross ties. One government inspector declared it the worst railroad he had ever seen. But that didn't stop the railroaders."
"More than six times as many railroad men as passengers were killed or injured in accidents during the early days of the transcontinental railroad. Railroading ranked as one of America's most dangerous jobs."
"The technology was so dangerous that virtually every break man was maimed."
Source: The Railroads That Tamed The West, Modern Marvels Season 2 Episode 9. 1996.
> Nobody gave up any rights to work on the railroad.
Because they didn't have any. Like the right for equal pay. The right to a safe working environment. The right to adequate breaks. The right to insurance etc. You think they had the same rights as you do today?
I'm not saying the project was a bad project, it was amazing. I'm saying that the speed of its development isn't something we can long for, without also mentioning it requires conditions which completely suck for its workforce in 1865, just to mention one thing.
> The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
That's great, I'm happy it was built. You're missing the point. I'm not criticising the project, for its time it was amazing. I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today. I'm not sure in what field of work you're in, but I'm sure if you give up half your salary, work twice as hard, take fewer breaks, give up your insurance and workplace safety, that the company could save money, hire more people, get things done faster. But while a project would get doen faster, actual society (i.e., the measure of your wellbeing, which is what much of life is about) would become worse.
For example, we can probably build things faster if we took into Bangladeshi labourers and paid them a fraction of our salaries, let them sleep in barracks, give them no health insurance, no workplace safety, see tons of them die. Indeed, it's how Qatar is building out its infrastructure massively at the moment, at breakneck speeds. But it's no example to me of how we should look to construct things today, nor is the transcontinental railroad an example for today, however amazing it was to build in the 1860s.
There were no guards to prevent the workers from dropping their tools and leaving. That is a fundamental right.
> I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today.
A 100 times increase in distance in 10% of the time with no powered construction equipment cannot be explained as merely paying people half as much and not giving medical insurance (though I'm sure they had medical teams on site to do what they could, but medical practice in those days was a bit frightening to us today). There was no intent to grind up workers blood to use as lubricant, and in fact they did many things along the way to reduce worker deaths and injuries. See my other comment about how they cut down on the use of nitro as it was too dangerous, despite being twice as fast as black powder.
It's quite interesting how you're completely unwilling to argue the original point (which is that a 1860s construction project is no model for today as it came at a great cost we're not willing to accept, besides being completely incomparable to the modern-day example you gave), but completely willing to argue quite meaningless aspects to the discussion seemingly for the sake of it.
And the lives of between 1,000 and 2,000 largely Chinese immigrants for the transcontinental railroad alone. Certainly more died during the construction of the remainder of the US rail network. Construction projects in other countries were significantly more deadly.
That wasn't due to speed, that was due to a lack of safety regulations. Spain and China built out national high speed rail networks in timely fashions in recent years with pretty normal accident rates for modern construction. French companies even offered faster and cheaper proposals for california HSR, and we said 'no' because they were French and not in some Bakersfield politican's donor list.
But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track, demanding endless environmental impact studies, attending every city council meeting to complain about the project, etc, etc.
Building a bridge across a ravine is a fairly well understood and easy to solve problem as long as no one is actively trying to stop you.
> But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track, demanding endless environmental impact studies, attending every city council meeting to complain about the project, etc, etc.
People love to get their pitchforks out against eminent domain but I assert without it not a single large public works project would ever get built. No dams, no sewer treatment plants, no water lines, no power lines, no power plants, no trains, no highways, no anything. Without eminent domain, there will always be some holdout somewhere that throws a wrench in things no matter how many truckloads of money you toss at them.
To actually build massive public infrastructure, you need a way to force people to cooperate. Without, you'd never get the project off the ground.
It's mostly infant mortality, not labor standards. Average remaining years of life at age 10 has gone up, but nothing like as dramatically as the average life expectancy at birth has (expected age of death for a 10-year old white male: 58 in 1850, 76 in 2011).
The 5 is a disaster of a freeway. It sees such an amazing amount of traffic and I feel like the state honestly has no idea what to do about it as it gets worse and worse each year with more commuters and increased trucking traffic, since freight rail is evidently at capacity in California. I have hit gridlock on that freeway at 10pm dozens and dozens of times. The entire way from LA to SD is marked by death, with scrape marks on every single barrier pretty much continuously over hundreds of miles, and tire marks of cars careening in a spin across all the lanes into a wall.
The solution is not to build more highways and roads, as much as many people hate to hear that. Basically as soon as it is made slightly easier and faster to drive, people will adjust by driving more.
There are quite a few instances where an already large interstate has been increased in size and the traffic got /worse/ after the fact. Cars just aren't an efficient way to move people around for the money they cost.
I'm genuinely curious if things are going to start swinging back in the other direction where there is more focus on other transportation modes outside of cars. There have been some small scale rail expansions in larger cities, some intercity rail lines opening (brightline) and being built (california high speed rail). It hasn't been enough to hit a sort of tipping point yet though.
While it is true that commute times might go down when freeways get wider, that's only half the coin. The purpose of the 5 is not to facilitate commuters like many other local highways in SD and LA, but to facilitate international trade between the U.S. and the world. Speed goes down, yes, but throughput goes up. Throughput is what is needed when you are trying to move trucking traffic from Central America through the southland north up the the central valley of CA, or east along the 10. It is what is needed when you need to move trucking traffic carrying all goods ordered by Americans from Asia from the port of long beach or LA into the heartland, because the freight rail grades are already at capacity. It's like having a bucket of water with a few holes vs a lot of holes; rate of flow might be unchanged per hole (lane), but you are moving more water (trucks) in the given span of time with the bucket with more holes. Right now there are dozens of supercarriers anchored off the coast of Long Beach, waiting weeks to unload goods into clogged logistical networks.
In a future where everyone takes a bus or a train or a bike to work, they are still ordering all their shit online from Asia and stocking their grocery stores with food from Central and South America, and there will therefore always be increasing demand for the movement of more goods over time as the population continues to grow.
yeah i'm sure we could have those breakneck speed railway construction in the middle of the open, unihabited plain for the majority of it and then for the incredibly dangerous stuff we could send in the marginalized at the time chinese/irish workers to handle unstable dynamite paid half that of other workers and ignoring any and all safety regulations and building codes of today.
China managed to build a massive high speed rail network across rough terrain and completely inhabited land in a few years. Their network is safe and reliable.
