The IEA and climate negotiators want to set a target for shifting the economy to run on electricity.
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All hail electrification. But let’s talk about the hard part.
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"None of this will be easy."
But for once the needs of the planet and the bean counters align... which pretty much makes the transition inevitable.
But for once the needs of the planet and the bean counters align... which pretty much makes the transition inevitable.
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Electric utilities: “Ho, ho! Sounds like our rates are too low!”
On that note, I cannot wait until I can make solar panels work and roll my own, at least as much as possible. Kicking fossil fuels out of my house now at least gives me an option though it was a long road to get to this point. But that’s just me, as the article suggests we need comprehensive cooperation to make such freedoms accessible to all. Keep pushing the rope and writing to politicians folks! We can do it!
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On the case of it not being easy except for rich countries, i don’t know if I agree, we see india skipping coal and hevay fossil options.
Pakistan and lazakhstan and other countries have been setting up local solaf home installations electrifying villages for the first time and much more cheaply then with a traditional grid.
Its hard to convert grids, and costly
But for off grid separate solutions solar is amazing, the west just isn’t used to that.
Pakistan and lazakhstan and other countries have been setting up local solaf home installations electrifying villages for the first time and much more cheaply then with a traditional grid.
Its hard to convert grids, and costly
But for off grid separate solutions solar is amazing, the west just isn’t used to that.
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“None of this will be easy”
Actually, all of this will be easy and cheap compared to dealing with the destruction wrought by rapid Climate Change. Every 0.1 degree matters.
Actually, all of this will be easy and cheap compared to dealing with the destruction wrought by rapid Climate Change. Every 0.1 degree matters.
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An odd statement to make, as many developing countries are going full speed ahead with localized renewable energy grids, eschewing the need to build a more expensive regional or national grid system. We saw the same thing with communications. They didn’t string up their countries with phone lines for audio calls and internet. They went straight to wireless. Africa, Latin America, India and others account for a significant yearly increase of the renewable energy total. An Oil Price article referenced on MSN:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/othe...60-as-developing-nations-power-up/ar-AA2cMqNw
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I like that Nigeria is mentioned (one of their local/but also inhabited a neighboring country ethic groups was a big part of my linguistics studies), perhaps due to their high oil production, but they have the added issues of still having to deal with Boko Haram attacks. So a bit more will no doubt be needed in terms of what's put in the cost, and obviously actual aide (and the other countries that are fighting against Boko Haram). To be fair other countries also have issues (even ones socio-eco-external) and worse likely have low to limited resources to focus on grid advancement and use (though I'm sure any bit is a big help to them).
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I'm not sure how much faith should be put in the IEA regarding solar adoption projections since they've historically gotten their solar predictions laughably wrong. Even now their projections are to basically flatten out the currently exponential growth in solar.
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I'm on a natural gas furnace, not a boiler, but last I checked (admittedly two or three years ago) my home heating cost would double if I switched to a heat pump. That was assuming 90% efficient furnace, and 300% efficient heat pump.The article said:
I have the same utility (DTE, southeast Michigan) for both electricity and natural gas. Make of that what you will.
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We spent $6 trillion blowing up, rebuilding, and blowing up again Afghanistan, all for the same form of government that was there when the decision was made to invade to return after two decades. We spend (near enough) $1 trillion a year on the ability to do that again. We spend > $ 1 trillion a year on overhead with a for-profit health insurance system when Medicare for All could reduce that overhead enough to free up a trillion a year.
The problem is not the upfront cost. It is how our elected officials prioritize spending.
Who wants free healthcare and free energy to every household (up to some reasonable cutoff value), free heat pumps, free insulation upgrades, and free local grid upgrades? All for the low low cost of.. exactly what we're paying now. And after a ~10 year transition period while the existing for-profit utility system gets realigned into a system which only profits from commercial and industrial customers and the new, publicly owned and operated system takes over, our collective costs go down, because none of us have to pay for electricity anymore.
Or, you know, we could keep slobbing the knob of capitalism and decry social, democratic governance that uplifts everyone and installs a floor through which none of us might ever fall, all while actually enabling small business to have a better chance of survival and leveling the playing field for big business by requiring the largest users to fund the system for themselves and everyone else.
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Yeah, it's a global average, so YMMV. Personally, my home heating bill would be about the same with gas or with resistance heating; sure gas is cheaper per kWh but I'd have to pay the connection fee too. Someday I'll get a heat pump installed, I just need to do some ground work first to get there.
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Till the prices came down, the world basic did pilot projects. When they did, acceleration began. Now it's roaring, and the old forces are at best slowing it a bit.
