One thing with electrical heating is that there’s no fundamental limit to how good insulation can get, and hence no limit to how little energy you can, in principle, use to heat a house.
The used market for EVs that are only good for commuting is pretty cheap. By this, I mean cars with a useful range of less than 100 miles, and possibly no DC fast charging. First generation Leafs, Bolts, i3, 500e, California compliance EVs, and other cars like that are usually less than $10,000 for even low mileage models. Of course, with the way the car market has been in the last year, that may have changed.
Teslas have traditionally held their value extremely well, and for a long time they were the only reasonable option if you wanted more than a little commuting car. There are good general purpose new EV models from Hyundai, Kia, Ford, and others coming out all the time now. Some of the old commuter only cars have gotten much more useful in their followup generations.
It will take a few years for the first of those models to be coming off lease, and start entering the used market in large numbers.
As for do-it-yourself maintenance, there really isn’t much. Most of that isn’t so much because it can’t be done at home, but that there is nothing to do. The only thing I’d call maintenance I’ve done to my EV is tire related which I let somebody else do, and replacing the cabin air-filter, which I did myself.
Sure, but as a practical matter who would want to live in a windowless house with five foot thick foam walls? And how would you breath inside it? Air quality is already an issue with houses with modern, standard insulation.
Agree. Our house was built to ‘R2000’ standards, and I understand that since then the sealing properties of new houses have been dialed back because R2000 homes can build up radon or cause ‘sick house’ syndrome There is very much a practical limit to how airtight you should make a house. Really efficient homes need to circulate air through heat exchangers to capture as much energy as possible before exhausting it.
If that were true (it isn’t), it would equally apply to gas furnaces. But on this board we obey the laws of thermodynamics. The most efficient housing standard now is ‘passive house’, which requires complete sealing of the house, a house design that maximizes volume to surface area, requires more insulation and expensive windows, etc. They claim a reduction in energy of up to 80% from a ‘typical’ home. It is extremely hard to retrofit existing homes to this kind of standard, and it adds maybe 10%-20% to the price of a new home. Not many people are buying in.
Electric heat is more expensive and less efficient than gas heat if you use baseboard heaters (the cheapest way to convert), and close to the same if you use a heat pump. But installing a heat pump can cost $10,000. You’ll likely never make your money back on any energy savings. So converting to that would require subsidizing those systems heavily to get anyone to do it.
Since they don’t really change overall energy consumption, and natural gas is already half the CO2 output per BTU as gadoline or coal, spending large resources on that would be a foolish use of money that could be spent on more effective ways of tackling climate change. There’s a lot of lower-hanging fruit out there than trying to super-insulate every house and convert it to electric heat, High efficiency furnaces are your best first upgrade. A tankless water heater is a good upgrade.
Electric heat also suffers from the problem of lack of redundancy. If the electricity fails, a small backup generator or even a battery can run the igniter and fans on a gas furnace and keep your house warm. If the gas goes out but the grid is up, you can keep the house warm with electricity. And if we also all have electric cars, if the grid fails the entire infrastructure is dead.
Losing heat when it’s -35 outside can be a life threatening event. It can also result in burst water lines and flooding. I had a friend just have his furnace fail in -37 weather. He managed to shut off the water and drain the pipes before they froze, but his family spent a miserable night huddled around a couple of portable electric heaters. If everything was electric and the power went out, it would have been much more dire.
The other problem with electric heat is service availability. I mentioned already that upgrading to 200A would cost me at least $30,000, and my neighborhood can only handle a few houses upgrading before the distribution transformers are saturated, But everyone would definitely need a bigger electrical service if they needed to convert to electric heat. Our entire energy distribution system would have to be upgraded. This just isn’t going to happen soon. Not for decades.
Yes, there are practical limits to how much you can insulate a house. But most houses are nowhere near those practical limits. You can make the typical house much more heat-efficient just with steps that the resident wouldn’t even notice (aside from on their utility bills).
I actually made a noticeable impact on my utility bills by weatherizing the apartment I rent - simple stuff, like plastic over leaky windows, replacing a door sweep and weather stripping, and stuff like that. A lot of our housing is poorly insulated, significant improvements can be had with simple things. It would be a good place to start.
Apparently the latest argon-filled triple-paned and coated windows are almost as efficient as walls.
