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2000-Watt Society

194 points by privong 4y ago

Communitivity 4y ago
I don't see how this is possible with modern technology, unless you limit people to low power laptops or chrome books. If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh [1]. That's already 1.2kwh over, without accounting for anything else. I see the solution as providing renewable electricity at low cost, rather than reducing the amount of electricity. [1] https://www.inchcalculator.com/watts-to-kwh-calculator/ https://www.inchcalculator.com/watts-to-kwh-calculator/
- mech987 4y ago
  You are confusing the watt and the watt-hour. Running a 2000 watt load for 24 hours will use 48,000 watt-hours (48 kilowatt-hours).
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Your desktop is not going to spend 8 hours running at max TDP, even if you're gaming or doing CAD work. The majority of that time it will be close to idle, pulling no more than 40w from the wall (and thats if you have a poorly optimized system).
- bwestergard 4y ago
  Watts are a unit of energy per unit time. So not like a fixed budget in dollars, but rather a recurring budget in dollars per hour. Obviously, our energy use varies a great deal over time (just as our monetary spending tends to), so we can smooth that out (amortize it) to get a rough idea of our average rate of energy use. If you use a 400 watt computer all of the time your personal remaining energy budget is 1600 watts. I use a computer around 10 hours a day during the week, and three or four on weekend days (so around a third of the time). Amortized, that means I would be using on average around 133 watts on computing, if I used such a desktop. But I actually use a Thinkpad T420, and its consumption averages out to around 30 watts when in use (so amortized to 10 watts).
- PopAlongKid 4y ago
  I just checked my HP Pavilion business-class desktop purchase a couple of years ago, it has a 180W power supply.
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
  No-one uses 400w computers anymore for working though?
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    No-one? Really? What do you do with your computer?
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      I've never owned a computer that uses anywhere near that. Maybe the family computer back in the early 2000s when computers were shared and had their own room.
    - orwin 4y ago
      I mean, three years ago at work i had a 1000W power unit and even when i plugged a TitanX and tried to learn Deep learning i don't think I used more than 200w/h on average (it's still hot, couldn't put my feet near the CU). On the plus side, i learned how to install and debug Cuda.
- Tepix 4y ago
  First of all, your calculation is completely wrong. 400W * 8h would be 3,2kWh which is a lot less than 2000W * 24h = 48kWh per day that is advocated here. Second, the Macbook Pro which i use 8 hours a day has a 140W power supply but I'm sure it uses less than 50W on average. - 50W * 8h = 0,4kWh - 2kW * 24h = 48kWh. The laptop isn't going to be the problem! Heating OTOH uses lots of energy so good insulation is the key.
  - ginko 4y ago
    It's shocking how hard of a time people have distinguishing watts from watt hours. Even in a forum aimed at technical people.
    - Bud 4y ago
      Not that shocking. About half of American society was unable to figure out why masks and social distancing were helpful during a pandemic.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      I like to use the analogy of fuel tank capacity (kWh) vs. engine output --- horsepower for Americans and most Brits (kW). Power is a flow, it's the rate of energy usage (or output) over time. More power means higher top speed, or stronger acceleration, or hill-climbing ability, or towing capacity. Energy is a stock, it's a total quantity of potential. A bigger fuel tank won't make your car any faster, but it will determine how much range you have. Since appliances, equipment, generators, etc., consume or produce watts of power, it's handy to consider how much energy this represents by simply multiplying watts by time, by default, hours.
- benj111 4y ago
  On top of misusing watts and watt hours as already pointed out. The issue of computers is the embodied energy in actually producing it. So you're better off just using your existing pc for longer, that will make more difference.
- nicolaslem 4y ago
  The average person doesn't use desktop computers anymore, hell the younger generation barely use laptops. Also a high end desktop computer might pull 400 W from the wall while gaming, but that's not something the average person does 8 hours a day. Light work on a desktop computer with a monitor should be around 80 W on average.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Measure is the best way to know how much energy actually used. Let's check your own computer.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Well, first of all, the 400w is a limit, not a _target_. A computer with a 400w power supply does not generally run at 400w. If it did, you'd notice it; that's not an insignificant amount of heat. However, more importantly, you've misread the article significantly: > which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) > Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh So well within budget, then.
- FabHK 4y ago
  400W is, well, 20% of 2000W.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. The average person doesn't have a desktop, let alone a 400w one, it's all phones and laptops these days
- daneel_w 4y ago
  A 400 watt power supply doesn't consume 400 watts by just being powered on. It just means it can deliver 400 watts of power if necessary, sometimes briefly, sometimes continuously.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Much the same as a 400 horsepower automobile isn't generating that output all the time, but can reach a peak output of that amount. In the case of power supplies, both total capacity and durability are indicated by the power rating. I don't know what current thinking is, but recall when overspeccing the power supply was often recommended for reliability and cooling considerations.
    - daneel_w 4y ago
      I remember the old recommendation from the early 2000s, but I'm not sure if it's still "a thing". Switched-mode power supplies reach closer to their nominal efficiency rating the more current you pull through them. I have an anecdote: many years ago when Bitcoin/altcoin mining on GPUs was still feasible I ran a rig with a 335 watt TDP graphics card, and the whole setup measured 360-something watts at the wall outlet. It ran 24/7 for months on a 400 watt PSU, without problems.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  That's an astonishingly small minded and fractally incorrect take. First 400W is peak not average. Second Wh isn't W. 400W is 400/2000ths of 2000W Third 500mW can provide a reasonable amount of compute for most tasks as evidenced by my 2 yo phone being a perfectly usable desktop when plugged into a monitor. The 10W to run peripherals vastly exceeds the compute needs and is mostly in the form of light being absorbed by an lcd. Before that I had a 6yo laptop that used around 3-10W including screen. Phone hardware is perfectly capable of gaming, local document editing, compiling, and even running small scientific workloads. Fourth you're completely ignoring embodied energy, transport and climate control which are the things that actually matter. Fifth. You can do things that aren't sit at a computer. Sixth. A high power desktop isn't that common even amongst people who play new AAA games a lot. Seventh. The attitude of 'we can't possibly deviate even miniscully from having everyone on earth follow my exact lifestyle (even the 90% of people who have no access to it) right down to one particularly wasteful aspect of it that has only been around for fifteen years in its current most wasteful form' is unfathomably small minded and entitled.
skot9000 4y ago
This wouldn’t really be necessary if we had cleaner power generation.
- bwestergard 4y ago
  It's a quantitative question. How much cleaner can each energy source be made, what is a feasible energy mix, and which ecological and climate constraints are we trying to stay within? It seems 2000-watt vision provides realistic answers to these questions that are compatible with an overall improvement in human well being in the developed countries.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Yeah, this talk of 'energy' rather than 'pollution' seems to be growing recently. Presumably some attempt to capitalise on the Russian gas crisis to undermine net zero goals and keep fossil fuels burning a tiny bit longer. This group seems to get it as they're talking about reducing Primary Energy without reducing standard of living (mostly done by "electrifying everything") but I don't think that would be clear to most readers, who will just ignore the "same standard of living bit" and feel they are being oppressed.
  - prottog 4y ago
    > most readers, who will just ignore the "same standard of living bit" and feel they are being oppressed. I think this is an uncharitable view, but that aside, is that not a reasonable assumption for "most readers"? This group is exceptional in that they explicitly state maintaining the same standard of living as a goal. In what I know of most modern climate-related discourse, there are very few such mentions.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      No it's not a reasonable assumption. Which specific groups are you aware of that think dealing with climate change by phasing out burning fossil fuels will reduce standards of living? I think you'll find a common funding source behind them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thot_experiment 4y ago
This is absolutely doable, I've been off-grid for almost 3 years now with a very minimal setup and for the most part I have no complaints outside of a couple weeks in the dead of winter, and the one week that gets really really hot in the summer. I'm not sure how to calculate my total embodied energy but in terms of electricity I have never used more than 7kWh in a single day, which works out 300W and includes all of my computing needs as well as refrigeration, lighting, minor heating/cooling, some small amount of cooking and at least a couple lattes every day. On the worst day in winter my consumption is usually ~1kWh, limited by solar production.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Sounds interesting, are you writing down what you are doing somewhere?
- brianwawok 4y ago
  So easy enough if building a new small house or a cabin. The US has many many houses with 4000+ square feet, and no good way to heat it cool outside if AC and a furnace. Are we going to bulldoze all existing houses to meet this goal? What’s the impact of that to the environment?
  - Forge36 4y ago
    We can require higher standards for new houses. Renovating existing houses will need to focus on the worst ones first. Possibly at sale time.
  - evilduck 4y ago
    Less dramatically they could also close some vents and doors.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Four thousand square feet? That's more than ten times the area of the apartment I own back in the UK. Big is generally easier to keep warm than small thanks to the square cube law, but even in pathological cases it's never harder when scaling up. Even assuming that 4000 sq ft is spread over 4 levels, that's a ground area of just under 93 m^2, and even in Anchor Point Alaska [0] with 15% panels, that roof can make more on average than the other poster says they're using. [0] This map doesn't go as far north as Anchorage: https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world
hedora 4y ago
