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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: Texas uses more energy per capita because they've included industrial use and it has a lot of energy intensive industry.

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Yep, furthermore, Texas is in the bottom 20% of states in terms of residential energy use per capita (which is pretty remarkable given how ubiquitous and essential AC is there). It's all about industrial use.

Low humidity + minimal need for winter heating makes a huge difference.

Low humidity in Texas?

Maybe El Paso, but the rest of the state is pretty humid unless you compare it to Florida or Georgia et al.

El Paso is definitely dry -- no doubt about that. When my nieces visited from El Paso, they complained about how hot it was here in Florida. They didn't believe that it was technically 10°F cooler here until we pulled up the weather page.

But yes, I generally think that people forget that most of the Texas population lives within the effects of the Gulf of Mexico. It's fun watching the transition from green to brown when flying.

Low humidity compared to where?

Average yearly relative humidity[1] :

 	Houston:
 	75% daily 
	90% morning 
	55% afternoon

In the summer, the heat is much more unbearable in Texas than let's say Arizona due to the high humidity rates. Every year, 97 days in Houston with Apparent temperature above 95°F due to humidity (vs. only 16 days per year where Actual temperature is above 95°F)[2]

[1] https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Texas/humidity-annual...

[2] https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Texas/hot-humid-days-...

Texas is a lot more than just Houston. Further, you want around 30-45% and AC only removes excess humity not 100% humidity. Also, it's summer and the second number that really matters so by comparison:

  July:
  San Antonio	44 (ok)
  Houston	55 (+10)
  Fort Worth	42 (ok)
  vs.
  Orlando	64 (+19)
  New Orleans	66 (+21)

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Louisiana/humidity-ju...

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Florida/humidity-july...

PS: Your AC lower air temp below your target room temp, and extracts water because that air is limited to 100% humidity. The air is then heated by your house which is how relative humidity drops. Aka they don't extract anything at 20% humidity and they extract everything over some % that varies based on outside temp.

North Texas (Dallas, Ft. Worth, etc.) get pretty cold during the winter. I've spent a fair amount of time in North and Central Texas and while high AC bills during the summer (i.e., mid-April to early October) are common, the single highest electric bill I've ever had was one January in North Texas when I was living in an apartment with an electric heater.

IIRC AC uses less energy to cool by N degrees than heaters use to heat by N degrees. The climate is in Texas's favor for residential uses.

This is wrong. Heaters have an efficiency of 100%, AC's don't. Energy cannot be created or destroyed.

But it is easier to cool by 4 degrees than heating 40.

actually you are wrong, heat pumps (air conditioners) typically have a coefficient of performance that is greater than 1. this means that they move more heat energy from the cold side to the hot side than they consume in moving the energy. this is possible because they are just moving the heat energy around, they aren't creating or destroying it.

http://www.powerknot.com/2011/03/01/cops-eers-and-seers/

Technically, a good heat pump has an "efficiency" of 250% ~ 400%, depending on conditions and such. But a good one will work for both heating and cooling, so that's a wash.

besides efficiency of cooling the temperature difference between what is comfortable versus what it is outside is narrower for cooling, throw in the as humans we can adjust easier to hotter climates than cooler.

there was a recent study where they examined over seventy million deaths attributed to temperature showed a 17 to 1 ratio with cold versus heat related.

On the note of data centers, Dallas is a great host for East Coast businesses as well.

DFW and Houston have immense amounts of office space, and office space consumes a ton of climate control electricity.

Houston has warm-to-hot summers and awful high humidity, so AC is absolutely required. DFW has less humidity, but much higher summer temps. AC very much required.

DFW also gets really cold 1-3 months of the year. And maybe it's my limited observations, but I would say the temperature swings have been more extreme in the last decade.

Years ago I lived in Fort Worth in a typical large house. My winter electric heating bill was $450/mo. My summer AC electric bill was $400/mo. The hum of climate control units is constant.

Depending on where you live in Texas, there can be 1-3 weeks of spring or fall where you need little climate control. The rest of the time it's all on.

It would be interesting to go back to the 50's and see the move in energy usage. I have a feeling that Detroit in its heyday was a pretty big user compared to non-industrial states.

They also have their own electric grid, separate from other major interstate grids.

That doesn't really affect energy usage though.

The Texas grid is separate due to a combination of just wanting to be independent and geography.

Back in the early days of the grid there was little reason to join the growing national grids because of the remoteness of Texas from the other population centers (transmission is expensive and in the early days inefficient) and abundant natural resources that could be used for generating electricity in the region. Before oil it was coal (and there's still a few plants in Texas using local peat coal, but fewer every year). Then oil, and natural gas. Now wind and solar are the new up and coming sources. Natural gas will be with us for awhile -- it's a handy fuel for generating electricity. It still produces CO2 (but less than coal), but can be spun up and down quickly to meet demand, something coal and nuclear aren't so good at.

We're not totally separate, though -- we have 5 DC ties to the other grids. As I write this looks like we're sending out about 350 MWh. Still, those ties are tiny compared to the current load of 59343 MWh.

There are good reasons we prefer to control our own power supply to some extent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

;)

Of course that was the fault of Texans.

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