I did the math. I live in a European Country that wants to get rid of Russian Gas, and right quick. If every household would use the same amount of energy that we use (and used over the past years, 3 people, we average 2.4KWh per day - or the equivalent of a continuously burning 100W light bulb), we would not need 90TWh p.a. (the country produces around 490TWh p.a) - which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily.
This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike.
We live comfortably on low energy, we use modern appliances like a dish washer and $400 washing machine which has a good footprint (worked for over 8 years, only one cosmetic repair necessary). We have laptops, tablets, smartphones, router, I used to run a webserver 24/7 for a while too. There is nothing that we miss and our footprint is below average. It's not difficult, in fact, it's liberating.
I hope people start to wake up.
PS. I could go on how good it feels to live on a low profile. Lucky us, we never owned a car and require one only a few times a year, and we use a car share service for that. We care for our electronics and use smartphones and laptops for at least five years or more. I own two pairs of shoes and try to go shopping for clothing only once a year. We do not fly, unless absolutely necessary. We try to buy and eat local food, try to be low on meat consumption. And the list goes on and on and on. We are doing this for years and I could not be happier about it.
> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike
I refuelled the smaller of our two cars this morning and paid around €1.80/litre - there's our price spike. I certainly had a "Oh my $deity, this is expensive!" moment while standing at the pump.
On the other hand, my wife is taking our eldest child into town for a hospital appointment today. It's not as though we can choose not to make that journey (I dearly wish it weren't necessary, but that's another story). So, they have to travel. In round figures she can expect to use 5 litres of fuel in the car for the return trip, so that's €9 of fuel.
I'm absolutely aware that the car doesn't just have costs associated with fuel, but it's the cheapest smallest model that that manufacturer makes, it was around €10,000 on the road, all taxes included, and it's already several years old. Fuel economy figures are 4.5 l/100 km aka 52 US mpg aka 63 UK mpg "combined".
To make the journey by public transport would take pretty much the same time from our home to the hospital but the connection only works twice per hour, so that means she should expect additional waiting time at least on the return trip, which the car doesn't have.
The kicker? The train ticket for my wife would be €30 for the round-trip. My son would travel free but only because I paid for an annual railcard for him already, covering his journey to school.
So even with Europe at war, it's still apparently significantly cheaper for us to travel by (ICE) car. Which feels wrong :(
Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon, states add on top of that somewhere in the range of 18 to 67 cents, so under a dollar no matter where you are. The EU requires a minimum gas tax of $1.55 a gallon, but depending on the country goes over $2 a gallon.
Right now Diesel (2.09€/l) here is more expensive than Super E10 (2.04€/l) ... that's like the first time during my 35 years on this earth that that has happened.
Here in Sweden Diesel has always been more expensive than petrol. Diesel is now over 25kr (€2.30), petrol around 22kr (€2.00). Electricity was €1/kWh this morning 07.00 - prices are set hourly.
Such sky high prices. Wholesale energy prices in my area (Texas) this morning was USD$0.075/kWh not including delivery, and that's a bit pricier than normal. 87 octane is running ~USD$3.89/gal, ~€0.94/L. Natural Gas costs me ~USD$1.36/CCF including delivery and taxes.
The really obnoxious thing is that Sweden does not use gas nor much oil for electricity production. Hydropower and nuclear form the base load, wind and solar add when available, the peak load is mostly covered through oil but this was only needed in times of peak demand - read very cold winter nights. The "party for the environment" has forced the closure of half of the nuclear plants leading to an increased use of those peak plants but this is not the only thing which has driven up the prices here. They went up because prices outside of Sweden went up and Sweden is connected to the European power distribution network, making it possible for Swedish power to be sold to other countries. This in turn has led to sky-high prices here, an enormous boon for the government and extreme power bills for the rest.
You mention elsewhere that your heat doesn't come from a heat pump.
It is absurd that you brag of low wattage when you're using gas directly to heat your home. A heat pump is one of two things a household can do to meaningfully reduce energy consumption, and the other one is not owning a car.
The rest of it is feel-good at best and self-righteous at the worst, when people start yelling at each other about imported food and aren't using heat pumps.
The reality is that fuel type isn't a choice for the vast majority of people. A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option.
Not owning a car is equally impractical in many parts of the world unless you happen to have considerable salary.
Everyone doing small things to reduce their overall impact during peak hours is something everyone can participate in at no cost and can have major impact.
> A heat pump installed is a year or more salary for most people if it's even an option.
I think nuance is required here. I installed what is called a "heat pump" in the US for $2500 USD this last summer. So you can see how claiming that $2500 is most people's salary for the year seems a little suspect from my POV.
How many btu? How many sq feet or meters are you trying to heat or cool? Are you in the U.S.? What brand? $2500 seems low or for a small living space.
copied from the web (so you know it's true.)
"30 BTU of heating output per 1 sq ft of living space.
For every sq ft of living space, you need about 30 BTU of heating output. That means, for example, that for a 1,000 sq ft home, you would require a 30,000 BTU heat pump (that's a 2.5-ton heat pump)."
Cost from 2021 (so it's more now with shortages and inflation.) For $2500 USD you are under 2 tons.
In fairness, you reference a single retailer. And that's really important here - retailers will always have a significant markup. You want to go to a wholesaler like CE [1] for a good deal. Most HVAC wholesalers and suppliers will give walk-ins an above wholesale price, which is still less than retail.
Most people are not able to install a heat pump themselves. I consider myself a fairly technical DIY sort of person but was not comfortable installing it myself. Installation is going to be the majority of the cost for the typical person buying a new heat pump.
The labor to install mine was $450. Granted I'm in the Southeast of the U.S. so YMMV, but that is not universally true and shouldn't be stated as such.
A new gas furnace plus A/C with the required high efficiency ducts will also cost about the same in the Bay Area. The 20k heat pump makes sense if you have to replace your entire HVAC system anyway due to age.
Cheaper options that work in parallel with your existing furnace are ductless mini splits with one or two indoor units serving main living areas.
A suit from Bijan also costs 25k. Am I supposed to extrapolate that all suits costs 25k? You are doing exactly this especially with the use of "can" which automatically implies an upper bar.
No but it’s to say that for many in the us installing a heat pump heater is a major expense where the roi will take many years to break even from savings
A huge number of US households install or replace a central air conditioning system each year.
The difference between a heat pump and an air conditioner is small (flow reversing valves, defroster on external compressor fins, some different control software).