All the target setting and earnest conferences etc are really beside the point. The economics are driving the whole thing. TBH, the best thing anyone can do is improve the economics (which the companies already have some incentive to do, but government could do more with more basic research!), but that's it. There is no reason from evidence to conclude all the mandates and targets and shit really do much of anything other than signal virtue.
All the target setting and earnest conferences etc are really beside the point. The economics are driving the whole thing. TBH, the best thing anyone can do is improve the economics (which the companies already have some incentive to do, but government could do more with more basic research!), but that's it. There is no reason from evidence to conclude all the mandates and targets and shit really do much of anything other than signal virtue.
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Yep. Pakistan has installed something like 51GW of solar, most of that over that last few years, most of that DIY installations on homes and small businesses.
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I'm confused how David Victor doesn't see electrification of heavy trucking. I see it already. Electric box trucks were very rare five years ago, are common now. Heavy trucks are rare today. Wait five years. China is at 30% electric this year (for new sales). Shipping and aviation, sure, but reducing the vast bulk of transportation emissions is nothing to sneeze at. BTW, one funny thing I've started to see online is a claim that cars are only 2% of global oil demand so it doesn't matter if we electrify them. Is that the 'bargaining' stage of grief for the oil majors?
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How did you determine your costs would double? I'm not saying you're wrong, just surprised at such a large increase.
Combustion heating is massively oversized compared to a heat pump, because those big boilers run in spurts rather than continuously like a heat pump does. Most people need much smaller capacity heat pumps, but a substantial portion of the contractors out there aren't doing proper Manual J calculations, relying instead of archaic rule-of-thumb sizing. Even the Manual J calculations are oversizing systems on newer, better sealed and insulated homes.
Heat pumps are generally still more expensive to operate than natural gas, but 2x is unusual. The ace card is if you can get solar at your home, though--that's when you start closing in on zero-running-cost climate control.
For anyone with an oil burner, the swap to a heat pump is a no brainer. Unless you're a private-equity captured firm that would rather keep extract profit... like the one which sold my mother a brand new air conditioner last year knowing that the oil burning furnace would be due for replacement soon and that the thousands of dollars a year in oil and maintenance would keep their lights on.
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If the goal is to convert everything, that's a recipe for failure. Or at least it's a goal that will take a century or two to reach. It's easily dismissed as far-fetched and basically impossible.
Meanwhile, I don't know anyone who wouldn't be thrilled to reap the advantages of conversion away from fossil fuels and the cost and cleanliness benefits it brings from a much more achievable and realistic reduction of 5%, 10%, 20%, etc.
Focusing on complete conversion is counterproductive. For many, it just turns into an excuse to do nothing.
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How is the global average only valid in the US?
If anything, it's probably wrong for the US since the US has unusually low fossil fuel prices.
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That’s 2 of the 3 pillars involved in the transition. The final one being elected officials.
Until we have sanity in the US government (all of it, not just the presidency) the incentives won’t be there as much as we probably need. We definitely can’t discount the power of Bean Counters in the private sector, as that will provide a lot of the forward movement needed for the rest of the country to follow. I mean, look at how much solar capacity has been installed in Texas, one of the most politically hostile places in the country to solar power.
It can be done, but it will take time and every little bit we can delay additional warming is a win for the planet!
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You misunderstand what the targets do: they're about making sure the system can work with that level of electrification. We could wait for market signals to tell us that adding a bunch of demand will require additional supply -- which takes years to get online, so in the meantime we suffer. Or we could plan for it ahead of time and have the chargers ready for when the EVs show up, the transmission lines built, generators, etc.
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Whenever I've had gas or oil heating, it didn't have any backup for the blowers and pumps and thermostats. When the power went out, heat went out. For the oil heat, I was in the literal Arctic region on a microgrid that would fall over roughly every month (one common reason: ravens shorting out the grid). I considered getting battery backup, didn't prioritize it, because it didn't really matter much.
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For the U.S., this is very much about the entrenchment of the fossil fuel industries and how they have shaped the economy in their image. The dependence of personal vehicles, the political fight over efficiency standards, the loss of train infrastructure to move freight, resistance to public transportation investment and city planning, and the immense war treasury for political battles and blatantly bogus media campaigns to sabotage change for the better.
This will all come to an end "some day", but in the intervening meantime, it will let other less fossil fuel "blessed" nations surpass the U.S. and reap the rewards of a cleaner, very much less rent-your-energy, renewable, green economies.
This will all come to an end "some day", but in the intervening meantime, it will let other less fossil fuel "blessed" nations surpass the U.S. and reap the rewards of a cleaner, very much less rent-your-energy, renewable, green economies.
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As a counterpoint, how many houses are destroyed in a catastrophic electrical explosion each year?