Our house was built very well insulated, but not up to R2000 standards. The extra pieces needed to make it R2000 would have cost a lot more for little benefit. A heat exchanger unit that the kitchen and bathroom fans also vent through seems to be pretty much standard in new houses.
I seem to use a little over 1000cubic meters a year, up to 200 in the peak months. Multiply that by 10.2 to get kWh. 2000 kWh works out to 66kWh per day. Considering charging my car might use 8kW for maybe 3 or 4 hours typically, house heat would demand a significantly larger consumption of power. Plus, i would have the concurrent cost to upgrade from 100A to 200A service. I don’t see an appreciable number of houses making that conversion. Older houses may be smaller but suffer from worse insulation, so the overall demand would be no better. I don’t even see new subdivisions in a hurry to eliminate gas furnaces.
I’m just curious if you live in a fairly old neighborhood. I’m in a pretty new one, all the houses are less than 15 years old, and 200A service is the norm here.
Our house was built in 1996, but the neighborhood itself is maybe 5-10 years older. My understanding is that most newer homes in Edmonton are on 100A service, while the older homes may only have 60A service. And all our power lines are underground, which means trenching on both city property and ours to change it. That’s why it’s so expensive.
Same here. Unless it’s a McMansion, a new house in a new subdivision has 100A service and natural gas heat - because generally, natural gas is much cheaper than electricity for heat. A cubic meter of gas is (was?) about 31¢, so the equivalent in electricity at 8.9¢ kWh would be about 91¢. Bit of a difference.
The other difference would be that older neighbourhoods probably have pole service. Newer neigbourhoods bury the wires. I would imagine pulling a thicker wire would be simpler (and cheaper?) on poles than through underground feed, depending on how far is needed. Would the meter need replacing too? However, I assume the house breaker panel I have in a relatively new house is sized to handle 200A also.
There’s never going to be weeks or months without wind/solar across a whole continent. I don’t understand why we aren’t racing forward to build a North American supergrid that can transport energy across long distances. One that is largely aligned north/south would be especially useful to deal with weather issues, but east/west helps as well.
Battery storage will be very helpful (already is helpful where deployed) on hour-to-day timeframes. Longer than that requires hydroelectric (ideally pumped, but can at as a reserve without pumping), but there are only so many locations where hydro makes sense. A supergrid can solve these problems.
Even aside from the benefits to renewable energy generation, the events in Texas illustrate how stupid it is to have a grid with limited interconnections to the rest of the country. Greatly increased grid capacity has a lot of advantages.
You don’t need to have the solar cells and windfarms where the power demand happens to be right now.
It’s always sunny and/or windy somewhere in Australia. I’m sure that is true of North America too.
Money and politics. It always is.
We are in the throes of a miniature version of the same here in Oz. We don’t have the same issues as the US, indeed most countries don’t. The US, Canada, some parts of Europe, are special in having places that get really really cold. I don’t think there is any answer except to subsidise building solutions for these areas. But the rest of the world mostly has more mild climates, and the need to push energy around a bit easier to manage.
We have 5 of the 6 states of Oz on a single grid. We are a very isolated country, long distances of nothing, so this really means inter-connectors that tie the major cities together, and allow a pretty solid amount of power to be shovelled across the country. But it isn’t cheap to do, and the impost on the end consumer’s electricity bill is real. Nor does it yet manage to wipe out price variations.
Right now it is blistering hot here, 6:45pm, and it is 38 C, aka 100 F, has been most of the day, and so we are at peak-peak load. The spot price for power in this state is 7 times that of Tasmania (which is nice and cool, and is right now exporting stored hydro power to the mainland.) The rest of the mainland is half our price. No wind and the sun is basically too low for the solar, so we are buying lots of our power in. At 11am the spot price was zero, and for the three hours before that, negative. Over the course of the week the average price has been quite low. Very sunny and windy. End consumers don’t pay spot prices, so we don’t get nasty shocks.
So, it is still a work in progress. Those people with solar and batteries here will be paying nothing for their power tonight. Still a lot of power comes from gas and coal, and there is little bit of peaking combined cycle gas turbine. But at the moment, the cost of installing wind power is so low compared to any other source that it is becoming difficult to make a case for investing in any conventional power plant. This is unlikely to change, except for solar photovoltaics continuing their dive downwards. This is a difficult problem. Investors and banks are not looking at conventional (and one places nuclear in the conventional basket) as good places to put money.