Those air conditioners should be replaced with heat pumps instead. At the very least, it provides summer cooling and a secondary backup heat source. Think of it as plug-in hybrid heating.
The problem is that there are relatively few contractors offering these, and they are mostly targeting the luxury market. Similarly, manufacturers have positioned heat pumps as high-end devices, rather than reversible A/Cs.
It is not even a skills gap issue. For the same reasons described above, if a technician can install an A/C they can install a heat pump. We need more technicians and more HVAC contractors willing to install them, which requires more consumers to demand them.
> I installed what is called a "heat pump" in the US for $2500 USD this last summer.
That sounds like a mini-split.
I'm in the US and to me a heat pump involves drilling a bore hole and installing a ground loop.
That costs anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000 depending on soil composition. Then you have the heat pump which ranges from $1,500 up to $10,000. Don't forget your home might have an older furnace, possibly gas or oil that probably needs to be replaced. Along with air handlers and any duct work. And that's only if your home is equipped with a conventional system.
For an older home equipped with radiators or baseboard heaters you're probably better off swapping out your oil or gas for electric but that comes at a cost.
You're thinking of a geothermal heat pump which I do not think is what OP was talking about. Heat pumps are ac/furnace 2 in 1 systems that run on electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
If you're going to insist that air source heat pumps don't exist then yes, heat pumps are very expensive. They do however, and especially in non-Scandinavian Europe, they will work fine.
Well then, I take it back that it isn't a shared definition in that sense.
But it's a pity, because the air source ones are basically AC units which can also run backward to heat your home, and if more people knew that, they'd install them.
Sure, that's fair. But if you use gas for all your heating and cooking, you should not smugly post on HN about how you are below average electricity usage, its so easy, and everyone else needs to wake up.
what would be great is if we stopped amplifying misleading messaging from some of the biggest polluters on the planet - oil companies, shipping companies and agriculture. Personal responsibility is great but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to what just one of these industries could do if they so wanted.
Shipping, for example, has great potential to reduce emissions yet most large companies do everything in their power to pass minimum standards in territorial waters and then it's a free for all on international waters.
Energy efficiency != green footprint. Gas is amazingly efficient, near 100%, certainly as good as a heat pump on 100% carbon neutral energy. However the green footprint it awful compared to an electric heatpump.
Amazingly a modern heat pump running on electricity generated by 100% gas is more efficient at heating than burning the gas for heat directly. Modern heat pumps are 5x efficient so you break even at even just 20% thermal efficiency of the power plant and gas plants are much more efficient than that. If you use the waste heat of the power plant for something else useful it's even better. Switching everyone to heat pumps would help even if 100% of your grid electricity was obtained by burning gas and obviously pretty much everywhere does much better than that.
> "Gas is amazingly efficient, near 100%, certainly as good as a heat pump on 100% carbon neutral energy."
Heat pumps achieve far in excess of 100% efficiency. You get several times more heat energy out than electrical energy goes in.
Of course, gas has in previous years been very cheap in many regions. So despite their efficiency advantage, often there hasn't been enough of an economic advantage to justify the upfront cost. But with the recent gas crisis, that might now be changing in Europe.
I'm intrigued by your number. That's less then 1000 kWh per year. Given that you say you do use 'modern appliances' like dishwasher and a washing machine it seems extremely low.
I have a fairly small house, with only 2 adults, that's full electric (appliances, cooking, hot water, heating). We have a dishwasher (used every other day) and we also use a washing machine (and sadly often the heat pump dryer because there is no space for a drying rack).
We use, all in, about 4000 kWh/year. About 750 to 1000 of that is for heating the house and hot water. My idle usage is higher then your average, which is somewhat crazy. I have about 30-40W for the ventilation system, about 20W for modem/router/wap, 10W for home server and the rest is for fridge/freezer I guess.
Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget. Let alone a dishwasher or washing machine cycle.
I'm fully aware that the biggest improvement can be made in being aware of your usage (which I am, I monitor it carefully) and try to be more mindful about it. Yet it's not easy to lower the numbers significant.
Some years ago, as a single, I also was (well) below 1000 kWh/year. But that was without a dishwasher, or dryer. And generally cooking less often/fancy then my wife currently does. Work from home with 2 adults (with big monitors, a beefy desktop, etc) also adds energy usage.
Same here. We have a modern heat pump water heater. It uses 2.6 kWh per day, set to cycle down at night and during the day. Three people, short showers every other day.
(I just switched it to always on. Trying to optimize water heating timing was just preventing it from storing solar electricity as heat, and didn't change daily energy consumption much.)
Edit: I should add we almost exclusively use a dishwasher to wash dishes (< 4 gallons a day). Laundary is probably our main water consumer. Showers have High Sierra shower heads. They're inexpensive, strong stream; 1.5 gpm (5.7 LPM)
As a household, we're at about 30kWh per day, exclusive of commute. The 40 mile round trip commute adds about 17kWh (110mpge electric car, 2500 ft elevation change).
I recently found a 100 watt phantom load (after the 30kWh measurement), and now the house idles at 500w. That includes fridges, water treatment + water heating, internet, LAN, NAS, etc).
Just piling on with more anecdata... This is for a roughly 2k sq foot house in the S.F. (East) Bay Area that was built in the 1970s with gas heat but electric clothes drier.
Early in the pandemic, we had a period where it was unoccupied but not really shutdown, i.e. refrigeration continued and lights were on timers for security. I can call this the baseline/idle load. It was about 9.2 kWh per day and 0.3 therms per day of natural gas for the pilot lights and tank-based water heater. When occupied in mild weather, our baseline moves to about 10.2 kWh per day and 0.5 therms of natural gas with cooking and water heater usage.
Our peak highest usage for electricity seems to be about 13.2 kWh per day in a summer month with terrible AQI where we had filtration fans running and even deployed a portable A/C due to not being able to do our normal natural cooling of the house. Our peak natural gas usage was around 5.2 therms per day for a cold winter month.
Edit to add clarification: these are averages over a 1 month billing period, not instantaneous peak power etc. When looking at finer grained usage, our electricity is quite flat over time with weekly spikes when we run our laundry and dry clothes with electricity.
My impression is that gas appliances are much more common in Europe. Gas stove, gas heating, gas water heater, washing machine, etc are all very common. Also insulation and windows are usually much higher quality, and the climate is a lot milder than northern America due to the Gulf Stream.
Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget.
