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One part is generation, the other is consumption. I did the math. I live in a European Country that wants to get rid of Russian Gas, and right quick. If every

One part is generation, the other is consumption. I did the math. I live in a European Country that wants to get rid of Russian Gas, and right quick. If every household would use the same amount of energy that we use (and used over the past years, 3 people, we average 2.4KWh per day - or the equivalent of a continuously burning 100W light bulb), we would not need 90TWh p.a. (the country produces around 490TWh p.a) - which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily. This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike. We live comfortably on low energy, we use modern appliances like a dish washer and $400 washing machine which has a good footprint (worked for over 8 years, only one cosmetic repair necessary). We have laptops, tablets, smartphones, router, I used to run a webserver 24/7 for a while too. There is nothing that we miss and our footprint is below average. It's not difficult, in fact, it's liberating. I hope people start to wake up. PS. I could go on how good it feels to live on a low profile. Lucky us, we never owned a car and require one only a few times a year, and we use a car share service for that. We care for our electronics and use smartphones and laptops for at least five years or more. I own two pairs of shoes and try to go shopping for clothing only once a year. We do not fly, unless absolutely necessary. We try to buy and eat local food, try to be low on meat consumption. And the list goes on and on and on. We are doing this for years and I could not be happier about it.

Aperocky 5y ago
How often do you shower? because according to google your 2.4kWh per day is good for 14 minutes of hot shower. Just me showering alone would have equaled your entire energy budget..
- distances 5y ago
  2.4 kWh isn't much, but 14 minutes is also an absurd time to shower. Get wet, turn water off while soaping & shampooing, and rinse after. I haven't timed but feels like a normal everyday shower shouldn't have more than two minutes of running water.
rayiner 5y ago
Meanwhile villagers in Bangladesh have 1/10 the carbon output you do. Why not go all the way?
simonh 5y ago
The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. They may reduce their energy usage a bit, but a lot of them will just take this hit financially because they can afford it. Frankly I'm in that category, a doubling of energy prices might reduce my savings for the year but by itself would be unlikely to affect my energy usage much. Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it. In a situation like this price signalling isn't enough. We need to treat it as the emergency it is, and my family and I have got to do some thinking about our usage and how to reduce it, but that needs to happen across the European economies.
- loeg 5y ago
  > The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. ... Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it. That sounds like an argument for a progressive pricing structure with an even more extreme increase at the highest consumption tiers? E.g., would 10x increase in marginal cost affect your consumption? It would probably affect mine.
  - sprucevoid 5y ago
    Robert Frank's progressive consumption tax proposal, https://archive.ph/AXDkQ https://archive.ph/AXDkQ Another alternative is flat consumption taxes on climate damaging products combined with general wealth taxation and cash redistribution to lower the impact on low income/wealth households.
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well, ultimately undermining the goal of saving resources, in the longer term. In my own country we see significant proportions of multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed and often with multiple children, because someone else picks up the tab. However the working class who that try to get ahead under their own steam before maybe breeding are having children later, and less of them if at all.
simongray 5y ago
> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike. I don't think you're going to get people to collectively reduce energy usage unless there is a direct incentive to do so, e.g. the price spikes you yourself mention. The best way to solve this is probably through regulation. In the case of leaving the lights on, this has mostly been "solved" by banning incandescent light bulbs which use ~10x as much energy as the LED light bulbs that are in use everywhere now. I think this is as good as it's gonna get right now with light bulbs. Energy usage of household appliances can be solved in the same way (not sure if it is, I just know about the labeling) and—at least in my country—heating consumption is being solved by increasing insulation requirements pretty hard.
- RenThraysk 5y ago
  Even LED have more efficient designs, Philips makes the Dubai Lamp specifically for Dubai but you cannot buy them outside of Dubai. https://www.mea.lighting.philips.com/consumer/dubai-lamp https://www.mea.lighting.philips.com/consumer/dubai-lamp
  - kragen 5y ago
    The efficiency difference is very small; the main advantage of the Dubai Lamp is that it lasts longer.
  - aembleton 5y ago
    Big Clive shows how to convert LED lamps to be like the Dubai lamp here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTB0ThzhOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTB0ThzhOY
kkfx 5y ago
Consume less, on paper, is easy, in practice it depend. Personally I have a small f.v. (south France) with battery backup, in sunny days almost all the year I have enough energy to waste it. In other days I need energy as anyone else. No battery can compensate. Doubling my battery capacity (witch is NOT cheat at all) just means having more energy from one sunny day to another. Survive just one day without sun means 4* the battery and I have to count the fact that does not have a reasonably good lifespan for the price. Essentially: it's unfeasible. And I'm talking about a "A-class" (BBC) house, so with very little energy needs compared to old ones.
- Retric 5y ago
  To go fully off grid you would need more solar and batteries rather than just more batteries alone. Panels produce some energy on cloudy days, suppose your deficit drops from -80% to -40%, now the battery which would last you 1 day lasts you 2 days, double your batteries as well and 2 days becomes 4 days. More critically many days that are moderately overcast go from a net loss to a net gain. It’s just an optimization problem based on your local climate, the cost of equipment, and your willingness to reduce remain after multiple cloudy days.
  - kkfx 5y ago
    So did you think it's practical buy a soccer stadium well-exposed south space and spend the money of a supercar just to be able to munge few more W in cloudy days? Of course also counting snowy days when you still get 0 output + you eventually need to clean-up your panels? Beside the willingness and the price, who many in the world can do something similar? Especially in EU where most people live in dense city, so apartments?
    - Retric 5y ago
      Grid solar is more efficient in general and much safer to install than rooftop solar, some people simply dislike connecting to the electric grid for various reasons. Anyway, you don’t need to face south if you just want more energy on cloudy days. As to more panels, it’s a question of how much you want to be off grid and how much energy you need. Normal solar installs cover a small fraction of the roof.
modo_mario 5y ago
How much energy went into the industry that made those appliances, your food, etc though? I think a lot of people underestimate that.
- rizkeyz 5y ago
  Yes sure. For example, I cannot even give you exact numbers of the footprint of the food we eat or the electronics we use. That would probably a good number to put on a lot of things, in terms of allowing people to make decisions not only on price and quality but hidden costs. The problem is that externalities are what the name says: things you are not required to factor into your price (something or someone else takes a hit).
newsclues 5y ago
I also live a low consumption life and think others need to adjust as well but residential energy consumption doesn’t include industry or commercial usage which also needs work.
