The Electrification of Everything
wsj.com
wsj.com
1) Air source heat pumps have become incredibly efficient even in cold climates.
2) Ground source heat pumps are complex and very expensive and probably best suited for large installs like schools.
3) Ductless mini splits are the preferred way to heat and cool most USA (tight) homes.
4) Modern code dictates a tight (measured by air changes per hour) home and making an existing home tighter is usually the best use of time and money.
5) Induction is superior in many ways and air quality points to gas cooking being much worse than previously thought.
6) Heat pump hot water heaters (with tank) are the most efficient way to provide hot water.
7) Tankless electric is difficult because of the huge spikes of power it needs. Maybe if you have a battery with your solar setup, it can work better.
8) Tankless also seems to have more maintenance issues than expected (e.g., it's not maintenance free as I imagined).
9) Once your house becomes very tight (measured by air changes per hour), you will need to bring in fresh air. An ERV is efficient at exchanging stale, temp-regulated air with outside air.
10) Building tight, all-electric, with solar will provide a comfortable, clean, long-lasting house, but it will be quite a bit more expensive. Possibly 30%+ more expensive than using standard contractor choices.
I'm just finishing doing a high performance renovation ( <1 ACH50, all electric, heat pumps, HRV, etc.). For new construction, the difference is more like +5-10% - the materials are marginally more expensive, and the labor doesn't require extremely specialized skills. The HVAC equipment is the very expensive part.
For a renovation, it's more like 20% more expensive but it can vary widely depending on the existing house's condition and the original build quality.
I personally saved a boatload by doing the high performance air sealing work myself - it's not that hard once you get the hang of it, just laborious.
The general contractor applied a secondary bulk water shedding house wrap, a rain screen, and the finish cladding.
There were other things I did internally during the drywall/plasterboard stage also to minimize air movement through walls and ceilings.
In Australia, but we just installed these in our house with in-ceiling cassettes and they're incredibly good. Also initially didn't care too much that they had WiFi control, but we ended up never using the remotes and just using the app. (Since you're typically sitting on the couch when you want to change the setting.)
Every ducted system I've seen is incapable of regulating separate rooms properly. Presumably one would need temp sensors in each room to do that, and that isn't done on cheap installs.
> 5) Induction is superior in many ways and air quality points to gas cooking being much worse than previously thought.
If anyone knows some good arguments to use when your partner is an excellent cook and loves gas for the high heat (searing and wok frying), I'm all ears. With the kitchen upgrade I installed a monster extraction rangehood (external fan, 3x the typical extraction) to hopefully deal with the air quality issue.
The whole kitchen would have a sub-panel _in_ the kitchen; because EVERY OUTLET would be it's own independent 20A capable circuit, run back to that sub-panel.
I don't expect to use 20A from every outlet all the time, but I don't want to be constrained from any mix-and-match of devices I need within the room's power budget.
Flat bottomed woks can work with induction however the round bottomed ones won't sit close enough to the coil to heat up properly. An outdoor wok burner could be a good way for your partner to get their wok hei fix without burning gas in the house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpoSvprBJpE.
The main downsides I'd mention:
When I cook with induction I'm not comfortable shaking the pan to sauté or flip food. The surface of the cooktop is supposed to be quite durable but it looks like glass and I tend to baby it against the (even imagined) possibility of scratching.
Only ferrous-based cookware will be heated by the cooker so any aluminum or copper pans in the house become useless.
(Don’t waste time with the cheap units, 10 or even 20 power levels is not enough)
Then watch your household simply cease to use the gas range
Out of curiosity I checked the two home improvement stores where I live, and the cheapest ones were $1,500+. An old fashioned smooth top electric range/oven starts around $700.
https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/bosch-pie631fb1e-kochfe...
There again 95% of new houses here have induction, so the price difference you are seeing is probably because market demand is that much lower in the US.
The induction range is coming down in price quickly now, so it may be they’ve made some progress on this issue. Just two years ago the cheapest was $4k.
(Range = cooktop and oven in one freestanding unit)
Then just need to see which appliances i can get to run on it. Seems most kettles, resistance and induction cooktops for the UK (50hz) should work. Anything with a motor is probably out unless it’s an inverter drive.
My take is that most of them are crap. They usually have 10 power levels, which is too few. Some also have temperature-based settings, but I suspect the sensors are too removed from the food surface to be accurate and they're basically ornamental.
I think you need good cookware that can spread the heat. I don't know what cookware is good, but most cookware just scorches your food in a ring-shaped pattern.
I do have one friend who spent a boatload of money on a gaggenau induction cooktop he loves. it seems to have elements spread out on the surface and adapts to the size and number of pans.
He also dedicated a 220v circuit to the thing, so it can pump out lots of energy, especially compared to ~1200 watts from a 110v countertop one.
This means there are some things possible in europe that are underpowered or impossible in the US. Tools like air compressors or garden equipment like electric mowers are smaller.
Other comments had some good suggestions, but I'd be sure to also mention:
Ease of cleanup: Induction units only get warm, none of the food or oil that gets spilled or splattered will burn onto the surface. A damp cloth is all the cleanup necessary.
Comfortable kitchen temperatures: You have a tiny fraction as much heat emitted into the room, so the kitchen remains a far more comfortable temperature.
Found an interesting list here: https://www.bestspy.co.uk/do-professional-chefs-use-inductio...
Also, it heats faster than gas on max power.
2) Ground source heat pumps are complex and very expensive and probably best suited for large installs like schools.
"
This is not really accurate on the complexity/etc side. Expense we'll get to later.
A. The GSHP is not complex at all, and often much easier to understand than the equivalent air source machinery. I could repair my GSHP.
B. The efficiency of air source heat pumps vary a ton in the field. This is not conjecture. This is backed up by years of research. Of course, unlike ground source heat pump (which usually contain tons of sensors and can tell you exactly how well they are operating in a lot of ways), air source heat pumps rarely contain any of the performance measurement sensors necessary to validate their efficiency in practice for your install, and they are rarely accessible. So you are limited to a small number of studies that bother to test them in the field by adding that kind of metering. Oh and manufacturer "self-reporting" about how good they are.
