"My new dryer is a heat pump. Uses less than half the energy my previous one did. It does take longer to dry clothes ..." I used a very modern heat pump dryer

"My new dryer is a heat pump. Uses less than half the energy my previous one did. It does take longer to dry clothes ..." I used a very modern heat pump dryer in Switzerland all summer and "... longer to dry clothes ..." is an understatement. A normal, mixed load of clothing took a full 2.5 hours to fully dry. It reminds me of CF lightbulbs: a failure to solve the real, big problems (efficient and clean generation of electricity) leads to widely distributed pain for end-users (dryers taking hours or terrible, dim, purple lighting). Far more interesting than hyper optimized electrical loads would be abundant clean energy sources. I would rather have solar panels and free electricity than have utility power and weird, complicated clothes dryers. ... and yes, my analogy is imperfect because the lighting issue was elegantly solved with LEDs. That's unlikely to be the case with clothes dryers, however ...