So not Florida or Arizona?
If we could just connect a really big heat pump between Florida and Northern Piper, all the world’s climate problems would be solved!
Looked into that but would have had to kill most of the trees on my lot, which had been a buying feature. Plus, pricey.
I know some people with acreages who have gone that route. Really helps to have a large area of land to work with. My backyard was too small.
It’s not conspiring. It just is the way it is, foolish humans!
Continuing the heat pump discussion, we had one installed this past summer and this winter is our first experience with it. We kept our gas furnace, the heat pump interior heat exchanger sits on top of the gas furnace. The thermostat lets us set the switch-over temperature where the heat pump stops running and the gas furnace takes over. Currently this is set for -12.2 degrees C, or about 10 degrees F.
The heat pump manual has a table listing COP (coefficient of performance) and TC (total capacity in BTU) values versus ambient air temperature. At 30 F, COP = 2.18 and TC = 36000 while at 10 F COP = 1.85 and TC = 31500. At -10 F (-23.3 C) the values are COP = 1.5 and TC = 23500.
For the winter so far here in Toronto, the furnace has only run for probably about 72 hours. The installer asked (in the middle of a heat wave in late June) if I wanted to connect the thermostat to wi-fi so I could install it’s app, which I declined. What he didn’t mention was that, despite the fact that the heat pump has an ambient temperature sensor, the thermostat they sold us isn’t capable of reading it. The only way for the thermostat to know the ambient temperature is to connect it to wi-fi so it can access Apple Weather. We discovered this after our first cold snap, where we hit about -20 C overnight and woke to an indoor temperature of 13 C.
Recently put solar panels on my new house. My wife and I just retired, and it’s nice to know I won’t have to worry about fluctuating energy costs.
We don’t use batteries, but might go that route. So we are still connected to the grid. It’s called net metering. I make way more power than I can use during the day. I sell that power to the elec company and buy it back at night.
Currently it’s 8am. We have produced 99% of the electricity we use for this month. by the end of the day it will be around 105%. I’m still trying to puzzle this out. But so far, so good.
Sorry, somewhat late to the game with an answer. Discloser- I own farm ground that I rent out.
So I fill up my tillable farm ground with solar panels. What is my income per acre, per year from this? I doubt it would be anywhere close to what I would make renting it as tillable acres. Wind power? Sure. Get paid for having a few towers on your land and able to farm around them. Just because I can convert my cornfield in to a solar farm (I have been solicited by several solar companies), am I? No. Too much of an income hit. These panel are much more suitable for non-tillable/pasture ground, but the companies want a 100 acres or more, not the 15-20 that I have that is non-tillable. Plus once the lifespan of the panels are “spent” who is responsible for cost of removal and disposal? Especially the cement footings that hold the framework for the panels. The energy company can easily say anything they want at the lease signing, but in 20 or so years that company may not even be around and their successor, despite what the lease said, is big enough to drag out any lawsuits filed for non-removal until the farmer runs out of money, plus his/her land is still unusable for crop production.
This problem is already evident with “dead” wind turbine blades that are hard to recycle/dispose of and piles that nobody wants to claim. Just look what happened in Sweetwater Texas recently, 3,000 blades that are now “industrial waste” and the state is suing the recycler because the are not (or can’t) recycling them as they said they would do.
Just like the people who think that their food magically shows up at the store, statements made like the one I quoted shows how ignorant/naive people are to how the world really (especially farming) works.
I take it you didn’t watch the video.
I don’t know how much you net from the crops you grow on your land, but Alec was not claiming that if you rent your land to a solar company you will make more money than growing your crops. And if your plot is too small for the purpose, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the rest of his argument.
He says that if you install solar panels, you will be making power every day for 25 years or more, as compared to growing one crop of corn per year, which will be turned into ethanol that can only be burned once (less efficiently than the same quantity of gasoline).
If you want to counter the claims made in the video, I suggest you watch it and argue against what he actually says, not my two-sentence summary of a portion of it.
That is a problem that will be solved and probably way before we find ways to deal with legacy power production waste like spent nuclear fuel which continues to accumulate. But, that isn’t stopping the ramping up of nuclear power production.
There isn’t one method of large-scale power production that doesn’t have drawbacks, but there are some that are more sustainable than others. Wind and solar have some of the best potential despite the ongoing, non-stop negative smear campaigns by conservatives (oil industry).
Nah, we’ve known how to deal with spent nuclear fuel for decades. We’ve just decided that we’d rather not do the easy solution to the problem.
Now, coal ash, that’s a problem that we haven’t figured out, and nobody’s even really seriously trying to find a solution.