My thoughts exactly. Without any cooking at all (and exluding heating) we would do like 2.5kWh/day. But add a morning coffee (drip), noon thea (boil with induction), and a nice dinner to that (at least 2 induction plates, often oven as well) and that number simply doubles.
So OP: really curious to how you do the cooking, if any?
There are a lot of factors at play, climate is by far is the biggest. I moved from the east coast to the west coast of the United States and my home energy consumption was halved.
That being said, we still used 9600kWh last year which is more than double your consumption.
The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. They may reduce their energy usage a bit, but a lot of them will just take this hit financially because they can afford it. Frankly I'm in that category, a doubling of energy prices might reduce my savings for the year but by itself would be unlikely to affect my energy usage much. Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it.
In a situation like this price signalling isn't enough. We need to treat it as the emergency it is, and my family and I have got to do some thinking about our usage and how to reduce it, but that needs to happen across the European economies.
> The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. ... Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it.
That sounds like an argument for a progressive pricing structure with an even more extreme increase at the highest consumption tiers? E.g., would 10x increase in marginal cost affect your consumption? It would probably affect mine.
Another alternative is flat consumption taxes on climate damaging products combined with general wealth taxation and cash redistribution to lower the impact on low income/wealth households.
I'm a fan of flat income tax with flat, per-person guaranteed income. Set the tax rate and base income so that the changeover is revenue neutral, zero income people are a bit better off than currently, and the 90th percentile pays about what they pay now. Billionaires will end up paying way more. (In this proposal, capital gains are treated as regular income.)
The beauty of this is that now you can add astronomical consumption taxes, and just plow the increased revenue into the guaranteed income pool. On average, the consumption tax is revenue neutral for the government, and (as a percentage of income) disproportionately goes to the poor.
Also, you can eliminate 99% of the US tax accounting industry, food stamp program administration, and all sorts of other bureaucracies.
Yes to per-person guaranteed income. No to flat income (or wealth) tax (progressivity is better so no good reason to switch to something worse). Revenue neutrality: only if, and to the extent, it makes it makes the policy package easier to pass.
In practice, progressive tax curves and incentive programs let politicians meddle. Once they can meddle, lobbyists write the tax code.
So-called progressive taxes are always regressive in practice, at least in the US. Keeping the math simple makes it easy to keep them honest. (Make the marginal rate 40-50% if you want. Just set the base income so that the middle class is paying 33%.)
> In practice, progressive tax curves and incentive programs let politicians meddle.
Is there cross-country comparative empirical evidence for that? My hunch is that very obscure tax curves (trapezoids and what not with layers of ad hoc edge cases) are vulnerable to meddling. But I doubt there's a general meddle-ability difference between simple forms of progressivity vs flat.
I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well, ultimately undermining the goal of saving resources, in the longer term.
In my own country we see significant proportions of multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed and often with multiple children, because someone else picks up the tab. However the working class who that try to get ahead under their own steam before maybe breeding are having children later, and less of them if at all.
> I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well
From the POV of climate destruction the segments that don't plan so well, or to put it more bluntly, who plan and act so badly that they're strongly disproportionately responsible for the problem are those that the progressive consumption tax (and general wealth taxation) adresses: the wealthiest.
US style welfare provisions have three flaws at the same time. It is
(1) not generous enough to escape the costly everyday scarcity tax*
(2) spiked with time-wasting conditions and bureaucratic procedures and
(3) politically and socially stigmatized. The US should transition to the northern european welfare state model which works better in all those three regards.
Industrial consumption dwarfs the rest of us. We can fool around with 'energy theatre' turning off lights and walking to the market. But unless we can do 'big industry' more efficiently then it's all for show.
While I don't disagree with the need to make commercial and industrial industries more efficient, I don't think ignoring residential/consumer choices is a good move.
Industrial and commercial energy usage accounted for about 50,000 trillion BTU of energy consumption in the US in 2019. Residential used about 21,000 trillion BTU in the same time. [0] Definitely not insignificant in any way.
However! Transportation used about 28,670 trillion BTU that year. Somewhere around 50-55% [1] of that is from people driving around. I include that in residential/individual choice even if a lot of it is for commuting, because a massive amount of that number is driven by vehicle choice (people have switched to gas guzzling SUVs and trucks in droves as fuel efficiency has crept up, negating efficiency increases), housing type/density and location, etc.
This puts residential/individual energy usage at ~35,000 trillion BTU and commercial/industrial at 71,000. So individual usage is a full _third_ of total energy consumption.
That's massive, and a huge amount of that could easily be cut out if we stop subsidizing people driving trucks, SUVs, etc 45+ minutes each way to work so they can live in some mediocre suburb.
We could also not listen to a minority of NIMBYs and throw out the awful zoning laws that have swept the US over the last 50+ years to make it legal to build more traditional styles of homes and apartments to reduce sprawl and reduce infrastructure costs massively.
Industry still needs to be made far more efficient, but individuals are still a huge factor in energy usage. Other parts of the world have different energy numbers, but a lot of first world countries look fairly similar to what I just laid out.
It's pretty hard to care about saving energy when there's a hundred meter column of flame on the horizon. Mossmorran is an intermittent offender, but worldwide you would be appalled at how much gas is flared. It's probably enough to make up for the loss of Russian gas.
I never understood the strong emotional reaction to gas flaring. I think there is likely some excess use on the fringes, but my understanding is that in most cases not-flaring would be more wasteful.
It's not complicated: it's wasting an irreplaceable resource (fossil fuel) and a difficult-to-replace resource (CO2 safe capacity), in large quantities, while at the same time everyone else is being asked to reduce their consumption.
It often costs more to not flare, which isn't quite the same kind of "wasteful", and sometimes it is necessary for safety reasons. But mostly it happens because gas is a "cheap" byproduct of production of other fuels.
I agree that a big part of the reason is that alternatives to routine flaring are economically wasteful.
I think that most people generally underappreciate the challenges associated with alternatives. Many alternatives require substantial infrastructure that will be under utilized to avoid flaring. If you have an oil drill in a remote location, there are huge material costs involved in either transporting the gas to a processing center, or converting it to liquid natural gas on site, and then transporting that (assuming there is a nearby market that will take it).
In your example of Mossmorran, I would really be interested in an analysis of the alternatives. I looked but couldn't find any. Would the plant need to be completely redesigned and rebuilt to avoid flaring? Maybe it is low hanging fruit and it could be avoided with some extra storage tanks. Maybe the nature of the flared gases are specialized would require the construction of a second plant to process.
