So many new technologies and improvements in old technologies. I am totally fascinated by the science and technology. Some will make the grade and others will fall by the way side. Incremental improvements are certainly welcome and useful. Still, fossil fuels (since we've all but ruled out nuclear) will continue for many, many more years supplying our base load of energy. No act of Congress, no force of will, no "hope", no "wish", no "data", no "report(s)", no individual commitment, no "surge", no level of conservation will alter that by very much. I can conceive of a day when renewables will indeed match our needs (as humans). I will not live to see it and I even doubt that my grandkids will live to see it.
It the mean time, it may be possible to chip away at carbon emissions and work toward the goal of 100% renewable. But "thinking does not make it so" comes to mind. As always, YMMV.
I always welcome steps toward more renewable energy.
But even when all our cars are EVs, and all the electricity we use come from solar and wind generators, people still forget something. What do people do for heating in the winter, if not burning something?
Electric resistance heating is 100% energy efficient in the sense that all the incoming electric energy is converted to heat. However, most electricity is produced from coal, gas, or oil generators that convert only about 30% of the fuel's energy into electricity. Because of electricity generation and transmission losses, electric heat is often more expensive than heat produced in homes or businesses that use combustion appliances, such as natural gas, propane, and oil furnaces.
If electricity is the only choice, heat pumps are preferable in most climates, as they easily cut electricity use by 50% when compared with electric resistance heating. The exception is in dry climates with either hot or mixed (hot and cold) temperatures (these climates are found in the non-coastal, non-mountainous part of California; the southern tip of Nevada; the southwest corner of Utah; southern and western Arizona; southern and eastern New Mexico; the southeast corner of Colorado; and western Texas). For these dry climates, there are so few heating days that the high cost of heating is not economically significant.
Electric resistance heating may also make sense for a home addition if it is not practical to extend the existing heating system to supply heat to the new addition.
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[Outline]
Types of Electric Resistance Heaters
- Electric Furnaces
- Electric Baseboard Heaters
- Electric Wall Heaters
- Electric Thermal Storage
Trick question? At some point you generate enough excess electricity to heat as well? Examples: My son's house is all electric. My father-in-law heated their entire basement with electricity which was nice as that heat rose up.
Yes resistance heat is not efficient but if you generate excess and it is cheap then who cares? Also there are places that are perfectly OK with heat pumps that are a lot more efficient.
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... I can conceive of a day when renewables will indeed match our needs (as humans). I will not live to see it and I even doubt that my grandkids will live to see it.
It the mean time, it may be possible to chip away at carbon emissions and work toward the goal of 100% renewable. But "thinking does not make it so" comes to mind. As always, YMMV.
That is what bothers me about chart. It seems that something happened in 2009 and that renewables are replacing nuclear. What other conclusions can anyone draw from that form of data presentation?
(I was in a job where chartsmanship was a prized talent back in the day. This form makes the viewer the least informed.)
Lol, when I lived on Hawaii people didn't use fuel. BBQ's in the park via coal, never used the A/C...not sure about hot showers but there were a lot of folks who hitchhiked down or up Mt Haleakala so they didn't even need petrol The A/C didn't work in our honda beach cruiser and we didn't even care. When we sold it nobody else seemed to care that looked at it and it sold quick lol.
That is what bothers me about chart. It seems that something happened in 2009 and that renewables are replacing nuclear. What other conclusions can anyone draw from that form of data presentation?
That is what bothers me about chart. It seems that something happened in 2009 and that renewables are replacing nuclear. What other conclusions can anyone draw from that form of data presentation?
(I was in a job where chartsmanship was a prized talent back in the day. This form makes the viewer the least informed.)
yes I was referring to the German chart in post #333. A big in in 2009 and a smaller dip in 2011? It really does not tell me anything beyond my earlier conclusion which seems self-evident.Edit: OH. You are probably talking about the German chart?
yes I was referring to the German chart in post #333. A big in in 2009 and a smaller dip in 2011? It really does not tell me anything beyond my earlier conclusion which seems self-evident.
Not sure why you are stuck thinking that it has to be 100% or 0%. Why can't there be multiple solutions and dual methods. Some locations (vary by state, country, etc) can use electricity 99% of the time and others 80 or 90+%Not a trick question!
About homes being all electric, yes, both my homes, one in the low desert and the other at 7,000 ft-elevation are all electric, and both have heat pumps for cooling as well as heating.
I have no problems with my electric homes, because that power is generated for me, by generation plants burning coal, natural gas, and splitting atoms. Tough luck getting 365/24/7 power from solar for that, and I am in the Southwest.
Solar and wind energy can have outages as long as several days, if not weeks. We have talked again and again about the lack of huge storage to store enough energy to last such outages.
Batteries are critical for our clean energy future. Luckily, their cost has dropped so low, we might be much closer to this future than we previously thought.
In a little less than a year, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 35 percent, according to a new Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. Cheaper batteries mean we can store more solar and wind power even when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing. This is a major boost to renewables, helping them compete with fossil fuel-generated power, even without subsidies in some places, according to the report. Massive solar-plus-storage projects are already being built in places like Florida and California to replace natural gas, and many more are on the way.
The new battery prices are “staggering improvements,” according to Elena Giannakopoulou, who leads the energy economics group at Bloomberg NEF. Previous estimates anticipated this breakthrough moment for batteries to arrive in late 2020, not early 2019.
According to the report, the cost of wind and solar generation is also down sharply — by between 10 to 24 percent since just last year, depending on the technology. These numbers are based on real projects under construction in 46 countries around the world.
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Not sure why you are stuck thinking that it has to be 100% or 0%. Why can't there be multiple solutions and dual methods. Some locations (vary by state, country, etc) can use electricity 99% of the time and others 80 or 90+%
I also don't know why you think everything will have linear improvements and things won't change in other curves.
Example of how things can change from yesterday's article:
https://grist.org/article/batteries-are-key-to-clean-energy-and-they-just-got-much-cheaper/
I'm always amazed at how much in denial people are about renewable energy. Net zero homes cost about $20,000 more than regular homes. (Add a little more in the north, a little less in the south). ...
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Having a zero energy commute is also easily done, I'm assuming anyone with some intelligence can figure this out in 2019. ...
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Yeah, it's not 100% due to industrial uses etc, but why the extreme negativity?
The future is here and 2030 will look a lot greener than 2019. It won't be by central planners, just by people making personal choices. The retirement home we buy soon will be set up to be zero footprint, either originally or by retrofit.
I'm always amazed at how much in denial people are about renewable energy. Net zero homes cost about $20,000 more than regular homes. (Add a little more in the north, a little less in the south)...
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Anyway... here's one possibility that hasn't been discussed.... yet.
[update]There are several other factsheet pages too. Nice. http://css.umich.edu/factsheets [/update]