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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Problem is that:

1) People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it

2) When you need the energy, it's too late to make the equipment/house more efficient, and when you don't need it, people don't think it's important to make it more efficient

3) Mandating that people upgrade their equipment is unpopular, they vote against it, yet when they get hit with the bill for the energy later, they're unhappy with government for not having done more to control it.

It's a thankless job, to be sure. Good thing taking away people's incandescent bulbs was recognized as a threat to democracy and stopped.

View on HN

The problem here is the high tomorrow in Dallas is supposed to be about 10°F. The typical winter high for Dallas is a bit below 60°F. This means that the demand for heating is about 4-6× what it normally would be for winter.

Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...):

• Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass.

• Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night.

• Heating peak demands tend to be correlated with the longest time since the sun was last shining... This bodes poorly for solar supply and also self generators - even those with battery backup.

• Texas typically imports from neighboring states... Most of which are in a similar irregular climate.

• Heating requirements for a building vs exterior temperature is non-linear, as are heat pump efficiencies. This is especially pronounced with poor insulation factor.

To put it into context, Quebec has ~46,000MW of peak electrical production capacity for a population of 8.4M. during cold winter days (-30°f) it uses all of that capacity and becomes a net-importer. In Summer months, it uses 1/3 of this.

Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M.

As others have pointed out, heating requirements (watt/m^2) are in fact linear which is why it's possible to more or less accurately calculate a building's insulation performance in watt/m^2/K, it's just that there's a grace zone where if it's e.g. 65F outside and you want it to be 72F inside, you might not need to heat at all because the shortfall is covered by solar gains through your windows, internal gains (cooking etc.) and energy stored as thermal mass. That is, the nonlinearity is not in heating needs, but in the efficiency of heating production and the amount of heating you get for free.

Yes that is correct in theory, BTU requirements are linear based on delta temperature with everything else being static.

What doesn't follow is electricity consumption per BTU produced, ie. if your heating source efficiency is non-linear, such as a heat-pump + resistive fallback heating. You can easily consume 8x the amount of electricity with a delta T of 60 than you do at 15.

In reality, outdoor air temperature alone isn't indicative of the entire building heat loss/requirement - ground temperatures don't respond linearly to air temperatures. Likewise, there are some oddities that come into play with high temperature deltas such as phase-change of materials or outright failure in some cases. Precipitation and wind can also affect thermal efficiencies.

A bitter-sweet example for Texans: The snow can actually provide some insulation. It would be worse if you had no snow and similar air temperatures than getting that 12" of fluffy stuff later this week.

Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built.

I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly never been anywhere NEARLY this cold in the 26 years I've lived here, and the idea that we really won't be above 32F (0C) for a material amount of time until SATURDAY is really really nuts. In a normal Houston winter, by contrast, we MIGHT see 3-4 nights that freeze. We go years without needing to wrap plants, and I've never bothered to wrap outside pipes before. (Outlying areas to the north and especially northwest of the urban core get as much as 10 degrees F colder, but even so it's not a regular thing.)

So yeah, we're all built here for cooling and not heating. Ambient air temp outside is rarely more than 95, so getting your house to 78 is pretty attainable. But when we get cold snaps, WE certainly notice in our house, which is a relatively new (1997) 3-story townhouse (very vertical; it's about 1800 sq. ft. or 167m^2). It's just not set up to heat evenly or well.

The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.

As a consequence, a window in our bedroom is open about 2" all winter.

The other gotcha in our house is the floor in the first level, where I have my office (I work from home). It's a stained concrete floor, which is great in the summer because it helps keep the room nice and cool. Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing in the winter. I'm wearing thick wool socks and long underwear in here now, even though I have a plug-in radiator to supplement the central heating.

Actually, the radiator -- a Delonghi; it works great -- would probably be enough IF the windows were better sealed. My desk is up against a window. My legs feel cold all day in weather like this (well, in cold weather; there hasn't been any weather LIKE THIS before), to the point that last week when it was much warmer (45F during the day) I was wearing sweatpants over jeans.

The house is wonderful and comfortable and attractive. It works GREAT for the vast majority of our weather. It just gets drafty in the winter. And, of course, today I'm concerned that we're going to get rolling outages. Whooo!

At least we have a fireplace. (People laugh about it, but in all honesty having a fire is the easiest way to make the living area comfy without overheating the top floor, just based on where the heat goes. If the house was a little bit bigger, I suspect it would've come with 2 climate control units and proper zoning, which would help a LOT, but as is: just one big zone.)

I'll add that up here in the great north - we also use combined air conditioner/heat pumps but in most cases spring for the "low temperature" models with a built in defroster and higher pressure refrigerant - allowing them to heat down to -18°f. This would almost never make sense in a southern climate where it happens once every 20 years. Likewise, investing in any high efficiency/dual-source heating setup would not make any financial sense.

Any Texans looking for some guerrilla insulation/heating techniques:

Put up some painters plastic on the inside frames of Windows (with dual sided tape) as this acts like a very rudimentary dual-pane window. Kits exist for this also (apologies for the Canadian link: https://www.amazon.ca/3M-2141W-6-Indoor-Window-Insulator/dp/... )

Next I would look into a propane space heater (sometimes referred to as a garage/barn heater). These can be operated on a standard 20lb tank and can keep a house warm for a day or two on a single tank. Co2 levels are minimal but you should still make sure you have a decent co2 sensor nearby.