EER or COP of air source heat pumps in-situ can be easily 50% or less of claimed efficiency depending on real climate and how well designed they were for the situation.
GSHP are 85-99% of designed performance over a much wider climate range (again backed up by research, and with much larger sample sizes, since most GSHP have the monitoring sensors built in).
That's on top of usually much higher efficiency of GSHP over ASHP.
C. GSHP not amenable to the random "don't want to have to care about real engineering" HVAC contractors that most people deal with.
IE not even willing to do basic manual j load calcs.
They are only complex in this sense - most air source heat pump folks don't really have to know what they are doing, and it will often work okayish in terms of ability to heat/cool when they size it wrong. It will just be very inefficient.
If your ground source heat pump folks don't actually bother to do the work right and enter the calcs into the loop design program, it can fail.
Just about 100% of failed GSHP installs i've seen were done by air source contractors badly trying to moonlight because they thought they margin would end up better (and who were bad at ASHP as well).
Any good loop design program will give you the EER/COP of the system in your case based on historical temperature, along with actual yearly cost/etc. So you don't have to guess whether it will work out for you (and it will be very close to reality). It's also obvious if your contractor is giving you bullshit if you have a loop design report - IE if the page with the assumptions/data show clear nonsense.
As performance standards increase (IE California), or any form of real in-situ efficiency testing of air source heat pumps was ever required, you would see this "really efficient" argument disappear really quick. (Heating has definitely gotten a lot better in lower temps, not gonna argue with that).
D. It is true that GSHP is expensive to install, but that's mostly a factor of scale for drilling, and not size of install or unit cost. It's never going to be an effective way to deal with a single 2000sqft house. It will be a much more effective (and space efficient) at serving multi-unit complexes, regardless of individual house size.
For example, when they do GSHP for a new construction community (out here they are doing 200 new homes for examples), it's not a lot more expensive than installing air source pumps.
For single houses, again, it depends on your real in-practice performance of an ASHP, which is rarely ever measured. For a house i owned in MD, and compared to two ASHP's that were properly sized (and properly sized/sealed duct work/house/etc with actual leakage/r-value/perf testing), but just a really bad in-practice fit for my climate (neighbors had same issues, etc), it only took 5 years to pay back the GSHP cost (after tax credits, etc). This is uncommon case, obviously. But i'll also say being able to set the house at 72 and leaving it that way forever is worth something too.
Ductless i've got no qualms with :)
I think most folks with tight homes would be much better off in practice with lots of ductless wall/ceiling units than standard ASHP/GSHP.
In general, if you google "measured performance ground source heat pump" and "measured performance air source heat pump", you can find studies.
Most of the GHSP studies are consistent. Some of the ASHP studies are inconsistent with each other.
We have a a very large cottage in Northern Ontario (3000 sq/ft +) that has been sprayed foamed (Demilic Heatlok) and has in floor radiant heating and forced air AC all supplied by Geo Thermal. The electric bills a year are less than what some people spend at Starbucks. The comfort is incredible in -30F/-34c or +100f/38c and a bomb could go off outside and I doubt you would hear it. The costs to insulate the whole house and to install the Geothermal (including AC) was 55k, less than what some folks spend on kitchen cabinets and counter tops.
Maybe a 30% higher price, but likely a lower cost when you factor in externalities.
The house will need around 2000W[0] of heat in the middle of winter. For that usage, the most expensive part of gas would be the network fee, not the gas itself. An electric heat pump is a bit more expensive that a gas boiler, but considering we'd need to have a gas connection introduced to the property, the overall upfront cost is the same. The lifetime of both units is the same (10-15 years).
Someone here mentioned a gas absorption heat pump before, but those units are much more expensive than an electric heat pump in my country, and it still has the same issue of the gas network fee being expensive. We'll also have solar PV, so that will cut the electricity running costs even lower once it's paid off (~7 years).
It's interesting that once you have an efficient building envelope, technologies that you would think would be more efficient such as solar water heaters or ground source heat pumps don't actually make sense financially in the long term. I also ran the numbers for underfloor infrared heating vs electric heat pump + hydronic underfloor heating. Taking into account the higher installation costs, and expected life of the heat pump unit, the infrared heating - which is must less efficient - actually works out costing around the same. The unit we have will also provide DHW and cooling in the summer, so it's apples and oranges, but for a pure heating perspective it's worth considering that option, espeically if you want a lower upfront cost.
[0] For a 160m2 / 1700sqft house. This doesn't take into account 'waste' heat from appliances, so our primary heat source demand will actually be less.
Not cheap though.
But they're not less efficient, ducted systems are more efficient. Mini-splits multiply your refrigerant lines, compressors, heat exchanger, condensing coils, etc., so you're multiplying your inefficiencies. A single variable rate, zoned, ducted heat pump is the most efficient, but they definitely cost more.
The installation cost is vastly lower than heat-pump based units, they fit in a cabinet under a sink much better, are easier to wire up to an on-demand on/off button, is even cheaper to operate during summer months, etc. Would work even better with a solar thermal panel for preheating the cold water.
The button in question being a 30-minute auto-shut-off switch, actually.
Looking at prices for the unit, the difference between Ground source heat pumps and air source heat pumps is around 15%. This assume we want heated water. AC-only units are naturally much much cheaper, but since there does not exist ground source AC-only units it is not a very fair comparison.
When it comes to extracting heat from the environment there are a few different choices. Air, solar, borehole, ground, and water. As I understand it, which one is the most cost efficient choice depend more on the environment which it is getting installed than the actually unit.
I don’t get this argument that increasing electricity generation is going to be particularly hard. From 1950 to 1959, the US more than doubled electricity generation.
The article says by 2050 we’ll need about double current electricity production. That’s three times as long! From 1950 to 1973, just 23 years, electricity production increased by over 450%.
People trying to make it sound like this will be unprecedentedly hard either forgot about the time when America used to grow electricity quickly, or they’re pessimistic about modern America’s ability to build anything big any more.