- rizkeyz 5y ago
  Here residential energy accounts for 26% of the overall energy consumption - but even if we only adjust in this field, we can already make a difference.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Interesting way to say that we are only addressing 26% of the issue, and ignoring the 74% of the problem that is more concentrated and wealthy, so it’s seems like the priority is reversed from logic.
Ygg2 5y ago
The sad truth is, it's practically unfeasible to have pure renewables. Even most wind/solar plants have a peaker gas plant somewhere, for when demand surpasses available resources. Sure batteries are nice, but you need huge amounts to smooth out the grid. That said, it's possible to use excess electricity to create some form of gas (like hydrogen or hydro-carbon).
- patall 5y ago
  But we do not need to go to 100℅ renewable right away. 80% would be great already. Yet Europe in total is at less than 50%, and there we are only considering power. We'd be so much more flexible both in regards to Putin and climate change if we just reduced our demand by 50%. Step by step, not all at once. And then power-to-X can do the last bit.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > The sad truth is, it's practically unfeasible to have pure renewables. It's more feasible than nuclear.
brtkdotse 5y ago
> we average 2.4KWh per day Unless you're living on 5 m2 you're not including heating, which is the biggest consumer of energy.
- thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
  And industry. And transportation. And commercial or public buildings. Taking into account only personal electricity consumption and disregarding all the rest that makes society work is deeply myopic As a rule of thumb - electricity consumption in developed countries is about 1 kW per person, once everything is accounted for. Energy consumption is about 5 times as much
  - rizkeyz 5y ago
    I was talking explicitly about electricity only. It's clear that I depend on so much more for all the surroundings to work. But the figures I pulled out are for electricity only and our country has 26% of its electricity generated by gas, which we could get rid of if people would use less electricity, which I believe is totally possible. I haven't talked about anything else. But even this tiny area can make a difference. This is where people have most or even all the control.
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      Energy is energy whether it's electricity or something else. Europe's primary energy source is fossil based, either oil or gas, which of course mostly comes from Russia. If you want to reduce your reliance on oil and gas from Russia, then you need to reduce your consumption of both materials regardless of how it's used. That means more than just converting your electrical supply to non-fossil source, it also means converting your heating supply as well (wood briquettes do horrific things to air quality, inner cities would become no-go zones for asthma suffers if we swapped gas for wood briquettes). Indeed the majority of household energy consumption in Europe is directly burning gas, not using electricity. So turning off light bulbs will have negligible impact on Europe's gas needs.
- rizkeyz 5y ago
kavalg 5y ago
I guess that you don't cook a lot. Then you shall maybe take into account the energy used to produce the food that you order and to deliver it to your home.
- hannob 5y ago
  I cook a lot. I don't even have a very efficient stove (it's on my todo-list to get an induction stove, but we're in a rented flat, so it's a bit complicated). I still have a really, really tiny electricity bill. Cooking isn't a major issue in electricity use. It's the devices you buy and some basic behavior sanity (switch off what you don't use etc.).
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    My refrigerator, which is from 2020 and replaced a failed 1979 unit, uses about as much electricity as your flat. So does the pool pump. So does the network equipment. And if I were to run the heating system, it would too. Using a toaster oven to bake a meal for two would consume roughly 15-30% of your home's daily energy budget. I used 18.85 KWh yesterday, which includes running a load of laundry through a resistively heated dryer. 14.07 KWh of that came from my solar panels.
    - zaroth 5y ago
      Sounds totally reasonable to me. I don’t understand the theory of trying to strangle household energy usage. Increasing household energy use is not the problem, it’s actually the solution to a huge productivity and standard of living increase for your population. Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy. Limiting energy use disproportionately hurts the poorest of the population and drives up the poverty rate. That 18.85kWh of energy at utility scale is roughly $0.25 USD in energy cost. You figure you got a quarter’s worth of value from everything that energy accomplished for you that day? Probably more like 100x that value. What’s the opportunity cost of trying to halve your energy bill and save about a dime a day? The solution is cheap, abundant, clean energy. The featured article shows that’s actually where most of our new production is coming from already. Although in truth that’s more indicative of how overly constrained our energy production growth is, but things are rapidly moving in the right direction due to technology maturation and a supportive tax structure. Funny that’s all it takes to align incentives and let human ingenuity and the manufacturing learning curve run its course. The problem is the doomsdayers who can only extrapolate linear outcomes from past performance and entirely discount the obvious technological paradigm shifts which are occurring.
logifail 5y ago
> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike I refuelled the smaller of our two cars this morning and paid around €1.80/litre - there's our price spike. I certainly had a "Oh my $deity, this is expensive!" moment while standing at the pump. On the other hand, my wife is taking our eldest child into town for a hospital appointment today. It's not as though we can choose not to make that journey (I dearly wish it weren't necessary, but that's another story). So, they have to travel. In round figures she can expect to use 5 litres of fuel in the car for the return trip, so that's €9 of fuel. I'm absolutely aware that the car doesn't just have costs associated with fuel, but it's the cheapest smallest model that that manufacturer makes, it was around €10,000 on the road, all taxes included, and it's already several years old. Fuel economy figures are 4.5 l/100 km aka 52 US mpg aka 63 UK mpg "combined". To make the journey by public transport would take pretty much the same time from our home to the hospital but the connection only works twice per hour, so that means she should expect additional waiting time at least on the return trip, which the car doesn't have. The kicker? The train ticket for my wife would be €30 for the round-trip. My son would travel free but only because I paid for an annual railcard for him already, covering his journey to school. So even with Europe at war, it's still apparently significantly cheaper for us to travel by (ICE) car. Which feels wrong :(
- apexalpha 5y ago
  There's €2,43/Liter on the highway gas stations here in NL already...
  - fho 5y ago
    Right now Diesel (2.09€/l) here is more expensive than Super E10 (2.04€/l) ... that's like the first time during my 35 years on this earth that that has happened.
    - Ourgon 5y ago
      Here in Sweden Diesel has always been more expensive than petrol. Diesel is now over 25kr (€2.30), petrol around 22kr (€2.00). Electricity was €1/kWh this morning 07.00 - prices are set hourly.
aperson_hello 5y ago
Are you heating/cooling on that 2.4kwh/day too? Or do you have gas heat/hot water? There's no way to heat my house (to even just hot enough to avoid frozen pipes) without using significantly more than 100w during the winter. Even "passive" houses here would use more than that for climate control.
- rizkeyz 5y ago
  No, 100W is without heat (I should have mentioned that) and without hot water.
  - eldaisfish 5y ago