I've noticed it's becoming increasingly common to just give up and excuse everything in the US. "Well we could build new rails, but..." "Well we could get health care prices under control, but..." "Well we could solve (x problem that most other countries don't have), but..."
It's kind of a sad decline from being the world leader by far like the US was 50 years ago. There's always a billion reasons to not do something, but not much push to actually do something.
They used black powder, dynamite only became available towards the end.
You have good points, but consider it ran TWO THOUSAND MILES, not 22, and still took only 10% of the time. You say "open plain", but try driving it some time. It had to go through two mountain ranges, for example.
The workers came because they got better pay than anywhere else. This includes the Chinese and Irish. It was not built by conscripts.
death toll is not known but it's over 1000 they estimate of just chinese laborers. at the peak there were 15,000 or so workers working on the rail. in fact the main suspected etymology of "chinaman's chance[0]" (aka no chance) was because they were the demographic that did the super dangerous work that killed 6% on the low end. The construction was also not one large project but two large projects constructed in parallel and the blasting/excavating was done ahead of the time. Sure they could lay down 10 miles of track a day on open plains but the hard work was through the mountains and that's the stuff that slows the construction down like if you were to build 22 miles of track in a heavily populated area with land already claimed by other entities and having to deal with easements and other legal battles + logistics.
Nitroglycerin was used in large quantities on the central pacific railroad construction and were predominantly chinese laborers whereas the union pacific was more irish laborers. The central pacific rail owned their own TNT factory even. I am not sure what you are getting at; black powder was used but it certainly wasn't the only thing in use especially in the west.
"At the tunnels, especially Summit Tunnel, the Chinese were using great amounts of black powder, up to five hundred kegs a day."
"The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn't exploded with his pick.
It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot. Strobridge declared, "Bury that stuff." Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it."
"Nothing Like It In The World", Ambrose, pg. 200-201
I'm not just quoting the book, I read the whole thing. It's really a great story.
Because they had a government mandate. ST continually must renegotiate with every level of local government. This could all be sidestepped by a state law, but this is just another cost of FPTP voting.
It wasn't quite that simple. It was a giant project, and there was the usual squirrel fire drill one sees with any large government project where everyone has their hand out for bribes and corruption.
People do things fast when they think it’s the most important thing, like the Covid vaccines.
Government officials and most of the contractors are going to keep on using their stupid inefficient 25mpg SUVs and pickup truck and never take the train anyway, why would they want the project to go any faster?
It's important to remember that electricity isn't an energy source, it's an energy medium. This seems trivial, but seems to be a blind spot for people who, for instance, try to set up comparison between electricity and fossil fuels. The comparison doesn't make sense when one is an energy source and the other merely a medium.
Generating electricity is a bit of a misnomer, because it's more about repackaging energy than creating it. Again, this is trivial but easy to lose sight of. The important question is: what's the energy source?
Install solar on everyone's roofs. Subsidize it with money from property taxes. Make it mandatory for owners of rented buildings, and mandatory for businesses. That alone will easily meet all our projected energy requirements for quite a while.
lol no it won't. This is a horrible oversimplification. Solar panels can only offset some energy requirements for a limited time in certain climates. Even if you were to install batteries in every home, the cost is monumental, battery supply is limited and you lose the economy of scale.
> Once complete, the VPP will include 50,000 houses fitted with 5 kW rooftop solar systems and 13.5 kWh Tesla batteries. Together, they will be capable of delivering up to 250 MW of solar power and 650 MWh of energy storage.
> So far, less than 1,000 homes have been completed. Still, the aggregated storage was able to make a difference.
With regards to Australian rooftop solar potential, it’s estimated at almost 179GW, roughly a bit more than 3.5x total current Australian generation capacity.
I think the problem is that much energy policy originates from california, which has a relatively mild climate.
Additionally in california, peak energy demand seems to be when the sun is very strong in the summer, so solar power matches very well with air conditioning load.
The rest of the united states has weather, so situations like the-dead-of-winter + no-sunshine might be a better fit for fossil fuels.
I don't think the person you are replying to had a good plan, but solar definitely could offset the energy consumed by cars. The average car will only consume ~12KWh per day. Even a small 3-4KW system can do that.
Yes, its an oversimplification, but in a world where the problem is all the electric cars, you also have rolling battery buffers available whenever you want them.
We already use hot water heaters and air conditioners in a similar way. Peak shaving with people's home charging setups wouldn't be hard to add.
As of Jan 1, 2020 California has come very close to these requirements. Most new construction residences (with a few exceptions) must have enough solar generation equipment to meet 100% of the buildings electrical needs.
Send it back into the grid. Charge cars. Feed industries that need daytime power. Pay the owners back for it, or give them free night-time electricity in returns. Heat up some high heat capacity goo, or hell even water, and use that to heat your apartment during cold nights in desert weather.
If you still have surplus after all that, mine bitcoin and use it to fund battery research, environmental initiatives, fund education, fund healthcare.
This is basically a pipe dream unless people radically change the way they consume power.
Peak energy consumption is typically around dusk, so driven primarily by home consumption not industry. Convince people not to use air conditioners after 4pm and maybe we would be able to match supply to demand.
Moreover, even if we all started sitting in our hot dark houses after work we'd still have an extremely variable supply which would mean more robust infrastructure to transmit less overall power.
Hence solar, which generates until sunset, paired with ~4 hours of storage, which carries the grid through peak evening load until most folks are off to bed and grid load declines rapidly.
And then it's a rainy day and everybody stays home from work because there's no power? Or we spin up a bunch of dirty natural gas?
This also doesn't address the seasonal changes in supply. We're realistically talking about creating energy infrastructure (and then maintaining it) that ulaverages maybe 20% capacity.
I just feel like solar proponents like to completely ignore the very real unsolved issues because solar+batteries is tidy if you don't think too much about it.
Natural gas fired peaker plants will continue to be a crucial part of our electrical system indefinitely. They allow generation to be rapidly spun up and down to stabilize the grid; other generation sources can't react as quickly, or sometimes can't react at all. And natural gas isn't very dirty.
Free night-time electricity from where? You need to generate it from somewhere or store it. It just doesn't magically appear...
Solar in large scale will be fun. Essentially at peak production it will have zero price or potentially negative price... And then during night you need to generate it from somewhere and pay premium... I wonder would it be actually cheaper soon not to have solar and just get it for free during day and then pay same during dark times...
How much energy do you think would be required to air source sequester all of carbon we’ve emitted into the atmosphere over the last 100 years? I don’t believe we have any shortage of demand for electricity, and loads will be structured to accommodate variable generation (this is typically referred to as demand response).