This wouldn't be an entirely unfounded concern.
Pessimism leads to inaction.
Another big issue is the cost to run. In order to be a decent candidate, you need to buy national advertising, which is owned by a handful of companies, which would prefer certain candidates who would provide them with profitable legislation.
The current crop is rotten and the mechanisms we have to get a new one are coopted by these entrenched private interest groups who actively fight to ensure their profitable status quo doesn't change, and only does if a profitable angle has been already conceived. Maybe this is the American Way.
This is a bizarre misrepresentation of history. There are entire industries of corruption now that didn't even exist in FDR's time. The current government spends far more as a percentage of (a vastly larger) GDP; the fact that nothing useful gets done can't very well argue for less corruption.
Generating electricity is a bit of a misnomer, because it's more about repackaging energy than creating it. Again, this is trivial but easy to lose sight of. The important question is: what's the energy source?
https://www.tesla.com/en_au/support/energy/savpp-faqs (South Australia Virtual Power Plant FAQs)
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/teslas-australian-virtual-p... (Tesla's Australian virtual power plant propped up grid during coal outage)
> Once complete, the VPP will include 50,000 houses fitted with 5 kW rooftop solar systems and 13.5 kWh Tesla batteries. Together, they will be capable of delivering up to 250 MW of solar power and 650 MWh of energy storage.
> So far, less than 1,000 homes have been completed. Still, the aggregated storage was able to make a difference.
With regards to Australian rooftop solar potential, it’s estimated at almost 179GW, roughly a bit more than 3.5x total current Australian generation capacity.
Looking here, it seems like 1 GWp in Australia can yield around 1500GWh/year. A conventional plant running just 20 hours per day yields 7300 Wh/Wp/yr.
https://www.solarchoice.net.au/blog/how-much-energy-will-my-...
Yes, its an oversimplification, but in a world where the problem is all the electric cars, you also have rolling battery buffers available whenever you want them.
We already use hot water heaters and air conditioners in a similar way. Peak shaving with people's home charging setups wouldn't be hard to add.
Additionally in california, peak energy demand seems to be when the sun is very strong in the summer, so solar power matches very well with air conditioning load.
The rest of the united states has weather, so situations like the-dead-of-winter + no-sunshine might be a better fit for fossil fuels.
If you still have surplus after all that, mine bitcoin and use it to fund battery research, environmental initiatives, fund education, fund healthcare.
Surpluses are never a problem.
Solar in large scale will be fun. Essentially at peak production it will have zero price or potentially negative price... And then during night you need to generate it from somewhere and pay premium... I wonder would it be actually cheaper soon not to have solar and just get it for free during day and then pay same during dark times...
https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325
https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-fortnight-burying-power
Or maybe use it to power factories that make hundred dollar bills?
Sorry, but Bitcoin does not create a net increase in value for all the energy dumped into it. As you described it, it is simply an elaborate way to waste resources.
Point is, surplus isn't really an issue.
Peak energy consumption is typically around dusk, so driven primarily by home consumption not industry. Convince people not to use air conditioners after 4pm and maybe we would be able to match supply to demand.
Moreover, even if we all started sitting in our hot dark houses after work we'd still have an extremely variable supply which would mean more robust infrastructure to transmit less overall power.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-... (https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_artic... for this illustrated; batteries replace the natural gas ramp)
This also doesn't address the seasonal changes in supply. We're realistically talking about creating energy infrastructure (and then maintaining it) that ulaverages maybe 20% capacity.
I just feel like solar proponents like to completely ignore the very real unsolved issues because solar+batteries is tidy if you don't think too much about it.
I do wonder about situations like the recent texas fiasco. Maybe we want something like "cheaper at night" not pure economic nonsense like "$9,000/kwh for the next 15 minutes"
So my grandmother, who gets a large part of her retirement income from a couple of $5-600/mo rental homes she owns will have to shell out 10-20k each to keep doing that? On what planet does that make sense?
For the high income armchair landlords, impose a solar tax and fund solar installations for everyone else.
I want to think about how to make stuff possible, not excuses about why we can't do it. This kind of excuse-making attitude is why the US is falling behind in climate efforts.
The anti climate change narrative also fuels macroeconomic problems as the willingness for the US to invest into its own nation decreases for no logical reason or gain.
There is nothing virtuous about being dependent on fossil fuel imports.
Not saying this is impossible, but it surely is a challenge.
What you've forgotten here is that doubling or tripling the carrying capacity of electrical infrastructure isn't a trivial task. Remember that in the 50s, electrical energy was generated at large sites like the Hoover dam or the James Bay project in Quebec. It was then distributed out to houses that didn't have many high capacity electrical appliances.
Today, all that has changed with dishwashers, electric dryers and now EVs slowly becoming standard. You are making it seem like these infrastructure upgrades can be magicked into existence without decades of investment, planning and effort.
The article is right - no country is ready for the sudden change. Watch as EVs go from a rich person's toy to the mainstream and the electrical infrastructure keeps collapsing dealing with the sustained surge in demand.
Electrification will significantly increase energy usage (kWh), but it has a much smaller impact on peak power (kW). Electric cars charge at night, electric heat pumps replace air conditioners, et cetera.
Also, infrastructure was designed for rising demand. For infrastructure was built in the 60s the planners would say "demand is doubling every decade, so if we want our infrastructure to last 100 years..."
Sure, there will be some places that don't have adequate infrastructure, but it will be a small fraction.
That parked electric car may very well back-feed into the grid to shave the peaks of demand.
That clothes dryer might run 'slow' until it's peak pricing time, same with EV charging.
My 'smart' thermostat already does it for HVAC. Everything else will too.
A typical EV charger draws anywhere from 7 kW to 25 kW. That is the total connected load of more than one typical North American house. And typical pole-mounted transformers are around 50 -200 kVA. Two EVs added to the regular mix is all it takes to upset the balance.
Also, where the heck do you find 25 kW home chargers? I've heard of 60A ones (13.2 kW), but ours is 7.2kW and is probably about twice as much as we need.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/wall-connecto...
