A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California.
Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas and doesn't match load at all.
Is it though? I imagine your landlord doesn't think it's good for them. It's not bad for them, but why would they spend hundreds or thousands of dollars improving your apartments insulation when it costs them nothing to keep the poor thermal in place.
I too lived in rentals that had terrible thermal protection. It was awful to heat and cool. Yet, my landlords wouldn't have spent a dime to improve that.
Not sure what can be done here, but with seemingly more and more homes becoming rentals this perhaps needs a solution.
I think some of the Scandinavian countries have banned these heaters.
However there are also indirect benefits to improving insulation generally. First of all there is less fossil fuel pollution since much of the US is still mostly on fossil fuel power, so reducing electrical demand has a positive impact on air quality and atmospheric carbon dioxide. Also a lower load on the local power grid reduces operating costs and reduces wear on grid equipment, reducing frequency of part replacements. Also AC units tend to be pretty loud since they're running fairly large compressors, and themselves generate heat outside the house, and though these factors may be small they do contribute to both noise and heat pollution.
I think a subsidy for energy efficiencyizing buildings in various ways should be provided, I know they have been in limited ways before. Regulating new construction to ensure a base level of heat exchange resistance would be another way.
A 50/50 split might work, since landlord is responsible for energy efficiency of the home and the tenant is responsible for setting the thermostat sanely?
2. Set up Bitcoin mining rig
3. Profit, since you only have to pay half of the utility bill
Tax based on efficiency. Tie permits for building renovation to insulation upgrades.
But most energy losses in older buildings are from leaking air not thermal conductance. So upgrading to R-1 but sealed and we'll installed Windows can do a lot without having to spend 50k.
Also, you can use thermal shutters that have MUCH higher R-value than even top of the line windows.
Do you think attic air sealing, or more effective attic insulation would have a big impact? It does feel like the roof turns into a radiant heater in the summer.
(The only energy auditor available in the area is also in the business of providing the insulation, which is why I’m skeptical.)
If you have a really old house make sure you don't have vermiculite insulation which might make things way more expensive cause it likely has asbestos in it. Apart from that you can also DIY it but it's messy. Your state may offer incentives for doing it too.
https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/attic_air_...
You'll still want insulation on the floor of the attic space, and seal off the living space from the attic.
From what I gather the main complication is keeping critters out while opening your attic to a substantial flow of fresh air. A pile of rockwool insulation sounds like a hell of a home for many small mammals, and bees can get past all but the finest of screen meshes. It seems feasible to diligently install screens on all the vents but it'll be a maintenance burden to keep them intact as the years go by.
I heat to 18oC in winter (Montreal) and AC to 24oC in summer. My electricity bill averages USD$40 per month. The windows made a nice difference, and still seem efficient after 10 years.
In the desert by me people use substantial awnings on the exterior putting the windows in shade. It's a lot cheaper than fancy window treatments and in my experience far more effective. Provides more space to mount solar panels too.
A well designed awning lets in more light in winter, giving you solar gain when you want it, but provides extra shade in summer.
I know a lot of people who upgraded windows & insulation.
Many also did geothermal heating. I've heard from some trades people a lot of negatives about this one though.
There's the problem.
The article says UK but it's actually EU.
As with most things, make it a legal requirement.
Forcing existing landlords to retrofit to new building standards isn't even done for safety purposes, so it certainly isn't going to happen for energy efficiency.
And calling for this to now be a thing, well, I can't think of a better way to get entrenched interests to suddenly lobby hard against every single new building reg.
No, but habitability standards do (or, technically, in general affect the legal ability to charge rent for units in existing buildings.) So, user those of your concern is recalcitrant landlords.
> Forcing existing landlords to retrofit to new building standards isn't even done for safety purposes
Yes, this is done (not always, but it does happen), through habitability standards beifn updated along with building standards (or referencing them.)
And the only example I can think of for the latter was for asbestos. If being as horrible as asbestos is the bar you have to clear, regulation isn't a viable option and we're stuck with market solutions.
I have lived in building <10 years old where a breeze blows through closed windows.
The energy bills aren't so bad that middle-class renters are going to differentiate which apartment they choose based on the potential energy bills. (Whereas a homeowner who has already settled down into that house/condo has an incentive to reduce bills). So the heating/cooling energy is just going to keep getting wasted.
The house my dad grew up in he no a/c. We had to install it in the 1980s. Now it would be unlivable without.
But the thermal profile is terrible. It’s designed to bring heat inside year round.
10 degrees plus in changes over a few decades?
Besides the near absence of insulation, a lot has to do with design itself. Prevalence of huge windows or glazed curtainwalls, indoor convection, exposed floor slabs, huge balconies, abundance of complex shapes, and no avoidance of West-East orientation.
A house I was renting took about 50,000+ BTUs worth of two large AC units to maintain around 90F during the summer. Our electricity bill would get pretty close to $500/month if it was hot (and down to <$20 other months).
