10 ms·

From the simulations website: "A megawatt-hour of electricity is about the amount a household uses in a month." That is the elephant in the room. Our househol

From the simulations website: "A megawatt-hour of electricity is about the amount a household uses in a month." That is the elephant in the room. Our household of three adults can comfortably live on about one sixth of that amount. Who can tell me with a straight face that living comfortably on three times our electricity consumption is impossible, even in a harsher, less moderate climate? That alone would reduce US household consumption by 50%! I applaud Google for coming up with this tool. I also hope it will open its eyes to the feasibility of changing people's consumption patterns.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
A megawatt-hour is 1.38kW continuous consumption. It's not hard to imagine how a household could use that. Two long how showers per day per person, air conditioning / heating, a pool heater, a fridge, another fridge in the garage, a deep freezer in the back room. Some people have multiple always-on PCs and screens. And now we're expecting everyone to recharge their car at home too.
- icebraining 9y ago
  The point is not that it's hard to imagine; it's that it can be considered normal. Why would people take two long showers every day?! Or leave screens turned on all night at home?
  - wiz21c 9y ago
    spot on. But now, how do you make people accept the new normal in the (idealistic) time frame required by COP 21 goals ?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    I gave up asking my partner to close the bathroom and bedroom doors when she is at home during the day with the heat pump set to 25 degrees C. It causes the heat pump to run flat out because it can't deal with that much hear loss. And she's one of these save the whales type. And she wasn't working (receiving welfare) and I was paying the utility bills. So I asked her to move out. Which doesn't solve the problem, just relocates it. Point being, people don't know. And that's ok, there's plenty of stuff I don't know. We just need to engineer solutions to these problems. And maybe some of that is social engineering. But in the mean time: I give up.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    I gave up asking my partner to close the bathroom and bedroom doors when she is at home during the day with the heat pump set to 25 degrees C. It causes the heat pump to run flat out because it can't deal with that much hear loss. And she's one of these save the whales type. And she wasn't working (receiving welfare) and I was paying the utility bills. So I asked her to move out. Which doesn't solve the problem, just relocates it. Point being, people don't know. And that's ok, there's plenty of stuff I don't know. We just need to engineer solutions to these problems. And maybe some of that is social engineering. But in the mean time: I give up.
- markvdb 9y ago
  It's not difficult to imagine how a US household could use a MWh of electricity per month indeed. We know these are the facts. Point is, it is possible to change those consumption patterns. Quoting from your example: * heating: 67°F should be fine in winter. replace by natural gas where possible. invest in appropriate insulation and ventilation. Look at how much of northern Europe does it. * air conditioning: use less and more recent airco. 76-77°F should be fine in summer. * pool heater? just switch it off, or at the very least switch to a more efficient source of heating * cut the second fridge in the garage, or at the very least, replace it with something efficient * use an efficient freezer * Check what machines have to be always on. Use something efficient for the things that really have to be always on. I'm quite sure something along these lines would have cut more than 2/3 of the electricity consumption of this average American household. It is physically possible to make these changes. I concede that it would not be easy to convince the people to actually make changes in this direction, but it can be done!
  - ghthor 9y ago
    I propose a new type of economic system powered by crypto computing. A system where those that pay out the least in expenses get paid the most basic income. You could then normalize the distribution to avoid an inequality problem and overly harsh punishments. You turn each BI account into a bank. So I can pay with my BI as a debt using an escrow account. The payee could then redeem the value for cold hard cash, or if they hold it and use it as money they get interest based on the value I continue to add to the account. An expense is a payment using BI that is redeemed for value instead of held as currency. This would encourage good savings patterns and also encourage lowering the potential debts that might become redeemed. This empowers the service providers to punish overusage of resources by redeeming values instead of holding them. You could also build into the contract an enforcement to just punish those that use the most resources by auto redeeming there values. In the end these punishments don't kill people, but they should incentivise more humans to lower the amount of resources they use with that slight gamification.
  - VeejayRampay 9y ago
    Or don't use AC altogether. Continuous AC always all-the-time is a very American thing.
- neves 9y ago
  Pool heater? 3 fridges? The world wouldn't support this.
agumonkey 9y ago
People on youtube use fresnel lens as solar concentrator, you can get a lot of heat from this apparently (enough to melt just about everything).
Gravityloss 9y ago
