All those people that signed up for and are getting $1.00 per kWh exported out of their PW's during Flex Time are going to be like
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Natural Gas vs Heat pumps for heating
- Thread starter wwhitney
- Start date
Still deciding between manufacturers. First choice would have been Rheem but they are having compressor noise issues with the Gen 5. Supposedly this has now been fixed but the line is shut down for a month while they refit. That brand also provides network connectivity that allows you to program an hour by hour schedule 7 days a week and the temperature for each hour which allow you to optimize heat extraction like say from a hot attic during the when the power needed to move heat from a hot air source drastically reduces electricity usage even beyond the UEF 4x range.
If Rheem isn't back online in another month, I'll probably get the Bradford White or A/O Smith hybrd but then I lose the granular scheduling that the Rheem/Ruud has with EcoNet.
Did you have central air before and now you have head units in each bedroom? How much was the system and how many tons equivalent?
this is from this WSJ article - not sure if it is behind a paywall
Opinion | Get Ready for the Blackouts
Mismanagement and the push for renewables are degrading the reliability of the U.S. electrical grid.www.wsj.com
Three things are weakening the grid. One is the rush to add renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which depend on amenable weather to function. Second, over the past few years, numerous coal and nuclear plants that provide baseload power and help keep the grid stable have closed. Third, regional transmission organizations such as Ercot in Texas and Caiso in California are mismanaging the system. They are not providing enough incentives to ensure reliability such as providing payments to generators that have on-site fuel storage.
Renewable energy promoters don’t want to admit that wind and solar are undermining the grid. But the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit trade group, said in a report last month that “changing resource mix” is the most urgent challenge for reliability. The group says America’s electric generation capacity “is increasingly characterized as one that is sensitive to extreme, widespread, and long duration temperatures as well as wind and solar droughts.”
It's unfortunate that we're nuking nuclear. It can and is done safety in parts of the world that use modern safety designs. Even the waste can be turned into forever batteries that run devices that aren't within 10 feet of normal human habitation.
My house is 2 story, 3300 sq feet. I used to have central air, but with an accident, I removed the two units, removed duct work, and reclaimed the chases.
They were like 2 multipack, propane, like 5 ton each maybe.
I replaced with 3 compressors. One 3.5 ton with 4 heads, one 3 ton with 2 heads, and one 2 ton with 3 heads. Basically I now have a head per room, 100% zoned, and the wife LOVES IT!!!!!! Now we can cool, or heat, JUST the area we want. Compressors, and heads, are super quiet! I feel SO lucky this happened since they are driven from the solar, and batteries at night. I now have a house made in heaven for being off the grid if I wanted to. I used to never run AC summer, too much money and upstairs would get over 90. Now its at 74
Like I believe France is the leader, with units in mountains? So yep, can be done safely.
I agree. That said, there are at least 2 companies building mini nuke plants that sound promising.
A lot less chance of something catastrophic happening when with many mini plants distributed. Also easier on the grid.
Uranium emissions from coal power plants have killed thousands of times more people than nuclear accidents. Humans have no idea how to assess risk even with numbers in front of their face...especially when it comes to policy making.
Also consider that France, South Korea, and China have standardized their nuclear plant designs. Americans like to develop massive cost-overrun-crazy projects because each profit-neutral (har har) utility wants to invest as much as possible to pass the buck to rate payers and book their guaranteed profit. This means they want to waste/spend more. So every time there's a new reactor for the American model, it's back to square 1 and they have to custom-build something with all the risks involved of a new design.
But the standard design used in the other countries means they can mostly replicate/improve one design and learnings from one could be retroactively deployed to the many. Yeah, if there's a big earthquake or something mega bad (like a meltdown) they're kind of screwed since it would put into question the risk of the other plants. But at least they aren't just burning a crap ton of stale dino farts while wondering where all the water has gone while their forests are all on fire.
