Tesla Asking Owners to Limit Charging During Texas Heatwave
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
I'm not even talking about shitty walls insulation in a pretty good hotel, they wouldn't need much AC if walls weren't tangibly warm.
Electricity problems in Texas are very overrated. Otherwise people and businesses wouldn't do that (i.e. there are no incentives for them to stop wasting huge amounts of energy).
This one is easy to solve, increase the electricity/fuel taxes.
With that said, ERCOT has $20B worth of renewables projects in the interconnect pipeline, so the cost of energy should trend down over the next 3-5 years.
Also rebates or progressive costs (same as PG&E in California already does) can control that even more.
But still I think those businesses I've seen waste like 100x more than normal household, so we only need to make the price non-negligible.
The walls in hotels are just cost snipping and not unique to Texas. Somehow sticks on bricks construction is ok for commercial construction and saves money vs the prefab concrete stuff that was common from the late 90s until a few years ago.
The problem with Texas is that it’s governance is controlled by resource extraction types and reactionaries seeking a theocracy. That combo, even with the vast resources, prosperity, and wealth of Texas results in things like designed to fail power grids.
Alot of big states have similar problems with different casts of characters. My home state of NY suffers from the sharp divide of the NYC Metro area and everywhere else. Policy is made by folks who don’t even realize that other regions of the state exist.
You're not a fan of 5-over-1 construction? Besides the ugly aesthetic (subjective), I think they're great across the board. It's not just about saving money; wood is superior to concrete from an environmental perspective, the more wood you can use the better. With modern fire codes, particularly mandated sprinklers, alarms and and redundant staircases, these sort of wood buildings are very safe.
Due to work polices I find myself in Hilton properties. Compare a circa 2008 Hampton Inn to a more recent Home2 suites. The newer building is an inferior guest experience by any metric.
5 over 1s are usually built by syndicated developers. You can rest assured that ever expense will be spared and every corner cut. With the prefab concrete corners were cut as well, but the nature of the building made sound less of a problem, although ventilation was probably worse, increasing operational cost.
For anyone else who was looking to learn more, Wikipedia terms this an "Air door"[0].
This is a public goods problem and the only way to fix it is for the government or utilities to impose a change to the incentive structure, e.g. by charging more when they need people to conserve.
Don't enclosed parking garages use more energy?
Because of dangerous exhaust gases from cars (carbon monoxide, etc.), some kind of ventilation is required[1].
Building open-sided garages allows natural ventilation, which uses no electricity. Enclosed garages must have exhaust fans, so they would use more electricity.
I'm not sure why you'd build an enclosed parking garage if you had a choice. Perhaps it's useful in cold climates to block the wind on cold winter days, but that is unlikely to be a good trade-off in Austin.
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[1] see: https://wginc.com/open-or-closed-does-my-parking-garage-requ...
Texas has a lot (and has the potential for even more) wind and solar energy. Like the rest of the US grid, Texas needs to build more transmission lines to move the power from the middle of nowhere to the densely populated areas.
That said: the reason this is a problem at all is Texas's criminal joke of a power infrastructure, and that deserves to be dunked on irrespective of mitigation strategies.
There isn't a whole lot to prevent me from leaving now... I am strongly considering moving to California or some region that approximates the weather patterns of SF. I keep asking myself if I want to live out the rest of my days in a place where the default mode of operation is "death or misery" unless you are inside some artificially-cooled arena.
Unfortunately practically everywhere in the US where the default is year-round comfort and happiness, there's a lot of homelessness and visible crime on the streets.
However I still prefer CA over most the alternatives, it's a huge state with plenty options outside of LA/SF/Oakland.
Take the medium sized town I lived in for example, average home price is well over $1M which is unreachable for most. The city is bounded by sea and mountains and the land is mostly built out. Even though all new constructions are multi-family homes, hundreds more needs to be built. Existing homes are privately owned and will hardly change even under SB9 (allowing duplex). Empty or vacant lots are few and take years to review/infill.
See the draft housing element:
https://www.cityofsanmateo.org/DocumentCenter/View/87532
Found this an unfortunate recurring theme when people talk about moving for jobs/weather/lifestyle. The life-changing things are often local and outside your news feed
Has anyone else heard this?
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...
Honda has had two manufacturing plants in central Ohio for decades and 3-4 times as many people employed by the suppliers that popped up in the state than there are direct employees. Obviously the support/supply chain for Intel will be vastly different and won't be moving as much mass but it may make up for it in avg skillset and commensurate salary.
I read semiconductor plants need a lot of freshwater. It is confusing why Arizona is receiving so much investment in fabs. The entire west is lacking in water. With the exception of the Seattle area; there isn't a city out West that doesn't have a major water concern.
Meanwhile the Great Lakes have the largest bodies of freshwater in the world.
I remember reading that Texas and California have the highest solar energy production potential in the states, and with the recent spikes in demand, I believe Texas will move closer to utilizing it. (https://web.archive.org/web/20120916045134/http://www.nrel.g...)
NIMBY attitudes are not as popular in Texas.They really don't care what the world looks like. As a result, Texas has a massive amount of solar / wind production. They beat their own production goals, repeatedly.
It would seem like a good idea to just sprinkle in solar and wind farms all throughout west Texas. Then setup high voltage lines to run the power to Albuquerque, El Paso, Waco, Odessa, Midland, etc.
For perspective at the extent of oil production (and their lack of care over the landscape), look on Google Maps at Andrews, TX
Car owners would be incentivised to sell the electricity in their vehicles' batteries back into the grid.
Similarly, the grid could disincentive charging - either through surge pricing or flat-out refusing to supply electricity to high-power circuits.