Huh. We're absolutely crushing this at our house. We averaged 486 watts per person in the worst month this year so far. I cheat and charge the car at work, but even when I commute every day (40 miles round trip, half-mile elevation change), it's only half our energy consumption, so we're easily below 1kw per person. I'm not including embodied carbon of stuff we buy, but still... We did buy energy efficient everything: Induction range, hybrid heat pump water heater, spent extra on insulation, heat pump furnace, LED lights, medium-wattage desktop computer, high MPGe EV, etc. However, we live in a normal US house with few compromises (though we don't need air conditioning or heating most days, due to the local climate). It makes me wonder how the average US household is at 12KW. That's roughly two of our house's air conditioners running full blast, per person, 24 hours a day.
- codefined 4y ago
  The number also appears to include 'upstream' energy usage, things like how much energy was used to transport food to you. How much energy to produce the items you consume. I imagine raw household electrical usage is only a small fragment of this.
- johngalt 4y ago
  > wonder how the average US household is at 12KW If you've eliminated transportation and heating that is #1 and #2 for most people's energy consumption. Third place would likely be air-conditioning, and you've eliminated that too.
  - hedora 4y ago
    I’m including transportation and heating/cooling. Even if we kept the thermostat at 120F in the winter and 32F in the summer, we’d still be under 3kw per person (due to our furnace being on 100% of the time and never reaching temperature).
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  Food (and discretionary transport) is the second-highest number (1100w of 5100w) in their Swiss energy use table, between heat and electricity.
mikewarot 4y ago
There's more to this than just energy, we're all about to get a very strong lesson in the fact that fertilizers require fossil fuels as chemical feedstock. The Ukraine conflict has already lead to a steep drop off in the availability of fertilizers for many countries across the globe. Those will result in greatly reduced harvests and food scarcity. The next few years are to be very rough, and nothing can be done to fix it. Deglobalization will make things even worse for countries that can't produce or purchase enough fuel, food or fertilizers.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Luckily you can make them from sunlight as well (either through PV or sustainable agriculture) Unluckily none of our governments seem to have had the forethought to either make the massive capital investment required for the former or the even bigger labour and knowledge investment to do the latter when this became obviously important.
knoebber 4y ago
I'm living/working remotely off grid with a solar panels, batteries, and a 2000w inverter. It's comfortable. I usually have a few lights, the wifi router, a monitor, laptop charger, and a fridge plugged in. This comes out between 100w and 300w, so I have room to spare for bigger items like power tools. I do cheat by using a propane range for cooking and wood for heat. At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bob1029 4y ago
  > At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are. I know for a fact that the induction cooktop is the epitome of efficiency. Virtually every watt that passes through the switching electronics and coils winds up somewhere in the cookware. I've got a Breville control freak and a 750w microwave oven as my emergency cooking gear for when I am stuck on solar battery backup.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Have you looked into home biogas digesters? They can turn waste into cooking fuel.
  - knoebber 4y ago
    I haven't, I'll check them out, thanks!
- bombcar 4y ago
  Pressure and slow cookers are beasts for energy efficiency - pressure winning because they’re on for shorter time, but slow cookers can do things too (especially if you have “waste solar” during the day).
bob1029 4y ago
I had a non-optional experience along this axis living thru the 2021 Texas grid crisis. Being in the gulf coast region automatically makes it nearly impossible to fit a 2kW budget during the summer (unless you live in a large walk-in freezer), but during the winter I was able to get down to 800 watts continuous for a period of a few days. This included my computer, fridge, some lights and central furnace blower. The furnace is kind of cheating though - replacing the natural gas with a heat pump would instantly blow my 2kW budget all on its own. That said, you could probably get really close if you tried to hit the target with a modern heat pump and good insulation throughout. The only reason I voluntarily subjected myself to this was because I was being billed $9/kWH thru Griddy (a wholesale, real-time rate provider) during the entire, multi-day incident. I did run a one-off load of laundry that probably cost me ~$50. Requiring use of variable rate energy providers and forcing consumers to adapt habits to the available resources seems like one way to get people to pay attention to how much energy various things consume. It also seems like an effective way to mitigate one-off generation shortfalls.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  I come from a country where the average temperature is the same as in a refrigerator. I sometimes think it would be a lot easier to just move most people away from here... at least those living in big badly insulated electrically heated houses. Some pensioners actually do move to Spain, maybe visit the summer cottages every now and then (when it's too hot in Spain and the cottage doesn't need heating). Birds certainly follow the seasons. I guess the same applies to very hot climates. You could move away for the summer at least, if not completely.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    In both places you may get most of the benefits from moving down - underground rooms mitigate temperatures.
  - etothepii 4y ago
    An interesting question springs to my mind. How does the carbon omissions of having a summer and winter house and flying between them compare to heating the summer house in winter or cooling the winter house in summer.
johngalt 4y ago
Aiming at the wrong goal. A "10kw society" on solar or nuclear is better than "2kw society" on coal.
- titzer 4y ago
  They are independent variables. In practice the "10kw society" solar/nuclear society that economic-growth-above-all people push means "2kw coal + 4kw solar + 4kw nuclear". Growth is just cover for not replacing the dirty sources.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Because they specify Primary Energy, coal does get penalised more than solar or nuclear, so that part is kind of implied, plus it's from the 80s. Generally negawatts (watts you don't use due to efficiency or insulation) have always been the cheapest watts, that's only recently become less true because of solar price declines.
  - etothepii 4y ago
    It did mention getting 500W from carbon based means. I'm in the lets use as much green energy as we want camp. The hair-shirt stuff from many in the green movement is the main reason I don't take them seriously. Agreed that GW and sea level rise are existential issues for coastal communities (and possibly the human race as a whole) but why cap energy usage from Nuclear, Wind and Solar. I'd sign up for a 100W cap on carbon faster than a 10kW cap on energy.
    - immibis 4y ago
      We do still need to avoid a civilization where every square inch is plastered with solar panels used for bitcoin mining.
      - etothepii 4y ago
        Fortunately this is unlikely since: - Nuclear doesn't take up that much space. - BitCoin/crypto mining is so wasteful someone will think up a better idea. I'm sure if it.
mtmmtm 4y ago
I live in Sweden. I have a large house. It consumes 14 MWh/year. I have not sacrificed anything. I use a heat pump (using energy from the ground).
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  I wish someone would setup neighborhood geothermal heat pumps as a heating utility or coop model. It's so expensive for everyone to bore into the ground for this.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Modern new builds of housing do this, at least in some countries. At that stage you can not bother installing gas pipes and come out financially ahead. Though air source are getting so good that places that require ground source are getting smaller.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  Similar situation here, but in Finland. I use 14 MWh of /electricity/ each year (medium-sized house, three-person household). That excludes the firewood that we use for heating the sauna, and to keep the house warm during winter, when the cold is too much for the heat pumps to manage. Oh, and travel. In order to reach the goal in the article, a three-person household would need to restrict energy use to 52560 KWh/year, /including/ all those things AND the production of everything that household consumes. I can't see how it's even remotely possible with today's technology and societal climate. That being said, there's no harm in researching and developing more efficient technologies. I don't even want to think about how bad the energy crisis would be if we were all still using 60w/40w lightbulbs.
Havoc 4y ago
Comments here seem to be missing a key detail >including embodied energy Which is >Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself. I'm far below the 2k limit on mains energy usage, but I suspect after factoring in above it'll be comically far off. Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...
- bombcar 4y ago
  You can get a rough estimate based on cost (not perfect but it can be usable) and then own the thing long enough that the energy cost to make drops to negligible. A made in USA toolset from USA sourced materials is unlikely to cost less than the energy needed to make it. Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.
  - netjiro 4y ago
    > Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner. When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Wouldn't years of function (potentially scaled with remaining effectiveness) he a better proxy where it's calculable?
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Isn’t that already approximated by the purchase price of a used item? There’s some weird transients where a 45-day old car is artificially cheaper (because why would someone sell a 45-day-old car if it wasn’t a lemon?), but that seems to average out pretty quickly. It might slightly underprice used electronics, but if the alternative destination is a landfill, that slight underpricing seems fine to me.
hoseja 4y ago
I want a personal cold fusion reactor and to be a 2000 MW person, not this unviable milquetoast degrowth.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Unviable degrowth or unliveable planet
  - prottog 4y ago
    Degrowth will absolutely remove more enjoyable life-years from the planet than even maintaining the status quo, let alone achieving technological progress that will allow carbon-free 2000MW per person. The latter is certainly preferable to the former.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      > let alone achieving technological progress that will allow carbon-free No guarantees that we are on that path, if it was the case we'd already all be running on nuclear but we made the opposite choice, in Europe for example because gas is cheaper, cheaper = more profit = growth = better and we all see where it got us But let's continue with out ultra wasteful ways of life, surely when China and India catch up with EU/US level of waste the world will be saved
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Yeah. Screw this 'climate change' nonsense. Let's see if we can vaporize the mantle by 2100. The second law exists and climate change is just the first of many symptoms of running face first into it. 2kW is a sensible limit for living on a planet and having it still be a planet worth living on. You might push it up an order of magnitude or two without cooking humans by fully transforming most habitable land and carefully rejecting 30% of the sunlight whilst using the rest, but that would destroy most ecosystems. If you want a barren rock to bake, go live on the moon.