"If you still have surplus after all that, mine bitcoin and use it to fund"
Or maybe use it to power factories that make hundred dollar bills?
Sorry, but Bitcoin does not create a net increase in value for all the energy dumped into it. As you described it, it is simply an elaborate way to waste resources.
This is really the natural solution - economic forces do figure things out.
I do wonder about situations like the recent texas fiasco. Maybe we want something like "cheaper at night" not pure economic nonsense like "$9,000/kwh for the next 15 minutes"
Will it? Certainly in my part of the country most structures cannot go off-grid on solar alone, even with significant storage. Hard to make it up on volume.
> Make it mandatory for owners of rented buildings, and mandatory for businesses.
So my grandmother, who gets a large part of her retirement income from a couple of $5-600/mo rental homes she owns will have to shell out 10-20k each to keep doing that? On what planet does that make sense?
Subsidize it 100% for her and low income rental owners then.
For the high income armchair landlords, impose a solar tax and fund solar installations for everyone else.
I want to think about how to make stuff possible, not excuses about why we can't do it. This kind of excuse-making attitude is why the US is falling behind in climate efforts.
Is that outcome a good thing in some way that I’m not seeing? Because to me, that just seems wasteful. (For society I mean; it’s obvious how it’s a good thing for makers and installers of PV systems.)
Well yes, because scientifically speaking we're fucked if we don't do something, and the current iteration of the economy incentivizes short-sighted thinking, not long-term survival and avoidance of unrest due to a resource crisis.
It makes economic sense. Damage caused by CO2 pollution doesn't make economic sense.
The anti climate change narrative also fuels macroeconomic problems as the willingness for the US to invest into its own nation decreases for no logical reason or gain.
There is nothing virtuous about being dependent on fossil fuel imports.
Yeah, I was throwing the author a bone, there. Unfortunately, with scare articles like this, it’s somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. We need articles talking about how it’s relatively easy given historical capabilities, but we need actual action.
Too bad the nature of politics has changed. We need another FDR and WPA. Too many politicans favor crafting lucrative public contracts to their cabal of friends than crafting a productive public works project. There is no job security in that.
Another big issue is the cost to run. In order to be a decent candidate, you need to buy national advertising, which is owned by a handful of companies, which would prefer certain candidates who would provide them with profitable legislation.
The current crop is rotten and the mechanisms we have to get a new one are coopted by these entrenched private interest groups who actively fight to ensure their profitable status quo doesn't change, and only does if a profitable angle has been already conceived. Maybe this is the American Way.
I disagree. The FDR era featured a lot more public corruption and cronyism then currently exists. Indeed, I suspect there's some trade-off between anti-corruption and the ability to get things built, as layers of checks, hearings, certifications, etc. end up making it much harder and more time consuming to build anything.
The FDR era featured a lot more public corruption and cronyism then [sic] currently exists.
This is a bizarre misrepresentation of history. There are entire industries of corruption now that didn't even exist in FDR's time. The current government spends far more as a percentage of (a vastly larger) GDP; the fact that nothing useful gets done can't very well argue for less corruption.
Generating electrical energy isn't difficult. Distributing it is. Balancing variable generation against variable demand is even more difficult.
What you've forgotten here is that doubling or tripling the carrying capacity of electrical infrastructure isn't a trivial task. Remember that in the 50s, electrical energy was generated at large sites like the Hoover dam or the James Bay project in Quebec. It was then distributed out to houses that didn't have many high capacity electrical appliances.
Today, all that has changed with dishwashers, electric dryers and now EVs slowly becoming standard. You are making it seem like these infrastructure upgrades can be magicked into existence without decades of investment, planning and effort.
The article is right - no country is ready for the sudden change. Watch as EVs go from a rich person's toy to the mainstream and the electrical infrastructure keeps collapsing dealing with the sustained surge in demand.
Infrastructure is sized for peak power usage, so for those early evening times when somebody might have their air conditioner, range and clothes dryer running simultaneously.
Electrification will significantly increase energy usage (kWh), but it has a much smaller impact on peak power (kW). Electric cars charge at night, electric heat pumps replace air conditioners, et cetera.
Also, infrastructure was designed for rising demand. For infrastructure was built in the 60s the planners would say "demand is doubling every decade, so if we want our infrastructure to last 100 years..."
Sure, there will be some places that don't have adequate infrastructure, but it will be a small fraction.
And just like the internet, the 'generation' is getting closer and closer to the customer. As netflix installs appliances in my region, we're also generating electricity at the rooftop or regional cogen systems.
That parked electric car may very well back-feed into the grid to shave the peaks of demand.
That clothes dryer might run 'slow' until it's peak pricing time, same with EV charging.
My 'smart' thermostat already does it for HVAC. Everything else will too.
I don't think you have a good handle on how the distribution system is sized. Single, large loads like EVs at 10-30 kW were on nobody's radar even as recently as the 2010s. yes, infrastructure was designed for rising demand but not the sudden addition of 7 kW+ of capacity in multiple homes.
A typical EV charger draws anywhere from 7 kW to 25 kW. That is the total connected load of more than one typical North American house. And typical pole-mounted transformers are around 50 -200 kVA. Two EVs added to the regular mix is all it takes to upset the balance.
Starting in the early 90s, here in Ireland, instant heating electric showers, generally about 10kW, became very popular (they’re actually beginning to die out; many new homes have PV as part of meeting govt energy efficiency targets, so get tanked hot water ‘for free’). And 90s Ireland wasn’t winning any prizes for electrical infrastructure. I’m sure the US can manage some car chargers.
An AC unit uses 3.5 kW and there are times everybody on the block is using them. The grid doesn't fall over.
Also, where the heck do you find 25 kW home chargers? I've heard of 60A ones (13.2 kW), but ours is 7.2kW and is probably about twice as much as we need.
The grid in California falls over when everyone turns on the AC. Rolling blackouts are still a problem. Our state government and the electric utilities (especially PG&E) have terribly mismanaged the system through a mix of greed, incompetence, and caving in to special interests.
> What you've forgotten here is that doubling or tripling the carrying capacity of electrical infrastructure isn't a trivial task.