Like I said above, I am sure there are some areas where alternatives are cost effective, or even mildly cost negative, but still should be implemented. On the other end of the spectrum, I am sure that there are cases where it would be more wasteful to capture the gas than shut down the wells entirely.
Because it's methane and contribute more to global warming than the CO2 from it's burn. Though there's the expensive and not always practical alternative of selling it. It is difficult to transport/store natural gas.
That sort of argument baffles me. Do they think industy just burns fuels for fun like some Captain Planet Villain and products automagically appear on store shelves?
Consumers are the ultimate source of funding for the industry through their purchases or purchases of their governments. That is what drives industrial consumption. They aren't rogue mining von Neumann machines who make more miners for the sake of it!
Is that true everywhere? Last year we went from -18c to 46c. It wasn't the demands of big industry that shut down our grid for a week, and dropped gas line pressures so low we couldn't turn on backup gas plants. It was residential heating. And in the summer, our load peaks because of residential air conditioning. Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks?
>Maybe the base load is mostly industrial and large relative to those peaks?
Exactly right. Residential usage tends to spike greatly during hot or cold events since a much larger portion of it is for heating and cooling. For industrial users, there is some heating and cooling component, but the industrial process is generally what's going to dominate.
So, if you look at extreme events, residential usage will dominate during those times. The residential usage total may spike up to 2x or 3x "baseline" usage, which industrial never will. However, if you look at sum totals across a year, industrial will typically be a much larger user than the residential sector.
We all depend on industry, yet the majority of people have zero idea how industry actually works. It is just there, and supposed to work. And yes, big industry is the key driver. They are also among the first to change when money is to be made, or saved.
What more can individuals do? It sounds like the commenter isn't interacting with big industrial entities. Local produce, not flying / driving etc. Fighting with their wallet and personal decisions.
I agree we should be self critical and vigilant about calling out climate posturing but if we shame people / ourselves for anything short of al gore wetdream ecoterrorism aren't we in danger of creating a convenient nihilism narrative that justifies not doing anything at all?
Even if it's true I always see this excuse to not try to reduce your consumption as a pure cop-out. If everyone had this attitude then nothing would ever change.
And industry. And transportation. And commercial or public buildings. Taking into account only personal electricity consumption and disregarding all the rest that makes society work is deeply myopic
As a rule of thumb - electricity consumption in developed countries is about 1 kW per person, once everything is accounted for. Energy consumption is about 5 times as much
I was talking explicitly about electricity only. It's clear that I depend on so much more for all the surroundings to work. But the figures I pulled out are for electricity only and our country has 26% of its electricity generated by gas, which we could get rid of if people would use less electricity, which I believe is totally possible.
I haven't talked about anything else. But even this tiny area can make a difference. This is where people have most or even all the control.
Energy is energy whether it's electricity or something else. Europe's primary energy source is fossil based, either oil or gas, which of course mostly comes from Russia.
If you want to reduce your reliance on oil and gas from Russia, then you need to reduce your consumption of both materials regardless of how it's used. That means more than just converting your electrical supply to non-fossil source, it also means converting your heating supply as well (wood briquettes do horrific things to air quality, inner cities would become no-go zones for asthma suffers if we swapped gas for wood briquettes). Indeed the majority of household energy consumption in Europe is directly burning gas, not using electricity. So turning off light bulbs will have negligible impact on Europe's gas needs.
True! Our heating is to a large part based on fossil sources, but we started to move towards more renewable sources, like wood briquettes - which would be CO2-neutral. Indeed we could switch at least 50% of our heating to climate-neutral sources right now.
The renewability of wood briquettes is dubious at best, it's not clear the carbon emissions from biofuels is being properly accounted for, because many place don't consider the carbon release at time of burning, but rather at time of harvest. Unfortunately the rules of accounting for carbon emission at time of harvest aren't great either, with it being possible to simple not account for the carbon emission by claiming a clear-cut forest is still a forest, so no land use change has occurred, and thus no need to account for carbon emissions resulting from land use change (which is the trigger point for computing the carbon emission of cut trees).
In addition burning biofuels like wood briquettes and wood pellets at home release horrific amounts of carbon monoxide and other small particulate from incomplete combustion. Stuff that does horrific things to local air quality, we'll see the return of impenetrable smog to our cities, and health warnings telling asthmatics not to go outside for risk of dying due to inhaling all the nasties.
The source of heating is not what's the most important (in any case an (electrical) heat pump is always going to be more energy efficient, everything else pales in comparison).
Insulation is really the most important thing to reduce a building energy consumption (some buildings are even built with zero heating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_heating_building), along with air-tightness and heat_recovery_ventilation.
Seriously. Modern insulation + heat pump/heat recovery ventilation makes it possible to heat a 140m2 house in the far north of Sweden for a whole year with a few thousand kWh.
Does no one else see the irony in cutting down forests, some of the very things we are trying to preserve by reducing atmospheric CO2, as a means to reduce CO2 emissions? The phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" seems very apt here.
See also: clearing land (including fragile desert ecosystems!) for solar farms vs residential/urban solar, biofuels in general, subsidizing EVs which encourage poor land use and sprawl vs legalizing denser housing and building better public transport, etc etc etc.
When you burn wood, the CO2 released into the atmosphere gets re-absorbed by the next batch of trees that you're gonna burn next year. The overall process can be carbon-neutral, neither increasing nor decreasing the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Once gas comes out of the ground, it's guaranteed to get into the atmosphere one way or another, and it's never going back down in there.
> Forests are recyclable.
Forests, like many other ecosystems, take hundreds of years to stabilize and mature. Clear cutting an area destroys far more than just the trees in that area.
No, but when second growth or plantation forests are cut down for heating/electricity it puts pressure on more mature forests for timber products, wood pulp, etc. The plantations/farmed forests could be instead used for these products.
You can use managed forests for those too. This isn't an either/or problem.
Deforestation is bad, but it doesn't happen because people want timber. Deforestation happens because people want to use that land for something other than growing trees, the most common reason being to make room for cattle pasture.
If you want to save the trees, don't stop burning wood, almost all wood products available today come from sustainably farmed managed forests. If you want to save the trees, stop eating beef. Also palm oil.
Are you heating/cooling on that 2.4kwh/day too? Or do you have gas heat/hot water? There's no way to heat my house (to even just hot enough to avoid frozen pipes) without using significantly more than 100w during the winter. Even "passive" houses here would use more than that for climate control.
So you're chastising everybody for not using as little "energy" as you (counting only electricity) so that we can get off of russian gas, while you're only able to get your numbers so low because 90% of your own energy usage is from gas?