But the standard design used in the other countries means they can mostly replicate/improve one design and learnings from one could be retroactively deployed to the many. Yeah, if there's a big earthquake or something mega bad (like a meltdown) they're kind of screwed since it would put into question the risk of the other plants. But at least they aren't just burning a crap ton of stale dino farts while wondering where all the water has gone while their forests are all on fire.
Except with MCE PG&E you can opt into a greener Tarif. But even without that the mix doesn’t look NG only: California ISO - Today's Outlook
Also keep in mind that home solar is a nobrainer in most of California so your home use may be greener than the grid anyways.
a "greener Tariff" doesn't change the electrons going to your home. There's no electron cop telling the green electrons to go one place and not the other. You could pay for a green tariff and very well have all NG sourced electrons powering your house
Actually, the electrons are colorless. You can't track the energy going into your house back to a particular generator. All that is knowable is that the energy into the grid = energy out of the grid - transmission losses. So it's just a matter of accounting--if you arrange to have energy equivalent to your usage injected into the grid from a source of your choice, you can claim that energy as "yours".
Of course, the above is true instantaneously. I'm not clear if the various energy providers actually arrange to offset your usage instantaneously. It's plausible that they have a reasonable model of the aggregate time distribution of their customers' usage and arrange the energy offset time distribution accordingly. But I don't know if that's how it works. If there's a time profile discrepancy between usage and the energy offset, then other generators are being used to handle the time shifting.
Cheers, Wayne
Here's a one stop shop that makes the argument we should all un-enroll from MCE's "deep green" or whatever they call their "all renewables" tier.
If you believe what this Bob Silvestri fellow is saying... this "community choice aggregator" doesn't do much other than to make generation costs even more expensive than what one would pay if they hit up PG&E directly. And that's crazy since PG&E = sucks. Literally all MCE is doing now is making it so its customers are deceived into thinking paying MCE is making the world a better place by allowing MCE to purchase more renewable credits instead of dirty credits. But as Wayne says... energy is energy. It's not like MCE is taking the premium to then become responsible for making more renewable sources.
But the flip side is that if MCE didn't pay extra $ into green credits, then some of the renewable generator/operators may not produce as much energy (unlikely, but it is possible). Which would mean more natural gas and imports. For example, if you're a homeowner that is a net producer of solar energy, then by all means you want to be an MCE customer since they pay twice the wholesale rate (twice that of PG&E) for solar in excess of your consumption. This could motivate someone like H2ofun to buy 25 extra panels since he'd make a ROI case that 2x the wholesale rate could actually have a positive return.
I will read that. If you think about it, most aggregators don't do anything other than add more salaries into the equation. They don't do billing, they don't generate, they don't distribute, they don't maintain.Here's a one stop shop that makes the argument we should all un-enroll from MCE's "deep green" or whatever they call their "all renewables" tier.
If you believe what this Bob Silvestri fellow is saying... this "community choice aggregator" doesn't do much other than to make generation costs even more expensive than what one would pay if they hit up PG&E directly. And that's crazy since PG&E = sucks. Literally all MCE is doing now is making it so its customers are deceived into thinking paying MCE is making the world a better place by allowing MCE to purchase more renewable credits instead of dirty credits. But as Wayne says... energy is energy. It's not like MCE is taking the premium to then become responsible for making more renewable sources.
But the flip side is that if MCE didn't pay extra $ into green credits, then some of the renewable generator/operators may not produce as much energy (unlikely, but it is possible). Which would mean more natural gas and imports. For example, if you're a homeowner that is a net producer of solar energy, then by all means you want to be an MCE customer since they pay twice the wholesale rate (twice that of PG&E) for solar in excess of your consumption. This could motivate someone like H2ofun to buy 25 extra panels since he'd make a ROI case that 2x the wholesale rate could actually have a positive return.
right at this moment, 29% of PG&E Supply is NG. At night, even more so. What do you think the winter would be if everyone heats by electric?
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