It was a house with a large, north/south-facing roof, with black roofing tiles, zero roofing insulation, and poor airflow (but lots of leaks) so we couldn't just open windows/doors. It was utterly absurd construction at even a glance (outside of fashion), and our utility costs were far more than it would've cost to improve. But the property owner lived elsewhere and had no interest in improving anything, only basic repairs.
(I wonder if there is a study on house sturdiness and longevity in Europe vs USA - there seems to be a huge difference. Are US houses considered a single generational (to be bulldozed instead of inherited)?)
In general, yes, but if you look for a term called the duck curve which characterizes that frequently the load comes up after peak output, or even after sunset. For coastal CA wind often helps fill that offset as winds frequently come up near sunset, but it's not always a guaranteed thing.
So there does need to be some sort of offsetting storage - even if it's fairly short term. But, that gives us a nice set of market niches for renewable storage to grow up though with early smaller uses growing to larger uses. ie. peak offsetting for daily variation at small capacity, to larger uses of multi-day/weekly variation compensation, maybe extended weather variation offset, to massive uses for scales like seasonal offset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
PS: and oddly enough, some of the old recommendations for efficiency are backwards for a newer renewable grid: e.g. getting a thermostat that schedules lower temperatures into the evening can push power use to later, vs pre-cooling during the day when you might consume the electric coming off panels w/o the need to store it in a battery.
As an individual then yes you can reduce your peak load on the grid by reducing power in the evening. But that is only the case because other people have already massively reduced the peak during the day by installing solar, see this graph they provide:
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/what-we-do/in-depth/solar-power...
What I think. Demand metering in a solar grid would likely motivate people enough to cut late afternoon and early evening usage. So I think policy and rate setting can match infrastructure and it's costs to demand.
The demand isn't greater in the evening, the relative demand, after you subtract all the energy provided by solar, is in the evening, during periods of the year when demand is low but solar supply is high.
It's like someone cured cancer and then someone came up with the llama curve, showing that some of the people who survived cancer got pushed off cliffs by llamas ten years later and everyone was like "Oh no, that cancer cure has caused the llama curve, what will we do?"
But some of that capacity is slow to respond and need time to ramp up, which may be longer than the time taken for solar to ramp down.
The simple solution to this is to start those slow to ramp sources a little earlier and throw away their excess energy output.
Obviously that's wasteful, but as long as the generation mix is overall cheaper and less carbon intensive with solar added, which it is, then it's not a big deal. And obviously as soon as you add storage then they can help these sources ramp more efficently at first and expand to replace them entirely over time.
All in all it's one of the least problematic problems that ever got its own name.
What's terrible is that PG&E charges the end customers $0.28-$0.42/kwh even though it purchases even the most expensive wholesale power below 5c/kwh
I spoke with my legislator about this and he told me (and I quote) 'the PG&E lobby is strong' before ignoring me.
Typical PG&E delivered power rates are $0.28-$0.42/kwh.
PG&E charges about the same for transmission and delivery that providers outside California charge for transmission delivery and the power itself.
With just about every other commodity (and even with electricity in other parts of the country), you are given a discount if you purchase more. In the case of California, the regulators have been influenced by PG&E and have terrible pricing and tiering.
It's worth noting in Santa Clara, CA, the local power company Silicon Valley Power prices their electricity about .10-11c/kwh.
(without an existing cool place to dump heat, you can't generate energy, otherwise you could just extract heat from everything everywhere and cool it all down to absolute zero, solving both the energy problem and global warming with a single stroke)
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608840/a-material-that-th...
It's possible to use solar heating to directly power indoor cooling, without converting to electricity as an intermediate step. My rough understanding is that this is potentially more efficient, but it adds mechanical complexity and loses flexibility (since it only really works in direct sunlight). And it's probably becoming less cost-effective in comparison as PV prices continue to drop.
Ammonia absorption does not require violating the Third Law as some commenters have suggested below. It is less efficient than the Carnot limit, so you cannot use it to get a perpetuum mobile.
To get energy from heat, you need a hot end and a cold end. The more difference between the two, the more energy you can extract. Extracting energy from small temperature differences is very inefficient. Temperature is measured from absolute zero for this.
Lower temp can only be viable if you reduce the work needed to run the engine, and can still output the needed work/energy.
This is related to why work and heat are both measured in joules.
Gas burns at a much higher energy than steam, so it's much easier to extract more energy with less fuel, making for a smaller form factor.
I should clarify I was talking about an engine here. Not a power generator.
What I said is correct though. You can compensate for lower temperatures with a more efficient engine & energy conversion, and of course more fuel/input.
The actually relevant distinction is that gas turbines, like other internal combustion engines, have a much higher ramp rate than external-combustion engines like a steam turbine. This makes “peaker” gas turbines a crucial resource for establishing power grid stability.