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The article claims that today is that day, at least for new installations: > That’s record-cheap electricity—roughly half the price of competing coal power.
by piotrkaminski 10y ago
The article claims that today is that day, at least for new installations:
> That’s record-cheap electricity—roughly half the price of competing coal power.
- virmundi 10y agoStorage not included. To run an AC in Florida at night you'd burn through a Tesla wall unit in a few hours. You want that AC at night. So you'll need probably 3-5. At $8k per unit, $24k-$40k total. I like solar. I like wind. I like the grid because the best way to handle the power storage from over production during the day is in a centralized fashion.
- kuschku 10y agoOr you just insulate your house and use heat exchangers with controlled airflow to avoid the need for any AC at all. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
- bzbarsky 10y agoThat Wikipedia article explicitly says that making this concept work in a tropical climate (we're talking Florida, right?) is so far an unsolved problem, and that the one example in Louisiana does in fact have an AC. Not needing AC by having decent insulation in Germany or Scandinavia (which is where most passive houses are located) is a _much_ easier problem than not needing AC in Florida. Of course not needing _heating_ is a big problem there, and is what the passive house designs are mostly aiming to deal with.
- greglindahl 10y agoFor air conditioning, one solution is to make ice when electricity is cheap, and then use that for cooling. Here's an example unit: https://www.ice-energy.com/ https://www.ice-energy.com/ This concept dates back to the 1950s. The usual application then was to cool during the day using electricity delivered at night; now it's flipped, and you can make ice during the solar peak for cooling the rest of the day.