  - hoseja 4y ago
aqwsde 4y ago
Oh, this is not a Michael Jackson reference ...
- aqwsde 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/VA5hpF7PH1Q https://youtu.be/VA5hpF7PH1Q
ksimukka 4y ago
Currently averaging about 9.75kWh per day during spring/summer/fall. However, come winter the max average will probably be 50kWh per day. My latitude is about 60 (59.9139) degrees north and electric heating panels don’t seem to be the most efficient when it is below freezing. With improved insulation and a modern heat pump, I’d be curious to see how much energy we would consume.
- niklasrde 4y ago
  Assuming you're talking about heating & electricity in your accommodation only? The vision here encompasses all energy use if I understand correctly.
  - ksimukka 4y ago
    Yes, I’m referring to electricity as it is my largest source of energy use. Aside from that, accounting for the energy used to produce the food and consumables is somewhat challenging, so I don’t really consider it. But I suppose it would be worth trying to guesstimate? I’m not that familiar with the 2000-watt society.
aaron695 4y ago
FabHK 4y ago
Some people here seem to be confusing electricity usage and energy usage. As the Wikipedia article highlights, the average Swiss uses about 5kW (that's 5kWh per hour), of which only about 10% are electricity. Similarly, about 10% are car usage, or about 0.5kW. If we take the average car to develop on average 50kW, and assume an efficiency of 1 (for the sake of the argument), then they use a car around 1% of the time or about 15 minutes a day (less if efficiency is <1, as it is). ETA some more reference points: A human eats around 10,000kJ per day = 86400 seconds, let's call it 100,000s, so 10,000kJ/100ks = 100J/s = 100W, about as much as a bright lightbulb (the old fashioned ones, not LED). The sun gives us about 1kW of power per square meter. Say photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of 10%, and the sun shines 6 hours a day (=25%), then we are talking around 25W/m². So, the average Swiss uses the energy corresponding to about 50 people working for him or 200m² of PV, the average US citizen of 120 people or 480m² (5000 sq feet), and the goal here is to push it down to 20 people or 80m² PV. Great reference: the books by Vaclav Smil, eg. How the World Really Works.
- markvdb 4y ago
  15 kWh of electricity for 100 km of car transportation is realistic for a defensively driven modest electric car. At 500W, that's about 80 km of car use per day. In an electric Hummer or similar, your car energy budget would be gone in 35 km. In a fossil fuel Hummer, getting to the bakery 10 km away might be possible, but only one way.
- phkahler 4y ago
  A good EV will get about 3 miles per kWhr. So 20kwh recharged over night will get you 60 miles per day. IMHO EVs need MUCH larger batteries to facilitate longer range driving or deviations from a daily routine, but that doesn't change the typical energy usage much.
  - neon_electro 4y ago
    How much longer range driving do you personally need? I drove a 2018 Chevy Bolt EV 12,000 miles per year on average for four years (totaled it this past Memorial Day weekend). Never got stranded/ran out of juice. Plenty of fast charging (55kW doesn't even reach 1 C (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rate) so I can basically fast charge with no concern for my long-term battery health), plenty of slow charging (1kW on my home 120V EVSE), 60kWh was more than enough for trips to Montréal, Vermont, and Chicago (from Philadelphia) over those four years.
daneel_w 4y ago
> ... (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) ... That's just over 1400 kWh per month. As a reference of personal and immediate consumption, most central- and north European apartment dwellers consume around 2000 kWh per year. Anecdote: my household - two adults, two terrible cats, dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer, no TV, two bicycles and feet instead of a car - have consumed 160-170 kWh per month steadily, around the year, for as long as I can recall.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fuzzy2 4y ago
  Maybe continue reading a little…? > The concept addresses not only personal or household energy use, but the total for the whole society, including embodied energy, divided by the population. Filling up my car’s gas tank once is roughly 444 kWh in fuel value alone. Add to that gas refining, logistics and whatnot.
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    I read all of it, not just a little of it. I'm commenting on personal, immediate consumption.
    - fuzzy2 4y ago
      Before you edited your comment, it was purely about average consumption of grid electricity. However, that’s not even the “personal, immediate consumption”. It’s just… grid electricity. You eat. You have clothes, devices, machines that had to be made and shipped. You heat your dwelling. Everything counts. It’s sometimes hard to quantify what this means, a lot of amortization is always going on.
      - daneel_w 4y ago
        Please don't go on the Internet and tell other people what they meant. My comment says APARTMENT DWELLERS for a reason, to contrast with e.g. house owners, whose needs are vastly different. I edited and added/clarified with "personal immediate consumption" because either you were nitpicking or I wasn't clear enough with "apartment dwellers".
stephc_int13 4y ago
Watt could be used as kind of universal physically based, end-game-level currency, sounds better than crypto or fiat IMHO.
- nine_k 4y ago
  As envisioned by sci-fi authors like Heinlein. The only problem is storage. Carrying a wallet with a few MJ in it may be just hazardous, even if transferring funds is 100% efficient (using superconductivity). So any realistic scheme would include some tokens, with associated energy stored / generated elsewhere. More realistically, these tokens are associated with the economic and military might of the issuing party; this is similar to what modern fiat money is.
- pjc50 4y ago
  To a great extent this is what the oil economy is like.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  It's bitcoin. Bitcoin is electricity money. The universal electro-dollar. Because the miner reward for securing the monetary network is intrinsically linked to electricity availability, there will always be fundamental link between cost of electricity and value of bitcoin.
  - immibis 4y ago
    No, this is nonsense. In reality, there is a link between cost of electricity, value of bitcoin, hashing rewards, and electricity used in hashing. And the dependent variable is the electricity used in hashing - not the cost of electricity, nor the value of bitcoin.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Naive utopian solution: Distribute a fixed amount of energy credits equally among the population on a regular basis and let the market determine what is best to do with them. Peg the amount of such credits to the dirtiness of the global energy mix, including transportation, gas usage, etc. such that, if we clean up our energy usage this month, everybody gets to spend more credits next month. Eventually we have more tokens than we know what to do with because our energy supply is nearly free of emissions. There may still be some niche uses for carbon-emitting fossil energy (running helicopters to inspect electrical transmission lines, for example) but market forces will have pushed them to the absolute minimum level. This is of course all a way of getting everyone on board with our real, material situation, which is that there is a finite amount of carbon that we can afford to dump into the atmosphere in the immediate next few centuries. This is basically just cap-and-trade with extra steps but has the advantage of novelty, and that it is graspable by the average voter who (rightfully) views cap-and-trade schemes as being 1) really boring and 2) mainly a way for Wall Street types to scam money out of productive enterprises. Under this scheme, we can generate huge public support for green energy schemes since each new watt of generation installed this month will mean everyone is better off in real terms next month.
restore_creole_ 4y ago
A Tesla Model 3, the most efficient EV, uses 240 Wh/mile. You could not drive more than 8.3 miles without exceeding the 2 kWh/h.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  You get all day to average 2kW, or 48kWh/day, or 200 miles/day [if you spent no other energy, of course]. If you drove 20 miles, that’s 10% of your energy budget for the day, even if you did it all in a single hour.
  - slackfan 4y ago
    Might as well just use a horse and buggy at that point.
    - neon_electro 4y ago
      Personally I prefer a bicycle if the use case and distance is right!
- mrtksn 4y ago
  If it was possible to move multiple persons with electric vehicles and if those people lived in close proximity that don't require driving long distances everyday then just going to the shop wouldn't exceed the goal.
  - neon_electro 4y ago
    Sounds logical to me! Put more people in the car and the total energy budget for car travel goes up, right?
    - mrtksn 4y ago
      The budget goes up linearly by person but the cost behaves differently because you don't have to add the same amount of gear for each person.
moralestapia 4y ago
>which pictures the average citizen of energy poor countries reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts Why the distinction? Why not all citizens?
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Nah. Sorry but I don't like it at all. Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one. But, let's make sure that the production, storage and distribution of energy, in all its forms, is sustainable, and available to every country. The trend is already here: cheaper than ever solar and wind energy, cheaper and cheaper energy storage, new energy breakthroughs, promising ones like nuclear, etc. It means the world will be able to soon produce much more energy, using only sustainable sources. Let's make energy available to everyone, at an affordable rate. That's my dream. Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Couldn't have said it better. At a certain point--and I think some are past this point--it becomes a death cult of "any energy used is evil."
- manoDev 4y ago
  > Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one. You know this really means “let’s keep the average per capita consumption high, so I can keep spending the 10x more than a third world citizen” right? > Not a communist-like starvation of sorts. Rational usage of resources is very far from “starvation”.
- seper8 4y ago
  Agreed 100% Article from MIT regarding Solar energy: "The potential is enormous, says MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable — at least, for the lifetime of the sun. "It's finite, but we're talking billions of years," Taylor says. "
- tims33 4y ago
  Totally agree. I think the premise of maintaining quality of life while dramatically reducing energy consumption won't bear out. There is no successful path to stopping global warming that dramatically drives up energy cost or reduces quality of life. Plentiful zero carbon energy is the path forward.
concordDance 4y ago
This seems very misguided. The problem isn't energy usage its the side effects of the energy production. If everyone was using a megawatt but this was in the form of some factory on the moon being incredibly inefficient as they make the new Must Have MoonRockTM that gets teleported to your living room this would actually be just fine.
- Bud 4y ago
  Not misguided. Because here in the real world, both now and for the foreseeable future, especially the near future in which we have to urgently deal with climate change impacts, energy production does indeed have those side effects.
  - condour75 4y ago
