3 ms·

Saving you a click - "it's efficient if you count waste heat as useful". As a rule of thumb, a good PV panel and a good thermal engine will give you similar ef

Saving you a click - "it's efficient if you count waste heat as useful". As a rule of thumb, a good PV panel and a good thermal engine will give you similar efficiencies - a little under 20%, more if you want to spend lots, but really very tricky to exceed mid-30s. A thermoelectric generator, quoted as "1/3rd as efficient as PV" - sounds about right, so maybe 6%. PV panels consume land. A wood-fired generator as suggested would need at least 10x the land to grow the trees for the same energy input, even forgetting the difference in efficiency. Probably closer to 100x. Oh, and PV works in literal deserts, where land is cheap, because it's useless to grow food or as a reserve, so you're sacrificing nothing! The closest practical variant of this is district heating with a regular fossil- or nuclear- turbine generator. IIRC, a few towns in Russia have genuinely too cheap to meter heat because of this.

m463 6y ago
I think the article is worth the click, even if just for the soviet history.
vkou 6y ago
> IIRC, a few towns in Russia have genuinely too cheap to meter heat because of this. There's an engineering reason for it, as well, that has nothing to do with economics. A lot of the apartment blocks built in Russia during the later communist years were built from prefabs - essentially, entire 'rooms' would arrive on trucks from a factory, and would get snapped together like lego bricks. The plumbing was pre-installed in these rooms - specifically, it would be pre-wired into the solid-concrete walls, at the point of manufacture - so that construction workers did not have to actually do any plumbing at the time of assembly. This is a great system, because you can put a building together very quickly. It does have a few drawbacks, though. Russian winters are cold. Really, really, really cold. So cold, in fact, that during winter, hot water plumbed through the buildings is the only thing that keeps their occupants from freezing to death. Most of these buildings don't have any other source of heating. Of course, if hot water ever stops getting plumbed through your building (Because of, say, a ruptured pipe, a problem at the central heating plant, etc), then, in a matter of days, every single pipe in your apartment block will freeze solid, and explode. This would be bad enough in a 'normal' building, but it is made worse, because the pipes aren't even accessible for maintenance - they are buried deep within the walls of the concrete prefabs.

m463 6y ago

I think the article is worth the click, even if just for the soviet history.

vkou 6y ago

> IIRC, a few towns in Russia have genuinely too cheap to meter heat because of this. There's an engineering reason for it, as well, that has nothing to do with economics. A lot of the apartment blocks built in Russia during the later communist years were built from prefabs - essentially, entire 'rooms' would arrive on trucks from a factory, and would get snapped together like lego bricks. The plumbing was pre-installed in these rooms - specifically, it would be pre-wired into the solid-concrete walls, at the point of manufacture - so that construction workers did not have to actually do any plumbing at the time of assembly. This is a great system, because you can put a building together very quickly. It does have a few drawbacks, though. Russian winters are cold. Really, really, really cold. So cold, in fact, that during winter, hot water plumbed through the buildings is the only thing that keeps their occupants from freezing to death. Most of these buildings don't have any other source of heating. Of course, if hot water ever stops getting plumbed through your building (Because of, say, a ruptured pipe, a problem at the central heating plant, etc), then, in a matter of days, every single pipe in your apartment block will freeze solid, and explode. This would be bad enough in a 'normal' building, but it is made worse, because the pipes aren't even accessible for maintenance - they are buried deep within the walls of the concrete prefabs.