Plastic or rather polyethylene tarps or sheets, even plastic bags, stapled to Windows around frame help a lot to keep house warm. Another very good trick, is to hang blankets in hallways that don't have doors. It keeps the room where the heat is warmer, and really really helps with drafts. That also helps to survive, if no heat anywhere, and to keep one living space warm To keep water in sinks bathrooms kitchens from freezing, keep the cabinet doors open, and if really cold, keep the water trickling, especially in cold water lines. These tricks can save your pipes from freezing, which is real mess and expensive. Source - Canadian.

I remember my parents covering my old leaky single-pane windows in our first house with plastic in the winter. It looks goofy, but it's cheap and it really helps. We also had storm windows that we'd replace our screens with in the winter.

We later moved to a house with newer windows that removed this need, and adult me has a ground source heat pump so I'm toasty even with the 15°F weather here.

Anticipating the cold snap, my wife ordered insulating curtains for the big windows on the front of the house, to hang behind the decorative ones.

I figured it was more an example of "must do something" than "activity that will actually help," but I was proven wrong IMMEDIATELY. They've made a material difference (no pun intended), and I'm said I said no when she asked if I wanted some for my office.

She's a keeper :)

Absolutely. We've been keeping each other for almost 20 years.

>would not make any financial sense.

Yeah, that's what people often miss. We're not prepared for this, and don't build for it, because it almost never happens.

And it'll be 70F on Sunday.

Bubble wrap produces very decent insulation for single-pane windows.

> The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.

Every townhouse I've ever lived in had this problem. The thermostat is on the ground floor or 2nd floor, which results in the bedrooms upstairs being oppressively hot. I will drop the temperature by 5+ degrees before retiring for the night. I hear you about the cold office floor - I have hardwood over a slab and I'm thinking of ordering a heating pad like the one the cat has.

There are many intersecting problems here - the main one is that the standard building code in the South requires a minimum of R-15 insulation in the walls, so that's what the builders put in to remain cost-competitive. You can't get much more than that in a wall cavity framed with 2x4's. Builders and owners need to be incentivized to super-insulate. Not necessarily to a "Net Zero" standard, but increasing the minimum to R-21 (which requires going to 2x6 framing) would help in both heating & cooling seasons.

The other problem is that I have had only a single heat pump for the entire house. It would be much better to have a variable-refrigerant-flow (VRF) system where you have multiple "heads" with their own thermostats that run independently (commonly called a Mini-Split although there are differences). And then you can close the doors to rooms that aren't being used, dropping the thermostat in them to reduce usage.

Yeah, you get hosed on insulation if you buy a spec build. Custom homes are often built better, but come at a premium.

Larger townhouses -- say, 2500sqft & up -- are often zones more reasonably, at least here, such that heating/cooling can be managed with more granularity. But doing it really requires multiple units, not a single big unit.

December 1989, there wasn't an unbroken water pipe in Houston. Had to use hammers to break up ice waterfall on steps to apartment.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-weather/article/Photos-Re...

> The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises.

This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.

And it’s almost inescapable unless you’re interested in custom building or buying an old house.

“ This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.”

Wow dude. You decided why people want specific things and let us know that it’s an affront to future generations. I’m glad it tops the list over deep sea drilling, paved suburban road jungles, ocean acidification, and dubstep (they will look back and mourn the loss of our sanity in this age, but it’s so addictive...).

Maybe people just walk into a tall place and feel more comfortable in it? Maybe builders and markets respond to purchasers and their response to something that lots of people find more comforting?

Perhaps a hyper efficient off-grid renewable-driven earthen hovel isn’t for everyone?

I live in a small, modest, low ceiling home with zoned temperature management and comprehensive energy usage monitoring. That’s great for me and my family, but it’s a preference.

And, you know what? Open plan high ceilings are nice, especially when you don’t have kids and can hear each other more easily.

I hate open concept with enough fury to heat all of Texas to boiling. They’re clearly built and sold to people who never have had to try to keep kids out of things.

And even worse are houses badly “opened up” - thereby ruining whatever design was originally in place.

Well, as childfree people, that was an appeal.

My home is majority open concept on 2 of 3 floors with high ceilings and even with 3 kids I can say it's more appealing than those 1-room-per-100sqft 80s/90s layouts. Turns out kids are people too and enjoy nice spaces just the same.

Add zoned areas for the rooms that need heat/cold to isolate your usage.

Zoning a house built with a 1 zone system is very expensive, and zoning doesn’t do much when the house looks like this:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/7b/67/947b6734e9ec93809b2c...

You seem nice.

It wasn’t a personal comment. I’ve seen it in all the houses built in the past 3 decades, coast to coast. Makes no sense thermodynamically. Obviously it sells better than a house that wastes less energy.

"So that people can feel rich and high status" is an insulting way to phrase "has a different set of architectural preferences than I do."

It heats and cools far more efficiently than the traditional homes in Houston (mostly pier and beam construction). There's more to home appeal than thermodynamics, especially in a mild climate.

Houston is not a mild climate, based on how much AC usage I’ve seen there.

Conditioning an extra 2 to 12ft above your head is absolutely choosing vanity over energy efficiency.

However, most people don’t even have the choice since they’re making trade offs between various neighborhoods of various income levels, and once you get above a certain income, all the houses are made with open foyers and tall ceilings. The builders wouldn’t be able to sell the more energy efficient homes at as high of a price as the non energy efficient ones, so obviously we’re going to end up with a stock of homes where the all the heat downstairs is constantly going upstairs.

The reason the homes with higher ceilings will sell for a higher price is because people feel a certain way about them. A high ceiling has no practical benefits and is purely for aesthetics at the expense of energy efficiency. My intention isn’t to insult, but I think it is accurate. People do many things to project their status.