There's one relatively simple method: if electricity cost more, it would be easy to justify investments in energy saving. On the other hand, if the cost of things currently roughly depicts the environmental impact the things have, then it might not make sense to invest in energy saving with current technologies as that could have a very long payback time in environmental impact too.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  I believe this is already the case in California. The most expensive energy by kWh but the lowest energy bills because of a statewide commitment to energy efficiency. A carbon fee/tax/floor would be required to make things reflect their true cost in terms of climate change, this can be simulated in the app. Note that this isn't spending more money (at least up to the estimated social cost of carbon), since due to the externalities that cost is already being borne by sociery
  - bkjelden 9y ago
    Many Californians live in parts of the state where there is not much need for heating and cooling much of the year, which also helps keep consumption down.
mseebach 9y ago
The elephant in the next room however is the couple of billion people who are pining for a sliver of the middle class (read: high energy) lifestyle we've taken for granted for close to a century. It would be grossly immoral to deny this lifestyle to them (never mind geopolitically impossible). Sure, they get to skip a few steps on the ladder, and start out with LED lights and cheap insulation materials etc, but an energy efficient dish washer is more expensive than a less efficient one, and a well-insulated house is more expensive than one less so. Yes, we should keep demanding better and more efficient solutions, to make sure they get developed, but the only responsible thing to do is to prepare for a future where global energy consumption is going up by quite a bit.
- donquichotte 9y ago
  And the elephant in the third room is electromobility. 1MWh charges a Tesla Model S with a 100kWh battery 10 times, giving you 5400km of range. If two people in a household are commuting 135km/day each for 20 days/month in a Tesla Model S, electrical energy consumption of the household doubles.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    That elephant is not in the room yet. It's waiting at the Supercharger station a couple hours out on the highway, and won't be here for a quite some time. While that's changing with the Model 3 and the responses of other auto manufacturers, few people own or can afford a Tesla Model S. The elephant that's currently in the room is gasoline-based mobility. 5400 km in a gasoline-powered vehicle at 20 mpg or 14 liters per 100 km is 756 liters or 167.8 gallons of gasoline, and at 33.7 kWh per gallon, that's 5.655 MWh. The commutes multiply the energy consumption by more than a factor of 5. You shouldn't feel good about turning off an LED bulb and using a lamp instead if you also enjoy driving to work in your pickup truck.
  - Reason077 9y ago
    "If two people in a household are commuting 135km/day each for 20 days/month in a Tesla Model S, electrical energy consumption of the household doubles." This is a big problem if everybody wants to charge at peak times. But most people charge overnight. Smart chargers and smart grids will ensure that loads get balanced and there isn't a huge spike in demand at 7PM when everyone plugs in as they get home from work. In a future where grids are supplied largely by renewables and nuclear, EVs will benefit the grid by soaking up excess supply at off-peak times. When they're plugged in, they're effectively storage batteries on wheels.
aembleton 9y ago
Does that include heating and hot water? I consume ~8MWh/year in the UK. 1.5MWh of that is electricity, but the other 6.5MWh is gas mostly used in the winter months to keep warm. I set the temperature in my house to 17C (63F). I did go through a previous winter at 15C, but it just became too uncomfortable.
norea-armozel 9y ago
Another aspect of this is the fact many of those devices release a significant amount of radio frequency interference. Although mostly amateur radio operators and shortwave radio listeners are mostly affected that RFI does affect other electronics such as lights and TVs. Frankly, I wish the US govt would enforce its laws on energy efficiency and RFI more because they're not really that mutually exclusive barring switching power supplies (but even that to my knowledge is becoming less true as the regulator components are becoming even better at not producing as much RFI across the HF spectrum now).
bkjelden 9y ago
What does your household do differently that allows your consumption to stay so low?
- dboreham 9y ago
  I'll guess : hang up clothes rather than put them in the dryer?
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    Not even close. An electric clothes dryer on an eco-friendly cycle typically uses about 1 kW. Older models on higher-heat cycles use up to a staggering...4 kW. And that's just for the few hours a month that it runs, it will be off for the other 720 hours. The real difference is that OP probably lives in a well-insulated house in a moderate climate. In the hot, humid parts of the southern US, it's common to use 50 kWh/day just to keep the house liveable.
    - dboreham 9y ago
      "Few hours a month" !! Ours runs for many hours every day.
    - markvdb 9y ago
      For clothes, we both hang up and use an efficient condensating drier. We live in a (renovated) townhouse/terraced house in a moderate climate indeed, with good insulation and ventilation. Limited always-on electric components here: fridge/freezer, internet modem, phone base station and ventilation system. No big screens. Cooking is electric though.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago

A megawatt-hour is 1.38kW continuous consumption. It's not hard to imagine how a household could use that. Two long how showers per day per person, air conditioning / heating, a pool heater, a fridge, another fridge in the garage, a deep freezer in the back room. Some people have multiple always-on PCs and screens. And now we're expecting everyone to recharge their car at home too.

icebraining 9y ago
The point is not that it's hard to imagine; it's that it can be considered normal. Why would people take two long showers every day?! Or leave screens turned on all night at home?
- wiz21c 9y ago
  spot on. But now, how do you make people accept the new normal in the (idealistic) time frame required by COP 21 goals ?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  I gave up asking my partner to close the bathroom and bedroom doors when she is at home during the day with the heat pump set to 25 degrees C. It causes the heat pump to run flat out because it can't deal with that much hear loss. And she's one of these save the whales type. And she wasn't working (receiving welfare) and I was paying the utility bills. So I asked her to move out. Which doesn't solve the problem, just relocates it. Point being, people don't know. And that's ok, there's plenty of stuff I don't know. We just need to engineer solutions to these problems. And maybe some of that is social engineering. But in the mean time: I give up.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  I gave up asking my partner to close the bathroom and bedroom doors when she is at home during the day with the heat pump set to 25 degrees C. It causes the heat pump to run flat out because it can't deal with that much hear loss. And she's one of these save the whales type. And she wasn't working (receiving welfare) and I was paying the utility bills. So I asked her to move out. Which doesn't solve the problem, just relocates it. Point being, people don't know. And that's ok, there's plenty of stuff I don't know. We just need to engineer solutions to these problems. And maybe some of that is social engineering. But in the mean time: I give up.
markvdb 9y ago
It's not difficult to imagine how a US household could use a MWh of electricity per month indeed. We know these are the facts. Point is, it is possible to change those consumption patterns. Quoting from your example: * heating: 67°F should be fine in winter. replace by natural gas where possible. invest in appropriate insulation and ventilation. Look at how much of northern Europe does it. * air conditioning: use less and more recent airco. 76-77°F should be fine in summer. * pool heater? just switch it off, or at the very least switch to a more efficient source of heating * cut the second fridge in the garage, or at the very least, replace it with something efficient * use an efficient freezer * Check what machines have to be always on. Use something efficient for the things that really have to be always on. I'm quite sure something along these lines would have cut more than 2/3 of the electricity consumption of this average American household. It is physically possible to make these changes. I concede that it would not be easy to convince the people to actually make changes in this direction, but it can be done!
- ghthor 9y ago
  I propose a new type of economic system powered by crypto computing. A system where those that pay out the least in expenses get paid the most basic income. You could then normalize the distribution to avoid an inequality problem and overly harsh punishments. You turn each BI account into a bank. So I can pay with my BI as a debt using an escrow account. The payee could then redeem the value for cold hard cash, or if they hold it and use it as money they get interest based on the value I continue to add to the account. An expense is a payment using BI that is redeemed for value instead of held as currency. This would encourage good savings patterns and also encourage lowering the potential debts that might become redeemed. This empowers the service providers to punish overusage of resources by redeeming values instead of holding them. You could also build into the contract an enforcement to just punish those that use the most resources by auto redeeming there values. In the end these punishments don't kill people, but they should incentivise more humans to lower the amount of resources they use with that slight gamification.
- VeejayRampay 9y ago
  Or don't use AC altogether. Continuous AC always all-the-time is a very American thing.
neves 9y ago
Pool heater? 3 fridges? The world wouldn't support this.

agumonkey 9y ago

People on youtube use fresnel lens as solar concentrator, you can get a lot of heat from this apparently (enough to melt just about everything).