This has been studied recently, and the supposedly numbers aren't crazy:
> The increase in transmission needs as renewable electricity supply grows, for all 80%-by-2050 renewable electricity scenarios, result in an average annual projected transmission and interconnection investment that is within the recent historical range for total investor-owned utility transmission expenditures in the United States (i.e., $2 billion/yr to $9 billion/yr from 1995 through 2008) (Pfeifenberger et al. 2009).
> New transmission in the high renewable electricity scenarios was found to be concentrated in the middle and southwestern regions of the United States, mainly to access the high-quality wind and solar resources in those regions and to deliver generation from those resources to load centers.
The national grid in the UK has done tons of preparation - read about their Dynamic Containment program for example - but it’s much easier to just wave your hands and claim “we aren’t ready, it’s too hard”.
This is such a typical FUD article from the climate change denying WSJ. Boring and predictable
After all, it's not even that hard or costly in comparison.
Total expected lifetime cost of the F-35 program [1]: 1.5T$
Expected cost of shifting the US to 100% renewables [2]: 4.5T$ (note these estimates are probably at least double that of the real costs in light of the rapidly dropping deployment costs since)
Environmental cost of not doing it: Projected at 1.5T$ for the US by 2050, so it's almost self financing.
This is not even about serious economic restraint, it's literally just about having a frickin' fighter or not.
Note the Apollo program was a bargain compared to both at just 280B$...
"We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."
You need to build 300 square miles of wind farms or two nuke plants every three days to get to net zero by 2050. Won't happen. There's a forbes article that breaks it all down.
40% of our electricity is clean. So even if we need to more that double electricity while making all the existing electricity clean, the growth rate is still only a factor of 5 over 29 years compared to the factor of 5.5 we grew from 1950 to 1973.
> The idea is being pushed by several groups with a vested interest in seeing it happen—most notably, environmentalists and the tech industry.
Those environmentalists are just waiting to collect those dividends on a saved planet, while everybody else gets shafted.
> But in some sense, consumers have already made the choice to move toward at least the “electrification of a lot more things,” if not everything. That’s because our smartphones and computers and all the other devices that attach to them require electric power. So electrification is happening, whether we’ve made a conscious decision to electrify or not.
Yeah, let’s go back to the good old times of gas-powered computers and smartphones!
I know that authors don't write headlines, but this article should be headlined, "Touted for Climate Change Benefits, Energy Electrification Has Stalled and Poses New Risks and Costs". Most of their electric energy ratio graphs are flat for a twenty year period. While there have been major improvements in batteries and some improvements in efficiency, real electricity prices have not decreased in the same twenty years. The author correctly points out that electrification makes homes far more vulnerable to service disruption unless everybody shells out $10k+ for solar and batteries. Even then, you're going to need more Powerwalls than most people will ever buy to have hot water, transportation, and unspoiled food after a hurricane.
I think the stove is the only appliance that I will refuse to electrify. Cooking on a electric stove is just not the same, especially if you love to cook.
I never used a gas stove, so I can't compare, but I moved from a regular electric to an induction stove and it's a billion times better. I think it's quite close to a gas stove. Maybe someone who actually used both can chime in.
I've seen several articles recently highlighting problems with gas stoves. Some of these are environmental critiques--gas needs to be retired to deal with climate change. Another critique is around indoor air quality:
"On the air-quality front, at least, the evidence against gas stoves is damning. Although cooking food on any stove produces particulate pollutants, burning gas produces nitrogen dioxide, or NO2,, and sometimes also carbon monoxide, according to Brett Singer, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies indoor air quality. Brief exposures to air with high concentrations of NO2 can lead to coughing and wheezing for people with asthma or other respiratory issues, and prolonged exposure to the gas can contribute to the development of those conditions, according to the EPA. Homes with gas stoves can contain approximately 50 to 400 percent higher concentrations of NO2 than homes with electric stoves, often resulting in levels of indoor air pollution that would be illegal outdoors, according to a recent report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability think tank. “NO2 is invisible and odorless, which is one of the reasons it’s gone so unnoticed,” Brady Seals, a lead author on the report, says."
Indoor air pollution is only a serious problem for unvented gas stoves. Current building codes require venting for gas stoves and any gas stove installed in the 21st century will have a vent.
Many (most?) vents do not vent outdoors; they are attached to the microwave and simply move hot air from below the microwave to above it. It's still a major problem.
Source? In Minnesota at least, I've lived in 5 houses between the years 80s to 2010s that all had external venting with gas stove tops (no remodels). Our new house we are building also is required to have external venting due to code. I know states have individual requirements, but in Minnesota it is required to exhaust to external air.
That would be nice, and maybe brand-new places are doing that, but across 10+ apartments with gas stoves I've rented in the past 15-odd years, none of them have done that.
Me neither. I have an induction burner and would still love this feature on my vent - particularly for smoky steaks or oil fumes - sometimes I forget to turn it on/off.
I think an IR thermometer that activates the vent whenever the cooktop is over ~115F would accomplish this pretty well, provided the switch had a manual override to force it on if the sensor fails.
A quick search indicates they do exist on some pricier models.
I suppose there could be edge cases where the vent could make a stove fire worse by increasing airflow - wonder if these 'smart' vents have logic to handle these cases.
All indoor cooking requires venting outdoors to be safe.
The air quality concerns over gas stoves are a disingenuous argument to push for change for climate mitigation reasons. Most pollution from cooking is related to burning food not fuel, and electric burners make it far easier to burn food.
Rather than pushing think tank pieces environmental groups should push the industry to create induction ranges that are 1) cheaper and 2) don't create high frequency noise pollution. Current technology has a lot of positive aspects but the high-pitch buzzing is a deal breaker.
Are you sure about that? If I boil water in my kitchen on my gas stove the CO2 and VOC levels in our living area nearly triple within 15 minutes of using the stove without burning any food.
If I use the electric kettle there's obviously zero change in air quality.
I use airthings wave. Seems to be fairly accurate as far as I can tell. Whenever I open the windows the CO2 level drops down fairly close to the atmospheric CO2.
I mostly use gas. I loved my induction cooktop and its precise and fast heat control when I had it, but the only thing I didn't like was that it required all pots to be flat (I have round woks with only a tiny flat area) and everything had to be compatible with induction, so no clay or aluminum.
Even on the traditional gas vs electric debate, the heating power of a gas cooktop isn't guaranteed -- smaller BTU rated stoves take forever to heat with their dinky flames. I once had one that maxed out at around 350F when using a big pan.