From a thermodynamics POV, we're very mild. We only ever really want to cool about 20F. Heating is nominal. Most places to the north end up with significantly more expensive heating needs AND roughly equivalent AC needs.

You are still being insulting, or absurdly reductive. Neither is especially welcome. Normal humans value all sorts of competing concerns when evaluating a home where they may spend many many years. Maybe YOU only value thermodynamics and care nothing for aesthetics, but that doesn't mean people who don't share your POV are only trying to project status or whatever other uncharitable thing you envision.

I'm very much in favour of this kind of aesthetic, but having both the heating on and the window open all winter is sad and should be unnecessary.

To be super clear: the amount of heating actually done in a normal Houston winter day is very very minimal. It's just that enough of it collects in the high point of a tall home that an open window is desirable for balance (and, honestly, humidity).

OP doesn't seem mean at all, just accurate that open floorplans these days are built poorly. When I was shopping for houses, I never saw a good open floorplan. They all had weird angles, flows that didn't make sense, and zero symmetry, and the asymmetry was terrible to. Open floorplans these days aren't built to be nice, they're built to sell.

Did I piss off an architect?

If anyone wants to see what I'm talking about, I think there are some examples here: https://McMansionHell.com Some of them aren't really that bad, but there are some definite atrocities.

I lived in a similar structure for a while, a 3 story townhouse with single zone hvac, thermostat on the second floor. What was in that system that made it work was three dampers, one for each the floors. If you can locate the main duct going to each floor, you should be able to add a manually operated damper to reduce flow to the upper floor when heating and reduce flow to the lower floor when cooling. When I switched my system from heat to cool or cool to heat, I would usually make a point of adjusting the dampers, as well as using that as the time to replace the filters. If you don't have dampers at the source, closing the dampers at the registers on the respective floor to 90% should have a similar effect.

We have a sort of dumb zoning already, which is a thermostat on the first floor, but it only allows the first to opt out of whatever heating or cooling is happening in the rest of the house. This is never something we want to do.

Before COVID were were shopping to upgrade, so we're not going to put any more upgrade money into this house, but if we were going to stay I'd absolutely make changes in this.

The manual dampers for the ducts can be as cheap as $20. Why wouldn't you turn off cooling on the ground floor in summer? Heat should rise.

Re: dampers, we generally close 2 of the 3 vents in the 3rd floor for the winter.

Re: the downstairs, unfortunately it warms up quickly on a hot day, and the structure of the house is such that the downstairs room's heat doesn't really have an easy path up.

The other factor is that, in a NORMAL, non-plague year, I'm alone in the house during the work day. If had perfect control of the house climate system, I'd let the upstairs drift to 80 or 82 while keeping my office at 76 or 78, and not start trying to cool the rest of the house until after hours when my wife gets home. Same with heating: just heat down here during the day, and warm the rest of the house in the evening.

For open spaces an IR radiative heater - the kind with glowing elements - is better. It won't save much energy, but for comfort - you can actually point it toward your body and warmup it that way without having to heat everything around you first. The fireplace does this too.

> the kind with glowing elements

There are far-infrared ceramic heaters that don't glow. Less smell and more energy converted into radiation instead of warm air.

Yeah, hence the fireplace in the very open main room.

The radiator in my office -- which is a normal shaped room with maybe an 8 foot ceiling -- does very well.

We live in a 1914 house. There's 2 returns on the main floor. We end up with a wide gap among the floors (basement to 3rd floor). I looked into systems that have inflatable bags that block the areas that are warm so the other areas can get more of the hot air.

Something like this: https://www.retrozone.com/Catalog/flexdamper/Pumps.htm I didn't end up doing it and I don't know anybody who has. And it's probably a lot more expensive than opening your window in the winter.

There is probably a generation or two of work to retrofit housing across the US for energy efficiency, which can also address comfort, and health (indoor air quality). This is something that can only be accomplished using a government program like the Green New Deal (especially for rentals).

Hey neighbor, you live in the heights? You are describing my house and neighborhood :D

Still have power here

Montrose, near Taft & Fairview.

Do you close off the vents in the upstairs rooms? Seems like that would help a lot in the winter.

There are 3: one in the bedroom, one in the vanity area, and one in the actual bath/wc room. We close all the ones except the one in the bath/shower/wc tiny room, bc that is the place where we are often both naked and wet. :)

> Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M

Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW last night, before an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to weather and grid conditions.

Majority of the difference between consumption and generation is imported. ERCOT is operating at 52,000MW right now, with 37,600 of it being generated on-grid.

No. Texas does not have 15 GW of import capacity.

I was agreeing with your points....until I got to the bit, "Texas typically imports from neighboring states". Not with power. ERCOT is an isolated grid.

It imports from Mexico and neighboring grids.

From ERCOT's own Q&A:

-----------

EEA1

When the reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts, Emergency Energy Alert 1 is activated. That’s when ERCOT communicates to the public and to power generators that the situation is deteriorating.

At this time, ERCOT will import power from other states and from Mexico. This regularly happens during peak summer months and is not new. But right now, because prices are so cheap, and unrelated to the weather, ERCOT was already importing power from Mexico and other power grids.

Rotating outages do not happen during this stage.

EEA2

When the electric reserves drop to 1750 megawatts, other steps are taken to bring on additional capacity, but rotating outages are still not yet activated.

EEA3

When the reserves get to 1,000 megawatts and they are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, ERCOT will then ask electric suppliers like Oncor and Reliant to begin rotating outages to reduce load on the system.

ERCOT said the location of outages would be determined by each provider like Oncor and Reliant.

https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-fre...