Early tesla vehicles could actually charge from two home chargers simultaneously (though I'm uncertain how many amps total).
and of course, there are homes with more than one car.
This has been studied recently, and the supposedly numbers aren't crazy:
> The increase in transmission needs as renewable electricity supply grows, for all 80%-by-2050 renewable electricity scenarios, result in an average annual projected transmission and interconnection investment that is within the recent historical range for total investor-owned utility transmission expenditures in the United States (i.e., $2 billion/yr to $9 billion/yr from 1995 through 2008) (Pfeifenberger et al. 2009).
> New transmission in the high renewable electricity scenarios was found to be concentrated in the middle and southwestern regions of the United States, mainly to access the high-quality wind and solar resources in those regions and to deliver generation from those resources to load centers.
* https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/52409-ES.pdf
* https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html
See "Volume 4: Bulk Electric Power Systems: Operations and Transmission Planning":
* https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52409-4.pdf
December 2020 study from Princeton, "Net-Zero America" by 2050:
* https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/12/15/big-affordable-eff...
* https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/
There are cost estimates for various scenarios: some or zero natgas, some or zero nuclear, mostly or all renewable.
Summary news report of the study:
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/15/race-to-zero...
What i'm referring to is the expansion capacity of distribution grids to suddenly accommodate large amounts of power from EVs.
Simply posting a lot of links isn't usually a good strategy.
The national grid in the UK has done tons of preparation - read about their Dynamic Containment program for example - but it’s much easier to just wave your hands and claim “we aren’t ready, it’s too hard”.
This is such a typical FUD article from the climate change denying WSJ. Boring and predictable
That's good; it should be generated where it's needed and then distribution will be unnecessary.
The first transcontinental railroad took 6 years to 1,900 miles. All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle. Black powder was used for the tunnels, but the holes to put the power in were bored by hand.
In contrast, Seattle Transit will take 30 years to build 22 miles of track, with modern construction equipment, and that's in the remote possibility they'll be on schedule.
Seattle used to have rail networks. The right-of-ways are still there, but Sound Transit very carefully avoids using them. Nobody is ever able to explain why. Some even still have rusting rail on them, while the ST crews are blasting new right of way a block over.
If you can show that the railroad was built on blood, I'd be interested.
I grew up in Omaha, the end of the transcontinental railroad that Californians tend to forget about. I'm very sorry that so many Chinese immigrants died working on the railroad. I am also saddened by the many others who died, even though they were not immigrants of Chinese extraction. I'm also saddened by the atrocious conditions these immigrants escaped in China and compelled them to the US (I assume they did not desire to come to the US, and it's worth noting many no doubt landed elsewhere).
While the CRPP may have preferred Chinese labor, I do not find evidence that they did "most of the work". Indeed, the main employer of the Chinese was the CRPP, which laid 690 miles of the 1912 miles of track. The Union Pacific labor was primarily sourced from the remains of the Union and Confederate armies.
It is correct that 80% of the CRPP labor force was eventually (not initially) Chinese. It is also correct that the CRPP laid 36% of the rail by distance. First order approximation would suggest that the Chinese fraction of the built distance is between 15 and 29%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...
If you have evidence of Chinese slave ships coming to the US, I'd like to see it.
That's hardly people flocking to the railway jobs.
> The Central Pacific hired some Canadian and European civil engineers and surveyors with extensive experience building railroads, but it had a difficult time finding semi-skilled labor. Most Caucasians in California preferred to work in the mines or agriculture. The railroad experimented by hiring local emigrant Chinese as manual laborers, many of whom were escaping the poverty and terrors of the war in the Sze Yup districts in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province in China
It's like saying Bangladeshi workers flock to hard labour in Qatar because, sure because working in Bangladesh might be worse, not because the terrible conditions of working on infrastructure in Qatar as a Bangladeshi is some kind of standard for labour conditions or rights we should all aspire to.
Of course they were. Otherwise they simply couldn't have built it. They could not round people up, chain them together, and force march them to the construction site.
1. ST only has the funds to build out a small % of the project at any one time. The work has to be staged because they can't take out all the $ at once.
2. Project managing the build out of the whole thing at once would require a much larger organization, which would be more expensive
3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.
4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.
If you don't think they had a much larger logistics problem, consider the problems with supplying the crews with food, water, clothing, rails, ties, horses, wagons, everything they need, from a thousand miles away.
The most important thing, though, was the companies were paid by the mile. The faster they built, the more money they made, because that would push the meeting point further away. They had ENORMOUS incentive to move fast. And it worked.
ST, however, has no incentive whatsoever to move things along. They have every incentive to delay, invent problems, all so they can go back and demand more money.
At a company I used to work for, they hired a team of old software engineers to write a piece of software for a good customer. It took them 3 months, and arrived on time and under budget. Want to know the secret? They had a huge bonus for being on time (I think it was ten grand apiece), which would shrink away for every day late.
I asked if that was what motivated them to be on time, and they all denied it with "we're professionals". I openly laughed at that.
It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)
At that time I was paying attention to people actually knew something about vaccine development. They said it would take at least 18 months. Being a practical pessimist I decided to take the under and say 12 months.
The guys that knew what they were talking about were mostly right, most vaccines making it are taking about 18 months to make it to distribution. But I bet that out of ~100 vaccine programs a couple of them beat that by six months.
Thank you.
However, the primary reason Moderna and Pfizer they were able to get to market so fast was because the FDA agreed to a compressed testing schedule, Moderna’s preexisting investments in mRNA technology, and publicly funded research around stabilising spike proteins.
The primary contribution of Trump (and other world leaders) was the willingness to commit to purchasing large amounts of the vaccine and to accept much of the risk of the attempt failed. This accelerated the roll out as they were able to begin manufacturing before being given emergency approval.
However, it’s worth noting that many other successful vaccines were developed by charitable foundations and government research institutions in roughly the same period of time as the American efforts.
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behi...
It should be banal, but it isn't generally recognized by government planners, who expect that self-sacrifice and altruism governs peoples' behavior rather than selfishness.