I've also used gas, electric (briefly, years ago) and now induction. Induction is superb: very precisely controllable for everything from long slow simmer to nuking. The flat surfaces are much easier to keep extremely clean and also serve as extra space for putting stuff down when a given ring isn't in use. The only sense in which I preferred the old gas system was the controls themselves which were rotary dials rather than long-press surfaces. But I'm used to that now.
I have used gas, fire, electric, and modern electric (the glass kind). No induction yet.
Modern electric is best for consistency and control. Gas is best for fast heat. (wood) Fire is amazing for smores, great for grilling if you have the time to turn it into a radiant heat source.
Old electric (metal plates) sucks and is terrible.
I bought an Ikea induction to try it out alongside my gas stove. And it seems to heat my cast iron and steel pots and pans just as fast or faster than gas.
I've used both. Induction stoves are magical, and I also love gas. If you were going to electrify, go induction and you might even enjoy the fact that many things get to temperature faster.
I love gas, too, but there's a problem. I installed a CO2 meter in my office. It goes off whenever the stove is used. Going from 600ppm to over a 1000ppm, if I forget to turn on the exhaust fan.
1) It seems like you have to spend a lot to approach even a cheap gas stove, as far as cooking quality; and
2) Even on (say) Reddit threads full of people posting about how great they are, the same people comment a lot about how careful they have to be with the cooktop or how many times they've cracked and ruined(!!!) theirs and had to replace it.
I have a ~$50 110v induction cooktop I bought on Amazon. It replaced the same thing from about 7 years before that worked pretty much flawlessly until we melted it on the other range.
I never babied it - even took it camping, used it to cook in the backyard, and some very slow beer brewing with it. It's unreasonably awesome for the low price, and it makes cooking really fast and easy.
Gas is cheaper if you already have a gas installation. However nowadays most gas appliances are long gone and heating installations are increasingly switching to heat pumps. At that point, the cost to install gas just for cooking is hard to justify.
Indeed that’s the reason most places I’ve lived no longer have a gas stove. The cost of adding a gas supply is just too high for it to be viable.
> Gas is cheaper if you already have a gas installation. However nowadays most gas appliances are long gone and heating installations are increasingly switching to heat pumps. At that point, the cost to install gas just for cooking is hard to justify.
This must be very regional. We get about 3-4 months of hot weather, and 3-4 months of cold, and gas furnaces are still installed in most new homes, because it's much more expensive to heat with electricity. No-one's replacing them with electrical furnaces, when replacing furnaces, certainly—no-one wants the extra expense. Gas stoves are uncommon on lower-end houses, becoming more common as you move up, but gas furnaces are basically standard across the board. Heat pumps are sometimes installed, but I've repeatedly been advised by local HVAC folks that, whatever their claimed efficiency, they're not a great idea in our climate. Certainly it gets too cold here to rely only on them.
It's not close to a gas stove. Not by a long shot. It's just slightly better than normal electric because it doesn't have as much residual heat in the ring. The best thing induction hobs do is boil water, but it's still about half as quick as my kettle.
I find making nice and runny scrambled eggs on electricity really hard to do. Actually induction is even harder with the pulses of energy dissipating so quickly.
> Induction stoves are the highest EMF polluting device in a typical household. In particular they emit a large magnetic field.
And? You say this like the problem with this is obvious / self-evident.
(Feel free to get technical: I have an EE.)
The author of your source:
> My interest in the topic of EMF radiation is two-fold:
> I have studied Information Science and worked with router communication, Wi-Fi network, and fiber optics communication during the last 5 years. So I consider myself well-educated on parts of the technical aspects of the problem.
> I am married to a wonderful girl who is hyper-sensitive. She can literally feel high levels of EMF radiation on her skin when she is near strong Wi-Fi signals or other sources of electromagnetic fields like induction stoves.
Electric stove is also safer around kids and elderly..
I have gas stove, hot water, dryers and heating. The hot water and heating were upgraded to gas fairly recently, from oil (I live in New England, there are a lot of legacy heating systems- oil was actually an upgrade in the 1940s from the original coal heat). There is strong incentive to do this because oil was costing me $3800 / year back when oil hit $5 a gallon, whereas gas costs $700 / year. This upgrade costs $14000 (includeing installation of forced air vents, central A/C and gas water heat tank). The previous upgrade from coal to oil was about reducing waste and increasing convenience. With coal, you had to deal with ash waste and stoking.
A dual-stage electric heat pump would in theory work and have comparable operating cost, but the install cost was like $30000, had questionable reliability and few contractors even knew about it. Geothermal would also work, but my land is tiny and the cost would have been something like $60000. There was even a Honda generator home co-generation plant option available, but again, expensive and no contractors.
What would you do? BTW, my largest utility bill now is actually water, because we are paying for the Boston harbor clean-up in my sewage bill. I'm tempted to illegally use rain water for the toilets... A rooftop solar system is popular around here, but it's not worth it based on my tiny electric bill.
We have to get off of fossil fuels, but it's definitely going to take a government mandate backed with financial incentives to get people to switch.
It seems like induction could happen by itself in the next decade or two - the experience is really good now - but I agree, it seems like government action may be needed to get things like air source heat pumps rolling quickly. As you note, many contractors don't even know anything about them - there's a vicious cycle where they are expensive so they are uncommon & unfamiliar, which makes them expensive.
They meter the sewage by the amount of water you use, so using an un-metered water source would short-change them. You do have the option of getting a separate water meter for water you use for gardening, to avoid the sewage bill for water you don't send down the drain.
I've never heard of metering sewage before. Everywhere I've ever lived had a flat fee per home, or based it on square footage. Is the water utility owned by the local government?
Sewer billing is a thing where I am (Cincinnati, Ohio), and I can tell you exactly why!
The sewer system in the urban area was largely built out by about 100 years ago as a combined system, where rain water and sewage were in the same sewer pipes. Many people didn't really care about water quality and disease back then, so the fact that the Ohio river was a big stream of shit and chemicals didn't matter.
As other parts of life improved eventually more and more people wanted clean, healthy water and surrounding ecosystems, hence the EPA was created 50 years ago. The EPA got stricter and stricter over the last 50 years, and about 20-30 years ago started cracking down on sewage outflows in to waterways.
As a result, the local waste water treatment utility (owned by local government) has been under a legal decree to fix sewage overflows which occur during storms due to these combined systems. This has meant spending billions on tearing out these pipes and replacing them with separate storm water and sewage lines.
The utility started charging for separate clean water usage and sewer usage so people understood a bit better why their bill went up so much.