The DC ties represent <1.7% of current load. About the size of a single large generating station. ERCOT, by policy (to avoid certain federal regulations), keeps it that way. I guess you're technically right that they can import power, but that is far from the design intent of the system. (Which is stark contrast to the eastern and western interconections, and their internal multistate ISO's.)

Following up on this, I checked ERCOT status this morning and none of the DC ties are moving energy (at a moment when you might expect they'd really like to):

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

the Texas Interconnection (operated by ERCOT) is not fully isolated. They have 3 interconnections from Mexico (one of which has only ever been used once), and two with the eastern US.

It is not clear to me if these interconnections are normally used, or only used in Emergency scenarios. I think they are used both. However I have no idea what sort of capacity these have, and if that is enough in cases like this.

The roads here aren’t designed for snow either. My heat went out on Friday and I can’t even get the heater replaced because the trucks that deliver heaters can’t get through the roads.

Would be quite inefficient for municipalities to have plows and salt/sand spreaders sitting around for a decade not being used. Similarly for garages and distributors to carry winter tires.

> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night.

How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go?

Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and...

Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.

Ohhhh, interesting. Right, that makes sense.

There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.

The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.

Texas hit a peak of 69GW of production, not 37. 37 is what we're able to do after a ton of natural gas plants froze over.

Can't edit, but I was wrong on that number being production, that was peak capacity. That was peak capacity. However from my understanding there isn't a ton of interconnect capacity, so I have a hard time believing peak production was only 54% of peak capacity. Do you have a source for your numbers? It seems extremely low.

Why does Quebec use more electrical power in winter if most (nearly all) of their heating is natural gas/oil based?

I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but every source I've seen indicates that the majority of heat in Quebec is electric.

This matches my experience, FWIW. When I lived in Ottawa, I occasionally looked at houses and apartment across the river in Quebec and nearly all of them had electric heat.

More data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb17...

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr... (see Electricity heading)

https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-l...

Another thing that takes electrical power to heat in the winter is vehicles. In many Canadian cities in the winter it is very common to plug in your car over night so the engine won't be frozen solid in the morning. Forgetting to do this means your car won't start after a cold night.

Electricity cost in Quebec is around USD $0.05/kWh. Combine that with the fact that most alternative heating sources are at a premium (natural gas, propane and oil all cost substantially more in Quebec than they do in, for example, Texas) and the fact that 98% of Electricity is renewable source, that leads to a very heavy proportion of electric heat. It's not uncommon to have residential units exclusively heated by baseboard heaters - the least efficient means as far as energy required per unit of heat - however it's still cheaper to operate on a yearly basis than a natural gas furnace, while costing 20% of that to install/maintain.

IDK what it's like in quebec specifically, but a lot of my friends in Ontario would have multiple space heaters (depending on how many people were around and where they were) that they would use in the winter months for more 'localized' warmth and the HVAC was more about keeping pipes from freezing.

Central heaters may be natural gas/oil based but the blowing fans or water circulation are typically electric. Also people will supplement with electric space heaters for whatever room they are in while keeping the house somewhat colder than they would prefer.

Power is super cheap in Quebec ($0.04/kwh USD) and gas is not, so many people heat their homes to 16-19ºC with gas, then have electric space heaters in their rooms to bring it up to 21-23ºC.

There's non heating reasons to use electricity too.

Canada is north. In summer, the sun can set round 11PM and in winter at 330PM

That's a lot of hours of electrical light vs natural

Energy loss is strongly supralinear in the temperature gradient, so it's probably a lot more than that.

Energy loss through an insulator is exactly linear to temperature.

The problem is that people who would have otherwise tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the storage.

One other problem is that one of the ways people have been making their heating more efficient is by using heat pumps, and their efficiency gain drops off with lower temperatures until they become no more efficient than the resistive heaters they replaced during the kind of unusually cold weather Texas is apparently seeing. This makes the peak to average power usage problem even worse.

More modern heat pumps can be efficient at up to around -10 degF[1]. Higher efficiency federal/local rebates are not bad across the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if these were installed in some TX homes. It's still a capacity problem if average use is 10hr/day instead of 2hr/day and your house has no gas furnace heating. I would guess most TX (Dallas/Austin) homes probably do have a gas furnace, but maybe not in coastal/south TX (Houston).

[1] https://daikincomfort.com/go/aurora/

Are their heat pumps linked to outside if their efficiency is so affected? The models I see generally pipe underground, where the temperature is mostly stable and isn't affected by a week of unusually cold weather.

The overwhelming majority of heat pumps across the US are air-source (rather than ground-source), so "yes, overwhelmingly".

Oh you're right.

Time-dependent solutions to temperature change across a gradient are exponential decay functions that solve diff eqs based on Newton's law of cooling. It depends mostly on the insulation and the temperature difference.

While it is 10 F outside, the central heating system for my apartment in a 6-story building cannot maintain temperature. It is 66 F and gradually falling. I would guess it would be 2.5kW running 24/7.

25KW more likely

Probably closer to this than 2.5kw. 2.5kw on a decently modern heat pump should be providing 25k btu. About enough to heat a 2000sqft house ~50f over ambient.

I have a 2.4kW heater in my bedroom...

Just in case anyone is about to miss this detail:

That heater probably doesn't run continously.

For a well designed shared system you can get away with less than n x what an individual unit needs.

(That said, I too guess 2.5kW is too small for what GP mentioned.)

Energy usage is superlinear below a certain point. As I recall, about 25% of homes in Texas use heat pumps. but below 30-ish degrees, heat pumps don't work and they have to switch to resistance-based heating So, demand will start rising a whole lot faster.

