Heat Wave Results in Highest U.S. Electricity Demand Since 2017
eia.gov
eia.gov
Which is pretty lame. I'm with alexilliamson. So it's the highest in the last two years? Color me unimpressed. I guess it's just the consequences of recency bias running amuck. "2017? That was so five-minutes-ago."
Also a boring headline: "US oil use peaked fourteen years ago, in 2005." And yet, it's also true.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption
So is, "US per capita energy use has been falling since 2007."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-01/americ...
In order to get clicks, you have to frame everything in alarmist terms.
If you're going to write something, it's nice to have it read by an audience. In the grand scheme of anything alarmist (especially these days), this headline is fairly benign. Still, I'm sure the author likes to have their contributed content read, paid attention to, like any normal person would. So you come up with a headline that differentiates, stands out in some manner, even if it's reaching a bit.
Also, you are the oldest you have ever been.
You better do something, you're not getting any younger.
You may be. Firstly the interval size. Highest year since two years ago is unimpressive, highest day since two years ago is more (still not very) impressive.
Secondly this is coming from "Today in Energy" which appears to be a journal of the minutiae of energy production and consumption. I don't think the target audience is meant to be alarmed, just mildly interested.
For me, a two litter bottle of water, frozen and stood in a bowl in my bedroom with the window and door closed. Does wonders as draws out the water with condensation upon the bottle - lowering the humidity. Also cools the air.
Though I'm sure I'll get some form of aircon in the next few years.
Well, now I know another person on HN who's done that.
Also, European side-opening windows make it much harder to install an AC unit than American slide-up windows; in many cases your only option is a split system.
Anyway there is a high end home contractor with a YouTube channel and he sometimes travels to various places to see how things are done there. He did a whole series of videos on Swiss and German house construction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MBMHAOTt04
On that one the US is just a bit silly. Even in place where it's reasonably cold, houses are frequently built out of cardboard. I'm looking at you, Boston.
I happened to be passing through Stavanger on a cruise from Southampton (as you do) and studied Civ Eng at uni. Whilst docked and bimbling about the place, I saw a house part way through construction. Basically, if you sandwich enough dense foam and silvered insulation in between your structural components, then you can survive some pretty demanding temperatures.
It’s winter temperatures range is only slightly cooler than Edinburgh - and quite mild compared to many US cities!
Norway seems to have a reputation for fierce cold weather, but outside of the mountains and the Arctic north, both relatively unpopulated, it’s not really deserved in my experience!
Yes, we do get good passive cooling in general with this design. Some better than others. Half of the ground floor (first floor in en_US) of my house is tiled with underfloor heating. The dogs love it when dumping thermal overloading - it is cool to the touch regardless of air temperature.
Now, if I wanted to add AC to my house it would not need to account for window shape. I don't understand that comment. Slide up windows are called sash here in the UK and are generally associated with the Victorian era! To add AV I would simply get another consumer unit added to my home 'leccy feed. Then I would fit the internal air out in the primary living area and connect to the external unit by drilling holes in the wall. Not sure where the windows fit into this. Oh and I'd try and fail to get the wife to close the bloody doors.
Not going to happen - I'll stick to being British and whine when it gets warm.
As an example, the house I grew up in, late 1940s, was piped for heating only, to an oil furnace. When my parents wanted an AC, they got a window unit. (Bonus: The original heating system had ceiling vents, at some points the house was re-vented for floor vents)
My place has in floor heating, if I wanted AC there aren't any vents in my house, so same thing, I'd have to get a window unit.
In the Northeast especially, window units are very common.
Are you kidding ? Europe has pretty mild winter compared to North America. Everything north of the Washington state / Kansas / Virginia lines is getting pretty rough winter by European standards.
Most Europeans freaks out when they see 1/2" of snow. In N.A., it's business as usual.
This makes it hard to install such an unit and keeping the window airtight. It's also hard to get agreement from landlords (most people rent), so many people get portable units that blow hot exhaust air out via a dryer-vent style hose. That get stuck out the window, and the window is poorly air-tightened using a velroed-on barrier. The advantage is that it requires zero "modifications" and thus you can just do it.
The downside is that they're horribly inefficient.
That's because historically you simply didn't need AC in Central and Northern Europe. Also, only recently residential buildings ("zero energy house") have begun to use air-based heating which makes central AC feasible. (Obviously when you use AC you can forget the "zero energy" part). So for the huge majority of the existing buildings retrofitting AC is only feasible for a select few rooms due to cost.
I do not like this wording. It implies that progress entails an inevitable march of more and more air conditioning, and that this is a good and desirable thing, and that Europe needs to get with the program and start installing more AC.
I see AC installation as a net bad: it indicates that temperatures are exceeding comfortable levels, it burns energy (which will exacerbate the temperature problem in the long run), and it relieves the need to design buildings so that they maintain a comfortable temperature without AC.
The fact that demand for AC is rising is extremely alarming.
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
Of course this cycle could be broken with renewables, but the vast majority of the world's electricity comes from fossil fuels.
> A positive feedback loop speeds up a process. [0]
So in this context, that is highly undesirable.