You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home. That's just the math. Whether that energy comes to you in the form of fossil fuel or electricity doesn't matter, that's how much you and everybody else is using for climate control. The fact that it appears on your gas bill instead of your electric bill doesn't mean you're using any less power.
Nobody's gonna save the world by turning off their 3-watt LED bulb an hour earlier each night, cutting a whopping 0.09kwh (0.009%) from their monthly usage.
>You need around 1200kwh per month (annualized) heat a medium home.
I can't believe this is true outside e.g. Alaska, Norway, etc. I live in an area with a lot of cooling needs and very moderate need for heating, almost all of both are done with electric, and 1200 kWh per month is a good guess for total average home usage, heating/cooling, lighting, video games, cooking, all the rest.
that is then extremely misleading. Try redoing your calculation assuming all heat is electric, be that heat pumps or an electric stove. Same for water heaters and EVs.
Your post, although interesting, is the edge case.
Consume less, on paper, is easy, in practice it depend. Personally I have a small f.v. (south France) with battery backup, in sunny days almost all the year I have enough energy to waste it. In other days I need energy as anyone else. No battery can compensate.
Doubling my battery capacity (witch is NOT cheat at all) just means having more energy from one sunny day to another. Survive just one day without sun means 4* the battery and I have to count the fact that does not have a reasonably good lifespan for the price.
Essentially: it's unfeasible. And I'm talking about a "A-class" (BBC) house, so with very little energy needs compared to old ones.
To go fully off grid you would need more solar and batteries rather than just more batteries alone. Panels produce some energy on cloudy days, suppose your deficit drops from -80% to -40%, now the battery which would last you 1 day lasts you 2 days, double your batteries as well and 2 days becomes 4 days. More critically many days that are moderately overcast go from a net loss to a net gain.
It’s just an optimization problem based on your local climate, the cost of equipment, and your willingness to reduce remain after multiple cloudy days.
So did you think it's practical buy a soccer stadium well-exposed south space and spend the money of a supercar just to be able to munge few more W in cloudy days? Of course also counting snowy days when you still get 0 output + you eventually need to clean-up your panels?
Beside the willingness and the price, who many in the world can do something similar? Especially in EU where most people live in dense city, so apartments?
Grid solar is more efficient in general and much safer to install than rooftop solar, some people simply dislike connecting to the electric grid for various reasons.
Anyway, you don’t need to face south if you just want more energy on cloudy days. As to more panels, it’s a question of how much you want to be off grid and how much energy you need. Normal solar installs cover a small fraction of the roof.
Having a east-west roof and a large south area my panels are on ground, facing south, I'm connected to the grid and have no plan not to, but my point is that in mere kWh/month in most month I can say I produce more than I consume, witch is numerically true and practically false since I produce few hours a day much more than my needs and I still have to cover the rest.
My point is at national level: how can a nation imaging energy independence with f.v. and eolic. IMVHO that's simply an illusion. Some say "coupled to the nuclear", but since the network need to be always powered and nuclear better produce at a steady constant peace f.v. et al can just be local small-scale backups.
Something else? Well, maybe a country like Norway can with wind+hydro satisfy it's needs, but most countries can't, or essentially: I see nothing that can really work on scale beside a hypothetical global superconductive grid, or nuclear fusion etc witch actually are more dream with something behind then tangible things. Personally I can even recharge an e.v. since I do normally not need much car usage except for holidays/weekends etc, but if I need medical assistance I do not want to accept "we have drained battery, sorry" or at the hospital "we can't make surgery due to lack of energy today" and similarly when shopping for cheese I expect to find it, not to need more tentatives to buy it until I fond etc. Such "lux" witch are actually normal life in the western world I can see how can exists with the Green New Deal, simply.
I know oil&gas are finite resources, I know pollution is bad, but still fail to se a real solution that can scale behind mass genocides, middle-age revivals etc...
This gets really complicated if you want to understand solar at scale going forward.
First European countries don’t operate reliable and independent electric grids, it’s always been more cost effective to average our demand across huge areas. At the same time, at an organizational and technical level it’s useful to split the grid into multiple different chunks that all connect with each other to various degrees. Even the US shares it’s electric grid with Canada while connecting to the Mexican grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection A country may hit say 99% reliably on it’s own but 99.9X% when part of a larger grid.
Next reaching 99.9+% reliability requires significant redundancy no matter the scale. Normally you subsidize some percentage of generation so it’s there when you need it rather than trying to depend on second by second spot prices to handle extreme outlier events.
In that context solar is really vastly more reliable with a little extra capacity and a great deal of geographic separation between generation. Many US examples have 30+% capacity factors which is ~90% of their theoretical maximums ~(1/pi), but importing power east/west time shifts generation. Similarly aiming panels east or west trades off total generation to get more power either earlier or later.
All of the above doesn’t help at 2AM, but it still means your personal experience with solar doesn’t map very well to grid scale generation. California for example already sees 5% of all solar power being wasted, but because power is more valuable in the morning and evening than in the middle of the day that excess isn’t a big deal.
Sure, if you can use 100% of PV output then solar costs ~2c/kWh in a good location, but that number is largely irrelevant as you notice. The question is how much excess capacity do you add. If you can only use 50% of the output your paying 4c/kWh which is roughly the cost of just the natural gas needed to operate a natural gas power plant averaged over multiple years. Put another way if you own a natural gas power plant you currently save money installing PV simply to offset the cost of natural gas though that’s likely to change as PV gets more ubiquitous.
The question then becomes if you can meet say 60% of total monthly demand with solar but doing so means you have a lot of excess capacity should you then install batteries to cover some of the rest with batteries? Looking at how prices spike at some times of the day the answer seems to be yes, it’s only a niche but it’s still viable today. Which then brings the question of do you eventually build solar simply to charge batteries? We aren’t there yet, but with the way battery prices have been dropping that’s going to happen. (And when it does most other forms of generation get serious competition.)
Of course solar + batteries doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Hydroelectric generation is ~7% of total electricity generation in most areas, but while it basically provides a fixed amount of Wh per month it has a great deal of flexibility when within the month to generate power. This combined with weather forecasting caps how much battery power you want to set aside for unusual days as it’s cheaper to store energy in existing dams and tap that when needed. Hydro in in many ways the inverse of PV.
Similarly wind is it’s own thing and complements solar + batteries quite well.