There are newer heat pumps that work below 30 degrees, but they're more expensive and not typically used in Texas for obvious reasons.

Sort of - to understand how extreme a 10 degree high really is we should be comparing it to the high on the typical coldest day of the year, and then consider how many deviations away from that number this event is, not just how it compares to a typical winter day. Probably want to consider the low temps as well.

But on the other hand there are only so many hours in a day to run your HVAC/space heater. So from 8 hours per day, it can go worst case to 3x.

Hm, heating is either switched off/on depending on a thermostat ("bang-bang") or in more sophisticated systems is regulated according to need (modulating control). It might be on 24/7 regardless of whether it's hot or cold, but it's not going to use the same amount of power.

My furnace, which is common in mid level units, is two phase. It’s off, low, high. Basically it starts by modulating off and low. Once low is on 24/7 and it needs more heat, it modules low/high. At peak heat it’s just high all the time.

Upside to being in Indiana is our furnaces are made for this. I think I can keep my house at 70 down to like -30F outside. It’s a pretty expensive furnace though, wouldn’t make sense in Texas.

Even a cheap thirty year old furnace can do that - it was able to keep my house at 80° during the -40 (no need to specify; they’re the same that low!) last year. I actually intentionally drove it to 80 to give me thermal mass if needed but it turned out not to be necessary.

Burning gas is insanely thermodynamically active.

As an addendum, this winter I unfortunately found out that, at very low temperatures, the limiting factor might be the furnace, but it might also be the capacity of the radiators (or underfloor heating, or whatever) to shed heat. Tiny radiators or highly spaced underfloor pipes and it won't matter how fancy your furnace is, there's only so much heat it can distribute.

Radiators are an alternative to, not a part of, a forced air gas furnace.

Gas furnace burns gas, blows around hot air.

Radiator heats water, and pushes that water around to heat rooms via radiators.

The problem is it's the coldest night in about 30 years.

Here in Austin, it's just past midnight, and it's already down to 13°F (-10.5°C). It hasn't been that cold here since December 23, 1989.

Also, a lot of Texas homes have electric heat (except in the northern part of the state). Winters are relatively short and mild.

Many homes use electric heat pumps as the heating source. They're energy-efficient and easy to install in a home which has AC, so generally a good choice. But they get less and less effective as the outside temperature drops, so a backup electric heating coil kicks in, which uses way more electricity.

Just about every Texas building has air conditioning which is blasting for those 100 days of summer where it's often above 100 degrees. I'm surprised that a few days of cold is a bigger load than the crazy heat of summer.

I'd think it's the difference between cooling 30F (100->70) vs heating 60F (10->70)

That makes sense.

Edit: Now that the sun is up and shining through our windows, the duty cycle of our (natural gas) furnace has dropped way off. I'm pretty sure our energy usage today will be less than on a 100 degree day.

Cooling from 100 degrees to 70 uses much less energy than heating from 10 to 70.

And with windchill, it's well below 0°F.

I've lived in Texas all my life and can't remember the last time that happened.

> And with windchill, it's well below 0°F.

You won't feel the windchill inside, but it will amplify the impact of draughty buildings/poor insulation.

Yeah it's crazy. The water pressure in my apartment has dropped so much I basically don't have running water. The upstream pipes must be mostly frozen.

Luckily I stocked up on soup before all this so I'll last until the freeze breaks.

It has been snowing like crazy’s I just lost power too. Time for bed. :)

Texas has the equipment, but it's all frozen due to an extreme weather event.

1. The extreme cold is driving up demand to heat homes which is usually done in part by natural gas but

2. The cold has frozen natural gas pipes and wells, driving up the cost of gas 33x.

3. People are trying to heat their homes with electricity but

4. Wind turbines are frozen, limiting capacity, AND those sky high gas prices are limiting what gas power plants can output.

Most of this is correct, but thankfully, wind turbines do not appear to be frozen. In fact, current wind power to the grid is 4300MW. The predicted level is about 2450MW for right now. That’s difference amounts to the entire reserve power in their grid. You can see this on the ERCOT page (it’s a popup which is hard to link from mobile). If wind wasn’t doing so well things would be even more painful.

Everything else you said appears to be spot on.

Their press release from Feb 24th indicates that yesterday they were frozen. Perhaps not today, however. http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151

They were frozen. De-icing helicopters un-froze them.

How do you manage to freeze natural gas pipelines? It isn't even liquid at the near-surface air low-temperature record (-89.2 C/-128.6 F).

Crude natural gas is usually saturated with water downhole at warm temperatures and high pressures, some of which condenses as it is produced at the surface.

At many points in a pipeline further water removal can be essential too.

Even when not liquefied like LPG, when passing through a restriction valve or orifice, there is still additional cooling due to the product acting a bit like a refigerant.

The water content may be small but the quantity of cold gas passing through a narrow point which is well below 0C eventually can build up kilos of ice and block the flow until the ambient temperature rises enough to open it back up.

And you get can get clathrates (combinations of methane/ethane/propane and water).

Methane can't realistically freeze in the pipes, but unrefined natural gas has plenty of impurities which can. Note they're talking about "pipelines and wells" freezing in a gas production context, not residential gas mains.

Understandable. As long as it remains available, the price hike seems to incentivize operators to expend energy on manually thawing them. I'm assuming they could rig up makeshift natural gas burners/heat lamps to keep critical sections above freezing.

I feel like this reads like the first 60 seconds of intro to one of those youtube disaster-recounting videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB being one of said channels. I don't want to say in enjoy their videos due to the content, but for being so simple they convey a great deal of information in a way that few other media have done in decades.