Seattle is experiencing this as recent onerous regulations placed on landlords supposedly to protect renters is causing rents to rise and landlords to exit the business.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/stop-new-ren...
Anyway, people of course respond to incentives. However, that doesn't always means that the outcomes will be positive. There is such a thing as a perverse incentive, even in a free market utopia.
It's no great insight that markets are generally the most efficient means of allocating resources. However, it's also no secret that greedy individuals will gleefully extract economic rents from their monopoly over resources when they feel free to do so.
I agree with this point in general, and have some experience with government contracts, but think you’re over-simplifying a complex situation. The big thing which incentives got was zero holding back on capacity: I would say that was by far Trump’s best call in office because there’s no way to claw back that time later at any cost - the mRNA process is both highly specialized and new so there are bottlenecks all the way down. The other thing which saved time, however, was that testing time could be compressed because the disease was running rampant — that didn’t have much to do with incentives and couldn’t be predicted in advance. We also got lucky that the first vaccines were so effective: that was the primary concern with the first batch, that they might not be effective enough - instead, we had a Nobel-worthy unqualified success where the worst performing vaccines were at the warned level but the top candidates were some of the best vaccines ever made. That was welcome but we also got lucky.
Notably, if Seattle wanted a light rail could spend what it cost. Spending over thirty clearly has all sorts of problems - their supplies could go out of business in the middle of the process etc, etc.
I'm sure I find someone who could make the 3 billion dollars of planning money that went the California high speed rail sound sensible too.
>3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.
This doesn't work out in a linear model. You either hire N people for 2T years, or you hire 2N people for T years, either way a total cost of 2STN for a mean salary of S per year. It works the same way with project management. With equipment you might have something of a point, but not if the equipment is leased.
You can point to nonlinearity, but then that looks like a weakness of the system.
>4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.
The city is a moving target; details you work out today may not be true tomorrow. Worse, the different pieces of the system are interdependent: changing conditions may invalidate work already done, incurring additional costs.
Ultimately, it seems like the only compelling reason on this list is (1), which itself points to a lack of overall strategy on the part of the government.
> All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle.
It's both an argument to applaud efforts of the past, as well as criticise the nature of the past. I certainly wouldn't want to be a labourer in 1865, when life expectancy in the US was less than half (37) of today's 78 or so. It's not all labour standards of course, but it certainly must have played a role.
Boring through two mountain ranges, crossing many rivers (including the Mississippi). Endless bridges for ravines, creeks, and rivers. Lots of snow sheds, the longest was 29 miles, using 29,000,000 board feet of lumber.
Done with muscle.
Building a bridge across a ravine is a fairly well understood and easy to solve problem as long as no one is actively trying to stop you.
But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track
People love to get their pitchforks out against eminent domain but I assert without it not a single large public works project would ever get built. No dams, no sewer treatment plants, no water lines, no power lines, no power plants, no trains, no highways, no anything. Without eminent domain, there will always be some holdout somewhere that throws a wrench in things no matter how many truckloads of money you toss at them.
To actually build massive public infrastructure, you need a way to force people to cooperate. Without, you'd never get the project off the ground.
And the lives of between 1,000 and 2,000 largely Chinese immigrants for the transcontinental railroad alone. Certainly more died during the construction of the remainder of the US rail network. Construction projects in other countries were significantly more deadly.
The First Transcontinental Railroad started from Omaha, Nebraska, so it crossed neither the Missouri nor the Mississippi. Indeed, it only crosses the North Platte River, not the main stem itself, and this is the river famously described as "too thick to drink, too thin to plow," i.e., not quite the same challenge as crossing the broader and much deeper Missouri, Mississippi, or Ohio rivers.
Yes, Chinese muscle, many of whom died in the process. And I think we covered the 37 years of life expectancy during that time in the US, let alone for a Chinese immigrant doing heavy labour at a fraction of white people's salaries. I for one would not have preferred being born in 1865 to work on this railroad. But feel free to voluntarily give up all your privileges at your current job, it's definitely easier to get things done at the labour standards of 1860, using underpaid immigrant labour to do dangerous work. Let's all just give up our rights!
But my point was, the land was empty, i.e. not void of nature, but empty of people making political claims, e.g. like when building a transit line through Seattle. They're not remotely similar projects. The Seattle line of 22 miles you mentioned was built in the same 6 years, with need for far less 'muscle'.
At least empty of political claims if we forget about the de facto genocide of the native Americans that had to go at some point to make the US what it is today. I'm not sharing any nostalgia you may have of construction in this time.
There were many thousands of others. The eastern team did not employ any Chinese.
> rights
Nobody gave up any rights to work on the railroad. None were conscripts or forced labor. Any could walk away anytime they pleased.
> They're not remotely similar projects.
Nothing resembling the project had ever been done before. Lots of people thought it was infeasible. It was a triumph, exceeding even the wildest expectations. It arguably was the lynch pin that created the modern America.
The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
"Railroad travel was dangerous in the early years. Train wrecks and derailments were common killing and injuring countless passengers and railroad men. Boilers blew up, bridges collapsed under the weight of trains, brittle iron tracks cracked, primitive breaks overheated and failed. The lack of a signal system sometimes caused two trains to be accidentally switched onto the same track and sent speeding into each other. The wood passenger car seemed almost to self-destruct on impact."
"Passengers could be crushed and thrown out. Windows would shatter because there was no safety plate glass in that day. Stoves would overturn spilling hot coals through the crushed and broken wood and instantly trains were set on fire. Cars would fall into rivers off of bridges."
"In the race to build the line there was naturally a long list of defects, unsafe bridges, tunnels too narrow, road bed not properly level. Poor rail alignment and carelessly laid cross ties. One government inspector declared it the worst railroad he had ever seen. But that didn't stop the railroaders."
"More than six times as many railroad men as passengers were killed or injured in accidents during the early days of the transcontinental railroad. Railroading ranked as one of America's most dangerous jobs."
"The technology was so dangerous that virtually every break man was maimed."
