When I planned my house in 2018, my heat and water installer more or less shoved a heatpump on me, after he heard I wanted heated floors. I gave up on fighting him because I had a lot more on my plate at the time and told him “yeah, whatever, if you think that should be it…”. Cost me like, 10k€ more than the cheap gas heater I had planned, but then again, no gas tank, no chimney, it came to a point where I just didn’t give a fuck.
Last Christmas that dude got a very expensive bottle of whiskey from me.
This is a specific provision of the Inflation Reduction Act! This legistation is a huge step in the right direction for clean energy for so many people, and I am so glad that a solid chunk of that is going directly to indigenous communities.
Yes- this is not a perfect piece of legislation by any means, but a step in the right direction. A big thing that I had heard is that even navigating federal paperwork is, well, work. Not all tribes are set up so that they can take on that effort in advance of something that is beneficial for them in the long run. I know there are some non profits that are looking to connect these tribes with resources to get them going to take advantage of these provisions, but it’s definitely an imperfect process.
The trials covered the equivalent amount of power demand that a small gas plant would meet, or what could be saved by turning off more than half of London for an hour.
How can people always mix power and energy. Instead of giving us an actual number, we now know absolutely nothing.
So - I don’t know if every state handles it this way, but my state has a public service commission that has the authority to approve the big projects that utility companies engage in. In my state, my PSC makes their meetings available to watch online, and the public can show up in person, or call in to offer comments about utility matters.
I guess a utility here has an agreement with a farmer to build solar panels and a few wind turbines on their property, but to connect it to the grid, they had to run lines over other farmers lands.
These people were complaining that the power lines would cause cancer, that the solar panels would ‘leak’ and poison the land. That the concrete used in the construction footings would leech chemicals into the groundwater (these are farmers that use pesticides and fertilizers, as well as ranchers that have all manner of chemical and biological effluent running off their livestock).
Which is all to say. I agree completely. I think they are poor stewards of the land and let their political beliefs get in the way of using the land well. Being sold power by people who do use the land to generate power in environmentally friendly ways is just desserts.
That pricetag is just the unit and standard installation probably. Pieces are crazy high Here in Germany because the demand is crazy high. Not many heating installers have made the additional qualifications, so those who did can demand practically anything.
It’s not that the people don’t want the technology, the adoption pace is just higher then the supply chains can deliver.
And btw: you don’t need to reach 60°C with a heat pump. That would be pretty inefficient. That wouldn’t prevent installers from up selling you, but that’s a different story.
And btw: you don’t need to reach 60°C with a heat pump. That would be pretty inefficient.
Thanks for the feedback.
My boiler gives me control of the temp of the water running through the radiators which is independent of the room air temp thermostat. I set the water to ~55°C which seems to reasonably get the air to 17° without running continuously. I mentioned 60° because I figured that temp would enable someone to heat their room up quickly. I wonder why you say a heat pump would not need 60°. I would think the radiators need to reach a high temp like ~50—60° regardless of the kind of furnace. Maybe I’m doing something inefficient. Should I use a lower temp? I could lower the water temp but then there would be a point where the furnace has to run continuously which i would think is inefficient. I’m not sure how to find the efficiency sweet spot.
UPDATE
That pricetag is just the unit and standard installation probably. Pieces are crazy high Here in Germany because the demand is crazy high. Not many heating installers have made the additional qualifications, so those who did can demand practically anything.
Sounds reasonable. So if the demand has out-stripped supply on heat pumps, I wonder if geo-thermal would actually be cheaper than a heat pump ATM. IIRC the digging would be ~€10k (what I think is a typical price for digging a well… could be off). Though I don’t suppose you could use wall radiators with geothermal. Since geothermal water is only ~6° warmer in the winter, hydro-radiant flooring would have to be installed.
Running continuously is usually the ideal point. For heat pumps, it definitely is as the efficiency is highest with the lowest split between indoor and outdoor temps.
The issue is that if you suddenly want more heat, you first have to raise the water loop temperature before that can start pushing more heat into the house.
Systems are usually designed to keep up at perhaps 22-24C even on the worst days of winter; maintaining 17C is a lower target that can be met with less capacity and cooler radiators.
The issue is that the original radiators were sized to move the necessary n kW into the room with a water temperature of 60C. If you drop the water temperature to say 45-50C, you’re only going to get roughly two-thirds of the heat transfer. The other third needs to be made up somewhere else - additional heating or better insulation.
As you said, running continously is the ideal point for heat pumps. And for a continous load most radiators are big enough. In Germany they were scaled so they could heat up the rooms pretty quickly and then idle for time. Since thats not the goal with a heatpump we can use the idle time to even out the lower peak capabilities. You loose the ability to quickly adapt the room temperture, but with outdoor temperature probes connected to the heatpump this istn an issue. I am in the process of retrofitting my home to a heatpump and that what the engineer told me at least.
A bigger issue seems to be the single-pipe heating vs. two-pipe heating systems, but those are not the majority in germany and should be phased out anyway because they are so inefficient.
Give solar the same subsidies as coal and we can make billions of panels, no problem. The reason for the market shift away from US manufacturing is a lack of support in policy and infrastructure. US policymakers are still too entrenched in coal and oil.
We’ve had solar plants survive for years here. The reasons they eventually shut down are not internal.
Possibly because throughout is important, possibly because MWh seems to confuse a lot of people. People are used to thinking of electricity in its flowing state and in the modern era of batteries have generally been given it in time of operation of what the battery is for.
Power tells you how large of a gap in grid capacity-vs-demand storage can cover while renewables are below peak production. That’s the important number, as long as the energy stored is sufficient to last until renewable output goes back up.
Giving an energy storage number by itself could be misleading because it seems the batteries that have been built take longer than an hour to discharge. So for example 26 GWh storage does not equal 26 GW grid capacity.
But this article, like many others does seem to be loose with the power-vs-energy metrics:
If 6,600 MW doesn’t sound like that much, consider it is enough to supply electricity to about 6.6 million homes in California for 4 hours
Maybe the implication is that the total energy storage is 26,400 MWh?
Meh, this article really only discusses lithium ion and lead acid batteries. It is well known both of these are abysmal for grid storage, and are at best relatively expensive solutions for mobile energy.
There are already several energy storage solutions that are starting to be installed that aren’t these and that are far more cost effective. Flow batteries are an example. For the same cost as lithium ion we get 3x the energy storage and 3x the lifespan (and are essentially 100% refurbishable) for the same cost. They just come at a price of weight and volume (which isn’t a problem for most grid or residential storage). There are others as well.
The article does do a good job talking about thermal as a solution, and this is very true. They don’t talk about high temperature thermal energy storage, though that is admittedly more of an industrial use case.
I will also say thag more solar is also something that is compelling and interesting - meaning we significantly overbuild solar capacity to capture the majority of mismatch of demand vs supply. We often think about trying to build the minimum amount of solar to get to match the output we need, but in the end it is probably cheaper to massively outscale what we build vs what we need.
Innefficient, can be catastophic to local environments, not feasible in like 70% of places, but that kind of energy storage is in une in a few places in China amd the US where it is a good option in the local geography.
We don’t need grid residential we need grid storage full stop. If it doesn’t work at scale and isn’t cost effective then it’s not a solution to get renewables to base supply
Most people interact with content by seeing a brief blurb on social media. The norm on reddit was around 2-2.5% of people would click through the title to the article. Failing to do the very basics - checking to see if the article says what is claimed, and thinking about it critically - is what almost everybody is doing.
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