The one I was thinking of is https://youtube.com/c/FascinatingHorror - they aren't quite as in depth but cover a lot of different events.

Thanks for the link.

And yes, my wording seemed weird, even to me.

I've definitely watched over 20 hours of their content. It's very well produced, very approachable and easy to understand. I'm pleasantly surprised at how good of a resource their videos are. I had lower expectations with them being part of the federal government.

My parents live in Dallas and rarely use the heating because of cost; instead they wear scarves and mittens inside. They are running it now, because it is the coldest they've ever seen. When your alternative is to freeze to death, you pay. Finding fault with people because of that is insensitive and lacking in empathy. They know the cost, they also know what the temperature outside is.

Resilience is an important principle in engineering, we know that from software, but it is even more important in infrastructure. People rely on this for staying alive. It is important to have a diverse set of electrical generators. Atomic energy and coal are very resilient. As someone else pointed out, a lot of green infrastructure is prone to failure in extreme events. The wind turbines froze. When the sun isn't shining the solar doesn't work, and it is coldest at night. It is great to have green infrastructure _with_ other types. This stuff is way to important to play politics with.

Of all the things the comment you replied to complained about, people's inelastic demand wasn't one of them: it was merely the background for all of the actual things being complained about.

Shutdowns of natural gas plants made of the majority of the shortfall, not wind turbines[1].

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

> People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it

Basically this. Few individuals pay the actual price of electricity. At best, they'll pay time-of-day rates that might change schedules 2x/year. Otherwise, everyone pays the average cost, and couldn't care less if noon-time electricity costs 10x on Monday vs. last Thursday.

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing, or paying extra for the privilege of an "unlimited plan" or something.

That could be achieved for example by instead of setting your space heater to "low heat", "Mid heat" or "high heat", you could just hit the "$1/hour of heat", "$2/hour of heat", or "$3/hour of heat" settings. The heater itself can look at the minute by minute pricing to decide how much heat to output, and the user can decide to turn it up if they want to pay.

Electronics to connect to wifi and check a server for pricing cost under a dollar now (ESP8266).

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing

This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?

> This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?

Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day.

I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api.

I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things:

- turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do this are available in the $150 - $350 price range

- scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary - showering to low demand times

- maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications to the construction

- or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC)

- not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to allow their vehicles to be used as power banks.

It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current price hike, API access and real time price information helped me to make the jump however.

Conclusion:

Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems like a good idea for companies that are in a position to provide it.

Sadly Tesla doesn’t have the tech in their car to pump power out fast. You need their home battery product power wall.

It’s actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during peak demand.

Batteries don't work all that well at these lower temperatures. I suppose if your Tesla is in a garage that would work, though.

Teslas regulate their battery heat for this reason.

https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips

I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the current energy price displayed on a screen in our kitchen.

This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.

This is amusingly interesting to me. I’d love to know more about your setup and the results make sense (I’ve considered installing a second dishwasher to be able to handle an entire days worth of dishes overnight) but it also seems somehow slightly dystopian.

I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.

The screen in my kitchen is a dakboard (https://dakboard.com/site) we largely use it as a digital picture frame and calendar but it supports querying/parsing json out of the box. So to get the price on it I have it hit my providers json api https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/.

For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).

Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.

Very cool

At some level, consumers do pay that minute-by-minute rate, it just gets averaged out.

No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash, another group of people jacked up theirs up.

Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of those 68s are going to get changed to 80.

If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot more will be set 68.

If anything, the poorer people will be the ones going to 68. So your grand plan is to let the poor freeze while the rich stay warm?

Making people pay directly for what they use puts them at an advantage when the alternative is for them to pay a share of what everyone uses.

Would you prefer to be poor and have a large electricity bill because bob up the street uses power at the worst time of day, or would you prefer to at least have the option to save money by heating your house when power is cheaper and let bob pay extra for not being considerate about his power use times?

We normally operate our thermostat at 67 during the winter but have put it down to 60 given the power crisis. If people are crying about going way down to 68 I have no sympathy.

68 = they deserve the pain, 67 = all ok?

It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why is there so little empathy on here?

Ok just for the record you’re not going to freeze to death at 67. I know because I’m in Dallas and my heater is out entirely. It’s 52 in here and were cold and uncomfortable but we’re not going to freeze to death either.

When we are facing record snow and temperature low with possible grid collapse that could result in numerous deaths then yes... my sympathy for first world comforts softens.

Because there’s a difference between

- the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty

- we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die?

- the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years

Why are you assuming that the poor are demanding t-shirt and shorts temperatures? Please stop making up strawmen.

And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.

Because that’s what the discussed 68F temperature is, I didn’t make up 68F as a straw man, it was suggested by parent comments as an unreasonably cold that it’s in humane to leave poor people to experience unassisted.

Dishwashers come into it when the parent poster arguing in favour of markets-fix-everything said their plan was not for poor people to become human icicles, but for everyone to be pushed by prices to adjust non-essential power use such as washing to other times. Such a plan doesn’t depend on a smart anything - ERCOT twitter feed is suggesting people don’t do laundry on Valentine’s Day to reduce power use, the suggested price influence is that people don’t do laundry by their own choice because it costs more.

Pricing isn’t demand based, so everyone does laundry and uses heat, then the grid collapses - do you think the rich and poor are equally affected by rolling blackouts? That they’re more egalitarian? I suspect not, as rich people will have more and fancier clothing, more money for impromptu propane purchases, more insulated houses, more luxurious vehicles and more money for gas, etc.

There is no current way to provide enough electricity to keep people alive while not providing any for rich people’s luxuries. If demand-based pricing can reduce overall use so the grid doesn’t collapse and there isn’t a huge price surge and people can afford to survive, isn’t that better?