(Electrical fires are not the same, because they give time to escape the building)
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Everything is pretty much what "net zero carbon emissions" means. We're in the easy early-mid-transition now, and the best brains should really be working on scaling up fixes to the technically crunchy problems.
We mooks can just replace our "burn stuff" equipment with electric gear now when it gets retired.
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poke 532810
Ars Scholae Palatinae
This does not make much sense. It sounds like he’s trying to claim that wind and solar have a disadvantage because they have high upfront costs, but the alternative given has higher upfront costs and higher operating costs and a higher environmental impact. This whole article reads like someone grasping at straws in a vain attempt to make solar and wind seem worse than they actually are.
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I think it depends heavily on how expensive your electricity is.
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The problem (in America) is that it seems like electricity prices are going to go up significantly. We are in the process of building trillions of dollars worth of data centers at the same time that more people are driving electric vehicles. I think it's possible that the savings people see driving electric vehicles may not last very long...
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The hard part is going to be wresting power (hah) from the intrenched (and extremely well heeled!) fossil fuel interests.
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Distribution fee is already half of my bill. In theory I can select company that sells the electricity, but it won't affect that natural monopoly.
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Also, solar/wind has become more attractive/predictable as even the US can't bomb the Sun…
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"vain attempt to make solar and wind seem worse than they actually are" is basically the free bingo square in any game of Carbon Policy Bingo.
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Tomorrows New York Times headline, probably, “Trumps innovative plan to bomb the sun to prevent further expansion of its nuclear stockpile is as daring as it is risky”
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Boiler? Maybe if you have radiators. He probably has forced air heat like most houses built after air conditioning became a thing. The furnace is built into the air handler.
Gas heat is still cheaper and the air that comes out of the registers is warmer than with a heat pump. Also, the electrical upgrades required for a heat pump are non-trivial for an older house.
Oil heat is stupidly expensive, and an old oil furnace is terrible for air quality inside the house, never mind outside. If you want the best low-hanging fruit for electrification, concentrate on the oil burners first. It is, as you say, a no brainer.
But regardless, the best thing you can do, and it doesn't even require infrastructure changes, is to insulate the homes. This reduces energy bills regardless of the fuel. Anything old enough to have oil heat is old enough not to have good insulation.
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I second that on the insulation. I recently had the siding on my house replaced, and we went with cement fiber slats; this necessitated cladding the whole exterior in plywood prior to installation, and the combination of the extra plywood and the more efficient siding type made a significant difference in cooling requirements over the summer. We also had the majority of our windows / sliding glass doors replaced, which made another huge dent. Combined it looks like our cooling needs will probably be reduced by about half next summer, which is fantastic, as I live in an area where it routinely gets above 115f / 46c.
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I used my DTE bill to get the electric and gas rates. For electric, I used the lower, off-peak night rates, on the assumption more heating would be needed overnight when it's colder. I converted each to BTU, for kWhr electric and CCF gas, using the efficiencies I posted. All the heat pump details you mention would factor into the efficiency, but at 300% I suspect I'm already overestimating it on average.
I do have solar, but it does less well during winter than I expected. Behavior I've seen repeatedly is overcast for a while, then we get a snow storm followed by sunny weather and cold temperatures. The snow covers my panels, and it doesn't melt for several days because it's too cold. Just looking at historical solar radiation levels misses that effect. They're on my roof, so I can't brush them off.
I'll add, my roof faces close to due south, and is fairly steep (35 degrees I think). It's about as well-placed as it could be for passive snow clearing.
Looking at my current bill, the rates have gone up about 13% for gas and 14% for electric since I did the previous calculation (winter 2023/24). But those are summer rates. I think electric is lower in winter (though my wife thinks they're the same). Not sure about gas rates, but I don't think so.
Edit: To clarify, I have a forced air furnace, not a boiler.
Edit 2: I went to DTE's website. The peak hours (3 pm - 7 pm) are cheaper in winter, but the off-peak rates I am using do not change.
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Remember that time Obama funded Solyndra, Mitt Romney called it a grift, and the American public fixated on a tan suit and binders full of women? China funded dozens of Solyndras while we argued about nonsense.
We could choose solar today even if we gave them 10% of the subsidies we give oil. Native solar panels would be cheap in five years and ubiquitous in ten.
Edit: I will never forget because Romney also name-checked the fuel cell startup I worked for called Ener1.
We could choose solar today even if we gave them 10% of the subsidies we give oil. Native solar panels would be cheap in five years and ubiquitous in ten.
Edit: I will never forget because Romney also name-checked the fuel cell startup I worked for called Ener1.
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Yeah, the same "grift" that gave us Tesla Motors and actually made money for the US govt. I remember that.
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