    Solar is getting cheaper by the day, batteries are getting cheaper and more efficient by the day, and there's a ton of money pouring into research. Maybe I'm crazy, but I can see a future, maybe a few decades from now, when power is "too cheap to meter" because of renewables.
    - BanazirGalbasi 4y ago
      Electricity use is only one part of energy consumption. Transportation costs, production costs, and even food generation are all included in the umbrella. Also, "costs" aren't just referring to dollars spent, but also environmental impact. Having cheap electricity is only a small part of the equation, and barely a relevant one at that.
      - jjk166 4y ago
        Energy is roughly transferable - if you have cheap electricity you can use it to produce cheap process heat, synthetic fuels, food, environmental cleanup, etc. You get enough solar panels for a low enough price and all the other problems become trivial.
    - jl6 4y ago
anonu 4y ago
48kWh per person per day? That seems like a huge amount. I live in an a place where we have to run the AC almost all day and we use less than this along with all the other electric appliances.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> I live in an a place where we have to run the AC almost all day and we use less than this along with all the other electric appliances. They're including transportation costs.
- function_seven 4y ago
  It's all energy consumption by a person, not just their residential electrical usage. So the gas you may use to heat your water, or the gasoline in your car, or the fraction of the street light outside your home. The energy that runs your local grocery store, hair salon, or Chick-fil-a. The energy that went into growing your food, making your clothing, and shipping your monthly Chewy.com order. 48kWh is a much smaller amount when it includes all of our per capita economic activity.
outside1234 4y ago
Its not about the watts - it is about the composition of those watts. You could use 2000Wh of electricity in Texas, but that would still only be 29% zero carbon. You could use 5000Wh of electricity in Norway, but 99% of that would be zero carbon. This is superior to the 2000Wh approach.
megaman821 4y ago
Wow, I just calculated my direct energy usage. Now I live in Texas where it is hot so I only required heating 2-3 months of the year, and have one electric and one gas car. * Electricity - 13,000 kWh * Natural Gas - 7,000 kWh * Gasoline - 14,000 kWh Burning stuff is just so wildly inefficient. A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  > A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half. That's more due to the seemingly magical properties of heat pumps producing 2-3x as much heat as energy input. Burning nat gas to create heat in your home is nearly 100% efficient, which is why resistant electric heaters generally can't compete. Though resistant heaters might be more carbon neutral depending on your local grid. Of course, burning stuff to do mechanical work is quite inefficient, especially in a small scale engine like a car. If we must burn stuff, we should do it is massive thermal plants that have the money and expertise to squeeze out the maximum efficiency possible, and deliver electricity to do the small scale work, like driving.
agumonkey 4y ago
It's staggering how old these topics were. Club of Rome: 72, never heard of it until few years ago. 2kW society .. 1998, first time I hear the name, even with all the fuss about climate change, it didn't hit my radar. So strange.
narrator 4y ago
Everybody move to the tropics, get used to the heat and ride motor scooters just like India and Bangladesh. Cold climates that require a lot of energy just to live in are going to empty out in the next decades. I predict a massive wave of immigration from Europe, Australia, and Canada to Latin America. There are already a ton of people from these countries showing up in Mexico because of Covid restrictions, easy immigration for first-worlders, and a lower cost of living. I suspect the upcoming winter of deprivation and economic crisis in Europe and other cold regions will send a bunch more economic/cold refugees that way.
- konschubert 4y ago
  The facts disprove your hypothesis. Also, climate change.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Australia has millions of km^2 in the subtropics. Why would they move due to heating requirements? Also there will be many, many climate refugees from floods, famines, droughts, super storms, fires, dust storms, and so on. Most of these issues are much harder to overcome than adding insulation, living in a reasonably sized home, sharing a wall or two, installing a heat pump, and putting on a jumper.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Unless someone breaks thermodynamics, there is really no way to reduce to 2000W without reducing consumption of goods by a factor of 10 in the west. That means a new phone every 20 years instead of 2 (global mobile device supply chain is huge), getting new shoes every 10 years instead of 1, getting a new car every 50 years instead of 5, etc.
- wazoox 4y ago
  That's perfectly fine, let's build durable goods. I still have some tableware from my great-grandmother, more than 100 years old. It works just as well as new plates and forks. But more than that, we won't have the choice. Thermodynamics will constrain us sooner or later.
- lultimouomo 4y ago
  According to the article, the US us by far (very far) the worst offender and yet it is only 6x over the target, not 10. Switzerland, which does not strike me as a country with a low standard of living, is 2.5x over the target. Europe 3x.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    In terms of globalization supply chain, the west has similar power utilizations. US has much larger homes and drives far more inefficiently due to individual vehicle usage instead of mass transit. Reducing those by 6x would be a huge change.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Or just get rid of the lawn, beef, the 'great room', and 95% of cars (and keep the rest for 30 years). Then make the electronics last at least 5 years, and you're well past target.
thereisnospork 4y ago
I can't help but feel like this is an ass-backwards approach to the problem, we should be trying to add a zero to the (greenly produced) energy available for each person instead of bean-counting. Imagine if this was our approach to internet bandwidth? "No you don't need more bandwidth, just compress your geocites webpages by an extra 5x - that's the future of the internet we want to see!" We could produce far more energy than we could ever save by cutting. It is not an accident that the historical chart of quality of life vs. energy consumption per capita is up and to the right.
programmer_dude 4y ago
India experienced a massive heat wave last summer. My electricity consumption exceeded the average US per month figures for the first time (>900 KWh/month). Bulk of it went to airconditioning. Needless to say I am deeply concerned about the times ahead. I am pretty sure increase in electricity consumption is only going to aggravate things further.
kkfx 4y ago
It's a bit hard condensate the concept in an HN comment but I'll try: - the "Green" new deal, originally have imagined (with a classic managerial fallacy) a world made up by single-family homes in places with enough Sun for p.v., BEVs, a little need to move and no industries. Perhaps because this is the way some manager's live and they call it sobriety respect of others who do differently. Than they discover people's in crowd then to behave in stupid ways, like Le Bon describe in his masterpiece BUT not that stupid so grid-connected p.v. without stationary and/or on-wheel storage because cutting electricity bill with p.v. for a significant amount of locations on earth pay back, the rest do not. As a result electricity grids are more and more unstable. Keeping the frequency is always hard and we have chosen to made "large enough" grids to have a "slowly changing mean load" slow enough that big power plants can keep up the frequency; when p.v/eolic start to be big enough the power peaks they produce make's the grid frequency skyrocket or fall too fast for large power plants to lower/step up their generator power. Not counting the fact that most people do not live in single-family homes where a p.v. system and an on-wheel battery can live with; - some politicians who have blindly follow the initial vague dream have decided the answer is "reduce energy consumption" and have even invented ways to reduce it who actually increase the amount of consumed energy like regulating "how many hour to run the heating" vs "let the system run quietly 24/7; - since most people DO NOT live on nor have p.v. anyway most home appliance are NOT designed to maximize self consumption witch means run full power as quick as possible when energy from the Sun is available vs try to spread the load as much as possible to keep the grid load as stable as possible. As a result most p.v. systems instead of target maximizing self-consumption target to produce as many kWh as possible. As a result p.v. systems are LESS interesting and the grid is more strained. A simple example: most hot-water systems try to run few minutes every hours instead of all at once on input. To keep a grid load stable running few minutes every hours and have small quantity of water to heat is IDEAL, you consume less energy and keep the load stable on average. On p.v. it's the exact opposite. Since the Sun shine for limited period of time but when it do it offer much energy what it count is heating as much as possible large amount of water to have enough hot water for the rest of the day, possible for more than one day. Essentially NO system on sale offer such simple regulation, while some offer "grid-backed" regulations like grid energy meters who told "run" or "do not run" depending on current grid load but in ways that are hard to be used on p.v. even if they are very similar. Another example: most appliance start to consume from 0 to max in a snap. For the grid is not an issue, the single appliance consume a very small fraction of power of a power plant and on average that's just noise. Small p.v. inverters on contrary have issues keeping up such peaks, who happen to be big at micro-grid scale. As a result many appliance like ovens who try to use peaks to reduce the total amount of kWh consumed they run very bad on p.v. in self-consumption and inverter stress terms. Again: some appliance try to run for longer time to reduce the amount of peak power usage, while on p.v. it's better run quickly to run an appliance after the other in the limited amount of time the Sun shine and so on. Long story short if some really want a new deal: - ALL BEVs MUST have an open standard data port (no matter if canbus or something else) to talk to any p.v. inverter on sale allowing to do the same stationary battery inverters and batteries do: charge ONLY from p.v., offering power from battery to the home to a maximum DOD if the grid do work, another threshold if case of grid blackout and parameters to tell the car ensuring a minimum SOC for a certain point in time allowing to charge from the grid if needed; - BEV need to cost equally of their correspondent ICE not pushing up ICE and fuel price to makes EV convenient; - incentive de-urbanization in the sense from a multi-apartments building (sorry I do not know how to name such buildings in English) to a single family home if you live there for a certain amount of years; - impose a simple and cheap communication mode to power-hungry home appliances like simple modbus to allow their control from a central home system, like a home server/a p.v. inverter etc and allowing communication to tell how much power they going to need to run, in the next few seconds etc to allow inverters compensate peaks less hardly; - incentives the design of systems targeting maximizing self-consumption instead of grid-tied "metering" like "I give X kWh, get back Y and so...". Asking for "sobriety" is like asking do not panic on a sinking ship, the rebound effect is higher then else.