Then there is the abuse potential. Because essentially you can now selectively increase electrical load on a particular vehicle with any type of on road charging or energy discharge infrastructure.
But no... Authoritarians don't exist. No one would ever abuse wide-scale networked infrastructure to make their own lives easier!
The UK sets a minimum floor for export pricing, but companies are free to charge more than that. Thanks to the power of the free-market, I switched to a provider who did time-of-day export pricing. I (or rather, my battery) can decide to sell the electricity back during peak hours.
And, as for vehicles, they'll slurp up whatever is pumped to them. They control how much load they're willing to take.
Could abuse happen? Sure. But it sounds like the situation in Texas is already pretty abusive.
Oh right, no CCS adapter in the US yet. So ChaDEmo at 50 kW at best.
That said, it's not like brown outs are optional. If it can prevent a general brownout it's probably a good thing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/fort-worth-tx-the-first-city...
https://fortune.com/2022/02/10/texas-world-capital-bitcoin-m...
Reminds me of California use smaller shower nozzle so our farmers can grow almonds and alfalfa.
I'm sure that will go over well.
I think you meant "country", not "state" ;).
Wonder how these places will fare in 10 years time, or will some people in the south pretend the rising heat is "fake news".
Is it? Solar panels without any buffer battery should be a cheap energy source for an AC.
There's also the possibility of using an air-to-air heat pump that warms in winter and cools in summer. Coupled with solar energy that should work quite well in Texas.
This really depends on what two places we are comparing. It’s definitely cheaper to heat your house in Bay Area than to cool it in Texas, but the story becomes different when you compare Texas with, say, Minnesota.
Heat pumps are kinda what the sound like. Pumping 30 degrees of heat inside to keep warm takes more energy than pumping 20 degrees of heat outside to stay cool. Heating costs will come to dominate residential energy usage as people electrify their homes. A/C will be number two or possibly number 3 behind water heating.
All of that's kinda moot though since modern heat pumps are insanely effective, relatively cheap to install, and work down to sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures using only air-source exchangers.
This is a strange hint given that it's false, and this is easily looked up.
https://www.raleighheatingandair.com/blog/is-a-heat-pump-mor...
That just happens to be the first link I found, everyone will tell you the same thing. A degree of cooling is about five times as efficient as a degree of heating.
It's easy to see why. A heat pump gets its heat from either the ground or the air, either way this has to be amplified considerably because they are colder than the comfortable temperature.
Heat pumps running backward, air conditioners if you will, merely concentrate the heat and expel it.
Making matters worse, the amount colder than ideal which cold climates get is far lower than the amount hotter which hot climates achieve.
Making matters even worse than that, cold climates such as the Midwest still require air conditioning, just not for as many months.
Bottom line: Texas is cheaper to keep at a given interior temperature than Ohio. It isn't even close.
There's just no cheaper way to heat a house than to cool it, energetically speaking. Economically, sure, maybe you have a back lot and cordwood, who knows.
$16k heating bills: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-b...
Texas can’t handle the cold, either.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news/updates/SMOC_FebWinterStorm_...
I'll be damned, lookat that.
Most in Metro areas that have completely mismanaged their grids! I figured Austin would probably be the the worst given I got to see that idiocy with my own eyes.
If you weren't in an Urban center, odds were you were hunkered down, and even then, you had people like me that were calling around checking on people to make sure they were alright. I'd hazard a guess there may have been some factors at play where many people didn't have sufficient experience with cold weather ops to know what kinds of community efforts to organize.
And besides which, we Texans can be a stubborn bunch, at times to our own detriment.
Other boots on the ground reports: Dallas had power suspiciously seemingly divided along income boundaries. (Most affordable housing areas were load shed while higher value residential areas kept their lights on).
Austin's water system bit the dust. So did Lockhart's.
I don't want to hear a thing about it from an out of stater. Especially since frigging ERCOT/The PUC was apparently mostly run by them. One getting caught assuring Wall Street their energy futures would be safe.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/wall-street-profi...
And they were appointed by that idiot Abbott. Bloody corruption and incompetence at it's finest.
The problem is people insist on heating their homes far beyond what is strictly necessary. They demand a 25 C / 80 F indoor experience in the dead of winter so they can walk around inside in shorts like it were summer. Modern homes require heating to prevent pipes from freezing, but anything much more than that is pure luxury, not a necessity. Turn the heat down to 10 C / 50 F, then buy more blankets for your bed and some long-sleeve shirts for during the day. If you have an infant or elderly person in the house that need more heat, you can heat individual rooms a lot cheaper than an entire house. The power goes out completely, you can even double-bunk to stay warm. That isn't considered comfortable in modern culture, but our not-so-distant ancestors used to think nothing of it. It's certainly better than freezing. If freezing to death is a real concern, then you're in a survival situation and need to stop obsessing with comfort. Elderly people living alone are at the greatest risk, but none of this is an insurmountable problem, particularly if a community has the wherewithal to plan for it before it happens.
However to make people change their behavior will probably require rationing. Without rationing, everybody feels entitled to luxury and will greedily take as much as they can, collapsing fragile grids and generally wasting energy on robust grids.
If you have common sense and think ahead, cold temperatures are easy to survive. The scenario you should fear is the power going out during high-humidity heat waves. You can wrap yourself with more blankets if you get cold and survive near-arctic conditions, but if you've got a 40C wet bulb heatwave and no power to run AC, you're in seriously dire straights. Stripping nude won't help, evaporation cooling stops working, and staying in the shade won't keep you cool enough to survive. If the power is out, many people won't even have access to cool tap water; their only option would be to jump in rivers and lakes.