9 ms·

The article is touching on the important issue of homes but is missing three very important related issues. 1) The network that delivers power to the home. It'

by mfer 4y ago

The article is touching on the important issue of homes but is missing three very important related issues. 1) The network that delivers power to the home. It's not able to handle everyone electrifying everything. If you electrify everything (electric stove, electric car, air conditioner/heater) you are going to be hard pressed in many locales to be covered by at home solar. 2) Electricity generation. We need a lot more. 3) Dealing with problems in regions. Like power outages in areas that deal with lots of snow and freezing. How do people have heat to survive? How do things work so that we don't have destruction to homes from frozen pipes? Stuff like that.

cinntaile 4y ago
I don't get what frozen pipes has to do with electrifying the home?
- mfer 4y ago
  There is a push to move to electric heat generation in homes in some areas. If electricity goes out you loose heat. In many areas you can have weeks (even months) where the temperature is below freezing. Loose heat to your home and your pipes can freeze. When this happens they burst causing damage to the home.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    Pipes don't freeze immediately. A semi-decently insulated house will loose less than 10 degrees per day, so it would take a few days before pipes start freezing.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
      Cool! Most of the houses in areas of the US where pipes freeze are quite old, many have effectively no insulation (the one I currently rent has no insulation at all). If heat goes out, it'll reach outside temperature within a day. People here in Buffalo recently died because a blizzard took out electricity, homes lost heat, and they froze (mostly when they tried to get to the "warming shelter" locations and were trapped, but trapped in a car without heat vs trapped in a house without heat is freezing all the same).
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        yeah, but those houses aren't the ones that are getting electric heat. that's almost all only new construction. (and if you are in a house like this you'll gain a lot more by replacing the windows than the heat)
  - bluGill 4y ago
    There are very few houses that have a heating system that works without electric. There are blowers/fans that turn on when when the furnace turns on. Most of the time the thermostat itself needs mains power to function (the thermostat gets power from the furnace, but ultimate it comes from the mains feed). It isn't even possible to have a modern 90+ efficiency furnace without mains as the exhaust is not hot enough to let convection take care of the exhaust. A gas furnace doesn't need much power though. A heat pump needs a lot of power, and resistance heating is worse.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    Are you trying to say that the risk to lose electricity is bigger than the risk to lose the other heat sources? Wouldn't houses at risk have some sort of contingency measures in place such as insulated pipes, alternative heat sources,..?
    - vel0city 4y ago
      > Are you trying to say that the risk to lose electricity is bigger than the risk to lose the other heat sources? From my personal experiences, yes. Gas pipelines are practically always buried, electricity lines are often overhead and subject to storm damage. There have been dozens of times in my life where electricity is out but natural gas infrastructure is still available.
      - cinntaile 4y ago
        I wonder what causes this, the gas infrastructure needs electricity for the compressors too but maybe they have auxiliary power at each pump station? Some pressure reduction is probably acceptable too so there might be "automatic" redundancy.
    - mfer 4y ago
      > Are you trying to say that the risk to lose electricity is bigger than the risk to lose the other heat sources? In many places electricity is transitioned via above ground lines. Natural gas is via buried pipes. The above ground lines have far more issues due to natural events (like storms or tree branches falling). In addition to this, electricity already hit peak loads in some areas due to other things drawing on it. Electricity is more likely to have outages than natural gas.
epistasis 4y ago
There is mooooore than enough spare grid capacity to deliver the electricity to electrify homes. We size the grid for peak capacity, not for average capacity, which means that there's a very low overall usage amount. And the big drivers of additional electricity, heating and transportation, are easily shiftable to non-peak times. And as we have smarter devices, and more time of use billing, load shifting will be easy. That said, having lots more battery storage inside buildings may be a great way to help shift peaks, and be far cheaper than upgrading lots of connections everywhere.
- boringg 4y ago
  Not at all. Grid is not ready for this it need significant capital upgrades. Yes its designed for peak load but the load profile is changing significantly. And no you absolutely cant just load shift away heating and transportation of residential homes. That isn't cost free and we don't even have the projects in place to manage that yet.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Transportation is literally already battery, it is trivial to load shift charging, and in fact standard practice for anybody with electric transportation already! Heating is similarly trivial to load shift; heat or cool a little extra before the peak, stop during the peak, and then pick up afterwards. This goes for both space and water heating. Do you have any evidence about what upgrades are needed? I have a feeling that since you are so wrong about load shifting, that your intuitions about the grid may not be completely ok mark either. The grid upgrades I know about are for long distance transmission, not anything for distribution at the residential level, as we are discussing here.
    - mfer 4y ago
      Two pieces of evidence. 1) Places today have rolling brown outs at times in the year. Some power companies have seasons where they ask customers to limit their electricity use. Even peak load today can be a problem and the electrification of all the things means peak load will increase. 2) Articles that dig into this call out how the power grid will need to change to support the growth in consumption. When it's covered and experts speak they highlight the need for change to meet demand. Can you refute these?