2000-Watt Society

194 points by privong 4y ago

I don't see how this is possible with modern technology, unless you limit people to low power laptops or chrome books. If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh [1]. That's already 1.2kwh over, without accounting for anything else. I see the solution as providing renewable electricity at low cost, rather than reducing the amount of electricity. [1] https://www.inchcalculator.com/watts-to-kwh-calculator/ https://www.inchcalculator.com/watts-to-kwh-calculator/

mech987 4y ago
You are confusing the watt and the watt-hour. Running a 2000 watt load for 24 hours will use 48,000 watt-hours (48 kilowatt-hours).
smoldesu 4y ago
Your desktop is not going to spend 8 hours running at max TDP, even if you're gaming or doing CAD work. The majority of that time it will be close to idle, pulling no more than 40w from the wall (and thats if you have a poorly optimized system).
bwestergard 4y ago
Watts are a unit of energy per unit time. So not like a fixed budget in dollars, but rather a recurring budget in dollars per hour. Obviously, our energy use varies a great deal over time (just as our monetary spending tends to), so we can smooth that out (amortize it) to get a rough idea of our average rate of energy use. If you use a 400 watt computer all of the time your personal remaining energy budget is 1600 watts. I use a computer around 10 hours a day during the week, and three or four on weekend days (so around a third of the time). Amortized, that means I would be using on average around 133 watts on computing, if I used such a desktop. But I actually use a Thinkpad T420, and its consumption averages out to around 30 watts when in use (so amortized to 10 watts).
PopAlongKid 4y ago
I just checked my HP Pavilion business-class desktop purchase a couple of years ago, it has a 180W power supply.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
No-one uses 400w computers anymore for working though?
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  No-one? Really? What do you do with your computer?
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    I've never owned a computer that uses anywhere near that. Maybe the family computer back in the early 2000s when computers were shared and had their own room.
  - orwin 4y ago
    I mean, three years ago at work i had a 1000W power unit and even when i plugged a TitanX and tried to learn Deep learning i don't think I used more than 200w/h on average (it's still hot, couldn't put my feet near the CU). On the plus side, i learned how to install and debug Cuda.
Tepix 4y ago
First of all, your calculation is completely wrong. 400W * 8h would be 3,2kWh which is a lot less than 2000W * 24h = 48kWh per day that is advocated here. Second, the Macbook Pro which i use 8 hours a day has a 140W power supply but I'm sure it uses less than 50W on average. - 50W * 8h = 0,4kWh - 2kW * 24h = 48kWh. The laptop isn't going to be the problem! Heating OTOH uses lots of energy so good insulation is the key.
- ginko 4y ago
  It's shocking how hard of a time people have distinguishing watts from watt hours. Even in a forum aimed at technical people.
  - Bud 4y ago
    Not that shocking. About half of American society was unable to figure out why masks and social distancing were helpful during a pandemic.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    I like to use the analogy of fuel tank capacity (kWh) vs. engine output --- horsepower for Americans and most Brits (kW). Power is a flow, it's the rate of energy usage (or output) over time. More power means higher top speed, or stronger acceleration, or hill-climbing ability, or towing capacity. Energy is a stock, it's a total quantity of potential. A bigger fuel tank won't make your car any faster, but it will determine how much range you have. Since appliances, equipment, generators, etc., consume or produce watts of power, it's handy to consider how much energy this represents by simply multiplying watts by time, by default, hours.
benj111 4y ago
On top of misusing watts and watt hours as already pointed out. The issue of computers is the embodied energy in actually producing it. So you're better off just using your existing pc for longer, that will make more difference.
nicolaslem 4y ago
The average person doesn't use desktop computers anymore, hell the younger generation barely use laptops. Also a high end desktop computer might pull 400 W from the wall while gaming, but that's not something the average person does 8 hours a day. Light work on a desktop computer with a monitor should be around 80 W on average.
fomine3 4y ago
Measure is the best way to know how much energy actually used. Let's check your own computer.
rsynnott 4y ago
> If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Well, first of all, the 400w is a limit, not a _target_. A computer with a 400w power supply does not generally run at 400w. If it did, you'd notice it; that's not an insignificant amount of heat. However, more importantly, you've misread the article significantly: > which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) > Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh So well within budget, then.
FabHK 4y ago
400W is, well, 20% of 2000W.
lm28469 4y ago
> If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. The average person doesn't have a desktop, let alone a 400w one, it's all phones and laptops these days
daneel_w 4y ago
A 400 watt power supply doesn't consume 400 watts by just being powered on. It just means it can deliver 400 watts of power if necessary, sometimes briefly, sometimes continuously.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Much the same as a 400 horsepower automobile isn't generating that output all the time, but can reach a peak output of that amount. In the case of power supplies, both total capacity and durability are indicated by the power rating. I don't know what current thinking is, but recall when overspeccing the power supply was often recommended for reliability and cooling considerations.
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    I remember the old recommendation from the early 2000s, but I'm not sure if it's still "a thing". Switched-mode power supplies reach closer to their nominal efficiency rating the more current you pull through them. I have an anecdote: many years ago when Bitcoin/altcoin mining on GPUs was still feasible I ran a rig with a 335 watt TDP graphics card, and the whole setup measured 360-something watts at the wall outlet. It ran 24/7 for months on a 400 watt PSU, without problems.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
That's an astonishingly small minded and fractally incorrect take. First 400W is peak not average. Second Wh isn't W. 400W is 400/2000ths of 2000W Third 500mW can provide a reasonable amount of compute for most tasks as evidenced by my 2 yo phone being a perfectly usable desktop when plugged into a monitor. The 10W to run peripherals vastly exceeds the compute needs and is mostly in the form of light being absorbed by an lcd. Before that I had a 6yo laptop that used around 3-10W including screen. Phone hardware is perfectly capable of gaming, local document editing, compiling, and even running small scientific workloads. Fourth you're completely ignoring embodied energy, transport and climate control which are the things that actually matter. Fifth. You can do things that aren't sit at a computer. Sixth. A high power desktop isn't that common even amongst people who play new AAA games a lot. Seventh. The attitude of 'we can't possibly deviate even miniscully from having everyone on earth follow my exact lifestyle (even the 90% of people who have no access to it) right down to one particularly wasteful aspect of it that has only been around for fifteen years in its current most wasteful form' is unfathomably small minded and entitled.

skot9000 4y ago

This wouldn’t really be necessary if we had cleaner power generation.

bwestergard 4y ago
It's a quantitative question. How much cleaner can each energy source be made, what is a feasible energy mix, and which ecological and climate constraints are we trying to stay within? It seems 2000-watt vision provides realistic answers to these questions that are compatible with an overall improvement in human well being in the developed countries.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Yeah, this talk of 'energy' rather than 'pollution' seems to be growing recently. Presumably some attempt to capitalise on the Russian gas crisis to undermine net zero goals and keep fossil fuels burning a tiny bit longer. This group seems to get it as they're talking about reducing Primary Energy without reducing standard of living (mostly done by "electrifying everything") but I don't think that would be clear to most readers, who will just ignore the "same standard of living bit" and feel they are being oppressed.
- prottog 4y ago
  > most readers, who will just ignore the "same standard of living bit" and feel they are being oppressed. I think this is an uncharitable view, but that aside, is that not a reasonable assumption for "most readers"? This group is exceptional in that they explicitly state maintaining the same standard of living as a goal. In what I know of most modern climate-related discourse, there are very few such mentions.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    No it's not a reasonable assumption. Which specific groups are you aware of that think dealing with climate change by phasing out burning fossil fuels will reduce standards of living? I think you'll find a common funding source behind them.

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thot_experiment 4y ago

This is absolutely doable, I've been off-grid for almost 3 years now with a very minimal setup and for the most part I have no complaints outside of a couple weeks in the dead of winter, and the one week that gets really really hot in the summer. I'm not sure how to calculate my total embodied energy but in terms of electricity I have never used more than 7kWh in a single day, which works out 300W and includes all of my computing needs as well as refrigeration, lighting, minor heating/cooling, some small amount of cooking and at least a couple lattes every day. On the worst day in winter my consumption is usually ~1kWh, limited by solar production.

