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Comment by ultra_nick | Hacker News Reader

Is it economical for anything besides heating?

Probably not but I live in a country with cold winters where it would be quite useful. It would probably also be useful to industry where high heat is needed for various manufacturing processes. The video mentions this.

It's just the resistive heating tho. Sure, it might allow you to buy the electricity to produce heat at lower rate but it fundamentally does not change the amount of energy you need to consume (well, increases it for losses).

It decreases the necessity of other types of batteries for this application, which is a substantial amount of energy consumed in the world.

Better to have some hot bricks being used for heating i the industries, even with lower efficiency, than having to supply the same thermal energy by storing it as electricity in some chemical battery.

Multipronged approaches are the only way for humans to become more energy-efficient.

Ideally you would want to use heat pumps which can produce up to 4 times as much heat as resistive heaters with the same amount of electricity.

Another option might be concentrated solar power.

It's probably most economical for industrial processes that need super-heated steam or air. For space heating, a heat pump is so much more efficient than a resistance heater that it would be hard to beat.

heating uses the vast majority of domestic (and dare I say often industrial) energy consumption. so it matters, even if it's not for electric generation. A lot of rooftop solar systems go direct to water heating, being more efficient than rouoting that through electrics. (ideally, you want both)

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