Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

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It's not difficult to imagine how a US household could use a MWh of electricity per month indeed. We know these are the facts.

Point is, it is possible to change those consumption patterns. Quoting from your example:

* heating: 67°F should be fine in winter. replace by natural gas where possible. invest in appropriate insulation and ventilation. Look at how much of northern Europe does it.

* air conditioning: use less and more recent airco. 76-77°F should be fine in summer.

* pool heater? just switch it off, or at the very least switch to a more efficient source of heating

* cut the second fridge in the garage, or at the very least, replace it with something efficient

* use an efficient freezer

* Check what machines have to be always on. Use something efficient for the things that really have to be always on.

I'm quite sure something along these lines would have cut more than 2/3 of the electricity consumption of this average American household.

It is physically possible to make these changes. I concede that it would not be easy to convince the people to actually make changes in this direction, but it can be done!

"heating: 67°F should be fine in winter. replace by natural gas where possible."

Replacing electric heating with natural gas isn't really valid as a long-term carbon solution. Certainly it's more efficient than using electricity produced from fossil sources, but it won't benefit from future grid improvements/decarbonisation. Heat pumps can deliver efficiency/cost comparable to gas in many countries.

Natural Gas heating is very common in the UK, but we're going to have to get rid of it eventually to meet climate goals.

The very low cost of gas also encourages people to burn more of it and overheat their homes (not uncommon to see flats with the boiler running and the windows simultaneously open for ventilation!). If we were thinking long-term, as you said, we're better off investing in better insulation and ventilation (MVHR).

> * pool heater?

This has to be the biggest offender of all the mentioned items.

The lower bound of heat required to raise the temperature of a 10mx6mx2m pool by 5 degrees Celsius is 700kWh, that's over 200kWh in electricity using a heat pump.

Yeah, my Dad has an outdoor pool with a heat pump, and the electricity bills are eye-watering. Thankfully he's now seriously looking at installing solar PV.

>solar PV

Fyi solar pool heating is a much cheaper option. They sell inexpensive unglazed plastic collectors specifically for this purpose. Reducing or eliminating that pool heating load should dramatically cut the PV system cost.

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/PoolHeating/pool_heatin...

Yeah, the pool actually did have this type of solar thermal heating originally, when they first bought the house around 15 years ago. But it wasn't very effective at heating outside of the peak summer months. Installing the heat pump meant they could swim around 5-6 months of the year instead of 2-3.

But to be fair, the collectors probably weren't big enough for the size of the pool. And the technology has probably also improved a lot since then - it was a pretty ancient set up.

PV is certainly more expensive but it has other utility besides just reducing the pool heating costs, as it will be able to generate reasonable energy year round for them (at ~45 deg latitude). If they didn't already have the heat pump then thermal might make more sense!

Or don't use AC altogether. Continuous AC always all-the-time is a very American thing.

I'd rather give up meat than AC, and I'm a meat lover. But I'm in the deep south, sure I'd give up AC in CO.

Makes sense for the South in summer months, sure. But in the USA as a whole, AC is used and abused even though there are solutions that involve building materials, behaviour and good habits that could make life livable. Temperatures get crazy high in Europe as well (40C or 105F is not uncommon in summer months in Spain or Italy and they do without AC). Using terra cotta, washing your floors, good use of shade, plants and trees, all that goes towards managing heat. Though the humidity in the southern US states does make it way more complicated, I'll give you that.

Not keeping shopping malls at freezing temps would help, too!

I used to think this until I spent some time in the tropics.

I folded u my temperate-climate clothes and put them away. They all went mouldy.

Although, I suppose that's just a knowledge / behavioural issue.

I propose a new type of economic system powered by crypto computing. A system where those that pay out the least in expenses get paid the most basic income. You could then normalize the distribution to avoid an inequality problem and overly harsh punishments.

You turn each BI account into a bank. So I can pay with my BI as a debt using an escrow account. The payee could then redeem the value for cold hard cash, or if they hold it and use it as money they get interest based on the value I continue to add to the account.

An expense is a payment using BI that is redeemed for value instead of held as currency.

This would encourage good savings patterns and also encourage lowering the potential debts that might become redeemed. This empowers the service providers to punish overusage of resources by redeeming values instead of holding them. You could also build into the contract an enforcement to just punish those that use the most resources by auto redeeming there values.

In the end these punishments don't kill people, but they should incentivise more humans to lower the amount of resources they use with that slight gamification.

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