Fixing wealth inequality or assisting the poor could come outside this system - UK has a winter fuel payment for the elderly and poor, for example: https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment

While I agree with your outrage, 68F is 20C, that’s a hot summer day in the UK; check this historic weather data for Heathrow Airport[1] for example, 5 months recorded a temp over 20C in 2020 and usually 4 or 3 in earlier years.

That isn’t a temperature you can reasonably describe as “freezing”. I’m not used to having a thermostat that high even in winter, it’s getting hot and stuffy that warm.

[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/sta...

You must have much higher humidity. Because 68F at 0 humidity is a little chilly even in a sweater. Right now it is -8F and my heater just clicked off set at 60F and I’m cold even under my electric blanket with a sweater on.

I think you have that backwards. Cold air with low humidity doesn't feel nearly as cold as cold air in high humidity.

20°C isn't cold at all unless you're soaking wet or there's some serious draft going on in your house.

Must be; it's 16C (61F) indoors and I've a window open to get a cooler breeze in because it's fresh outside.

People make similar choices all the time...

Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead."

Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.

That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second granularity.

Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.

in before "but this is freedom to make rational decisions!"

rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.

You're comparing filling up the car to literally freezing. Find some humanity!

Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious intent you want it to.

There's imperfect analogies, and then there's completely unrelated 'analogies'. It was the OP chose this analogy in particular, it kind of implies that they consider the situations to be similar.

I just read some people in Texas are camping out in their cars to keep warm.

The alternative to heating that much is wearing outside clothes inside, while heating only enough to prevent frost damage (and ideally not requiring gloves).

Giving electricity consumers the opportunity to set their consumption preferences is actually super logical. It's an obvious way to shave peaks off the total demand for electricity.

Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.

I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme.

Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)

Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging? Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the one single entity?

If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)

You make it sound like an economics problem when it's ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you can't rely entirely on supply side solutions else you are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme demand, a cost that's inevitably passed onto consumers.

This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable.

Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year.

It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.

There is a large cost to building out excess capacity to handle peak demands. That cost gets passed on to customers, and everyone ends up paying more for electricity. There’s also an environmental cost, as “peaker” plants typically burn fossil fuels. Even building grid-scale storage solutions would have a fairly large environmental impact (assuming that’s even feasible at all on the scale necessary).

It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.

They might not need to now, when most energy is generated by systems that run around the clock. But as we generate more solar, it'd be great if people could run more of their high energy activities like say, car charging during the day. I don't know of any way to incentivise this behaviour other than pricing.

Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug it in this afternoon instead of right now".

If you have a Tesla power wall, I believe you can set it up to do this. Basically go power wall (house battery) to house during expensive times of electricity. And then charge the battery back up during cheap electric times. I think even 10% of the grid with such a system would do a lot to take the edge off peak demand, as all of those goes guys go to 0% usage.

Here in Australia, I'm on a power plan that charges you the actual current wholesale price (plus an admin fee).

I have an app where I can check the price, and set up alerts for when there are price spikes and such.

I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into changing your behavior gradually.

Devices can offer functionality to take the decisionmaking burden from the user.

For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.

don't know about you but my dishwasher's shortest program is ~30 minutes - if price of electricity changed every minute, i just wouldn't care because it'd be pointless.

Most of the energy a wash cycle uses is for heating the water it just took in. The part where it splashes the water around uses next to nothing.

Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.

> from: GE to: end user

> Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled

> Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled.

> In order to save money, please send us money.

> P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak.

> thank you for your consideration.

> Mike at GE

They could have automated systems to react to prices. Or they could be simpler (like on a fixed daily schedule).

Ahh, yes, the center of Neoliberal logic. Widespread rip-off is acceptable if the individual has technically a choice to not get ripped-off and if the fineprint of the contract had a size of at least 0.000001pt.

Can you elaborate further on why you think the parent is in favor of ripping people off or deceitful contracts? I didn’t read anything in their comment to suggest that, so I am genuinely curious how you came to that conclusion.

Half-hourly electricity pricing exists in the UK: https://octopus.energy/agile/ I'm considering switching to it actually.

Notice that it's pseudo-realtime pricing... The price for a given half hour is set the day before. That means the price can't adjust for unpredictable events like a power station failing.

Texas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138767

Oh, cool, interesting to see a similar thing exists elsewhere. It looks like Griddy is missing a reasonable price cap though.

Interesting offering. This is where you want a battery (electric car counts as one). Costs need to come down first.

I actually don't have a battery. I have a large hot water tank with immersion heaters, heated overnight. I'm already on "economy-7", which is where the price is cheaper for 7 hours overnight.

Counter argument is that it is not my business to have to think how to consume energy to match the production pattern of my provider. It is literally their business to meet my energy demands. Invest in more generation capacity, more storage, improve the transportation grid.

IJS record-breaking cold weather in Texas currently.

Do you still have incandescent bulbs in the US? Its really hard to find them here in Australia. I thought they were banned but I just read that they are not, but have been phased out.

There are loopholes that allow incandescent bulbs to be sold in the US still. However, replacing incandescent bulbs would do basically nothing to help with this kind of power shortage caused by a cold spell - all their waste energy is heat, and they're as efficient at producing it as any other resistive heater. Switching to LED lighting saves people money during more normal times but makes the long-termp peak to average power usage ratio worse, and ordinary people have no reason to care about that because they pay the same amount for power during this kind of peak than they do at any other time even though it's a lot more expensive to produce.