I grew up cooking on a gas stove, and have since gotten used to electric and induction as I started renting. Electric (with a heating element) is truly horrible. You have to constantly move the pan off the heating element when you want to reduce the heat.
Induction, is however, very responsive and I don't really notice a difference between it and gas.
I hope you live someplace that doesn't plan on eliminating them. My town is currently planning to change the permitting laws so that every kitchen/home remodel will require the removal of gas cooktops and ovens. There's a big outcry from those aware of it, but most people don't even know it's happening.
I love to cook (even did it professionally for a while), and I just don't get this complaint. If you have good (i.e. thick) pans, response times aren't instant no matter what your heat source. I find the difference between gas and electric to be basically unnoticeable.
The contrary of this is that, for any given pan, pan + coil latency will be worse than pan + instant response, be that gas or induction.
I find the difference between instant responding heat sources and radiant coils to be very noticeable, particularly with thin pans and delicate cooking, so: eggs, in particular.
Of course that's technically true. My point is that the difference in latency is completely unnoticeable for me. The adjustment is so minor if you have good technique and good pans it's not worth mentioning.
I agree that response has mattered progressively less to me as I grow as a cook. However, that’s not really a line of argument that wins many followers.
The only thing that comes to mind when you say curved cookware is a wok. I've never owned a home stove, electric or gas, that got hot enough for proper wok stir frying so I have a standalone 14,000 BTU propane burner for that.
I'm no expert, but I will say that I see All-Clad pop up everywhere. I bought myself a bunch of their copper-core pans as a college graduation present and they have been worth every penny. (And it was a lot of pennies!)
It is hardly plausible that a gas grid will be kept operating just for cooking. Generating the gas probably would even be feasible, as the amounts are likely small enough that they could be met with biomethane generated from waste, but operating the grid is unlikely.
Many houses in remote locations (in the U.S.) have large propane tanks outside the house, which are refilled periodically by a truck.
So people are already doing this for reasons other than nostalgia.
Everyone with a propane grill—which is, like, every other house around here—already has a propane tank. You can go swap them out with full tanks at many grocery stores, when they're empty. It's pretty cheap—I'm not sure, but I wouldn't bet on electric being cheaper to cook with than propane. There are conversion kits for gas stoves. And yes, you're right, that's exactly what anyone out in the country with a gas stove already does (as you note, they've got those big propane tanks outside the house that get refilled every so often).
[EDIT] natural gas (not propane) is definitely cheaper to heat with, here, than electric. All the HVAC guys don't even recommend heat pumps to supplement the furnace. They recommend putting the money toward higher-efficiency AC and gas furnace instead. They say they're good on paper but more expensive in practice, in our climate (Midwest). Outright electric heating is crazy expensive (I've had it, with a very new furnace even, and it was terrible, was paying a high premium for mediocre heating).
Effort? How about necessity? You think they were going to run gas lines to our house in Bumphuck, Indiana that sat 200m off the road (the road which, I guarantee you, did not have a gas line buried next to it)?
Of course no one would be running gas lines, that's why we had a big LP tank to play on when I was a kid:
We have a new gas cooktop - we also looked up about the electric ones, but since the existing one was gas, we didn't know how much more it would cost to add wires across the house. It's pretty good and there are a few things you can't do with electric (like roasting a sheet of seaweed), but in general I think they're more or less comparable.
One problem with gas is that so much heat is lost to the rising hot air - in addition to inefficiency, it makes all the pot handles burning hot, so I always need to have mittens ready. Never had the problem when I had electric.
There are freestanding stoves which can be used where combustion-based heat is necessary. Many are aimed at camping or RV use (you'll see them often in VanLife conversions).
So long as fuel is available (propane, butane, alcohol, white gas), this is an option. Note that white gas should not be used indoors.
Same. I have gas central heating and a gas stove. During the winter electricity is not 100% and is nice to have heating (with ups) or to make a hot tea.
This sounds similar to the people who would refuse to upgrade to automobiles because horses were better than cars.
Induction is better in almost every way over gas. There are a few minor things you can't do it with it, like wok cooking or charring peppers etc. But for those instances, there are easy workarounds, I just use my turkey fryer for wok work, and use a handheld blowtorch for charring.
I've used all types of electric hob (that I'm aware of) hotplates, ceramic and induction, and they are all awful. Honestly I think the only people who can deal with them do nothing more than heat up tins of soup on them.
Every election in UK the last few years labour say they will electrify the rest of our railways, the Tories say they will too.
The Tories get in and then don't do it.
This is probably not an HN-approved comment, but if we can find a party donor or friend of a cabinet minister who also happens to be in the railway industry, I’m sure we’d see a new golden age of rail in the UK!
I need to update my home hot water heater. I'd like a tankless instant hot water heater. Despite wanting to do my part for climate change, all indications point me towards getting as natural gas unit instead of electric.
I went from a traditional (tank) gas water heater to a tankless gas water heater in my townhouse. I don't have any complaints about the performance of the water heater itself, but the process was a pain and I have had complaints from my neighbors about the gas smell when the water heater kicks on.
Your mileage will almost certainly vary, but in my case the upgrade to a tankless water heater meant that the max gas draw for my house (if the water heater, furnace, stove and gas fireplace were all firing at once) would exceed the existing gas service to my house. So I had to get the gas company out to upgrade my service, which meant having the existing utility lines located multiple times (as the first markings washed away by the time the gas company came out), and I had bits of my yard dug up, etc. I also had to have county inspection folks come visit, and coordinate that with the plumber, etc.
The exhaust for my water heater is right next to the border with my neighbor's townhouse, and they've got a deck at right about that level. And it turns out when a tankless water heater kicks on, the gas comes on for a second and then it ignites, pushing a small amount of unburned gas out the exhaust. My neighbors occasionally catch a whiff of that, and I've had to have the installer visit and get on the phone with the water heater manufacturer (Rinnai) to reassure them that everything is safe and working correctly.
All told, if I knew then what I know now, I would have just gotten a new tank water heater - and I'm sure the entire process would have been over and done in a day, with no damage to the lawn or skittish neighbors. The guy who installed my water heater was a nice guy but I would have been happier meeting him once rather than a half dozen times.
But if you wouldn't have to have upgrade your gas service or aren't worried about the exhaust location - by all means, join me in having infinite hot water!
Interesting, some of those older tank-less systems only kicked in if the flow rate was high enough. I used to have a really old tank-less system from the 1940s, it was just a heat exchanger in my oil heating steam boiler. This was massively inefficient, but it did provide infinite hot water..