vehemenz 4y ago
I think the article does a disservice to its thesis by focusing on California. Half the country lives in places where subzero temperatures are an issue. Not to mention, the rest of the country doesn't have the sunlight hours to make solar as viable, let alone the disposable wealth to upgrade their homes. Electric cars are still a long way from viability in most places, though it may not seem that way in California.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Nearly every state in the us has very viable solar. The blockers are not economic, but regulatory from the utility and utility commission side. There are small solar arrays all over farms in Minnesota, for example. Solar is super cheap, and only getting cheaper. Cheap enough that one can start to size your array for the seasonal minimum. And as storage gets super cheap this decade, solar plus storage are a "baseload" combo.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    I'll believe this when I see successful startup utilities cropping up all over for the low capital investment of buying a field and filling it with solar panels. Hell, I'd settle for seeing the existing utility companies doing this en masse.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      The barrier to this isn't economics, it's the regulatory process for utilities, which are often regulated to be monopolies. And for that matter, this sort of building of solar projects by small players has been going on for years, very successfully, under a PPA model. In places where it's allowed for startups to build new generation resources and get compensated on the market, such as Texas' ERCOT, solar is a dominant force. The challenge is not the tech, the challenge is that too many people are doing it, draining the supply chain: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/07/satellite-data-shows-big-solar-installation-delays-in-texas/ https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/07/satellite-data...
  - 4y ago
SoftTalker 4y ago
Yes we will need more electrical generation. I have zero interst in solar panels on my house. I don't live in an area where they would be particularly useful; moreover, I don't want to own them, or to be responsible for maintaining them; I don't want large batteries in my house, or to be responsible for maintaining those. I don't want transfer switches or the responsibility of maintaining those. I want to pay the electric utility to deliver electricity to my house. Everything about generating it, transmitting it, storing it, I want to be their responsibility.
- irq 4y ago
  The ability for power companies to deliver on this reliably is decreasing as our society grows increasingly low-trust. This is why you may want to take control of your own destiny and secure your own source of power.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    It’s insane radicals that try and shut everything down that are causing people to have to become more self-reliant. Most people I know have trouble remembering to change the oil in their car. Being in charge of electrical generation and giant batteries is not a good idea for many.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Maybe electrical companies should be the ones funding that infrastructure, basically give us roof space for modest discount on electricity
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Last I heard (a friend is a retired Electrical Engineer, with solar panels), there is a massive cost & complexity gap between "have solar panels on the roof of house" and "control your own destiny" (meaning you're able to run your house off-grid via solar panels). The former only needs (relatively) simple/stupid/cheap power & control electronics. Mimic the frequency & phase of the incoming AC from the utility, and let the panels run at 100%, 24x7, regardless of in-home power usage. Any solar_output > local_usage excess gets shoved back at the utility, any solar_output < local_usage shortage gets drawn from the utility, and dealing with that unpredictable yo-yo is 100% their problem and expense. The latter - even with no batteries - requires a bunch of complex control electronics - because solar panels do not magically put out 120VAC at 60Hz, for any load short of their maximum current power output.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ajross 4y ago
> If you electrify everything (electric stove, electric car, air conditioner/heater) you are going to be hard pressed in many locales to be covered by at home solar. That's exactly backwards, though. The problem[1] with ad-hoc local solar installations is that they're undersubscribed, and end up pumping juice back into the grid at inconvenient times where it can't be used. Being able to use that power locally is the goal, not something to be solved. [1] From the perspective of resource management. If you want to install solar as part of a prepper/off-grid effort you have a lot more design work to do and are absolutely going to have to inefficiently overprovision.
iso1631 4y ago
For your network question My village (UK) copes easily with everyone at home with the ovens on full cooking Christmas dinner and putting the kettle on after a football match, so clearly plenty of spare peak capacity (the grid has to match supply of course) The average car in the UK does about 7,000 miles a year, in the US about 12,000. That's 230 miles a week in the US, needing about 76kWh of power. That's an average 450W draw. Homes used to use more than that keeping the lights on. No doubt about electric generation, we need far more. Not hard, not expensive either. Generating it at a constant rate is a different thing, but with 200 million mobile batteries connected to the grid that's a fair amount of power shifting that's available. For your power outage problems, I had one last night. They turned the power off because a vehicle crashed into the overhead lines. With no power my oil boiler doesn't work, so it's rather moot. Do US home typically have heating that can work without any electricity? Do they generate their own electricity to run pumps etc?