    that is then extremely misleading. Try redoing your calculation assuming all heat is electric, be that heat pumps or an electric stove. Same for water heaters and EVs. Your post, although interesting, is the edge case.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    So you're chastising everybody for not using as little "energy" as you (counting only electricity) so that we can get off of russian gas, while you're only able to get your numbers so low because 90% of your own energy usage is from gas? You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home. That's just the math. Whether that energy comes to you in the form of fossil fuel or electricity doesn't matter, that's how much you and everybody else is using for climate control. The fact that it appears on your gas bill instead of your electric bill doesn't mean you're using any less power. Nobody's gonna save the world by turning off their 3-watt LED bulb an hour earlier each night, cutting a whopping 0.09kwh (0.009%) from their monthly usage.
    - cool_dude85 5y ago
      >You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home. I can't believe this is true outside e.g. Alaska, Norway, etc. I live in an area with a lot of cooling needs and very moderate need for heating, almost all of both are done with electric, and 1200 kWh per month is a good guess for total average home usage, heating/cooling, lighting, video games, cooking, all the rest.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Industrial consumption dwarfs the rest of us. We can fool around with 'energy theatre' turning off lights and walking to the market. But unless we can do 'big industry' more efficiently then it's all for show.
- omniscient_oce 5y ago
  Even if it's true I always see this excuse to not try to reduce your consumption as a pure cop-out. If everyone had this attitude then nothing would ever change.
- djfobbz 5y ago
  This is absolutely correct!
- siliconunit 5y ago
  Exactly, same goes for pollution, container ships, aviation..etc.
- hef19898 5y ago
  We all depend on industry, yet the majority of people have zero idea how industry actually works. It is just there, and supposed to work. And yes, big industry is the key driver. They are also among the first to change when money is to be made, or saved.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  Is that true everywhere? Last year we went from -18c to 46c. It wasn't the demands of big industry that shut down our grid for a week, and dropped gas line pressures so low we couldn't turn on backup gas plants. It was residential heating. And in the summer, our load peaks because of residential air conditioning. Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks?
  - cool_dude85 5y ago
    >Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks? Exactly right. Residential usage tends to spike greatly during hot or cold events since a much larger portion of it is for heating and cooling. For industrial users, there is some heating and cooling component, but the industrial process is generally what's going to dominate. So, if you look at extreme events, residential usage will dominate during those times. The residential usage total may spike up to 2x or 3x "baseline" usage, which industrial never will. However, if you look at sum totals across a year, industrial will typically be a much larger user than the residential sector.
noroot 5y ago
I'm intrigued by your number. That's less then 1000 kWh per year. Given that you say you do use 'modern appliances' like dishwasher and a washing machine it seems extremely low. I have a fairly small house, with only 2 adults, that's full electric (appliances, cooking, hot water, heating). We have a dishwasher (used every other day) and we also use a washing machine (and sadly often the heat pump dryer because there is no space for a drying rack). We use, all in, about 4000 kWh/year. About 750 to 1000 of that is for heating the house and hot water. My idle usage is higher then your average, which is somewhat crazy. I have about 30-40W for the ventilation system, about 20W for modem/router/wap, 10W for home server and the rest is for fridge/freezer I guess. Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget. Let alone a dishwasher or washing machine cycle. I'm fully aware that the biggest improvement can be made in being aware of your usage (which I am, I monitor it carefully) and try to be more mindful about it. Yet it's not easy to lower the numbers significant. Some years ago, as a single, I also was (well) below 1000 kWh/year. But that was without a dishwasher, or dryer. And generally cooking less often/fancy then my wife currently does. Work from home with 2 adults (with big monitors, a beefy desktop, etc) also adds energy usage.
- Valgrim 5y ago
  My impression is that gas appliances are much more common in Europe. Gas stove, gas heating, gas water heater, washing machine, etc are all very common. Also insulation and windows are usually much higher quality, and the climate is a lot milder than northern America due to the Gulf Stream.
- hedora 5y ago
  Same here. We have a modern heat pump water heater. It uses 2.6 kWh per day, set to cycle down at night and during the day. Three people, short showers every other day. (I just switched it to always on. Trying to optimize water heating timing was just preventing it from storing solar electricity as heat, and didn't change daily energy consumption much.) Edit: I should add we almost exclusively use a dishwasher to wash dishes (< 4 gallons a day). Laundary is probably our main water consumer. Showers have High Sierra shower heads. They're inexpensive, strong stream; 1.5 gpm (5.7 LPM)
Reason077 5y ago
> ”which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily” Aren’t you forgetting about natural gas used for heating and for industrial purposes? In many countries, this is actually the majority of natural gas consumption, not electricity generation.
dpierce9 5y ago
The goal of adding solar isn’t to use less electricity or less energy per person. Solar electricity is cheap and stable because it doesn’t have a volatile, margin-sensitive commodity as an input (as opposed to oil, ng, coal). Specifically, what is cheaper is midday units of electricity which have a direct impact on commercial and industrial uses (i.e. the largest uses). When you make something cheaper people use MORE of it. This is a good thing since, normalizing for efficiency, more energy use equals a higher quality of life. The idea that renewables are associated with sacrifice should go away. Instead, in a number of realistic cases renewables reduce the cost/impact of living a better life. I am setting aside the war component about which I am sympathetic (people should be cognizant of near term resource limits when they are in/adjacent to war).
- _0w8t 5y ago
  As the last autumn in Europe showed solar and wind were not stable when for months there were quite heavy clouds without wind. Big energy storage is required.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  Variable energy sources like wind and solar have a cost - a balancing cost that you do not currently pay. If you have solar panels, the grid buys all your energy, whenever you are able to deliver that energy. The rest of us subsidise your costs. Renewables like domestic solar appear to reduce costs because those costs are socialized. Compare the cost of drawing power from the grid with the cost of generating all your energy via solar PV and storage batteries.
  - dpierce9 5y ago
    Who is the we? Different countries, states, and grid-operators have different policies. Grid-scale renewables in the US are not ‘take it any time I have it’ to the grid, they are generally required to be able to dispatch down. This means when they are told the addition of those units of power will cause problems the units will be penalized for adding them. Renewables also pay for interconnection costs, they pay for transmission costs (which pays for transmission equipment), and they pay the grid-operators for operations. To say ‘all their costs are socialized’ borders on dishonest. I am open to there being additional externalities and balancing is a real challenge. But you have to tell me what they are and price them rather than rely on sweeping generalizations which are prima facie false.
rthomas6 5y ago
> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike. That's why there should be a price spike. For all a free market's faults, one thing they're good at is finding the right price for goods with elastic demand.
scythe 5y ago