Now Nuclear seems like a good fit on the surface but costs go up as capacity factor drops. In this model it’s really competing with Hydro and at vastly higher prices because most of the time it’s output is worth very little. Japan might subsidize nuclear because it’s grid is operating individually and so has more expensive and less reliable solar power. Similarly, it might be heavily subsidized for political reasons in some counties, but in general it’s unlikely to make up a large fraction of total generation long term.
Hum, perhaps I was a bit unclear: I think anyone, at any actual realistic scale, can't live with p.v. and eolic. The Sun shine around the globe, of course, so IF we have an hypothetical global superconductive network we can get "constant enough" p.v. and with the same network distribute eolic power around the world, but the if condition is not met: we do not have air-temperature superconductivity at scale nor such a giant global network.
Deploy p.v. at grid scale, not counting the cost, probably means covering the need of many countries in the world during a certain amount of hours/day, that's ok, I'm not really sure how much can scale even in theory but probably it can, however we have 24/7/365 activities that must never stop from hospitals to military passing through countless of enterprises, services etc and we can't power them from lithium storage... So regardless of the economical meaning we can't live on renewable IMVHO...
That's the biggest point: we still have nuclear, it's not really renewable so far, we do not have fusion, but some say we still can run much more nuclear than today before running out of uranium. There is the radioactive wastes issue, still unsolved, but apparently it's manageable and except in case of accidents there is essentially no pollution. Here came my point: nuclear work best at a constant peace witch means that to have energy in the night we still have energy in the day, at that's point why investing in p.v. etc? Just to diversify seems a bit expensive done at a grid scale...
A possible explanation is: yes, we can develop enough nuclear to supply energy for critical usage, but not much more, so we still need other sources, in that case p.v. and eolic might be an interesting option, that's seems convinced IF we can recycle batteries at minimum at 95% or so, witch means we can run a society on trains (electric) and e.v. limiting oil usage to things we do not know how to do otherwise. But again this might came, but so far is not there, so far pushing e.v. seems to be suicidal: we buy vehicles that last 5-8 years, have essentially zero resale value and we do not even know if we will recycle them or not nor if we can built enough batteries for anyone...
So New Urban Agenda? Most people stuck in modern concentration camps named prisons pardon, smart cities, to consume less and just few, rich enough to afford that new old lifestyle, outside benefiting from the hard work of those who live to work in prisons^Wcities? How can possibly a society like that can stay alive? Even if the élite-people separation works and people remain calm and productive, there is no much freedom to develop intelligence, to evolve, we have had élite-people separated society in the past, works for the élite for a certain period of time, but does not really scale. A certain degree of separation is a thing, the Great Reset level of separation is simply unsustainable in the medium run, not counting the long one.
IMHVO the real problem is that modern tech demand an extremely big quantity of people just to exists, and that's means and extremely big quantity of resources. The sole way to make it more efficient (less resource intensive) is erase the economic competition and doing so in the "new deal" way means creating a dictatorship that can't work, like Chinese one that works just because it exists in a context, not alone in the world.
Ignoring the rest of your comment you don’t need a superconducting network to move power around the globe. China just built a 3,300km 1,100KV DC line to move 12GW east or west with less than 10% losses. You can play with the geometry but no city on the earth is more than ~7,000km from sunlight, which would mean at most ~20% losses ignoring the ocean.
However, that’s incredibly wasteful vs building local battery storage. Especially by the time we need it, globally only 3% of electricity is from solar it’s going to be 20+ years before storage is an issue and batteries are already being built for large scale grid storage.
You can play with adoption curves but approximately 3.5 million more EV’s where built in 2021 than 2020. That took an incredible investment in battery factories and the trend is only going in one direction.
So far, from EV "data" (between " because I've read of them, not having them nor being able to really know how trustable they are) modern LiIon (i.e. LiFePo batteries) last 5 year of intense usage, 8 if the usage is less intense. And so far we are unable to recycle lithium batteries (while we almost entirely recycle classic plomb ones), productive capacity from raw materials yet unknown so we actually do not even know if we can build batteries for all on scale and for how many years since lithium itself is not so rare, but not so abundant.
Beside that my home can run on battery, my car probably can for most of it's usage (i.e. not counting long range trips) but trucks can't, yes we can build a classic EU 18m+ truck on batteries, only it halve it's load capacity and almost double the route time. We can push railroads of course, in the past in EU there were far more railroads than now (just http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg as an example) but that demand energy, in quantity.
IMVHO choosing nuclear for "industry and critical appliance" is mandatory, but in that case there is little interest for large renewable deploy, I do not see any other option: you can't run a solar panel factory on solar just as an example: it demand too much energy. You can't run an aluminum foundry on solar, you can't produce/recycle much glass on solar etc.
About EV adoption: yes they grow, following the high price of oil and the growth of domestic p.v. personally if I decide to buy an EV in most cases I can power it for free, unfortunately such EV is absurdly expensive and have exactly zero resale value so compared to classic ICE vehicle is an extremely overpriced crap... Of course if the trend will continue, since I need a car I'll have no other logical choices but that's far from being really convenient nor environmental friendly nor sustainable.
We don’t have a lot of data on really old EV’s but 10 year old model S’s are retaining around 40% of their initial prices which is really good for such expensive cars.
Some of that’s the limited stock of used cars right now, but it’s really inexpensive cars that are seeing the largest bump more expensive cars are closer to normal prices.
As to battery degradation, that varies wildly with chemistry your cellphone doesn’t use the same battery technology as an EV.
This is where the narrative about personal responsibility falls apart - when it comes to electricity and energy, everything is better at scale, and it's not even close. All the meaningful action is to be done on state, corporate and industrial level, individuals are a rounding error
Even with solar, where one might reasonably think the transportation costs would favor decentralized deployment - no, utility-scale deployments benefit dual axis tracking, amortization of fixed costs, integration with energy storage and economies of scale. We would all be better off as shareholders of utility solar than deploying rooftop + batteries, but that takes away the bragging rights
My utility charges about $0.30 per KWh right now and raises rates at about 4x inflation. Putting up solar panels is a no-brainer. The array I put up pays for itself in less than 18 months.
Until those economies of scale manifest as cheap electricity for consumers, the drive towards local generation is inevitable.
IMVHO depend on where you are, for me no tracking at all means I still have more than enough electricity when the Sun shine, but I do consume it 24/7/365, regardless of the meteo....
But you (and I) could have a seasonal thermal energy storage, cooling the solar array in summer and removing the need of external heating in winter. Doesn't work for power, but does for heat.