Source: The Railroads That Tamed The West, Modern Marvels Season 2 Episode 9. 1996.
https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographi...
Because they didn't have any. Like the right for equal pay. The right to a safe working environment. The right to adequate breaks. The right to insurance etc. You think they had the same rights as you do today?
I'm not saying the project was a bad project, it was amazing. I'm saying that the speed of its development isn't something we can long for, without also mentioning it requires conditions which completely suck for its workforce in 1865, just to mention one thing.
> The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.
That's great, I'm happy it was built. You're missing the point. I'm not criticising the project, for its time it was amazing. I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today. I'm not sure in what field of work you're in, but I'm sure if you give up half your salary, work twice as hard, take fewer breaks, give up your insurance and workplace safety, that the company could save money, hire more people, get things done faster. But while a project would get doen faster, actual society (i.e., the measure of your wellbeing, which is what much of life is about) would become worse.
For example, we can probably build things faster if we took into Bangladeshi labourers and paid them a fraction of our salaries, let them sleep in barracks, give them no health insurance, no workplace safety, see tons of them die. Indeed, it's how Qatar is building out its infrastructure massively at the moment, at breakneck speeds. But it's no example to me of how we should look to construct things today, nor is the transcontinental railroad an example for today, however amazing it was to build in the 1860s.
There were no guards to prevent the workers from dropping their tools and leaving. That is a fundamental right.
> I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today.
A 100 times increase in distance in 10% of the time with no powered construction equipment cannot be explained as merely paying people half as much and not giving medical insurance (though I'm sure they had medical teams on site to do what they could, but medical practice in those days was a bit frightening to us today). There was no intent to grind up workers blood to use as lubricant, and in fact they did many things along the way to reduce worker deaths and injuries. See my other comment about how they cut down on the use of nitro as it was too dangerous, despite being twice as fast as black powder.
You have good points, but consider it ran TWO THOUSAND MILES, not 22, and still took only 10% of the time. You say "open plain", but try driving it some time. It had to go through two mountain ranges, for example.
The workers came because they got better pay than anywhere else. This includes the Chinese and Irish. It was not built by conscripts.
Nitroglycerin was used in large quantities on the central pacific railroad construction and were predominantly chinese laborers whereas the union pacific was more irish laborers. The central pacific rail owned their own TNT factory even. I am not sure what you are getting at; black powder was used but it certainly wasn't the only thing in use especially in the west.
"The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn't exploded with his pick. It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot. Strobridge declared, "Bury that stuff." Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it."
"Nothing Like It In The World", Ambrose, pg. 200-201
I'm not just quoting the book, I read the whole thing. It's really a great story.
I've noticed it's becoming increasingly common to just give up and excuse everything in the US. "Well we could build new rails, but..." "Well we could get health care prices under control, but..." "Well we could solve (x problem that most other countries don't have), but..."
It's kind of a sad decline from being the world leader by far like the US was 50 years ago. There's always a billion reasons to not do something, but not much push to actually do something.
It wasn't quite that simple. It was a giant project, and there was the usual squirrel fire drill one sees with any large government project where everyone has their hand out for bribes and corruption.
There are quite a few instances where an already large interstate has been increased in size and the traffic got /worse/ after the fact. Cars just aren't an efficient way to move people around for the money they cost.
I'm genuinely curious if things are going to start swinging back in the other direction where there is more focus on other transportation modes outside of cars. There have been some small scale rail expansions in larger cities, some intercity rail lines opening (brightline) and being built (california high speed rail). It hasn't been enough to hit a sort of tipping point yet though.
In a future where everyone takes a bus or a train or a bike to work, they are still ordering all their shit online from Asia and stocking their grocery stores with food from Central and South America, and there will therefore always be increasing demand for the movement of more goods over time as the population continues to grow.
Government officials and most of the contractors are going to keep on using their stupid inefficient 25mpg SUVs and pickup truck and never take the train anyway, why would they want the project to go any faster?
Total expected lifetime cost of the F-35 program [1]: 1.5T$
Expected cost of shifting the US to 100% renewables [2]: 4.5T$ (note these estimates are probably at least double that of the real costs in light of the rapidly dropping deployment costs since)
Environmental cost of not doing it: Projected at 1.5T$ for the US by 2050, so it's almost self financing.
This is not even about serious economic restraint, it's literally just about having a frickin' fighter or not.
Note the Apollo program was a bargain compared to both at just 280B$...
"We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/f35-fighter-jet-pe... [2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/shifting-u-s-to-100-percent-ren...
Those environmentalists are just waiting to collect those dividends on a saved planet, while everybody else gets shafted.
> But in some sense, consumers have already made the choice to move toward at least the “electrification of a lot more things,” if not everything. That’s because our smartphones and computers and all the other devices that attach to them require electric power. So electrification is happening, whether we’ve made a conscious decision to electrify or not.
Yeah, let’s go back to the good old times of gas-powered computers and smartphones!
As weird as that looks I’m quite sure I could do that at home.
Modern electric is best for consistency and control. Gas is best for fast heat. (wood) Fire is amazing for smores, great for grilling if you have the time to turn it into a radiant heat source.
Old electric (metal plates) sucks and is terrible.
Even on the traditional gas vs electric debate, the heating power of a gas cooktop isn't guaranteed -- smaller BTU rated stoves take forever to heat with their dinky flames. I once had one that maxed out at around 350F when using a big pan.
"On the air-quality front, at least, the evidence against gas stoves is damning. Although cooking food on any stove produces particulate pollutants, burning gas produces nitrogen dioxide, or NO2,, and sometimes also carbon monoxide, according to Brett Singer, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies indoor air quality. Brief exposures to air with high concentrations of NO2 can lead to coughing and wheezing for people with asthma or other respiratory issues, and prolonged exposure to the gas can contribute to the development of those conditions, according to the EPA. Homes with gas stoves can contain approximately 50 to 400 percent higher concentrations of NO2 than homes with electric stoves, often resulting in levels of indoor air pollution that would be illegal outdoors, according to a recent report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability think tank. “NO2 is invisible and odorless, which is one of the reasons it’s gone so unnoticed,” Brady Seals, a lead author on the report, says."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/gas-stov...