Tepix 4y ago
Sounds interesting, are you writing down what you are doing somewhere?
brianwawok 4y ago
So easy enough if building a new small house or a cabin. The US has many many houses with 4000+ square feet, and no good way to heat it cool outside if AC and a furnace. Are we going to bulldoze all existing houses to meet this goal? What’s the impact of that to the environment?
- Forge36 4y ago
  We can require higher standards for new houses. Renovating existing houses will need to focus on the worst ones first. Possibly at sale time.
- evilduck 4y ago
  Less dramatically they could also close some vents and doors.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Four thousand square feet? That's more than ten times the area of the apartment I own back in the UK. Big is generally easier to keep warm than small thanks to the square cube law, but even in pathological cases it's never harder when scaling up. Even assuming that 4000 sq ft is spread over 4 levels, that's a ground area of just under 93 m^2, and even in Anchor Point Alaska [0] with 15% panels, that roof can make more on average than the other poster says they're using. [0] This map doesn't go as far north as Anchorage: https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world

hedora 4y ago

Huh. We're absolutely crushing this at our house. We averaged 486 watts per person in the worst month this year so far. I cheat and charge the car at work, but even when I commute every day (40 miles round trip, half-mile elevation change), it's only half our energy consumption, so we're easily below 1kw per person. I'm not including embodied carbon of stuff we buy, but still... We did buy energy efficient everything: Induction range, hybrid heat pump water heater, spent extra on insulation, heat pump furnace, LED lights, medium-wattage desktop computer, high MPGe EV, etc. However, we live in a normal US house with few compromises (though we don't need air conditioning or heating most days, due to the local climate). It makes me wonder how the average US household is at 12KW. That's roughly two of our house's air conditioners running full blast, per person, 24 hours a day.

codefined 4y ago
The number also appears to include 'upstream' energy usage, things like how much energy was used to transport food to you. How much energy to produce the items you consume. I imagine raw household electrical usage is only a small fragment of this.
johngalt 4y ago
> wonder how the average US household is at 12KW If you've eliminated transportation and heating that is #1 and #2 for most people's energy consumption. Third place would likely be air-conditioning, and you've eliminated that too.
- hedora 4y ago
  I’m including transportation and heating/cooling. Even if we kept the thermostat at 120F in the winter and 32F in the summer, we’d still be under 3kw per person (due to our furnace being on 100% of the time and never reaching temperature).
8bitsrule 4y ago
Food (and discretionary transport) is the second-highest number (1100w of 5100w) in their Swiss energy use table, between heat and electricity.

mikewarot 4y ago

There's more to this than just energy, we're all about to get a very strong lesson in the fact that fertilizers require fossil fuels as chemical feedstock. The Ukraine conflict has already lead to a steep drop off in the availability of fertilizers for many countries across the globe. Those will result in greatly reduced harvests and food scarcity. The next few years are to be very rough, and nothing can be done to fix it. Deglobalization will make things even worse for countries that can't produce or purchase enough fuel, food or fertilizers.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Luckily you can make them from sunlight as well (either through PV or sustainable agriculture) Unluckily none of our governments seem to have had the forethought to either make the massive capital investment required for the former or the even bigger labour and knowledge investment to do the latter when this became obviously important.

knoebber 4y ago

I'm living/working remotely off grid with a solar panels, batteries, and a 2000w inverter. It's comfortable. I usually have a few lights, the wifi router, a monitor, laptop charger, and a fridge plugged in. This comes out between 100w and 300w, so I have room to spare for bigger items like power tools. I do cheat by using a propane range for cooking and wood for heat. At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are.

deleted 4y ago
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bob1029 4y ago
> At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are. I know for a fact that the induction cooktop is the epitome of efficiency. Virtually every watt that passes through the switching electronics and coils winds up somewhere in the cookware. I've got a Breville control freak and a 750w microwave oven as my emergency cooking gear for when I am stuck on solar battery backup.
jollyllama 4y ago
Have you looked into home biogas digesters? They can turn waste into cooking fuel.
- knoebber 4y ago
  I haven't, I'll check them out, thanks!
bombcar 4y ago
Pressure and slow cookers are beasts for energy efficiency - pressure winning because they’re on for shorter time, but slow cookers can do things too (especially if you have “waste solar” during the day).

bob1029 4y ago

I had a non-optional experience along this axis living thru the 2021 Texas grid crisis. Being in the gulf coast region automatically makes it nearly impossible to fit a 2kW budget during the summer (unless you live in a large walk-in freezer), but during the winter I was able to get down to 800 watts continuous for a period of a few days. This included my computer, fridge, some lights and central furnace blower. The furnace is kind of cheating though - replacing the natural gas with a heat pump would instantly blow my 2kW budget all on its own. That said, you could probably get really close if you tried to hit the target with a modern heat pump and good insulation throughout. The only reason I voluntarily subjected myself to this was because I was being billed $9/kWH thru Griddy (a wholesale, real-time rate provider) during the entire, multi-day incident. I did run a one-off load of laundry that probably cost me ~$50. Requiring use of variable rate energy providers and forcing consumers to adapt habits to the available resources seems like one way to get people to pay attention to how much energy various things consume. It also seems like an effective way to mitigate one-off generation shortfalls.

Gravityloss 4y ago
I come from a country where the average temperature is the same as in a refrigerator. I sometimes think it would be a lot easier to just move most people away from here... at least those living in big badly insulated electrically heated houses. Some pensioners actually do move to Spain, maybe visit the summer cottages every now and then (when it's too hot in Spain and the cottage doesn't need heating). Birds certainly follow the seasons. I guess the same applies to very hot climates. You could move away for the summer at least, if not completely.
- bombcar 4y ago
  In both places you may get most of the benefits from moving down - underground rooms mitigate temperatures.
- etothepii 4y ago
  An interesting question springs to my mind. How does the carbon omissions of having a summer and winter house and flying between them compare to heating the summer house in winter or cooling the winter house in summer.

johngalt 4y ago

Aiming at the wrong goal. A "10kw society" on solar or nuclear is better than "2kw society" on coal.

titzer 4y ago
They are independent variables. In practice the "10kw society" solar/nuclear society that economic-growth-above-all people push means "2kw coal + 4kw solar + 4kw nuclear". Growth is just cover for not replacing the dirty sources.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Because they specify Primary Energy, coal does get penalised more than solar or nuclear, so that part is kind of implied, plus it's from the 80s. Generally negawatts (watts you don't use due to efficiency or insulation) have always been the cheapest watts, that's only recently become less true because of solar price declines.
- etothepii 4y ago
  It did mention getting 500W from carbon based means. I'm in the lets use as much green energy as we want camp. The hair-shirt stuff from many in the green movement is the main reason I don't take them seriously. Agreed that GW and sea level rise are existential issues for coastal communities (and possibly the human race as a whole) but why cap energy usage from Nuclear, Wind and Solar. I'd sign up for a 100W cap on carbon faster than a 10kW cap on energy.
  - immibis 4y ago
    We do still need to avoid a civilization where every square inch is plastered with solar panels used for bitcoin mining.
    - etothepii 4y ago
      Fortunately this is unlikely since: - Nuclear doesn't take up that much space. - BitCoin/crypto mining is so wasteful someone will think up a better idea. I'm sure if it.

mtmmtm 4y ago

I live in Sweden. I have a large house. It consumes 14 MWh/year. I have not sacrificed anything. I use a heat pump (using energy from the ground).

ROTMetro 4y ago
I wish someone would setup neighborhood geothermal heat pumps as a heating utility or coop model. It's so expensive for everyone to bore into the ground for this.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Modern new builds of housing do this, at least in some countries. At that stage you can not bother installing gas pipes and come out financially ahead. Though air source are getting so good that places that require ground source are getting smaller.
2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
Similar situation here, but in Finland. I use 14 MWh of /electricity/ each year (medium-sized house, three-person household). That excludes the firewood that we use for heating the sauna, and to keep the house warm during winter, when the cold is too much for the heat pumps to manage. Oh, and travel. In order to reach the goal in the article, a three-person household would need to restrict energy use to 52560 KWh/year, /including/ all those things AND the production of everything that household consumes. I can't see how it's even remotely possible with today's technology and societal climate. That being said, there's no harm in researching and developing more efficient technologies. I don't even want to think about how bad the energy crisis would be if we were all still using 60w/40w lightbulbs.

Havoc 4y ago

Comments here seem to be missing a key detail >including embodied energy Which is >Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself. I'm far below the 2k limit on mains energy usage, but I suspect after factoring in above it'll be comically far off. Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...

bombcar 4y ago
You can get a rough estimate based on cost (not perfect but it can be usable) and then own the thing long enough that the energy cost to make drops to negligible. A made in USA toolset from USA sourced materials is unlikely to cost less than the energy needed to make it. Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.
- netjiro 4y ago
  > Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner. When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Wouldn't years of function (potentially scaled with remaining effectiveness) he a better proxy where it's calculable?
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Isn’t that already approximated by the purchase price of a used item? There’s some weird transients where a 45-day old car is artificially cheaper (because why would someone sell a 45-day-old car if it wasn’t a lemon?), but that seems to average out pretty quickly. It might slightly underprice used electronics, but if the alternative destination is a landfill, that slight underpricing seems fine to me.

hoseja 4y ago

I want a personal cold fusion reactor and to be a 2000 MW person, not this unviable milquetoast degrowth.

lm28469 4y ago
Unviable degrowth or unliveable planet
- prottog 4y ago
  Degrowth will absolutely remove more enjoyable life-years from the planet than even maintaining the status quo, let alone achieving technological progress that will allow carbon-free 2000MW per person. The latter is certainly preferable to the former.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > let alone achieving technological progress that will allow carbon-free No guarantees that we are on that path, if it was the case we'd already all be running on nuclear but we made the opposite choice, in Europe for example because gas is cheaper, cheaper = more profit = growth = better and we all see where it got us But let's continue with out ultra wasteful ways of life, surely when China and India catch up with EU/US level of waste the world will be saved
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Yeah. Screw this 'climate change' nonsense. Let's see if we can vaporize the mantle by 2100. The second law exists and climate change is just the first of many symptoms of running face first into it. 2kW is a sensible limit for living on a planet and having it still be a planet worth living on. You might push it up an order of magnitude or two without cooking humans by fully transforming most habitable land and carefully rejecting 30% of the sunlight whilst using the rest, but that would destroy most ecosystems. If you want a barren rock to bake, go live on the moon.
- hoseja 4y ago

aqwsde 4y ago

Oh, this is not a Michael Jackson reference ...