>modern appliances like a dish washer Dishwashers actually save energy and water vs. hand-washing. Maybe you save a little energy if you handwash in cold water, but nobody does that and you would need a lot more soap.
- Kon-Peki 5y ago
  If you run them when they are full ;)
  - scythe 5y ago
    No, even if they're half full, they're still more efficient. Hand washing is so much worse it's almost never appropriate. https://www.bobvila.com/articles/dishwasher-vs-hand-washing/ https://www.bobvila.com/articles/dishwasher-vs-hand-washing/ >In the past, dishwashers might have consumed 10 to 15 gallons of water per cycle. Modern dishwashers, on the other hand, are designed with water efficiency in mind. In fact, the Department of Energy mandates that full-sized dishwashers can use a maximum of 5 gallons of water per cycle. Energy Star-rated appliances require even lower water usage, at 3.5 gallons per cycle. >According to a study conducted by the University of Bonn in Germany, washing a full load of dishes by hand uses an average of more than 26 gallons of water. The study also found that handwashing techniques vary widely, with some people using just 8.7 gallons for the task and others using 116! In other words, if you wash dishes like an average German, hand-washing half a load of dishes is roughly equal to using an old, inefficient dishwasher. And of course the dishwasher advantage gets larger with a modern system.
    - Kon-Peki 5y ago
      That's a great update, thanks for posting :)
    - H1Supreme 5y ago
      I have a dishwasher that I never use. Here's why: it's just me and my girlfriend. I usually use two pans (or one pot and one pan) when I cook dinner. They're stainless steel, and need hand washed. The dishwasher will not get everything off. Plus, I don't have an army of saute pans (and spatula's, etc) to use while I load up the dishwasher until it's full. So, I wash the pans, along with our plates and forks/knives by hand. We used to load up the dishwasher, but after a while it seemed so pointless to put the plates and utensils in there if I'm already washing pans. Just take another 2 minutes to wash them. If the dishwasher could clean my pans as well as I could, I'd reconsider. Also, if I had a big family, I'm sure I'd just do both.
samatman 5y ago
You mention elsewhere that your heat doesn't come from a heat pump. It is absurd that you brag of low wattage when you're using gas directly to heat your home. A heat pump is one of two things a household can do to meaningfully reduce energy consumption, and the other one is not owning a car. The rest of it is feel-good at best and self-righteous at the worst, when people start yelling at each other about imported food and aren't using heat pumps.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  The reality is that fuel type isn't a choice for the vast majority of people. A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option. Not owning a car is equally impractical in many parts of the world unless you happen to have considerable salary. Everyone doing small things to reduce their overall impact during peak hours is something everyone can participate in at no cost and can have major impact.
  - eldaisfish 5y ago
    what would be great is if we stopped amplifying misleading messaging from some of the biggest polluters on the planet - oil companies, shipping companies and agriculture. Personal responsibility is great but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to what just one of these industries could do if they so wanted. Shipping, for example, has great potential to reduce emissions yet most large companies do everything in their power to pass minimum standards in territorial waters and then it's a free for all on international waters.
    - therealdrag0 5y ago
      Shipping is the most efficient mode of transport though?
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    > A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option. I think nuance is required here. I installed what is called a "heat pump" in the US for $2500 USD this last summer. So you can see how claiming that $2500 is most people's salary for the year seems a little suspect from my POV.
ejb999 5y ago
bragging about how little electricity you use, and then excluding heat and hot water from the equation?
rookderby 5y ago
One issue in this calculation is that you'd need to increase the amount of electricity generated to replace heating and other work done by fossil fuels. From Saul Griffith's book Electrify, "Electrifying everything will require three to four times as much electricity." [0]. 490 * 3 = 1470TWh capacity, or I guess about three 100W light bulbs per day? [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  Going to comment here as it's on topic with books. One should also read "Without Hot Air" [1] and "Heat"[2] to understand the math and psychology of sustainability . the Tl;dr; being we'd need to cover an area, iirc, the entire Sahara desert with solar to provide solar for humanity (ignoring the problem of distribution, cost, how long it would take to do, maintenance). And then you also have to account for the psychological effect of "green" energy whereby people end up consuming _more_ because in their minds they discount the ecological cost to 0 My main conclusion (not the authors') is that we need nuclear[3] (maybe thorium). It's the only thing that scales the way we need. [1]: https://withouthotair.com/ https://withouthotair.com/ [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1114270.Heat https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1114270.Heat [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BybPPIMuQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BybPPIMuQQ (and the rest of gordonmcdowell's channel
- hedora 5y ago
  What coefficient of power does the book assume for heating air and water? Our water heater is a heat pump, and draws about 100w on average. It has a COP of 3-4. The house idles at 500w, with it on. I probably have about 100w of computers, and the balance is probably refrigerators (still optimizing the house...) Anyway, switching to a heat pump changes heating from the dominant load to "maybe I should power down the backup NAS and a switch or two".
pkdpic 5y ago
Im making progress towards the same lifestyle and Im surprised at how good it feels just on a personal health level. Your success is re-inspiring me to push further!
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I feel this will be the spring/summer of e-bikes. They are perfect, especially in Europe, for combating high fuel prices with the existing supply of batteries/goods/services. There's no way EV cars will ramp to address the oil spike. An e-bike gives a totally normal human being 20mph speed without heavy sweat, and effective distance to 8-10 miles, can deliver the power necessary to get up hills, fight headwinds, and tow a burly of goods. In a cheap, compact vehicle that only needs an LFP battery for 40-100 mile ranges, and simple outlet charge. Likewise maximizing home solar installations would help as well. Since this is strategic, rather than a pure economic concern, home solar might be able to be rolled out more quickly with rebates/incentives. Russia is enabled by oil and gas.
boulos 5y ago
Beyond the mentioned "lots of energy use is actually gas for us", I think you likely have a bug in your calculations. Did you calculate this based on your expenses and back into usage, or directly from usage? (Or are you saying 100W per person?). Unless you do not own a refrigerator, or have an incredibly tiny RV-style unit (36-50W!), you probably average 100W for your fridge alone. Charging the devices you wrote your comment with is another 10-90W (when charging), and then your router is at least 5-10W continuously. Same thing with a television or computer monitor: pretty good when idle (<5 W) but likely high when in use (30+W for an efficient monitor, but more like 150+ for a larger television even if modern). I don't see how your average could be 100W.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Just curious, why would you make a cosmetic repair on a washing machine? Mine has a few dents and scratches from various moves (it's about 15 years old at this point) and I never cared at all about what it looks like, just whether it worked or not? I've never actually done anything to it. I've been single most of that time though, so washing duty is pretty lite.

