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Redundancy is a great thing. If the power lines ice over, or there's a grid failure for another reason, heat goes, water pipes freeze over, and people will lit

Redundancy is a great thing. If the power lines ice over, or there's a grid failure for another reason, heat goes, water pipes freeze over, and people will literally freeze to death in winter. There was power failure in the entire province in Quebec in 1989 due to a solor storm. This is not hypothetical happening, but something to be expected. Considering the age and general decline of infrastructure in large US cities.

dml2135 5y ago
Agree with this, but the green solution for this is home batteries, not fossil fuels. We do need to harden and invest in the electric grid though, and I worry that climate activists may not be making it a high enough priority. You’ll lose support for electrification real fast if people lose their heat in the depths of winter.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  I've experienced power going out for a week. I don't know if we have battery technology to heat a house for a week. The tesla battery is 13.5 kWh and costs more than $10k. Just rough calculation, a typical baseboard heater is 1k so thats just enough capacity to run one heater for 13 hours. The space requirements and enough battery capacity for an entire 50 story apartment building that would last a week, would probably be prohibitively expensive. The alternative of having to fix frozen pipes in a large apartment building, even if nothing is flooded is probably months of plumbing work. If you could even find the plumbers to do the work if theres a large scale power outage in a city. My uncle is a plumber, plumbing a new condo building takes months and even years. And thats without complications of having to tear out walls to find where the pipes burst. I had frozen pipes in a house and it was a nightmare to deal with. They burst in multiple places and flood when temperature heats up. I'm for green technology, but not when it will kill people. Its important to make sound decisions, not based on ideology. Especially if you want to achieve your goals. You don't want the public to quickly turn against you.
  - dml2135 5y ago
    Oh I agree with you, I’m talking long term really, once battery technology is much better than it is now. But for now redundancy can be achieved with generators. That will allow us to keep some fossil fuels as reserves, without needing to build new fossil fuel infrastructure that will exist for decades to come.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    > a typical baseboard heater is 1k If you're talking big, expensive batteries, you may as well include heat pump heating/cooling systems, which are much, much, much more efficient than traditional electric heaters, and can be rigged up with shared infrastructure to reduce costs. For example, my building has one large hot/cold water loop that individual units hook into with small heat pump systems.
analyte123 5y ago
There was massive, massive power failure this year in Texas [0], dozens of people died from cold exposure. Few households in Texas have gas heating, so you could say it didn't make difference, although the electric heating itself was part of the problem because everybody's heat pumps hit the threshold of inefficiency at the same time, overloading the grid. Obviously, if you had gas to your house, you could run a generator and keep your pipes from exploding. If you had a gasoline car, you could put grandma in there to warm her up and stop her from dying. Or maybe you had a portable propane heater, or simply a wood stove or fireplace. The fully electrified house has none of these unless you spent $40,000 on a massive solar / battery setup. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
- stefan_ 5y ago
  It's funny you say that because the only reason the electricity supply collapsed is because the natural gas supply collapsed. So no, you would have been just as cold.

dml2135 5y ago

Agree with this, but the green solution for this is home batteries, not fossil fuels. We do need to harden and invest in the electric grid though, and I worry that climate activists may not be making it a high enough priority. You’ll lose support for electrification real fast if people lose their heat in the depths of winter.

dukeofdoom 5y ago
I've experienced power going out for a week. I don't know if we have battery technology to heat a house for a week. The tesla battery is 13.5 kWh and costs more than $10k. Just rough calculation, a typical baseboard heater is 1k so thats just enough capacity to run one heater for 13 hours. The space requirements and enough battery capacity for an entire 50 story apartment building that would last a week, would probably be prohibitively expensive. The alternative of having to fix frozen pipes in a large apartment building, even if nothing is flooded is probably months of plumbing work. If you could even find the plumbers to do the work if theres a large scale power outage in a city. My uncle is a plumber, plumbing a new condo building takes months and even years. And thats without complications of having to tear out walls to find where the pipes burst. I had frozen pipes in a house and it was a nightmare to deal with. They burst in multiple places and flood when temperature heats up. I'm for green technology, but not when it will kill people. Its important to make sound decisions, not based on ideology. Especially if you want to achieve your goals. You don't want the public to quickly turn against you.
- dml2135 5y ago
  Oh I agree with you, I’m talking long term really, once battery technology is much better than it is now. But for now redundancy can be achieved with generators. That will allow us to keep some fossil fuels as reserves, without needing to build new fossil fuel infrastructure that will exist for decades to come.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  > a typical baseboard heater is 1k If you're talking big, expensive batteries, you may as well include heat pump heating/cooling systems, which are much, much, much more efficient than traditional electric heaters, and can be rigged up with shared infrastructure to reduce costs. For example, my building has one large hot/cold water loop that individual units hook into with small heat pump systems.

analyte123 5y ago

There was massive, massive power failure this year in Texas [0], dozens of people died from cold exposure. Few households in Texas have gas heating, so you could say it didn't make difference, although the electric heating itself was part of the problem because everybody's heat pumps hit the threshold of inefficiency at the same time, overloading the grid. Obviously, if you had gas to your house, you could run a generator and keep your pipes from exploding. If you had a gasoline car, you could put grandma in there to warm her up and stop her from dying. Or maybe you had a portable propane heater, or simply a wood stove or fireplace. The fully electrified house has none of these unless you spent $40,000 on a massive solar / battery setup. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

stefan_ 5y ago
It's funny you say that because the only reason the electricity supply collapsed is because the natural gas supply collapsed. So no, you would have been just as cold.