aqwsde 4y ago
https://youtu.be/VA5hpF7PH1Q https://youtu.be/VA5hpF7PH1Q

ksimukka 4y ago

Currently averaging about 9.75kWh per day during spring/summer/fall. However, come winter the max average will probably be 50kWh per day. My latitude is about 60 (59.9139) degrees north and electric heating panels don’t seem to be the most efficient when it is below freezing. With improved insulation and a modern heat pump, I’d be curious to see how much energy we would consume.

niklasrde 4y ago
Assuming you're talking about heating & electricity in your accommodation only? The vision here encompasses all energy use if I understand correctly.
- ksimukka 4y ago
  Yes, I’m referring to electricity as it is my largest source of energy use. Aside from that, accounting for the energy used to produce the food and consumables is somewhat challenging, so I don’t really consider it. But I suppose it would be worth trying to guesstimate? I’m not that familiar with the 2000-watt society.

aaron695 4y ago

FabHK 4y ago

Some people here seem to be confusing electricity usage and energy usage. As the Wikipedia article highlights, the average Swiss uses about 5kW (that's 5kWh per hour), of which only about 10% are electricity. Similarly, about 10% are car usage, or about 0.5kW. If we take the average car to develop on average 50kW, and assume an efficiency of 1 (for the sake of the argument), then they use a car around 1% of the time or about 15 minutes a day (less if efficiency is <1, as it is). ETA some more reference points: A human eats around 10,000kJ per day = 86400 seconds, let's call it 100,000s, so 10,000kJ/100ks = 100J/s = 100W, about as much as a bright lightbulb (the old fashioned ones, not LED). The sun gives us about 1kW of power per square meter. Say photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of 10%, and the sun shines 6 hours a day (=25%), then we are talking around 25W/m². So, the average Swiss uses the energy corresponding to about 50 people working for him or 200m² of PV, the average US citizen of 120 people or 480m² (5000 sq feet), and the goal here is to push it down to 20 people or 80m² PV. Great reference: the books by Vaclav Smil, eg. How the World Really Works.

markvdb 4y ago
15 kWh of electricity for 100 km of car transportation is realistic for a defensively driven modest electric car. At 500W, that's about 80 km of car use per day. In an electric Hummer or similar, your car energy budget would be gone in 35 km. In a fossil fuel Hummer, getting to the bakery 10 km away might be possible, but only one way.
phkahler 4y ago
A good EV will get about 3 miles per kWhr. So 20kwh recharged over night will get you 60 miles per day. IMHO EVs need MUCH larger batteries to facilitate longer range driving or deviations from a daily routine, but that doesn't change the typical energy usage much.
- neon_electro 4y ago
  How much longer range driving do you personally need? I drove a 2018 Chevy Bolt EV 12,000 miles per year on average for four years (totaled it this past Memorial Day weekend). Never got stranded/ran out of juice. Plenty of fast charging (55kW doesn't even reach 1 C (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rate) so I can basically fast charge with no concern for my long-term battery health), plenty of slow charging (1kW on my home 120V EVSE), 60kWh was more than enough for trips to Montréal, Vermont, and Chicago (from Philadelphia) over those four years.

daneel_w 4y ago

> ... (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) ... That's just over 1400 kWh per month. As a reference of personal and immediate consumption, most central- and north European apartment dwellers consume around 2000 kWh per year. Anecdote: my household - two adults, two terrible cats, dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer, no TV, two bicycles and feet instead of a car - have consumed 160-170 kWh per month steadily, around the year, for as long as I can recall.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fuzzy2 4y ago
Maybe continue reading a little…? > The concept addresses not only personal or household energy use, but the total for the whole society, including embodied energy, divided by the population. Filling up my car’s gas tank once is roughly 444 kWh in fuel value alone. Add to that gas refining, logistics and whatnot.
- daneel_w 4y ago
  I read all of it, not just a little of it. I'm commenting on personal, immediate consumption.
  - fuzzy2 4y ago
    Before you edited your comment, it was purely about average consumption of grid electricity. However, that’s not even the “personal, immediate consumption”. It’s just… grid electricity. You eat. You have clothes, devices, machines that had to be made and shipped. You heat your dwelling. Everything counts. It’s sometimes hard to quantify what this means, a lot of amortization is always going on.
    - daneel_w 4y ago
      Please don't go on the Internet and tell other people what they meant. My comment says APARTMENT DWELLERS for a reason, to contrast with e.g. house owners, whose needs are vastly different. I edited and added/clarified with "personal immediate consumption" because either you were nitpicking or I wasn't clear enough with "apartment dwellers".

stephc_int13 4y ago

Watt could be used as kind of universal physically based, end-game-level currency, sounds better than crypto or fiat IMHO.

nine_k 4y ago
As envisioned by sci-fi authors like Heinlein. The only problem is storage. Carrying a wallet with a few MJ in it may be just hazardous, even if transferring funds is 100% efficient (using superconductivity). So any realistic scheme would include some tokens, with associated energy stored / generated elsewhere. More realistically, these tokens are associated with the economic and military might of the issuing party; this is similar to what modern fiat money is.
pjc50 4y ago
To a great extent this is what the oil economy is like.
anonporridge 4y ago
It's bitcoin. Bitcoin is electricity money. The universal electro-dollar. Because the miner reward for securing the monetary network is intrinsically linked to electricity availability, there will always be fundamental link between cost of electricity and value of bitcoin.
- immibis 4y ago
  No, this is nonsense. In reality, there is a link between cost of electricity, value of bitcoin, hashing rewards, and electricity used in hashing. And the dependent variable is the electricity used in hashing - not the cost of electricity, nor the value of bitcoin.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
Naive utopian solution: Distribute a fixed amount of energy credits equally among the population on a regular basis and let the market determine what is best to do with them. Peg the amount of such credits to the dirtiness of the global energy mix, including transportation, gas usage, etc. such that, if we clean up our energy usage this month, everybody gets to spend more credits next month. Eventually we have more tokens than we know what to do with because our energy supply is nearly free of emissions. There may still be some niche uses for carbon-emitting fossil energy (running helicopters to inspect electrical transmission lines, for example) but market forces will have pushed them to the absolute minimum level. This is of course all a way of getting everyone on board with our real, material situation, which is that there is a finite amount of carbon that we can afford to dump into the atmosphere in the immediate next few centuries. This is basically just cap-and-trade with extra steps but has the advantage of novelty, and that it is graspable by the average voter who (rightfully) views cap-and-trade schemes as being 1) really boring and 2) mainly a way for Wall Street types to scam money out of productive enterprises. Under this scheme, we can generate huge public support for green energy schemes since each new watt of generation installed this month will mean everyone is better off in real terms next month.

restore_creole_ 4y ago

A Tesla Model 3, the most efficient EV, uses 240 Wh/mile. You could not drive more than 8.3 miles without exceeding the 2 kWh/h.

sokoloff 4y ago
You get all day to average 2kW, or 48kWh/day, or 200 miles/day [if you spent no other energy, of course]. If you drove 20 miles, that’s 10% of your energy budget for the day, even if you did it all in a single hour.
- slackfan 4y ago
  Might as well just use a horse and buggy at that point.
  - neon_electro 4y ago
    Personally I prefer a bicycle if the use case and distance is right!
mrtksn 4y ago
If it was possible to move multiple persons with electric vehicles and if those people lived in close proximity that don't require driving long distances everyday then just going to the shop wouldn't exceed the goal.
- neon_electro 4y ago
  Sounds logical to me! Put more people in the car and the total energy budget for car travel goes up, right?
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    The budget goes up linearly by person but the cost behaves differently because you don't have to add the same amount of gear for each person.

moralestapia 4y ago

>which pictures the average citizen of energy poor countries reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts Why the distinction? Why not all citizens?

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Nah. Sorry but I don't like it at all. Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one. But, let's make sure that the production, storage and distribution of energy, in all its forms, is sustainable, and available to every country. The trend is already here: cheaper than ever solar and wind energy, cheaper and cheaper energy storage, new energy breakthroughs, promising ones like nuclear, etc. It means the world will be able to soon produce much more energy, using only sustainable sources. Let's make energy available to everyone, at an affordable rate. That's my dream. Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
Couldn't have said it better. At a certain point--and I think some are past this point--it becomes a death cult of "any energy used is evil."
manoDev 4y ago
> Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one. You know this really means “let’s keep the average per capita consumption high, so I can keep spending the 10x more than a third world citizen” right? > Not a communist-like starvation of sorts. Rational usage of resources is very far from “starvation”.
seper8 4y ago
Agreed 100% Article from MIT regarding Solar energy: "The potential is enormous, says MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable — at least, for the lifetime of the sun. "It's finite, but we're talking billions of years," Taylor says. "
tims33 4y ago
Totally agree. I think the premise of maintaining quality of life while dramatically reducing energy consumption won't bear out. There is no successful path to stopping global warming that dramatically drives up energy cost or reduces quality of life. Plentiful zero carbon energy is the path forward.

concordDance 4y ago

This seems very misguided. The problem isn't energy usage its the side effects of the energy production. If everyone was using a megawatt but this was in the form of some factory on the moon being incredibly inefficient as they make the new Must Have MoonRockTM that gets teleported to your living room this would actually be just fine.