If you are in a country reliant on private companies to generate and distribute your power, long term the writing is on the wall. However the market will normalise some things. Solar and wind are intermittent. The grid in its current state can’t operate entirely on them. So the price new operators can expect for ever more solar and wind will drop, as the extra power becomes harder to use. The question then becomes whether it is possible to make enough money by building inter-connectors and storage facilities to tie renewables together or whether the cost involved involved means that building new conventional power generation remains preferred. One might suspect there will be a break point. But personally I would not be putting my money into conventional power.
Conventional power generation plants are pretty well understood. Which means they are not getting cheaper either. Nuclear seems to be just getting more and more expensive as time goes on, with little to suggest that anything will change in the foreseeable future. The lead times on any new nuclear technology will be measured in decades (and fusion will remain 50 years off.) So in many ways the game is pretty much set.
Sovereign energy security is another matter. Governments will almost always be prepared to pay over the market driven design to deliver security. But politics is a funny place. And the elephant in the room is the politics of climate change. That has led to significant paralysis, and left the market to itself in many countries.
Just posting now, rechecked the spot prices. We are now 70 times the spot price in the rest of the country. This will raise eyebrows, but is a transient glitch - they happen. It makes up for the days when we don’t pay anything.
With the voltages usually used by the North American grids, it is as I understand inefficient to send power more than about 1,000 or so miles. The energy losses are too high, which is why Quebec doesn’t sell power beyond the more north-eastern states. I assume the Singapore cable will be an even higher voltage, then. Or, they are willing to live with the power loss.
You are also describing the problem with having an essential commodity priced by demand from moment to moment. I wonder how many household devices (and meters) have the smarts to temporarily back off on power demand as the costs get too high? Can you live with, say, the house temperature getting 5 degrees warmer for an hour or two to cut your electric bill in half?
This was the problem with California, which led to Enron and their shenanigans. . Free-market thinkers blithely said with the open market, companies would flock to build new plants. Meanwhile, while they debated the concept, the power company stopped building capacity because that would be free enterprise’s job. Meanwhile, before the switch free enterprise held off building because they were unaware what the profits would be like, and after because they could not see stability (reliability) in the pricing. All they could see was that if they or others add capacity, the returns would be lower. Enron then figured out the corollary, if they removed capacity, they could raise profits.
It’s as if the post office priced letters based on the day’s volume, and you had no choice because that’s how your paycheque arrived - and someone figured out the post office could do better by removing a lot of their mailboxes - an absurd notion.
Canada, for example, may not have much solar in the winter when they have houses to heat, but they do tend to have a lot of hydroelectric power (although recent west coast events from California to British Columbia have proven that that can be unreliable (or far too abundant) at times, especially with climate change. I really don’t think there’s a replacement for natural gas heat in the medium future, unless someone comes up with a way to use the natural gas infraastructure for hydrogen. (which would probably require significant changes to a large number of devices also) Hydroelectric power comes with its own set of ecological disruptions that trade the necessities of modern life for ecological stability.
But to circle back to the OP, Canada therefore is better suited to producing clean-ish power for EV’s, and may be able to accommodate a bigger load, even if we cannot supply enough to heat houses. Also, many larger dams are already built, despite the consequences. It would just mean not bypassing a lot of the water unused during the night.
Some researchers at Stanford’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering just published a paper (behind a paywall) that claims wind, water, and solar (WWS) plus storage can completely replace all other forms of generation in the US grid, and avoid summer blackouts like seen in California, and winter blackouts like in Texas.
A non-paywalled summary is available in Popular Science.
My very brief summary of their results:
- Simulations made for 2050
- Assume all transportation and building heating/cooling are electric (so higher demand than today)
- Assume existing pumped-hydro storage (PHS) and under construction PHS will be existing
- Only wind, water (traditional hydro, plus tidal), and solar
- No fossil fuel or nuclear production
- Depending on grid interconnect 15-30 TWh of battery storage will be needed
- More grid interconnects means less storage is necessary
- The maximum peak discharge of any battery can be 4 hours
- These can be concatenated, so one battery is drained over 4 hours, then the next
- More PHS will also decrease the need for batteries
- Increases in end user efficiency will reduce peak demand (better ACs, etc.)