> However, replacing incandescent bulbs would do basically nothing to help with this kind of power shortage caused by a cold spell

It depends on what you replace it with. If you switch to a resistive heater, yeah, that's pointless, but if you switch to a heat pump or natural gas-based heating it'd help.

There was an incandescent bulb phase out over several years that was supposed to end in 2020, but Trump blocked it because he claimed that LED bulbs were too expensive and made him look orange.[0]

You pretty much can’t buy them anymore at stores except for specialty bulbs like oven lamps, but that might vary state-to-state.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/climate/trump-light-bulb-...

So, someone at the Department of Energy that was hired in 2012, under Obama, made a ruling, and that's translated by the NYTimes as the "Trump Administration" doing it, which then gets referenced as "Trump blocked it because they make him look orange". Fake news in action, folks.

You gotta love implying the president has no power in this sort of thing while simultaneously implying Obama is at fault here. In the same sentence, no less.

He literally said it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_iFi1qH8Cg

Typical LED bulbs have shit spectrum coverage, and have terrible flicker when used with dimmers. I’ve been stockpiling incandescents.

Stockpiling incadescent bulbs instead of spending time doing research to find LED bulbs with a better light spectrum?

LEDs tend to give off a good range over the visible light spectrum. Incandescents tend to bias towards the higher end of the spectrum (towards red).

Agreed that some research can also help find a good light. There are plenty of "full spectrum" light solutions out there which may work for the original poster.

Compare Incandescents (A) vs LED (D) at https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-diff...

As an example for high-CRI LED lighting components, I'll mention Yuji.

https://www.yujiintl.com/

I replaced all of the frequently used lights in my house with LEDs. Now I actually have a stockpile of incandescent bulbs for things like the closets, laundry, and guest rooms where those lights may be on for less than a minute a day.

I bought a bunch of 25w bulbs for my lava lamp :)

When's the last time you used an LED bulb? The CRI has greatly improved since they first came out.

Maybe try dimmable LED bulbs? They work perfectly fine here.

I find LEDs look much better, particularly if you have chandelier type lights.

Dimmable led bulbs come in multiple varients and don't work with all style of dimmers. Quality matters too.

The best bet is switching to Hue or other smart bulbs that manage their own dimming. It's generally cheaper too unless you have a dozen bulbs on one dimmer.

Worse, a bunch of them have awful coil whine. I seem to be one of the few who can hear it, but quite a lot of electronics kick off an infuriating, high-pitched ringing and I don't want one more doing that.

yep. CFLs and LED bulbs are available everywhere, but every store stocks extremely cheap incandescent bulbs right next to them

Its pretty much LED bulbs and fixtures in the US. I think Trump administration reversed the original law but there are a few state laws that are even stricter. The manufacturers have all moved onto LEDs so no going back.

It would have been an executive order the Trump administration reversed, he wouldn’t have had the authority to reverse a congressional passed law.

Looks like it was just the more recent DOE regulations that were reserved. These were for specialty bulbs. But with some of the states still enforcing the changes combined with other countries doing similar things, the manufacturers probably will move on to newer technology.

> In 2014, the Department of Energy issued regulations that would extend the efficiency standards of the 2007 EISA law to some specialty bulbs, effective January 2020.[91] The new standards would apply to Edison, globe, and candelabra bulbs among others. In February 2019, the Department of Energy announced a proposal to withdraw this change. In September 2019 the Trump administration rolled-back these energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs with the Energy Department's publication of regulations in the Federal Register.[92][93] The Energy Department announced the reversal of the 2014 regulation that would have taken effect on January 1, 2020 and implemented the last round of energy-saving light bulb regulations outlined by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.[94]EISA law to some specialty bulbs, effective January 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...

What’s the problem with incandescents here? They’re inefficient, which means they turn lots of energy into heat instead of light, which means your thermostat will turn down your heating to compensate because it needs to produce less of the desired amount of heat.

In the abstract, they’re bad when you’re cooling a Texas house and they’re putting more heat into it; on a cold night a 100W resistance heater is a 100W resistance heater and if you’d banned them, the people with them would need 100W heat from another source for every bulb replaced. That wouldn’t save power or money or reduce demand now as you seem to be suggesting.

Or it’s day time and the bulbs are off, or nighttime and the bulbs are off for sleep. They seem the least relevant thing to gripe about in this specific context?

Natural gas to a powerplant is overall less energy efficient compared to natural gas to a high efficiency home furnace.

This is about Texas though where high efficiency gas furnaces. In the north natural gas is the normal way to heat. I'm not sure about Texas.

Natural gas heating is common in Houston. Most new construction I’ve looked at in north Houston use gas forced air for heating. I have never seen electric central heating in Houston; I am sure it exists, but in my experience most houses that have central heat, have gas.

I'm in Austin and my heater uses gas. Every house I've had has used gas. It's incredibly cheap around here.

So the people decide to act in a way that there will be power cuts - if it was only them, it wouldn't matter much - they would deserve it.

But since the system is shared, it affects everyone.

Insulation and heat pump equipped spot price aware water heaters etc could probably help a lot.

Insulation is the main issue. I live in a cold country where it often gets to -20c (-5F) during winter, but we can have peaks well below that. We usually don't even turn our heating on until it drops below freezing as our home is well enough insulated (we have much stricter building standards regarding this than the US), so that it's comfortable inside (21C/70F) until then.

Insulation helps in the summer too though - it's not just something you need in cold climates. If it's hot outside and you are running AC there's a temperature differential. Insulation will reduce the equalisation of that, and reduce the amount of energy you are using to cool your home. It's epecially important if you are in a stick framed home where there's basically no thermal mass (as opposed to masonry).

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