Bud 4y ago
Not misguided. Because here in the real world, both now and for the foreseeable future, especially the near future in which we have to urgently deal with climate change impacts, energy production does indeed have those side effects.
- condour75 4y ago
  Solar is getting cheaper by the day, batteries are getting cheaper and more efficient by the day, and there's a ton of money pouring into research. Maybe I'm crazy, but I can see a future, maybe a few decades from now, when power is "too cheap to meter" because of renewables.
  - BanazirGalbasi 4y ago
    Electricity use is only one part of energy consumption. Transportation costs, production costs, and even food generation are all included in the umbrella. Also, "costs" aren't just referring to dollars spent, but also environmental impact. Having cheap electricity is only a small part of the equation, and barely a relevant one at that.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      Energy is roughly transferable - if you have cheap electricity you can use it to produce cheap process heat, synthetic fuels, food, environmental cleanup, etc. You get enough solar panels for a low enough price and all the other problems become trivial.
  - jl6 4y ago

anonu 4y ago

48kWh per person per day? That seems like a huge amount. I live in an a place where we have to run the AC almost all day and we use less than this along with all the other electric appliances.

phkahler 4y ago
>> I live in an a place where we have to run the AC almost all day and we use less than this along with all the other electric appliances. They're including transportation costs.
function_seven 4y ago
It's all energy consumption by a person, not just their residential electrical usage. So the gas you may use to heat your water, or the gasoline in your car, or the fraction of the street light outside your home. The energy that runs your local grocery store, hair salon, or Chick-fil-a. The energy that went into growing your food, making your clothing, and shipping your monthly Chewy.com order. 48kWh is a much smaller amount when it includes all of our per capita economic activity.

outside1234 4y ago

Its not about the watts - it is about the composition of those watts. You could use 2000Wh of electricity in Texas, but that would still only be 29% zero carbon. You could use 5000Wh of electricity in Norway, but 99% of that would be zero carbon. This is superior to the 2000Wh approach.

megaman821 4y ago

Wow, I just calculated my direct energy usage. Now I live in Texas where it is hot so I only required heating 2-3 months of the year, and have one electric and one gas car. * Electricity - 13,000 kWh * Natural Gas - 7,000 kWh * Gasoline - 14,000 kWh Burning stuff is just so wildly inefficient. A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half.

anonporridge 4y ago
> A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half. That's more due to the seemingly magical properties of heat pumps producing 2-3x as much heat as energy input. Burning nat gas to create heat in your home is nearly 100% efficient, which is why resistant electric heaters generally can't compete. Though resistant heaters might be more carbon neutral depending on your local grid. Of course, burning stuff to do mechanical work is quite inefficient, especially in a small scale engine like a car. If we must burn stuff, we should do it is massive thermal plants that have the money and expertise to squeeze out the maximum efficiency possible, and deliver electricity to do the small scale work, like driving.

agumonkey 4y ago

It's staggering how old these topics were. Club of Rome: 72, never heard of it until few years ago. 2kW society .. 1998, first time I hear the name, even with all the fuss about climate change, it didn't hit my radar. So strange.

narrator 4y ago

Everybody move to the tropics, get used to the heat and ride motor scooters just like India and Bangladesh. Cold climates that require a lot of energy just to live in are going to empty out in the next decades. I predict a massive wave of immigration from Europe, Australia, and Canada to Latin America. There are already a ton of people from these countries showing up in Mexico because of Covid restrictions, easy immigration for first-worlders, and a lower cost of living. I suspect the upcoming winter of deprivation and economic crisis in Europe and other cold regions will send a bunch more economic/cold refugees that way.

konschubert 4y ago
The facts disprove your hypothesis. Also, climate change.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Australia has millions of km^2 in the subtropics. Why would they move due to heating requirements? Also there will be many, many climate refugees from floods, famines, droughts, super storms, fires, dust storms, and so on. Most of these issues are much harder to overcome than adding insulation, living in a reasonably sized home, sharing a wall or two, installing a heat pump, and putting on a jumper.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Unless someone breaks thermodynamics, there is really no way to reduce to 2000W without reducing consumption of goods by a factor of 10 in the west. That means a new phone every 20 years instead of 2 (global mobile device supply chain is huge), getting new shoes every 10 years instead of 1, getting a new car every 50 years instead of 5, etc.

wazoox 4y ago
That's perfectly fine, let's build durable goods. I still have some tableware from my great-grandmother, more than 100 years old. It works just as well as new plates and forks. But more than that, we won't have the choice. Thermodynamics will constrain us sooner or later.
lultimouomo 4y ago
According to the article, the US us by far (very far) the worst offender and yet it is only 6x over the target, not 10. Switzerland, which does not strike me as a country with a low standard of living, is 2.5x over the target. Europe 3x.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  In terms of globalization supply chain, the west has similar power utilizations. US has much larger homes and drives far more inefficiently due to individual vehicle usage instead of mass transit. Reducing those by 6x would be a huge change.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Or just get rid of the lawn, beef, the 'great room', and 95% of cars (and keep the rest for 30 years). Then make the electronics last at least 5 years, and you're well past target.

thereisnospork 4y ago

I can't help but feel like this is an ass-backwards approach to the problem, we should be trying to add a zero to the (greenly produced) energy available for each person instead of bean-counting. Imagine if this was our approach to internet bandwidth? "No you don't need more bandwidth, just compress your geocites webpages by an extra 5x - that's the future of the internet we want to see!" We could produce far more energy than we could ever save by cutting. It is not an accident that the historical chart of quality of life vs. energy consumption per capita is up and to the right.

programmer_dude 4y ago

India experienced a massive heat wave last summer. My electricity consumption exceeded the average US per month figures for the first time (>900 KWh/month). Bulk of it went to airconditioning. Needless to say I am deeply concerned about the times ahead. I am pretty sure increase in electricity consumption is only going to aggravate things further.

kkfx 4y ago

It's a bit hard condensate the concept in an HN comment but I'll try: - the "Green" new deal, originally have imagined (with a classic managerial fallacy) a world made up by single-family homes in places with enough Sun for p.v., BEVs, a little need to move and no industries. Perhaps because this is the way some manager's live and they call it sobriety respect of others who do differently. Than they discover people's in crowd then to behave in stupid ways, like Le Bon describe in his masterpiece BUT not that stupid so grid-connected p.v. without stationary and/or on-wheel storage because cutting electricity bill with p.v. for a significant amount of locations on earth pay back, the rest do not. As a result electricity grids are more and more unstable. Keeping the frequency is always hard and we have chosen to made "large enough" grids to have a "slowly changing mean load" slow enough that big power plants can keep up the frequency; when p.v/eolic start to be big enough the power peaks they produce make's the grid frequency skyrocket or fall too fast for large power plants to lower/step up their generator power. Not counting the fact that most people do not live in single-family homes where a p.v. system and an on-wheel battery can live with; - some politicians who have blindly follow the initial vague dream have decided the answer is "reduce energy consumption" and have even invented ways to reduce it who actually increase the amount of consumed energy like regulating "how many hour to run the heating" vs "let the system run quietly 24/7; - since most people DO NOT live on nor have p.v. anyway most home appliance are NOT designed to maximize self consumption witch means run full power as quick as possible when energy from the Sun is available vs try to spread the load as much as possible to keep the grid load as stable as possible. As a result most p.v. systems instead of target maximizing self-consumption target to produce as many kWh as possible. As a result p.v. systems are LESS interesting and the grid is more strained. A simple example: most hot-water systems try to run few minutes every hours instead of all at once on input. To keep a grid load stable running few minutes every hours and have small quantity of water to heat is IDEAL, you consume less energy and keep the load stable on average. On p.v. it's the exact opposite. Since the Sun shine for limited period of time but when it do it offer much energy what it count is heating as much as possible large amount of water to have enough hot water for the rest of the day, possible for more than one day. Essentially NO system on sale offer such simple regulation, while some offer "grid-backed" regulations like grid energy meters who told "run" or "do not run" depending on current grid load but in ways that are hard to be used on p.v. even if they are very similar. Another example: most appliance start to consume from 0 to max in a snap. For the grid is not an issue, the single appliance consume a very small fraction of power of a power plant and on average that's just noise. Small p.v. inverters on contrary have issues keeping up such peaks, who happen to be big at micro-grid scale. As a result many appliance like ovens who try to use peaks to reduce the total amount of kWh consumed they run very bad on p.v. in self-consumption and inverter stress terms. Again: some appliance try to run for longer time to reduce the amount of peak power usage, while on p.v. it's better run quickly to run an appliance after the other in the limited amount of time the Sun shine and so on. Long story short if some really want a new deal: - ALL BEVs MUST have an open standard data port (no matter if canbus or something else) to talk to any p.v. inverter on sale allowing to do the same stationary battery inverters and batteries do: charge ONLY from p.v., offering power from battery to the home to a maximum DOD if the grid do work, another threshold if case of grid blackout and parameters to tell the car ensuring a minimum SOC for a certain point in time allowing to charge from the grid if needed; - BEV need to cost equally of their correspondent ICE not pushing up ICE and fuel price to makes EV convenient; - incentive de-urbanization in the sense from a multi-apartments building (sorry I do not know how to name such buildings in English) to a single family home if you live there for a certain amount of years; - impose a simple and cheap communication mode to power-hungry home appliances like simple modbus to allow their control from a central home system, like a home server/a p.v. inverter etc and allowing communication to tell how much power they going to need to run, in the next few seconds etc to allow inverters compensate peaks less hardly; - incentives the design of systems targeting maximizing self-consumption instead of grid-tied "metering" like "I give X kWh, get back Y and so...". Asking for "sobriety" is like asking do not panic on a sinking ship, the rebound effect is higher then else.