Not sure it’s entirely as easy as the article (which reads a lot like PR) makes it sound. See the sections under sustainability and environmental effects in the article about Geothermal Energy on Wikipedia.
Has some technical details on the project in Bavaria. It seems to produce relatively low grade heat used mostly for district heating, with a relatively small ORC power generator.
Large parts of the US are quite cold in the winter; the large budget is to allow running a fairly large heat pump at the same time as charging a car and running a bunch of high-energy appliances.
Good read. I’m in the same situation: bought a house with 100A service and want to replace my hot water heater and furnace with heat pump models of both. Everything else is already electric, so I’ve been debating the need to upgrade the panel before replacing my last two gas appliances. (I think I was told that my drop can support 200A)
Yeah, whether you can do it or not is going to come down to just how many amps do you need on the heat pump. Larger houses with worse insulation in colder climates will need the 200A circuit.
I’m already electrically budgeted for central A/C, so I figure replacing the existing unit with a heat pump would be more or less “break-even”. The heat pump may even end up being slightly more efficient than the 8 y/o AC unit I have now :)
So I guess the only new load would be the heat pump water heater.
I do plan to get an EV and install a charger in the next 5 years or so, so I’ll likely end up having to upgrade my panel for 200A anyway.
What I’d look at then is demand management - basically software to delay charging the car while you run the oven or run the hot water heater on its fast-heat cycle. That can keep you inside 100A
Large appliances (water heaters, furnaces, ovens, heat pumps/air conditioners, clothes dryers) typically use 240v and have dedicated circuits but yeah, everything else is 120v.
so a house with 120v@200A will have a capacity of 24kw. I am really curious about how is that divided between heating devices. I can tell already 7-11 kw will be dedicated for EV charging if existed
It’s closer to 48kw. North American (residential) power is weird. lol.
We use what’s called split phase where basically you have three wires coming into your electric panel: two “hot” ones each carrying 120v and one ground.
The breaker box is staggered so that every other slot is powered by one or the other 120v inputs. To get 240v for large appliances, we use big, double-breakers which connect both of the 120v inputs together.
The rest of the 120v circuits are staggered across the two 120v inputs. e.g. If one of the two “hot” cables was disconnected, roughly half the outlets in your house would still work.
I’m actually amazed their first project is now, in 2023. Offshore wind has been a thing for decades. Was this illegal to do in the US before now or something? Or was it not worth doing due to the availability of free land?
For a long time offshore wind was just more expensive then onshore and the US had the space. It was only in the last decade that large scale offhsore projects started in Europe and China. That brought down costs and offshore wind turbines have become much bigger and more efficent, which makes them competitive.
The US also has the Jones Act, which only allows ships build in the US, own by Americans and staffed by Americans to transport freight between US ports. That makes building offshore wind farms very difficult as the US does not build those ships and lacks qualified personal.
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.
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.
At 5 k temp difference it’s looking at a max efficiency of 2%, probably more like .6% efficiency. For a perfect black body it’d emit about 314.966 W/m^2 at 273 K so at maximum this technology could generate about 6.3 W/m^2. Not too shabby. Cool.
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.
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