Aperocky 5y ago

How often do you shower? because according to google your 2.4kWh per day is good for 14 minutes of hot shower. Just me showering alone would have equaled your entire energy budget..

distances 5y ago
2.4 kWh isn't much, but 14 minutes is also an absurd time to shower. Get wet, turn water off while soaping & shampooing, and rinse after. I haven't timed but feels like a normal everyday shower shouldn't have more than two minutes of running water.

rayiner 5y ago

Meanwhile villagers in Bangladesh have 1/10 the carbon output you do. Why not go all the way?

simonh 5y ago

The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. They may reduce their energy usage a bit, but a lot of them will just take this hit financially because they can afford it. Frankly I'm in that category, a doubling of energy prices might reduce my savings for the year but by itself would be unlikely to affect my energy usage much. Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it. In a situation like this price signalling isn't enough. We need to treat it as the emergency it is, and my family and I have got to do some thinking about our usage and how to reduce it, but that needs to happen across the European economies.

loeg 5y ago
> The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. ... Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it. That sounds like an argument for a progressive pricing structure with an even more extreme increase at the highest consumption tiers? E.g., would 10x increase in marginal cost affect your consumption? It would probably affect mine.
- sprucevoid 5y ago
  Robert Frank's progressive consumption tax proposal, https://archive.ph/AXDkQ https://archive.ph/AXDkQ Another alternative is flat consumption taxes on climate damaging products combined with general wealth taxation and cash redistribution to lower the impact on low income/wealth households.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well, ultimately undermining the goal of saving resources, in the longer term. In my own country we see significant proportions of multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed and often with multiple children, because someone else picks up the tab. However the working class who that try to get ahead under their own steam before maybe breeding are having children later, and less of them if at all.

simongray 5y ago

> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike. I don't think you're going to get people to collectively reduce energy usage unless there is a direct incentive to do so, e.g. the price spikes you yourself mention. The best way to solve this is probably through regulation. In the case of leaving the lights on, this has mostly been "solved" by banning incandescent light bulbs which use ~10x as much energy as the LED light bulbs that are in use everywhere now. I think this is as good as it's gonna get right now with light bulbs. Energy usage of household appliances can be solved in the same way (not sure if it is, I just know about the labeling) and—at least in my country—heating consumption is being solved by increasing insulation requirements pretty hard.

RenThraysk 5y ago
Even LED have more efficient designs, Philips makes the Dubai Lamp specifically for Dubai but you cannot buy them outside of Dubai. https://www.mea.lighting.philips.com/consumer/dubai-lamp https://www.mea.lighting.philips.com/consumer/dubai-lamp
- kragen 5y ago
  The efficiency difference is very small; the main advantage of the Dubai Lamp is that it lasts longer.
- aembleton 5y ago
  Big Clive shows how to convert LED lamps to be like the Dubai lamp here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTB0ThzhOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTB0ThzhOY

kkfx 5y ago

Consume less, on paper, is easy, in practice it depend. Personally I have a small f.v. (south France) with battery backup, in sunny days almost all the year I have enough energy to waste it. In other days I need energy as anyone else. No battery can compensate. Doubling my battery capacity (witch is NOT cheat at all) just means having more energy from one sunny day to another. Survive just one day without sun means 4* the battery and I have to count the fact that does not have a reasonably good lifespan for the price. Essentially: it's unfeasible. And I'm talking about a "A-class" (BBC) house, so with very little energy needs compared to old ones.

Retric 5y ago
To go fully off grid you would need more solar and batteries rather than just more batteries alone. Panels produce some energy on cloudy days, suppose your deficit drops from -80% to -40%, now the battery which would last you 1 day lasts you 2 days, double your batteries as well and 2 days becomes 4 days. More critically many days that are moderately overcast go from a net loss to a net gain. It’s just an optimization problem based on your local climate, the cost of equipment, and your willingness to reduce remain after multiple cloudy days.
- kkfx 5y ago
  So did you think it's practical buy a soccer stadium well-exposed south space and spend the money of a supercar just to be able to munge few more W in cloudy days? Of course also counting snowy days when you still get 0 output + you eventually need to clean-up your panels? Beside the willingness and the price, who many in the world can do something similar? Especially in EU where most people live in dense city, so apartments?
  - Retric 5y ago
    Grid solar is more efficient in general and much safer to install than rooftop solar, some people simply dislike connecting to the electric grid for various reasons. Anyway, you don’t need to face south if you just want more energy on cloudy days. As to more panels, it’s a question of how much you want to be off grid and how much energy you need. Normal solar installs cover a small fraction of the roof.

modo_mario 5y ago

How much energy went into the industry that made those appliances, your food, etc though? I think a lot of people underestimate that.

rizkeyz 5y ago
Yes sure. For example, I cannot even give you exact numbers of the footprint of the food we eat or the electronics we use. That would probably a good number to put on a lot of things, in terms of allowing people to make decisions not only on price and quality but hidden costs. The problem is that externalities are what the name says: things you are not required to factor into your price (something or someone else takes a hit).

newsclues 5y ago

I also live a low consumption life and think others need to adjust as well but residential energy consumption doesn’t include industry or commercial usage which also needs work.

rizkeyz 5y ago
Here residential energy accounts for 26% of the overall energy consumption - but even if we only adjust in this field, we can already make a difference.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Interesting way to say that we are only addressing 26% of the issue, and ignoring the 74% of the problem that is more concentrated and wealthy, so it’s seems like the priority is reversed from logic.

