Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

I visited Austin, Texas last week. Amount of electricity wasting is enormous. Almost all stores, and all restaurants/bars have their doors wide open, blowing cold right out the door. Even some multilevel parkings do that (they don't even have enclosed walls).

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).

View on HN

The blowers may be “air curtain” that reduce loss.

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.

>The blowers may be “air curtain” that reduce loss.

For anyone else who was looking to learn more, Wikipedia terms this an "Air door"[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_door

> 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.

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.

I’m not a fan of cheap construction especially for hotels.

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.

No, I mean that I felt cold blowing on my legs walking down the street, not entering a door.

I've lived in South Texas my entire life. I rarely see doors left open - automatic doors are the norm for larger shopping places, and I've never heard of let alone seen an air conditioned parking garage.

I have lived in Austin my entire life. This is something the trendy places do, and it's awful. It's also not the only conspicuous waste around this town.

> 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.

It's not a good solution for poor people to have to choose between heat stroke and a huge bill.

This is solvable by giving everyone a fixed rebate.

Typically this is done by utilities with price tiers (first 1000kwh costs X, next 1000kwh costs X * multiplier, etc). This trivially encourages conservation and discourages excessive consumption without complicated taxing and rebates.

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.

Poor people would pay way, way less than wasters.

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.

If I'm in Texas and my personal effort to conserve energy will have no noticeable effect on the overall problem, then my personal incentive is to go ahead and be comfortable. That doesn't mean the overall problem doesn't exist.

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.

Yes, of course, I meant monetary incentives.

> Even some multilevel parkings do that (they don't even have enclosed walls).

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.

---

[1] see: https://wginc.com/open-or-closed-does-my-parking-garage-requ...

Isn't the criticism more that they're blowing air-conditioned air into the (appropriately) open-air garage?

In that case, I'm unsure why it's necessary to call it out separately from other exterior doors and emphasize it with "even", but yeah, maybe that is what they meant.

I think the absence of legislation is a sign of the regional politics not the needs of the population

Legislation to tell people what they can do with the electricity that they pay for?

The US has 5% of the world’s people but 25% of its energy needs. It seems inconceivable that there would be something that money couldn’t buy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com