I do something far shorter: heating water in the sunny days to have it in the cloudy ones, but that's definitively far from sufficient for heating the entire house and to scale at the entire house needs well... It's cheaper run on grid electricity, even these days.
Yes sure. For example, I cannot even give you exact numbers of the footprint of the food we eat or the electronics we use. That would probably a good number to put on a lot of things, in terms of allowing people to make decisions not only on price and quality but hidden costs.
The problem is that externalities are what the name says: things you are not required to factor into your price (something or someone else takes a hit).
I guess that you don't cook a lot. Then you shall maybe take into account the energy used to produce the food that you order and to deliver it to your home.
I cook a lot. I don't even have a very efficient stove (it's on my todo-list to get an induction stove, but we're in a rented flat, so it's a bit complicated).
I still have a really, really tiny electricity bill.
Cooking isn't a major issue in electricity use. It's the devices you buy and some basic behavior sanity (switch off what you don't use etc.).
My refrigerator, which is from 2020 and replaced a failed 1979 unit, uses about as much electricity as your flat. So does the pool pump. So does the network equipment. And if I were to run the heating system, it would too.
Using a toaster oven to bake a meal for two would consume roughly 15-30% of your home's daily energy budget.
I used 18.85 KWh yesterday, which includes running a load of laundry through a resistively heated dryer. 14.07 KWh of that came from my solar panels.
Sounds totally reasonable to me. I don’t understand the theory of trying to strangle household energy usage.
Increasing household energy use is not the problem, it’s actually the solution to a huge productivity and standard of living increase for your population.
Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy. Limiting energy use disproportionately hurts the poorest of the population and drives up the poverty rate.
That 18.85kWh of energy at utility scale is roughly $0.25 USD in energy cost. You figure you got a quarter’s worth of value from everything that energy accomplished for you that day? Probably more like 100x that value.
What’s the opportunity cost of trying to halve your energy bill and save about a dime a day?
The solution is cheap, abundant, clean energy. The featured article shows that’s actually where most of our new production is coming from already. Although in truth that’s more indicative of how overly constrained our energy production growth is, but things are rapidly moving in the right direction due to technology maturation and a supportive tax structure.
Funny that’s all it takes to align incentives and let human ingenuity and the manufacturing learning curve run its course. The problem is the doomsdayers who can only extrapolate linear outcomes from past performance and entirely discount the obvious technological paradigm shifts which are occurring.
You would need about 6kW of solar to fully cover that usage right? So about $15k-$20k over 20 years financed at 0% would be about $2-$2.75 a day.
If we could get a 6kW solar plus a 40kWh battery all packaged and installed with a 20 year life for $10k then we’re at $1.35 a day. I think we’ll get there in the next 10-15 years (inflation adjusted).
In this case you almost don’t need an electric grid for residential use — and actually it gets very hard to even support one once enough people transition. So it’s a radical departure from the current model.
I currently have 4 KWp installed and aimed badly, but also a 10 KWh battery pack. My total expenditure to achieve that was <$5000 and it's supplying the majority of my needs. I have plenty of panels remaining to put up as soon as my re-roofing is done. I need to increase the battery capacity. I bought used and installed myself.
Super impressive, that’s a lot of installed energy capacity for < $5k!
Is the $5.66 / 18.85kWh = $0.30 per kWh factoring in how much was your own supply?
$0.30 is about what I pay in MA for Generation plus Supply plus Taxes & Fees all together, and MA is on the higher side for energy costs in the US. Still very happy to be driving a Tesla right now though.
The goal of adding solar isn’t to use less electricity or less energy per person. Solar electricity is cheap and stable because it doesn’t have a volatile, margin-sensitive commodity as an input (as opposed to oil, ng, coal). Specifically, what is cheaper is midday units of electricity which have a direct impact on commercial and industrial uses (i.e. the largest uses). When you make something cheaper people use MORE of it. This is a good thing since, normalizing for efficiency, more energy use equals a higher quality of life.
The idea that renewables are associated with sacrifice should go away. Instead, in a number of realistic cases renewables reduce the cost/impact of living a better life.
I am setting aside the war component about which I am sympathetic (people should be cognizant of near term resource limits when they are in/adjacent to war).
Variable energy sources like wind and solar have a cost - a balancing cost that you do not currently pay. If you have solar panels, the grid buys all your energy, whenever you are able to deliver that energy. The rest of us subsidise your costs.
Renewables like domestic solar appear to reduce costs because those costs are socialized. Compare the cost of drawing power from the grid with the cost of generating all your energy via solar PV and storage batteries.
Who is the we? Different countries, states, and grid-operators have different policies.
Grid-scale renewables in the US are not ‘take it any time I have it’ to the grid, they are generally required to be able to dispatch down. This means when they are told the addition of those units of power will cause problems the units will be penalized for adding them.
Renewables also pay for interconnection costs, they pay for transmission costs (which pays for transmission equipment), and they pay the grid-operators for operations. To say ‘all their costs are socialized’ borders on dishonest. I am open to there being additional externalities and balancing is a real challenge. But you have to tell me what they are and price them rather than rely on sweeping generalizations which are prima facie false.
As the last autumn in Europe showed solar and wind were not stable when for months there were quite heavy clouds without wind. Big energy storage is required.
> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike.
I don't think you're going to get people to collectively reduce energy usage unless there is a direct incentive to do so, e.g. the price spikes you yourself mention.
The best way to solve this is probably through regulation. In the case of leaving the lights on, this has mostly been "solved" by banning incandescent light bulbs which use ~10x as much energy as the LED light bulbs that are in use everywhere now. I think this is as good as it's gonna get right now with light bulbs. Energy usage of household appliances can be solved in the same way (not sure if it is, I just know about the labeling) and—at least in my country—heating consumption is being solved by increasing insulation requirements pretty hard.
2.4 kWh isn't much, but 14 minutes is also an absurd time to shower. Get wet, turn water off while soaping & shampooing, and rinse after. I haven't timed but feels like a normal everyday shower shouldn't have more than two minutes of running water.
> ”which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily”
Aren’t you forgetting about natural gas used for heating and for industrial purposes? In many countries, this is actually the majority of natural gas consumption, not electricity generation.
I feel this will be the spring/summer of e-bikes. They are perfect, especially in Europe, for combating high fuel prices with the existing supply of batteries/goods/services. There's no way EV cars will ramp to address the oil spike. An e-bike gives a totally normal human being 20mph speed without heavy sweat, and effective distance to 8-10 miles, can deliver the power necessary to get up hills, fight headwinds, and tow a burly of goods. In a cheap, compact vehicle that only needs an LFP battery for 40-100 mile ranges, and simple outlet charge.