Ygg2 5y ago

The sad truth is, it's practically unfeasible to have pure renewables. Even most wind/solar plants have a peaker gas plant somewhere, for when demand surpasses available resources. Sure batteries are nice, but you need huge amounts to smooth out the grid. That said, it's possible to use excess electricity to create some form of gas (like hydrogen or hydro-carbon).

patall 5y ago
But we do not need to go to 100℅ renewable right away. 80% would be great already. Yet Europe in total is at less than 50%, and there we are only considering power. We'd be so much more flexible both in regards to Putin and climate change if we just reduced our demand by 50%. Step by step, not all at once. And then power-to-X can do the last bit.
pfdietz 5y ago
> The sad truth is, it's practically unfeasible to have pure renewables. It's more feasible than nuclear.

brtkdotse 5y ago

> we average 2.4KWh per day Unless you're living on 5 m2 you're not including heating, which is the biggest consumer of energy.

thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
And industry. And transportation. And commercial or public buildings. Taking into account only personal electricity consumption and disregarding all the rest that makes society work is deeply myopic As a rule of thumb - electricity consumption in developed countries is about 1 kW per person, once everything is accounted for. Energy consumption is about 5 times as much
- rizkeyz 5y ago
  I was talking explicitly about electricity only. It's clear that I depend on so much more for all the surroundings to work. But the figures I pulled out are for electricity only and our country has 26% of its electricity generated by gas, which we could get rid of if people would use less electricity, which I believe is totally possible. I haven't talked about anything else. But even this tiny area can make a difference. This is where people have most or even all the control.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    Energy is energy whether it's electricity or something else. Europe's primary energy source is fossil based, either oil or gas, which of course mostly comes from Russia. If you want to reduce your reliance on oil and gas from Russia, then you need to reduce your consumption of both materials regardless of how it's used. That means more than just converting your electrical supply to non-fossil source, it also means converting your heating supply as well (wood briquettes do horrific things to air quality, inner cities would become no-go zones for asthma suffers if we swapped gas for wood briquettes). Indeed the majority of household energy consumption in Europe is directly burning gas, not using electricity. So turning off light bulbs will have negligible impact on Europe's gas needs.
rizkeyz 5y ago

kavalg 5y ago

I guess that you don't cook a lot. Then you shall maybe take into account the energy used to produce the food that you order and to deliver it to your home.

hannob 5y ago
I cook a lot. I don't even have a very efficient stove (it's on my todo-list to get an induction stove, but we're in a rented flat, so it's a bit complicated). I still have a really, really tiny electricity bill. Cooking isn't a major issue in electricity use. It's the devices you buy and some basic behavior sanity (switch off what you don't use etc.).
- zbrozek 5y ago
  My refrigerator, which is from 2020 and replaced a failed 1979 unit, uses about as much electricity as your flat. So does the pool pump. So does the network equipment. And if I were to run the heating system, it would too. Using a toaster oven to bake a meal for two would consume roughly 15-30% of your home's daily energy budget. I used 18.85 KWh yesterday, which includes running a load of laundry through a resistively heated dryer. 14.07 KWh of that came from my solar panels.
  - zaroth 5y ago
    Sounds totally reasonable to me. I don’t understand the theory of trying to strangle household energy usage. Increasing household energy use is not the problem, it’s actually the solution to a huge productivity and standard of living increase for your population. Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy. Limiting energy use disproportionately hurts the poorest of the population and drives up the poverty rate. That 18.85kWh of energy at utility scale is roughly $0.25 USD in energy cost. You figure you got a quarter’s worth of value from everything that energy accomplished for you that day? Probably more like 100x that value. What’s the opportunity cost of trying to halve your energy bill and save about a dime a day? The solution is cheap, abundant, clean energy. The featured article shows that’s actually where most of our new production is coming from already. Although in truth that’s more indicative of how overly constrained our energy production growth is, but things are rapidly moving in the right direction due to technology maturation and a supportive tax structure. Funny that’s all it takes to align incentives and let human ingenuity and the manufacturing learning curve run its course. The problem is the doomsdayers who can only extrapolate linear outcomes from past performance and entirely discount the obvious technological paradigm shifts which are occurring.

logifail 5y ago

> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike I refuelled the smaller of our two cars this morning and paid around €1.80/litre - there's our price spike. I certainly had a "Oh my $deity, this is expensive!" moment while standing at the pump. On the other hand, my wife is taking our eldest child into town for a hospital appointment today. It's not as though we can choose not to make that journey (I dearly wish it weren't necessary, but that's another story). So, they have to travel. In round figures she can expect to use 5 litres of fuel in the car for the return trip, so that's €9 of fuel. I'm absolutely aware that the car doesn't just have costs associated with fuel, but it's the cheapest smallest model that that manufacturer makes, it was around €10,000 on the road, all taxes included, and it's already several years old. Fuel economy figures are 4.5 l/100 km aka 52 US mpg aka 63 UK mpg "combined". To make the journey by public transport would take pretty much the same time from our home to the hospital but the connection only works twice per hour, so that means she should expect additional waiting time at least on the return trip, which the car doesn't have. The kicker? The train ticket for my wife would be €30 for the round-trip. My son would travel free but only because I paid for an annual railcard for him already, covering his journey to school. So even with Europe at war, it's still apparently significantly cheaper for us to travel by (ICE) car. Which feels wrong :(

apexalpha 5y ago
There's €2,43/Liter on the highway gas stations here in NL already...
- fho 5y ago
  Right now Diesel (2.09€/l) here is more expensive than Super E10 (2.04€/l) ... that's like the first time during my 35 years on this earth that that has happened.
  - Ourgon 5y ago
    Here in Sweden Diesel has always been more expensive than petrol. Diesel is now over 25kr (€2.30), petrol around 22kr (€2.00). Electricity was €1/kWh this morning 07.00 - prices are set hourly.

aperson_hello 5y ago

Are you heating/cooling on that 2.4kwh/day too? Or do you have gas heat/hot water? There's no way to heat my house (to even just hot enough to avoid frozen pipes) without using significantly more than 100w during the winter. Even "passive" houses here would use more than that for climate control.