My only complaint with my new (2013) tank gas hot water, is that the tank already cracked and had to be replaced. It was not cheap: $2200. This is a rip-off, but contractors are expensive. I think the new tank-less systems are supposed to be more reliable than traditional tank heaters.
You paid that much for a water heater and it didn't have an eight-year warranty? Locally I'm seeing $650 for gas-fired 50-gallon 12-year-warranty heaters.
I suppose one might pay a plumber any amount of money. Once the gas lines are in use it surely doesn't take much work to unhook one appliance and hook up a new one? I installed a new (electric) hot water heater for my brother last week, but I didn't charge him for it...
I propose that you're improving things with tankless, regardless of heating technology.
We just did the same on our 2014 house, which had a builder supplied 50gallon natural gas water heater. Those continually burn natural gas in varying amounts to keep the tank's water heated.
In contrast, the tankless natural gas is a massive win just wrt natural gas, as it's only running when hot water flow is required.
Tankless gas water heaters have been demonstrated to not be very efficient, and also require a great deal of maintenance due to the very high BTU burner they require.
Risinger is entertaining, and is rarely afraid to spend more on construction, but in general his opinions seem to conform very closely to the commercial interests of his biggest sponsors. The biggest objection at your link seems to be that tankless allows long showers? What kind of ridiculous objection is that?
There are big yellow efficiency tags on the front of every appliance for sale in USA. The content of those tags is closely regulated by the government. If there is some reason to believe that they are inaccurate for tankless water heaters, please link to that.
Let me rephrase: Tankless gas water heaters (90-97% efficient) aren't anywhere near as efficient as more modern alternatives, specifically heat pump water heaters, which are 300-400% efficient. They are are marginally more efficient than condensing storage gas water heaters, which are 89% efficient.
Given the gulf in efficiency between tankless gas and heat pump water heaters, tankless gas shouldn't really be promoted as examples of high efficiency.
Consider also a heat pump water heater (often called “hybrid” as a category label even when some are not). Allows you to stay/switch to electric without the massive instant demand that a tankless instant requires. Dehumidifies and cools the utility area as well, which is helpful for some cases.
A rooftop solar heater 200 liters, plus an electric supplemental water heater plus the requisite control system runs about 2000 euros here, INSTALLED (Portugal)
An idea for you - consider an electric tanked with a drain water heat recovery unit. Even lower energy usage than a tankless, and while you can still run out of hot water the DWHR significantly accelerates the re-heating. The DWHR unit should last basically forever.
This is what I did, been very happy. Total cost wasn't more than $1,600 (DIY). Tankless is a nice idea but was just too complicated to ever pay for itself as a retrofit.
I’ve had tankless and now have a rheem heat pump water heater. The rheem uses far less energy (~60 kWh/mo) then the instant water heater. Lifespan I’m not so sure about. I know depending on the water quality they can have issues. I’ve seen many tank water heaters still working after 30 years with little to no service.
Tankless are smaller and it’s true they won’t run out of hot water so they do have that going for them.
We'll probably still need natural gas for heating for a few more decades. But it's pretty clear that everything that moves on wheels is going electric.
Nah. It’s pretty easy to electrify heating, too. A ground source heat pump or even a good (not mediocre) air source heat pump can reduce the energy cost of heating with electricity to the same as gas.
Yeah, depending on your climate, a heat pump can have a Coefficient of Performance [1] of like 3.5. If you don’t take this into account and just take “natural gas in therms => kWh” it often seems like a heat pump would be a large increase. Divide by 3 and it’s suddenly much better :).
Also ground source heat pumps can have COPs in the 4-4.5 range and also keep that performance through a wide temperature range unlike air source heat pumps. Sadly air source heat pumps COP really start to drop around 0F even with the new hyper heat models. Given that I would still probably prefer an air source heat pump over using heating oil or propane.
Yeah the reason they stay in the higher range is because they're pumping from a source of higher temperature in the first place. They're also more effective at air conditioning because they're pumping into a cooler medium.
As someone who lives in a climate that pretty reliably sees -40C and a week of the mid -30's ever year I think that the only option is a ground source heat pump - I can't see an air heat pump putting out 80,000 BTUs when it is at its least efficient.
I wonder how that works for a city - is the idea that everyone drills their own 15 foot hole? Our frost can reach down to ~8 feet.
The solutions I have seen for cities would be community/public ground loops. Piping would run similar to potable water but would return to a centralized location where they would have large wells. This would be impractical for suburban/rural environments but denser cities it would most likely work.
Pretty standard in Nordic countries. The source of heat is real question, but there are some options like burning garbage, or waste heat from factories, data centres and so on.
The source could also simply be the ground. With a heat pump the water doesn't have to be hot to provide heat to a building. The difference with the system Nordic countries have is that they provide hot water to residences which is directly used for heating.
This very much depends on where you live. We just did an all-electric conversion in the DC area and the cost works out to be ~$50/month more in the coldest winter months for our single-family home (also paying $0.01/KWh more for wind/solar than coal power). That's obviously not free but it's completely manageable in terms of home expenses, and the variable heat pump's efficiency saves on cooling as well as being notably better for humidity and temperature swings because it'll run more frequently at the lower levels rather than the cool-to-full-blast cycle of our old gas heater. Obviously, this approach is less viable the further north you go as you spend more time in the lower end of the efficiency curves but there are a _lot_ of people living in areas where it's basically trivial to do now.
If I set policy, I'd have subsidies for the upfront costs (maybe a base credit with 0% loans?) and especially consider things to push geothermal installs which are expensive up front but might be worth it long-term. We didn't want to deal with the extra hassle but I have been wondering whether we should have done that since it'd save in the summer, too.
Moving to an apartment with a gas stove and gas heat has probably saved me thousands of dollars in utility bills. Electric heat is so expensive and seems so wasteful, especially when my winter gas bill is like $18 a month (gets into the 40s-50s so not terribly cold, but used daily in winter).
Electric heat pumps use less electricity than electric resistance heating, especially in a climate like yours that does not get truly frigid temps. As a side benefit they also offer efficient cooling during hot weather.
Yeah, I live in a mild climate and my previous house was in-ceiling electric resistance heating. We mostly just bundled up, but just for a lark, I set all the thermostats to 65 for the month of January to see how much it would cost. It was a bit over $1000.
We had the warmest attic on the block though, I'm sure.