I think an IR thermometer that activates the vent whenever the cooktop is over ~115F would accomplish this pretty well, provided the switch had a manual override to force it on if the sensor fails.
A quick search indicates they do exist on some pricier models.
I suppose there could be edge cases where the vent could make a stove fire worse by increasing airflow - wonder if these 'smart' vents have logic to handle these cases.
https://up.codes/viewer/minnesota/mn-mechanical-code-2015/ch...
[EDIT] Code is from 2015 so at least since then.
The air quality concerns over gas stoves are a disingenuous argument to push for change for climate mitigation reasons. Most pollution from cooking is related to burning food not fuel, and electric burners make it far easier to burn food.
Rather than pushing think tank pieces environmental groups should push the industry to create induction ranges that are 1) cheaper and 2) don't create high frequency noise pollution. Current technology has a lot of positive aspects but the high-pitch buzzing is a deal breaker.
If I use the electric kettle there's obviously zero change in air quality.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-hidden-air...
source: https://emfcaution.com/home-appliances-emf-readings/#1_Induc...
You can do what you want, but I'll stick with gas and a vent fan, thanks.
And? You say this like the problem with this is obvious / self-evident.
(Feel free to get technical: I have an EE.)
The author of your source:
> My interest in the topic of EMF radiation is two-fold:
> I have studied Information Science and worked with router communication, Wi-Fi network, and fiber optics communication during the last 5 years. So I consider myself well-educated on parts of the technical aspects of the problem.
> I am married to a wonderful girl who is hyper-sensitive. She can literally feel high levels of EMF radiation on her skin when she is near strong Wi-Fi signals or other sources of electromagnetic fields like induction stoves.
1) It seems like you have to spend a lot to approach even a cheap gas stove, as far as cooking quality; and
2) Even on (say) Reddit threads full of people posting about how great they are, the same people comment a lot about how careful they have to be with the cooktop or how many times they've cracked and ruined(!!!) theirs and had to replace it.
Indeed that’s the reason most places I’ve lived no longer have a gas stove. The cost of adding a gas supply is just too high for it to be viable.
This must be very regional. We get about 3-4 months of hot weather, and 3-4 months of cold, and gas furnaces are still installed in most new homes, because it's much more expensive to heat with electricity. No-one's replacing them with electrical furnaces, when replacing furnaces, certainly—no-one wants the extra expense. Gas stoves are uncommon on lower-end houses, becoming more common as you move up, but gas furnaces are basically standard across the board. Heat pumps are sometimes installed, but I've repeatedly been advised by local HVAC folks that, whatever their claimed efficiency, they're not a great idea in our climate. Certainly it gets too cold here to rely only on them.
I never babied it - even took it camping, used it to cook in the backyard, and some very slow beer brewing with it. It's unreasonably awesome for the low price, and it makes cooking really fast and easy.
I find the difference between instant responding heat sources and radiant coils to be very noticeable, particularly with thin pans and delicate cooking, so: eggs, in particular.
[EDIT] natural gas (not propane) is definitely cheaper to heat with, here, than electric. All the HVAC guys don't even recommend heat pumps to supplement the furnace. They recommend putting the money toward higher-efficiency AC and gas furnace instead. They say they're good on paper but more expensive in practice, in our climate (Midwest). Outright electric heating is crazy expensive (I've had it, with a very new furnace even, and it was terrible, was paying a high premium for mediocre heating).
Of course no one would be running gas lines, that's why we had a big LP tank to play on when I was a kid:
https://www.homeimprovementbase.com/3-easy-steps-to-prepping...
So long as fuel is available (propane, butane, alcohol, white gas), this is an option. Note that white gas should not be used indoors.
I use a tabletop butane burner indoors (Iwatani 35FW) and it has at least 3x the heat and the wok is more stable.
I have gas stove, hot water, dryers and heating. The hot water and heating were upgraded to gas fairly recently, from oil (I live in New England, there are a lot of legacy heating systems- oil was actually an upgrade in the 1940s from the original coal heat). There is strong incentive to do this because oil was costing me $3800 / year back when oil hit $5 a gallon, whereas gas costs $700 / year. This upgrade costs $14000 (includeing installation of forced air vents, central A/C and gas water heat tank). The previous upgrade from coal to oil was about reducing waste and increasing convenience. With coal, you had to deal with ash waste and stoking.
A dual-stage electric heat pump would in theory work and have comparable operating cost, but the install cost was like $30000, had questionable reliability and few contractors even knew about it. Geothermal would also work, but my land is tiny and the cost would have been something like $60000. There was even a Honda generator home co-generation plant option available, but again, expensive and no contractors.
What would you do? BTW, my largest utility bill now is actually water, because we are paying for the Boston harbor clean-up in my sewage bill. I'm tempted to illegally use rain water for the toilets... A rooftop solar system is popular around here, but it's not worth it based on my tiny electric bill.
We have to get off of fossil fuels, but it's definitely going to take a government mandate backed with financial incentives to get people to switch.
I'm curious about why that's not allowed
The sewer system in the urban area was largely built out by about 100 years ago as a combined system, where rain water and sewage were in the same sewer pipes. Many people didn't really care about water quality and disease back then, so the fact that the Ohio river was a big stream of shit and chemicals didn't matter.
As other parts of life improved eventually more and more people wanted clean, healthy water and surrounding ecosystems, hence the EPA was created 50 years ago. The EPA got stricter and stricter over the last 50 years, and about 20-30 years ago started cracking down on sewage outflows in to waterways.
As a result, the local waste water treatment utility (owned by local government) has been under a legal decree to fix sewage overflows which occur during storms due to these combined systems. This has meant spending billions on tearing out these pipes and replacing them with separate storm water and sewage lines.
The utility started charging for separate clean water usage and sewer usage so people understood a bit better why their bill went up so much.
One problem with gas is that so much heat is lost to the rising hot air - in addition to inefficiency, it makes all the pot handles burning hot, so I always need to have mittens ready. Never had the problem when I had electric.