- Cost per unit of energy in most places will go down
- Total cost of this transition is $9-12 trillion
- Payback times are very short (on the order of years) due to savings in private energy costs and social energy costs (global warming, etc.)
Don’t @ me about this, I’m just summarizing their results. I’ll appeal to authority and say, a professor of civil engineering and his group at Stanford is going to know a lot more than me about this kind of thing.
If they are right, then we just need to get on with electrification, build WWS generation, and drop some big-ass batteries on the sites of old coal plants.
Interconnects with other states and building huge windfarms in the North Sea seems to be an important part of energy policy in the UK. The newer interconnects are High Voltage DC rather than AC and the losses are much less. Norway has a lot of spare hydro power. France often has a lot of spare nuclear power and when the wind blows the UK has spare wind power.
Here is what the UK is using right now.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
There is talk of a electricity interconnects to Iceland, which has a lot of geothermal and even Morocco, which is rich in solar. There is even talk of building a island hub in the NorthSea to create a European supergrid to assist in trading electricity between countries.
This is all dependent on the economics and politics of energy policy. The low cost of new Wind farms and the viability of long distance HVDC undersea cables will change everything.
The picture in the US is interesting, a very different geography. All that sunshine in wind energy in the south and mid-west could power a lot of coastal cities.
Engineering the electricity grids to accommodate the transition to renewable energy suppliers and the electricification of transport is a major undertaking, but all very possible. I am sure there are many electrical engineers who would relish the prospect, the existing grids are pretty old now (like a lot of infrastructure.)
There are, however, a lot of vested interests that like things just as they are and they have political influence. Electricity grids are also just part of the Energy policy equation to solve.
Mistakes have been made in the past with over optimism about the cost nuclear and the dependencies involved in the ‘dash for natural gas’ and the environmental effects of huge hydro schemes and the wasteland and pollution that opencast coal leaves behind.
There is no ‘magic bullet’ to solve the energy issue unless someone invents a viable fusion reactor for power generation. But some inventions do help a lot. The low power of LED lighting has reduced electricity demand significantly.
This ‘just have a think’ guy has an interesting overview of projects to move electricity very long distances by undersea cable. It is costly. Overground HVDC seems to be an established technology…but you wouldn’t want one in running over your backyard.
Sounds analogous to “I’d kill to get the noble peace prize.”
Making these batteries will likely destroy the planet, a lot before global warming would.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/17/politics/lithium-mining-energy-climate/index.html
They’re not.
The Texas blackout was mostly caused by equipment only designed to operate in weather that Texas had actually ever experienced. Once Texas got into weather that it had never experienced before (at least on record), the equipment that wasn’t designed for that kind of weather failed miserably. This was not an issue of capacity but rather an issue of weird record-setting weather. The northeast and southwest are the only two parts of the U.S. that have major large-scale capacity issues.
Texas isn’t a capacity issue, it’s a wake-up call that climate change is going to make things even more unpredictable. When I designed stuff for power plants, we looked up the hot and cold records for the area and designed according to that. Texas proved that’s not good enough any more.
A lot of little girls would like ponies for Christmas while you’re at it.
If this was an easy thing to do then folks wouldn’t be investing huge amounts of money into developing better technologies for it right now.
Sure, if you are willing to just arbitrarily make new lakes all over the place without regard to who currently owns that land or whether or not the local terrain supports that sort of thing, not to mention the local environmental impact.
Heh. Thanks, Stanford. I needed a laugh today.
You don’t need to worry much about coal plants. A lot of environmentalists have focused on coal, so much of the coal production in the U.S. has switched over to natural gas instead. Coal used to be the No.1 source of energy in the U.S., with nukes being 2nd. These days, natural gas is No.1, nukes are still 2nd, and coal is a declining 3rd. Everything else combined is a distant 4th.
Realistically, to provide enough power, your current choice is to either destroy the atmosphere with greenhouse gases (eliminating coal only forces this to switch over to natural gas instead) or pollute parts of the Earth for tens of thousands of years with nuclear waste and inevitable nuclear accidents. As much as I would love to see the world powered by green energy, I don’t see this changing within my lifetime. Most green energies aren’t consistent, energy storage to enable these inconsistent power sources to be used isn’t where it needs to be, and the costs to get the infrastructure where it needs to be to handle all of this are massive.