In the case of your parent comment, where winter temps don't go below 40-50, they don't even need a fancy heat pump, just a regular A/C with a reversing valve, which are not much more expensive.
I'm sorry but I can't agree that these flags are unjust. You're posting unsubstantive comments and breaking the site guidelines in other ways also. Would you mind reading them and sticking to the rules? Note, for example, the second-last one.
Being factually true doesn't mean its a productive contribution and not the kind of low-effort dismissal discouraged by the rules (I personally don’t think it warrants flagging, but I don’t think that or downvotes are clearly unjust, either.)
If flagging is abused to shut down civilly expressed imminent criticism, what is to stop me from just flagging everything I don’t like on HN? Is it not presumed that one is a good faith actor, at least initially? Are not downvotes also something one should be “reasonable” about, aka also requiring trust, community mindedness etc?
Shall HN turn into a subreddit per thread, as crowds defend post “territories”?
Sometimes the voting is unfair. However it most common that there is a reason for the voting behaviour and it is just that you are not making any effort to understand the reasons why people acting fairly can appear wrong to you. Read, watch, pay attention, and listen when someone spends their time to answer you.
The fact is material and pertinent. It is absolutely objectively pertinent to whether the WSJ journal is earnestly acting in good faith with a long history of anti-electrification articles. Whether you AGREE with my assessment that, no they are not a good faith actor, is perhaps an open question. My flagged comment below expressed my OPINION that the WSJ is a bad faith actor in this topic, arguably Rupert Murdoch is responsible for much of climate change denialism. However, flagging a civilly expressed opinion that has a pertinent bearing on the thread is abusing flagging for the sake of suppressing criticism.
The comment would potentially be much more valuable if, besides the bare fact, it made the case for how/why that fact should be given weight in the context of the instant article. (I can't judge whether it would or not without the content of that argument, but it at least has potential.)
> Whether you AGREE with my assessment that, no they are not a good faith actor, is perhaps an open question.
Whether or not I agree with that is tangential to whether I would agree that pointing one fact forming (I hope only part of) the basis of that assessment with no further elaboration of its relevance to the immediate subject of discussion is a contribution up to the minimum quality standards expected on HN.
I don't really understand electric bikes, on a flat surface, riding a bike is effortless for me (I don't really try to go fast, 20km/h is good enough), if it goes slightly uphill then it's a good opportunity to do a bit of exercise, but really, you can ride bikes with very little (own) energy, and that's super healthy, no engines, thanks
I think bicyles will become a primary transport in the next decades, electric or not
Former Cat 2 bicycle racer here, "Cat 2" meaning I was in damned good shape, and I still am even if old age has slowed me a bit. That climb up next to highway 520 from downtown Redmond to the Microsoft campus? Yeah, if I had a hankering to do so, I'd drop most folks going up that hill.
And yet I own an electric bike, and love the thing. Because I can go up that hill in my work clothes, and not show up a dripping, sweating, stinking mess. I can go down the hill from the house and get supper without having to don the clown outfit and the special shoes. Just wheel the bike out the garage and go with whatever I have on. Back up the hill to get home, give that electric motor an extra kick if I'm feeling lazy, sorted. And that's for an old ex-racer who is in probably better shape than 90% of his peers. Imagine the worlds that open for the elderly, overweight, or other "differently abled".
Bicycles have had over 100 years to "become primary transport" and unless one lives in the Netherlands, it obviously isn't going to happen. Stick a battery and electric motor on one, though, and suddenly one's practical range and power band is extended enough to make it a viable transportation alternative for not just the fully-abled and in-shape, but for nearly everyone.
I understand, but honestly I'm 36, commuted for many years (South-East of France, not really flat except sea-side), I've currently a re-broken clavicle since 10 days, and yet I still use my (modest) bike (sort of partially-temporarily disabled, that's annoying for the rest of life though). My energy is modest at least I'm maybe shaped for hills, it's just that as I explained, I ride slowly. You can spend as much energy as someone on his electric bike, it's just that you need to go slower, and not be stressed by time. I just wanted to say there are some mental barriers and false opinions on the difficulty of bike, or societal (like the fact to sweat ..) which can be overriden
e-bikes dramatically increase the number of people who can bike commute: you go faster for the same effort so the range is _much_ better, especially if you have hills; more people can avoid needing to take a shower when they arrive, which is great since so many employers do not provide facilities; and it means that people who need to carry kids and/or cargo can do so without sweating it. It also opens up quality of life improvements: you can trade a little extra weight for durable tires, more comfortable rides, BIG lights for night safety, etc.
According to my logs, I go about the same speed and heart rate on my cargo e-bike with my son and our gear commuting. The difference is that it saves enough time and helps with one notorious hill enough that I do it every day year round except for the worst weather whereas before I used to skip a few days a week — and I say that as a fairly fit cyclist who has ridden centuries at gun-timed speeds in the low 20s, so we're leaving out a LOT of bike commuters if we're saying that's inadequate.
I see e-bikes as a transformative technology for cities. If we want to stop the death, pollution, and quality-of-life impact of cars we should be rolling out bike infrastructure as quickly as possible — it's the cheapest, most flexible option we have. (Buses are second: more accessible, all-weather capable, but less flexible)
Since we got ebikes, we've averaged 2,000-2,500 miles per year on bike and sometimes go a couple months without using our car, which we are likely not going to replace when it dies.
Range goes way up – electrification can turn a 10+ mile commute from something intense (where you need a shower when you arrive) into something manageable.
It allows bikes to be a substitute for far more things that you'd otherwise use a different mode of transportation for.
I own a road bike and an e-bike. On level ground I'm much faster on my road bike (there's a 20mph(32km/h) governor on the e-bike, and it's heavier and has much more wind resistance.
However, I can haul over 100lbs of cargo and/or kids on the back of my e-bike, and can show up to work ready to go. Given that the ride to work includes climbs, and I would need to shower, the e-bike gets me there substantially faster. If I need to pick up a kid from an afternoon activity that is downtown, I can do so on my e-bike (I live about 13km from downtown, which my teenagers can do, but is a rather long ride for my younger kids to do).
I've been a cyclist almost my entire life. It's been my main method of transport for several years and I do it as a sport. I don't plan to own an electric bike because I take pride in being able to move my own weight around but I'll take anything that gets more people on bikes. Cars are a scourge and need to be severely limited. Electric bikes lower the barriers to entry for many people and I'd much rather be overtaken by an electric bike than a monstrous car.