rizkeyz 5y ago
No, 100W is without heat (I should have mentioned that) and without hot water.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  that is then extremely misleading. Try redoing your calculation assuming all heat is electric, be that heat pumps or an electric stove. Same for water heaters and EVs. Your post, although interesting, is the edge case.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  So you're chastising everybody for not using as little "energy" as you (counting only electricity) so that we can get off of russian gas, while you're only able to get your numbers so low because 90% of your own energy usage is from gas? You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home. That's just the math. Whether that energy comes to you in the form of fossil fuel or electricity doesn't matter, that's how much you and everybody else is using for climate control. The fact that it appears on your gas bill instead of your electric bill doesn't mean you're using any less power. Nobody's gonna save the world by turning off their 3-watt LED bulb an hour earlier each night, cutting a whopping 0.09kwh (0.009%) from their monthly usage.
  - cool_dude85 5y ago
    >You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home. I can't believe this is true outside e.g. Alaska, Norway, etc. I live in an area with a lot of cooling needs and very moderate need for heating, almost all of both are done with electric, and 1200 kWh per month is a good guess for total average home usage, heating/cooling, lighting, video games, cooking, all the rest.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Industrial consumption dwarfs the rest of us. We can fool around with 'energy theatre' turning off lights and walking to the market. But unless we can do 'big industry' more efficiently then it's all for show.

omniscient_oce 5y ago
Even if it's true I always see this excuse to not try to reduce your consumption as a pure cop-out. If everyone had this attitude then nothing would ever change.
djfobbz 5y ago
This is absolutely correct!
siliconunit 5y ago
Exactly, same goes for pollution, container ships, aviation..etc.
hef19898 5y ago
We all depend on industry, yet the majority of people have zero idea how industry actually works. It is just there, and supposed to work. And yes, big industry is the key driver. They are also among the first to change when money is to be made, or saved.
galangalalgol 5y ago
Is that true everywhere? Last year we went from -18c to 46c. It wasn't the demands of big industry that shut down our grid for a week, and dropped gas line pressures so low we couldn't turn on backup gas plants. It was residential heating. And in the summer, our load peaks because of residential air conditioning. Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks?
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  >Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks? Exactly right. Residential usage tends to spike greatly during hot or cold events since a much larger portion of it is for heating and cooling. For industrial users, there is some heating and cooling component, but the industrial process is generally what's going to dominate. So, if you look at extreme events, residential usage will dominate during those times. The residential usage total may spike up to 2x or 3x "baseline" usage, which industrial never will. However, if you look at sum totals across a year, industrial will typically be a much larger user than the residential sector.

noroot 5y ago

I'm intrigued by your number. That's less then 1000 kWh per year. Given that you say you do use 'modern appliances' like dishwasher and a washing machine it seems extremely low. I have a fairly small house, with only 2 adults, that's full electric (appliances, cooking, hot water, heating). We have a dishwasher (used every other day) and we also use a washing machine (and sadly often the heat pump dryer because there is no space for a drying rack). We use, all in, about 4000 kWh/year. About 750 to 1000 of that is for heating the house and hot water. My idle usage is higher then your average, which is somewhat crazy. I have about 30-40W for the ventilation system, about 20W for modem/router/wap, 10W for home server and the rest is for fridge/freezer I guess. Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget. Let alone a dishwasher or washing machine cycle. I'm fully aware that the biggest improvement can be made in being aware of your usage (which I am, I monitor it carefully) and try to be more mindful about it. Yet it's not easy to lower the numbers significant. Some years ago, as a single, I also was (well) below 1000 kWh/year. But that was without a dishwasher, or dryer. And generally cooking less often/fancy then my wife currently does. Work from home with 2 adults (with big monitors, a beefy desktop, etc) also adds energy usage.

Valgrim 5y ago
My impression is that gas appliances are much more common in Europe. Gas stove, gas heating, gas water heater, washing machine, etc are all very common. Also insulation and windows are usually much higher quality, and the climate is a lot milder than northern America due to the Gulf Stream.
hedora 5y ago
Same here. We have a modern heat pump water heater. It uses 2.6 kWh per day, set to cycle down at night and during the day. Three people, short showers every other day. (I just switched it to always on. Trying to optimize water heating timing was just preventing it from storing solar electricity as heat, and didn't change daily energy consumption much.) Edit: I should add we almost exclusively use a dishwasher to wash dishes (< 4 gallons a day). Laundary is probably our main water consumer. Showers have High Sierra shower heads. They're inexpensive, strong stream; 1.5 gpm (5.7 LPM)

Reason077 5y ago

> ”which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily” Aren’t you forgetting about natural gas used for heating and for industrial purposes? In many countries, this is actually the majority of natural gas consumption, not electricity generation.

dpierce9 5y ago

The goal of adding solar isn’t to use less electricity or less energy per person. Solar electricity is cheap and stable because it doesn’t have a volatile, margin-sensitive commodity as an input (as opposed to oil, ng, coal). Specifically, what is cheaper is midday units of electricity which have a direct impact on commercial and industrial uses (i.e. the largest uses). When you make something cheaper people use MORE of it. This is a good thing since, normalizing for efficiency, more energy use equals a higher quality of life. The idea that renewables are associated with sacrifice should go away. Instead, in a number of realistic cases renewables reduce the cost/impact of living a better life. I am setting aside the war component about which I am sympathetic (people should be cognizant of near term resource limits when they are in/adjacent to war).

_0w8t 5y ago
As the last autumn in Europe showed solar and wind were not stable when for months there were quite heavy clouds without wind. Big energy storage is required.
eldaisfish 5y ago
Variable energy sources like wind and solar have a cost - a balancing cost that you do not currently pay. If you have solar panels, the grid buys all your energy, whenever you are able to deliver that energy. The rest of us subsidise your costs. Renewables like domestic solar appear to reduce costs because those costs are socialized. Compare the cost of drawing power from the grid with the cost of generating all your energy via solar PV and storage batteries.
- dpierce9 5y ago
  Who is the we? Different countries, states, and grid-operators have different policies. Grid-scale renewables in the US are not ‘take it any time I have it’ to the grid, they are generally required to be able to dispatch down. This means when they are told the addition of those units of power will cause problems the units will be penalized for adding them. Renewables also pay for interconnection costs, they pay for transmission costs (which pays for transmission equipment), and they pay the grid-operators for operations. To say ‘all their costs are socialized’ borders on dishonest. I am open to there being additional externalities and balancing is a real challenge. But you have to tell me what they are and price them rather than rely on sweeping generalizations which are prima facie false.

rthomas6 5y ago

> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike. That's why there should be a price spike. For all a free market's faults, one thing they're good at is finding the right price for goods with elastic demand.

scythe 5y ago

>modern appliances like a dish washer Dishwashers actually save energy and water vs. hand-washing. Maybe you save a little energy if you handwash in cold water, but nobody does that and you would need a lot more soap.