It’s nice that we have folks like this Stanford group that are at least trying to move us in the right direction, but studies like these are over-optimistic and unrealistic, unfortunately.
I hope you included “margin of error” in those calculations. Apparently Texas did not. IIRC, the problem was not that Texas had never seen those temperatures before, just that they hadn’t seen them since electricity became common and had never seen them for so long (which gave equipment an opportunity to freeze). Then, apparently, the Texas government’s bill to require the industry fix the problem, modified (i.e. gutted) with lobbyist help, now does no such thing. It isn’t deja vu all over again … yet.
The linked article (at least, the South American one, the Nevada one avoids any detail) describes the cheap and dirty way to extract lithium. Like many other techniques, especially mining, absent stringent government regulation, the cheapest and hence usually the dirtiest method will predominate. If the process cannot work without vast amounts of water that are left to evaporate, then it will be fascinating to see how that works in Nevada, where as I understand all available water is pretty much spoken for already. Most industrial processes are far cleaner than they used to be prior to the regulations that cleaned things up. Paper mills no longer dump mercury into the water system; “smokestack industries” have cleaned up a lot more of their emissions; most mines and refineries are far cleaner than they used to be… and so on. Yes it costs more, which is why industry either didn’t do it or moved to the third world - but if necessary, they will do it.
I guess the point would be that even if they are wrong - any steps in the right direction are steps in the right direction. For example, if governments are not willing to spend the amount to build battery systems, a million people willing to drop the $20,000 or so to install a Powerwall or equivalent at home can have a similar effect. That would be 20 billion dollars of investment. When one home reduces their peak demand, it benefits everyone around them. Every home that installs some solar, even if not enough to go off grid, helps too. It only lacks incentive - and ridiculous peak power rates become the incentive, if altruism is not enough.
Technological development doesn’t stop just because it works now. Companies are always looking for faster, cheaper, simpler, which is why my Apple watch does not use vacuum tube technology.
Many many years ago I bought a ni-cad cordless drill; after I’d not used it for a few months, it was garbage. meanwhile, the harddisk based iPod I bought back in 2005 still works, even though it did sit for a year or longer at a time without charging. Experience with Tesla autos over the last decade show the battery technology is very reliable, and Tesla continues to experiment with formulas that use a lot less of expensive cobalt and lithium to achieve the same or better results (as do hundreds of other companies). iPhones and similar tech have benefited from increasingly higher battery capacity over the years in roughly the same form factor.
Not everyone who wants a pony, however, thinks about the need to shovel the stables daily.
Technology marches on, although sometimes in fits and starts. Don’t count it out, but don’t pin all your hopes on it.
It is possible to have an electricity supply contract that relies on renewable generators only…well kinda. There are some that buy into carbon offsetting projects and deduct the carbon captured from the carbon emitted to claim the electricity is carbon neutral.
I buy my electricity from Octopus Energy, which seems to be a ‘pure play’ renewable energy supplier. It buys power from generators that are renewable. So as a consumer I am supporting the transition to renewables.
What happens in the electricity generation business is a long game. Will a big grid scale battery come along with sufficient capacity to even out the variable nature of renewables? Will High Voltage DC Supergrids move the power around effictiently from where it is harvested to where it is consumed? Will some new nuclear fission or fusion tech become viable? These are all projects may take decades and are huge investments.
However, I can push it along a little as a consumer, I will. If my smartmeter and domestic devices start listening to my electricity supplier and turn off or delay use when during peak demand and reduce my bills, I will have some of that. If the government subsidises a ground or air heat pump to replace my natural gas boiler…show me the deal. If I can find a way to insulate my home without rebuilding it all, I am interested. When EV cars cost the same as ICE cars, why not?
Listening to very conservative industries like the auto industry and big power generators try to discourage technology changes because they want to protect their sunk assets and investments. Well that is business as usual. But the risk is that they will be left behind.
The electricity grids we have today were once new. Their building was one of the great achievements of the 20th century. They are long overdue for an upgrade and the transition to EVs and the growth of renewable generators is a sure sign that this is needed.