Never had that problem with gas. Not once.
Induction is better in almost every way over gas. There are a few minor things you can't do it with it, like wok cooking or charring peppers etc. But for those instances, there are easy workarounds, I just use my turkey fryer for wok work, and use a handheld blowtorch for charring.
* uses less energy
* never run out of hot water
* units are longer lasting
Tankless are smaller and it’s true they won’t run out of hot water so they do have that going for them.
This is what I did, been very happy. Total cost wasn't more than $1,600 (DIY). Tankless is a nice idea but was just too complicated to ever pay for itself as a retrofit.
Electric Tanked WH: $600
DWHR: $800
Parts, pipe, new electrical circuit, new breaker, etc: $200We just did the same on our 2014 house, which had a builder supplied 50gallon natural gas water heater. Those continually burn natural gas in varying amounts to keep the tank's water heated.
In contrast, the tankless natural gas is a massive win just wrt natural gas, as it's only running when hot water flow is required.
Not really - they're very well insulated, so they do a burn/coast/burn cycle where they are off far more than they are on.
That said - I'm a big fan of tankless, however in a big family with typical loads, the savings in gas alone aren't as much as you'd think.
Here's Matt Risinger's take:
There are big yellow efficiency tags on the front of every appliance for sale in USA. The content of those tags is closely regulated by the government. If there is some reason to believe that they are inaccurate for tankless water heaters, please link to that.
Given the gulf in efficiency between tankless gas and heat pump water heaters, tankless gas shouldn't really be promoted as examples of high efficiency.
https://www.energystar.gov/productfinder/product/certified-w...
Your mileage will almost certainly vary, but in my case the upgrade to a tankless water heater meant that the max gas draw for my house (if the water heater, furnace, stove and gas fireplace were all firing at once) would exceed the existing gas service to my house. So I had to get the gas company out to upgrade my service, which meant having the existing utility lines located multiple times (as the first markings washed away by the time the gas company came out), and I had bits of my yard dug up, etc. I also had to have county inspection folks come visit, and coordinate that with the plumber, etc.
The exhaust for my water heater is right next to the border with my neighbor's townhouse, and they've got a deck at right about that level. And it turns out when a tankless water heater kicks on, the gas comes on for a second and then it ignites, pushing a small amount of unburned gas out the exhaust. My neighbors occasionally catch a whiff of that, and I've had to have the installer visit and get on the phone with the water heater manufacturer (Rinnai) to reassure them that everything is safe and working correctly.
All told, if I knew then what I know now, I would have just gotten a new tank water heater - and I'm sure the entire process would have been over and done in a day, with no damage to the lawn or skittish neighbors. The guy who installed my water heater was a nice guy but I would have been happier meeting him once rather than a half dozen times.
But if you wouldn't have to have upgrade your gas service or aren't worried about the exhaust location - by all means, join me in having infinite hot water!
My only complaint with my new (2013) tank gas hot water, is that the tank already cracked and had to be replaced. It was not cheap: $2200. This is a rip-off, but contractors are expensive. I think the new tank-less systems are supposed to be more reliable than traditional tank heaters.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
I wonder how that works for a city - is the idea that everyone drills their own 15 foot hole? Our frost can reach down to ~8 feet.
If I set policy, I'd have subsidies for the upfront costs (maybe a base credit with 0% loans?) and especially consider things to push geothermal installs which are expensive up front but might be worth it long-term. We didn't want to deal with the extra hassle but I have been wondering whether we should have done that since it'd save in the summer, too.
Obligatory Technology Connections video:
We had the warmest attic on the block though, I'm sure.
I think bicyles will become a primary transport in the next decades, electric or not
It allows bikes to be a substitute for far more things that you'd otherwise use a different mode of transportation for.
Instead I'll just point out that being young(ish), (reasonably) healthy, and having only slightly uphill to worry about, are all luxuries.
Electric bikes make bicycling accessible to many more people, and their embodied and operating energies are quite modest.
Best of all, they don't take away your ability to ride a pushbike! Or brag about it on the Internet.
And yet I own an electric bike, and love the thing. Because I can go up that hill in my work clothes, and not show up a dripping, sweating, stinking mess. I can go down the hill from the house and get supper without having to don the clown outfit and the special shoes. Just wheel the bike out the garage and go with whatever I have on. Back up the hill to get home, give that electric motor an extra kick if I'm feeling lazy, sorted. And that's for an old ex-racer who is in probably better shape than 90% of his peers. Imagine the worlds that open for the elderly, overweight, or other "differently abled".
Bicycles have had over 100 years to "become primary transport" and unless one lives in the Netherlands, it obviously isn't going to happen. Stick a battery and electric motor on one, though, and suddenly one's practical range and power band is extended enough to make it a viable transportation alternative for not just the fully-abled and in-shape, but for nearly everyone.
According to my logs, I go about the same speed and heart rate on my cargo e-bike with my son and our gear commuting. The difference is that it saves enough time and helps with one notorious hill enough that I do it every day year round except for the worst weather whereas before I used to skip a few days a week — and I say that as a fairly fit cyclist who has ridden centuries at gun-timed speeds in the low 20s, so we're leaving out a LOT of bike commuters if we're saying that's inadequate.
I see e-bikes as a transformative technology for cities. If we want to stop the death, pollution, and quality-of-life impact of cars we should be rolling out bike infrastructure as quickly as possible — it's the cheapest, most flexible option we have. (Buses are second: more accessible, all-weather capable, but less flexible)
Since we got ebikes, we've averaged 2,000-2,500 miles per year on bike and sometimes go a couple months without using our car, which we are likely not going to replace when it dies.
However, I can haul over 100lbs of cargo and/or kids on the back of my e-bike, and can show up to work ready to go. Given that the ride to work includes climbs, and I would need to shower, the e-bike gets me there substantially faster. If I need to pick up a kid from an afternoon activity that is downtown, I can do so on my e-bike (I live about 13km from downtown, which my teenagers can do, but is a rather long ride for my younger kids to do).