by mfer 4y ago

cinntaile 4y ago

I don't get what frozen pipes has to do with electrifying the home?

mfer 4y ago
There is a push to move to electric heat generation in homes in some areas. If electricity goes out you loose heat. In many areas you can have weeks (even months) where the temperature is below freezing. Loose heat to your home and your pipes can freeze. When this happens they burst causing damage to the home.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  Pipes don't freeze immediately. A semi-decently insulated house will loose less than 10 degrees per day, so it would take a few days before pipes start freezing.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
    Cool! Most of the houses in areas of the US where pipes freeze are quite old, many have effectively no insulation (the one I currently rent has no insulation at all). If heat goes out, it'll reach outside temperature within a day. People here in Buffalo recently died because a blizzard took out electricity, homes lost heat, and they froze (mostly when they tried to get to the "warming shelter" locations and were trapped, but trapped in a car without heat vs trapped in a house without heat is freezing all the same).
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      yeah, but those houses aren't the ones that are getting electric heat. that's almost all only new construction. (and if you are in a house like this you'll gain a lot more by replacing the windows than the heat)
- bluGill 4y ago
  There are very few houses that have a heating system that works without electric. There are blowers/fans that turn on when when the furnace turns on. Most of the time the thermostat itself needs mains power to function (the thermostat gets power from the furnace, but ultimate it comes from the mains feed). It isn't even possible to have a modern 90+ efficiency furnace without mains as the exhaust is not hot enough to let convection take care of the exhaust. A gas furnace doesn't need much power though. A heat pump needs a lot of power, and resistance heating is worse.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  Are you trying to say that the risk to lose electricity is bigger than the risk to lose the other heat sources? Wouldn't houses at risk have some sort of contingency measures in place such as insulated pipes, alternative heat sources,..?
  - vel0city 4y ago
    > Are you trying to say that the risk to lose electricity is bigger than the risk to lose the other heat sources? From my personal experiences, yes. Gas pipelines are practically always buried, electricity lines are often overhead and subject to storm damage. There have been dozens of times in my life where electricity is out but natural gas infrastructure is still available.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      I wonder what causes this, the gas infrastructure needs electricity for the compressors too but maybe they have auxiliary power at each pump station? Some pressure reduction is probably acceptable too so there might be "automatic" redundancy.
  - mfer 4y ago
    > Are you trying to say that the risk to lose electricity is bigger than the risk to lose the other heat sources? In many places electricity is transitioned via above ground lines. Natural gas is via buried pipes. The above ground lines have far more issues due to natural events (like storms or tree branches falling). In addition to this, electricity already hit peak loads in some areas due to other things drawing on it. Electricity is more likely to have outages than natural gas.

epistasis 4y ago

There is mooooore than enough spare grid capacity to deliver the electricity to electrify homes. We size the grid for peak capacity, not for average capacity, which means that there's a very low overall usage amount. And the big drivers of additional electricity, heating and transportation, are easily shiftable to non-peak times. And as we have smarter devices, and more time of use billing, load shifting will be easy. That said, having lots more battery storage inside buildings may be a great way to help shift peaks, and be far cheaper than upgrading lots of connections everywhere.

boringg 4y ago
Not at all. Grid is not ready for this it need significant capital upgrades. Yes its designed for peak load but the load profile is changing significantly. And no you absolutely cant just load shift away heating and transportation of residential homes. That isn't cost free and we don't even have the projects in place to manage that yet.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Transportation is literally already battery, it is trivial to load shift charging, and in fact standard practice for anybody with electric transportation already! Heating is similarly trivial to load shift; heat or cool a little extra before the peak, stop during the peak, and then pick up afterwards. This goes for both space and water heating. Do you have any evidence about what upgrades are needed? I have a feeling that since you are so wrong about load shifting, that your intuitions about the grid may not be completely ok mark either. The grid upgrades I know about are for long distance transmission, not anything for distribution at the residential level, as we are discussing here.
  - mfer 4y ago
    Two pieces of evidence. 1) Places today have rolling brown outs at times in the year. Some power companies have seasons where they ask customers to limit their electricity use. Even peak load today can be a problem and the electrification of all the things means peak load will increase. 2) Articles that dig into this call out how the power grid will need to change to support the growth in consumption. When it's covered and experts speak they highlight the need for change to meet demand. Can you refute these?