Gravityloss 9y ago

There's one relatively simple method: if electricity cost more, it would be easy to justify investments in energy saving. On the other hand, if the cost of things currently roughly depicts the environmental impact the things have, then it might not make sense to invest in energy saving with current technologies as that could have a very long payback time in environmental impact too.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I believe this is already the case in California. The most expensive energy by kWh but the lowest energy bills because of a statewide commitment to energy efficiency. A carbon fee/tax/floor would be required to make things reflect their true cost in terms of climate change, this can be simulated in the app. Note that this isn't spending more money (at least up to the estimated social cost of carbon), since due to the externalities that cost is already being borne by sociery
- bkjelden 9y ago
  Many Californians live in parts of the state where there is not much need for heating and cooling much of the year, which also helps keep consumption down.

mseebach 9y ago

The elephant in the next room however is the couple of billion people who are pining for a sliver of the middle class (read: high energy) lifestyle we've taken for granted for close to a century. It would be grossly immoral to deny this lifestyle to them (never mind geopolitically impossible). Sure, they get to skip a few steps on the ladder, and start out with LED lights and cheap insulation materials etc, but an energy efficient dish washer is more expensive than a less efficient one, and a well-insulated house is more expensive than one less so. Yes, we should keep demanding better and more efficient solutions, to make sure they get developed, but the only responsible thing to do is to prepare for a future where global energy consumption is going up by quite a bit.

donquichotte 9y ago
And the elephant in the third room is electromobility. 1MWh charges a Tesla Model S with a 100kWh battery 10 times, giving you 5400km of range. If two people in a household are commuting 135km/day each for 20 days/month in a Tesla Model S, electrical energy consumption of the household doubles.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  That elephant is not in the room yet. It's waiting at the Supercharger station a couple hours out on the highway, and won't be here for a quite some time. While that's changing with the Model 3 and the responses of other auto manufacturers, few people own or can afford a Tesla Model S. The elephant that's currently in the room is gasoline-based mobility. 5400 km in a gasoline-powered vehicle at 20 mpg or 14 liters per 100 km is 756 liters or 167.8 gallons of gasoline, and at 33.7 kWh per gallon, that's 5.655 MWh. The commutes multiply the energy consumption by more than a factor of 5. You shouldn't feel good about turning off an LED bulb and using a lamp instead if you also enjoy driving to work in your pickup truck.
- Reason077 9y ago
  "If two people in a household are commuting 135km/day each for 20 days/month in a Tesla Model S, electrical energy consumption of the household doubles." This is a big problem if everybody wants to charge at peak times. But most people charge overnight. Smart chargers and smart grids will ensure that loads get balanced and there isn't a huge spike in demand at 7PM when everyone plugs in as they get home from work. In a future where grids are supplied largely by renewables and nuclear, EVs will benefit the grid by soaking up excess supply at off-peak times. When they're plugged in, they're effectively storage batteries on wheels.

aembleton 9y ago

Does that include heating and hot water? I consume ~8MWh/year in the UK. 1.5MWh of that is electricity, but the other 6.5MWh is gas mostly used in the winter months to keep warm. I set the temperature in my house to 17C (63F). I did go through a previous winter at 15C, but it just became too uncomfortable.

norea-armozel 9y ago

Another aspect of this is the fact many of those devices release a significant amount of radio frequency interference. Although mostly amateur radio operators and shortwave radio listeners are mostly affected that RFI does affect other electronics such as lights and TVs. Frankly, I wish the US govt would enforce its laws on energy efficiency and RFI more because they're not really that mutually exclusive barring switching power supplies (but even that to my knowledge is becoming less true as the regulator components are becoming even better at not producing as much RFI across the HF spectrum now).

bkjelden 9y ago

What does your household do differently that allows your consumption to stay so low?

dboreham 9y ago
I'll guess : hang up clothes rather than put them in the dryer?
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Not even close. An electric clothes dryer on an eco-friendly cycle typically uses about 1 kW. Older models on higher-heat cycles use up to a staggering...4 kW. And that's just for the few hours a month that it runs, it will be off for the other 720 hours. The real difference is that OP probably lives in a well-insulated house in a moderate climate. In the hot, humid parts of the southern US, it's common to use 50 kWh/day just to keep the house liveable.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    "Few hours a month" !! Ours runs for many hours every day.
  - markvdb 9y ago
    For clothes, we both hang up and use an efficient condensating drier. We live in a (renovated) townhouse/terraced house in a moderate climate indeed, with good insulation and ventilation. Limited always-on electric components here: fridge/freezer, internet modem, phone base station and ventilation system. No big screens. Cooking is electric though.