Kon-Peki 5y ago
If you run them when they are full ;)
- scythe 5y ago
  No, even if they're half full, they're still more efficient. Hand washing is so much worse it's almost never appropriate. https://www.bobvila.com/articles/dishwasher-vs-hand-washing/ https://www.bobvila.com/articles/dishwasher-vs-hand-washing/ >In the past, dishwashers might have consumed 10 to 15 gallons of water per cycle. Modern dishwashers, on the other hand, are designed with water efficiency in mind. In fact, the Department of Energy mandates that full-sized dishwashers can use a maximum of 5 gallons of water per cycle. Energy Star-rated appliances require even lower water usage, at 3.5 gallons per cycle. >According to a study conducted by the University of Bonn in Germany, washing a full load of dishes by hand uses an average of more than 26 gallons of water. The study also found that handwashing techniques vary widely, with some people using just 8.7 gallons for the task and others using 116! In other words, if you wash dishes like an average German, hand-washing half a load of dishes is roughly equal to using an old, inefficient dishwasher. And of course the dishwasher advantage gets larger with a modern system.
  - Kon-Peki 5y ago
    That's a great update, thanks for posting :)
  - H1Supreme 5y ago
    I have a dishwasher that I never use. Here's why: it's just me and my girlfriend. I usually use two pans (or one pot and one pan) when I cook dinner. They're stainless steel, and need hand washed. The dishwasher will not get everything off. Plus, I don't have an army of saute pans (and spatula's, etc) to use while I load up the dishwasher until it's full. So, I wash the pans, along with our plates and forks/knives by hand. We used to load up the dishwasher, but after a while it seemed so pointless to put the plates and utensils in there if I'm already washing pans. Just take another 2 minutes to wash them. If the dishwasher could clean my pans as well as I could, I'd reconsider. Also, if I had a big family, I'm sure I'd just do both.

samatman 5y ago

You mention elsewhere that your heat doesn't come from a heat pump. It is absurd that you brag of low wattage when you're using gas directly to heat your home. A heat pump is one of two things a household can do to meaningfully reduce energy consumption, and the other one is not owning a car. The rest of it is feel-good at best and self-righteous at the worst, when people start yelling at each other about imported food and aren't using heat pumps.

cptskippy 5y ago
The reality is that fuel type isn't a choice for the vast majority of people. A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option. Not owning a car is equally impractical in many parts of the world unless you happen to have considerable salary. Everyone doing small things to reduce their overall impact during peak hours is something everyone can participate in at no cost and can have major impact.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  what would be great is if we stopped amplifying misleading messaging from some of the biggest polluters on the planet - oil companies, shipping companies and agriculture. Personal responsibility is great but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to what just one of these industries could do if they so wanted. Shipping, for example, has great potential to reduce emissions yet most large companies do everything in their power to pass minimum standards in territorial waters and then it's a free for all on international waters.
  - therealdrag0 5y ago
    Shipping is the most efficient mode of transport though?
- andrew_ 5y ago
  > A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option. I think nuance is required here. I installed what is called a "heat pump" in the US for $2500 USD this last summer. So you can see how claiming that $2500 is most people's salary for the year seems a little suspect from my POV.

ejb999 5y ago

bragging about how little electricity you use, and then excluding heat and hot water from the equation?

rookderby 5y ago

One issue in this calculation is that you'd need to increase the amount of electricity generated to replace heating and other work done by fossil fuels. From Saul Griffith's book Electrify, "Electrifying everything will require three to four times as much electricity." [0]. 490 * 3 = 1470TWh capacity, or I guess about three 100W light bulbs per day? [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

maerF0x0 5y ago
Going to comment here as it's on topic with books. One should also read "Without Hot Air" [1] and "Heat"[2] to understand the math and psychology of sustainability . the Tl;dr; being we'd need to cover an area, iirc, the entire Sahara desert with solar to provide solar for humanity (ignoring the problem of distribution, cost, how long it would take to do, maintenance). And then you also have to account for the psychological effect of "green" energy whereby people end up consuming _more_ because in their minds they discount the ecological cost to 0 My main conclusion (not the authors') is that we need nuclear[3] (maybe thorium). It's the only thing that scales the way we need. [1]: https://withouthotair.com/ https://withouthotair.com/ [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1114270.Heat https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1114270.Heat [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BybPPIMuQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BybPPIMuQQ (and the rest of gordonmcdowell's channel
hedora 5y ago
What coefficient of power does the book assume for heating air and water? Our water heater is a heat pump, and draws about 100w on average. It has a COP of 3-4. The house idles at 500w, with it on. I probably have about 100w of computers, and the balance is probably refrigerators (still optimizing the house...) Anyway, switching to a heat pump changes heating from the dominant load to "maybe I should power down the backup NAS and a switch or two".

pkdpic 5y ago

Im making progress towards the same lifestyle and Im surprised at how good it feels just on a personal health level. Your success is re-inspiring me to push further!

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

I feel this will be the spring/summer of e-bikes. They are perfect, especially in Europe, for combating high fuel prices with the existing supply of batteries/goods/services. There's no way EV cars will ramp to address the oil spike. An e-bike gives a totally normal human being 20mph speed without heavy sweat, and effective distance to 8-10 miles, can deliver the power necessary to get up hills, fight headwinds, and tow a burly of goods. In a cheap, compact vehicle that only needs an LFP battery for 40-100 mile ranges, and simple outlet charge. Likewise maximizing home solar installations would help as well. Since this is strategic, rather than a pure economic concern, home solar might be able to be rolled out more quickly with rebates/incentives. Russia is enabled by oil and gas.

boulos 5y ago

Beyond the mentioned "lots of energy use is actually gas for us", I think you likely have a bug in your calculations. Did you calculate this based on your expenses and back into usage, or directly from usage? (Or are you saying 100W per person?). Unless you do not own a refrigerator, or have an incredibly tiny RV-style unit (36-50W!), you probably average 100W for your fridge alone. Charging the devices you wrote your comment with is another 10-90W (when charging), and then your router is at least 5-10W continuously. Same thing with a television or computer monitor: pretty good when idle (<5 W) but likely high when in use (30+W for an efficient monitor, but more like 150+ for a larger television even if modern). I don't see how your average could be 100W.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Just curious, why would you make a cosmetic repair on a washing machine? Mine has a few dents and scratches from various moves (it's about 15 years old at this point) and I never cared at all about what it looks like, just whether it worked or not? I've never actually done anything to it. I've been single most of that time though, so washing duty is pretty lite.