vehemenz 4y ago

I think the article does a disservice to its thesis by focusing on California. Half the country lives in places where subzero temperatures are an issue. Not to mention, the rest of the country doesn't have the sunlight hours to make solar as viable, let alone the disposable wealth to upgrade their homes. Electric cars are still a long way from viability in most places, though it may not seem that way in California.

epistasis 4y ago
Nearly every state in the us has very viable solar. The blockers are not economic, but regulatory from the utility and utility commission side. There are small solar arrays all over farms in Minnesota, for example. Solar is super cheap, and only getting cheaper. Cheap enough that one can start to size your array for the seasonal minimum. And as storage gets super cheap this decade, solar plus storage are a "baseload" combo.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I'll believe this when I see successful startup utilities cropping up all over for the low capital investment of buying a field and filling it with solar panels. Hell, I'd settle for seeing the existing utility companies doing this en masse.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    The barrier to this isn't economics, it's the regulatory process for utilities, which are often regulated to be monopolies. And for that matter, this sort of building of solar projects by small players has been going on for years, very successfully, under a PPA model. In places where it's allowed for startups to build new generation resources and get compensated on the market, such as Texas' ERCOT, solar is a dominant force. The challenge is not the tech, the challenge is that too many people are doing it, draining the supply chain: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/07/satellite-data-shows-big-solar-installation-delays-in-texas/ https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/07/satellite-data...
- 4y ago

SoftTalker 4y ago

Yes we will need more electrical generation. I have zero interst in solar panels on my house. I don't live in an area where they would be particularly useful; moreover, I don't want to own them, or to be responsible for maintaining them; I don't want large batteries in my house, or to be responsible for maintaining those. I don't want transfer switches or the responsibility of maintaining those. I want to pay the electric utility to deliver electricity to my house. Everything about generating it, transmitting it, storing it, I want to be their responsibility.

irq 4y ago
The ability for power companies to deliver on this reliably is decreasing as our society grows increasingly low-trust. This is why you may want to take control of your own destiny and secure your own source of power.
- treeman79 4y ago
  It’s insane radicals that try and shut everything down that are causing people to have to become more self-reliant. Most people I know have trouble remembering to change the oil in their car. Being in charge of electrical generation and giant batteries is not a good idea for many.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Maybe electrical companies should be the ones funding that infrastructure, basically give us roof space for modest discount on electricity
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Last I heard (a friend is a retired Electrical Engineer, with solar panels), there is a massive cost & complexity gap between "have solar panels on the roof of house" and "control your own destiny" (meaning you're able to run your house off-grid via solar panels). The former only needs (relatively) simple/stupid/cheap power & control electronics. Mimic the frequency & phase of the incoming AC from the utility, and let the panels run at 100%, 24x7, regardless of in-home power usage. Any solar_output > local_usage excess gets shoved back at the utility, any solar_output < local_usage shortage gets drawn from the utility, and dealing with that unpredictable yo-yo is 100% their problem and expense. The latter - even with no batteries - requires a bunch of complex control electronics - because solar panels do not magically put out 120VAC at 60Hz, for any load short of their maximum current power output.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ajross 4y ago

> If you electrify everything (electric stove, electric car, air conditioner/heater) you are going to be hard pressed in many locales to be covered by at home solar. That's exactly backwards, though. The problem[1] with ad-hoc local solar installations is that they're undersubscribed, and end up pumping juice back into the grid at inconvenient times where it can't be used. Being able to use that power locally is the goal, not something to be solved. [1] From the perspective of resource management. If you want to install solar as part of a prepper/off-grid effort you have a lot more design work to do and are absolutely going to have to inefficiently overprovision.

iso1631 4y ago

For your network question My village (UK) copes easily with everyone at home with the ovens on full cooking Christmas dinner and putting the kettle on after a football match, so clearly plenty of spare peak capacity (the grid has to match supply of course) The average car in the UK does about 7,000 miles a year, in the US about 12,000. That's 230 miles a week in the US, needing about 76kWh of power. That's an average 450W draw. Homes used to use more than that keeping the lights on. No doubt about electric generation, we need far more. Not hard, not expensive either. Generating it at a constant rate is a different thing, but with 200 million mobile batteries connected to the grid that's a fair amount of power shifting that's available. For your power outage problems, I had one last night. They turned the power off because a vehicle crashed into the overhead lines. With no power my oil boiler doesn't work, so it's rather moot. Do US home typically have heating that can work without any electricity? Do they generate their own electricity to run pumps etc?