Likewise maximizing home solar installations would help as well. Since this is strategic, rather than a pure economic concern, home solar might be able to be rolled out more quickly with rebates/incentives.
Beyond the mentioned "lots of energy use is actually gas for us", I think you likely have a bug in your calculations. Did you calculate this based on your expenses and back into usage, or directly from usage? (Or are you saying 100W per person?).
Unless you do not own a refrigerator, or have an incredibly tiny RV-style unit (36-50W!), you probably average 100W for your fridge alone.
Charging the devices you wrote your comment with is another 10-90W (when charging), and then your router is at least 5-10W continuously. Same thing with a television or computer monitor: pretty good when idle (<5 W) but likely high when in use (30+W for an efficient monitor, but more like 150+ for a larger television even if modern).
Dishwashers actually save energy and water vs. hand-washing. Maybe you save a little energy if you handwash in cold water, but nobody does that and you would need a lot more soap.
>In the past, dishwashers might have consumed 10 to 15 gallons of water per cycle. Modern dishwashers, on the other hand, are designed with water efficiency in mind. In fact, the Department of Energy mandates that full-sized dishwashers can use a maximum of 5 gallons of water per cycle. Energy Star-rated appliances require even lower water usage, at 3.5 gallons per cycle.
>According to a study conducted by the University of Bonn in Germany, washing a full load of dishes by hand uses an average of more than 26 gallons of water. The study also found that handwashing techniques vary widely, with some people using just 8.7 gallons for the task and others using 116!
In other words, if you wash dishes like an average German, hand-washing half a load of dishes is roughly equal to using an old, inefficient dishwasher. And of course the dishwasher advantage gets larger with a modern system.
I have a dishwasher that I never use. Here's why: it's just me and my girlfriend. I usually use two pans (or one pot and one pan) when I cook dinner. They're stainless steel, and need hand washed. The dishwasher will not get everything off. Plus, I don't have an army of saute pans (and spatula's, etc) to use while I load up the dishwasher until it's full.
So, I wash the pans, along with our plates and forks/knives by hand. We used to load up the dishwasher, but after a while it seemed so pointless to put the plates and utensils in there if I'm already washing pans. Just take another 2 minutes to wash them.
If the dishwasher could clean my pans as well as I could, I'd reconsider. Also, if I had a big family, I'm sure I'd just do both.
One issue in this calculation is that you'd need to increase the amount of electricity generated to replace heating and other work done by fossil fuels.
From Saul Griffith's book Electrify, "Electrifying everything will require three to four times as much electricity." [0].
490 * 3 = 1470TWh capacity, or I guess about three 100W light bulbs per day?
What coefficient of power does the book assume for heating air and water?
Our water heater is a heat pump, and draws about 100w on average. It has a COP of 3-4. The house idles at 500w, with it on. I probably have about 100w of computers, and the balance is probably refrigerators (still optimizing the house...)
Anyway, switching to a heat pump changes heating from the dominant load to "maybe I should power down the backup NAS and a switch or two".
Going to comment here as it's on topic with books.
One should also read "Without Hot Air" [1] and "Heat"[2] to understand the math and psychology of sustainability . the Tl;dr; being we'd need to cover an area, iirc, the entire Sahara desert with solar to provide solar for humanity (ignoring the problem of distribution, cost, how long it would take to do, maintenance). And then you also have to account for the psychological effect of "green" energy whereby people end up consuming _more_ because in their minds they discount the ecological cost to 0
My main conclusion (not the authors') is that we need nuclear[3] (maybe thorium). It's the only thing that scales the way we need.
Just curious, why would you make a cosmetic repair on a washing machine? Mine has a few dents and scratches from various moves (it's about 15 years old at this point) and I never cared at all about what it looks like, just whether it worked or not? I've never actually done anything to it. I've been single most of that time though, so washing duty is pretty lite.
The sad truth is, it's practically unfeasible to have pure renewables.
Even most wind/solar plants have a peaker gas plant somewhere, for when demand surpasses available resources. Sure batteries are nice, but you need huge amounts to smooth out the grid.
That said, it's possible to use excess electricity to create some form of gas (like hydrogen or hydro-carbon).
But we do not need to go to 100℅ renewable right away. 80% would be great already. Yet Europe in total is at less than 50%, and there we are only considering power. We'd be so much more flexible both in regards to Putin and climate change if we just reduced our demand by 50%. Step by step, not all at once. And then power-to-X can do the last bit.
> This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike.
That's why there should be a price spike. For all a free market's faults, one thing they're good at is finding the right price for goods with elastic demand.
I also live a low consumption life and think others need to adjust as well but residential energy consumption doesn’t include industry or commercial usage which also needs work.
Here residential energy accounts for 26% of the overall energy consumption - but even if we only adjust in this field, we can already make a difference.
Interesting way to say that we are only addressing 26% of the issue, and ignoring the 74% of the problem that is more concentrated and wealthy, so it’s seems like the priority is reversed from logic.
Im making progress towards the same lifestyle and Im surprised at how good it feels just on a personal health level. Your success is re-inspiring me to push further!
I did the math. I live in a European Country that wants to get rid of Russian Gas, and right quick. If every household would use the same amount of energy that we use (and used over the past years, 3 people, we average 2.4KWh per day - or the equivalent of a continuously burning 100W light bulb), we would not need 90TWh p.a. (the country produces around 490TWh p.a) - which would allow us to get rid of Gas for energy entirely easily.
This is war, but everywhere I look the lights are on and people only save if there's a price spike.
We live comfortably on low energy, we use modern appliances like a dish washer and $400 washing machine which has a good footprint (worked for over 8 years, only one cosmetic repair necessary). We have laptops, tablets, smartphones, router, I used to run a webserver 24/7 for a while too. There is nothing that we miss and our footprint is below average. It's not difficult, in fact, it's liberating.
I hope people start to wake up.
PS. I could go on how good it feels to live on a low profile. Lucky us, we never owned a car and require one only a few times a year, and we use a car share service for that. We care for our electronics and use smartphones and laptops for at least five years or more. I own two pairs of shoes and try to go shopping for clothing only once a year. We do not fly, unless absolutely necessary. We try to buy and eat local food, try to be low on meat consumption. And the list goes on and on and on. We are doing this for years and I could not be happier about it.