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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I worry about the 'futureproofness' of heat pumps.

Specifically, heat pumps use more energy on cold days. They use a massive amount more energy on the coldest days.

Today, if you use double the electricity, it costs double the money. Thats affordable as long as it happens rarely.

But, with lots of people getting EV's and heat pumps, and the generation mix getting more wind and solar, I forsee energy companies forcing customers onto dynamic pricing plans. Ie. the price adjusts every hour of the day.

Now when it's cold, and everyone else is trying to use extra power for their EV's and heat pumps, the price will go way up. So now, instead of using double the power and paying double, you'll use double but pay 50x.

Suddenly the economics of a heat pump don't look so attractive when you realise you paid $300 on one cold night...

Dual heat sources solve this (I doubt gas will ever have dynamic hourly pricing).

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Retrofit market is still huge, especially in Maine where people mostly Don’t have natural gas connections and therefore don’t have a monthly standby charge for that.

When you already have a Woodstove, pellet stove, oil heat or propane heat for the cold snaps, yeah, the economics really pushes in favour there.

Seems to me that if regulators allow that kind of dynamic pricing, then it would come with much cheaper rates at other times.

Suppose you did pay $300 on one cold night... but it also turned out that your electric bill for May and September was basically $0. Would that be the worst thing in the world? Utilities are monopolies, and regulators keep an eye on their total bottom line. A massive yearly profit would come in for scrutiny.

Rather than maintaining individual gas heaters, it's more likely that the energy companies would maintain gas-powered peaker plants. If they operate 1% of the year, then we've cut 99% of the carbon emissions, with no loss of service. Even if they somehow had to operate 10% of the year, that's a 90% drop in CO2.

No utility would want to build power plant that works 10% of the year tho, that's the problem

We've already got lots of gas power plants.

The cost of converting them to peaker plants isn't zero, but it's not anywhere near the cost of building new ones.

If they earn 50x on 5% of days, it looks make sense. A problem is that other player want to join the market so finally won't earn 50x

My heat pump shuts off when the CoP goes down to 1. I still have my electric baseboards from before so they kick in when the heat pump kicks out. Can't all heat pumps be configured to shut off like mine does?

I live near Maine and have similar weather, and typically the heat pump only goes out for 3 to 5 nights and 1 or 2 days over the winter. The extra cost of a few days of EBB use is pretty minor compared to the savings throughout the other 362 days of the year.

Many parts of our grid are more efficient when it’s cold. The brownouts in heat waves are caused in part by equipment overheating. For instance power line sags causing discharges to ground. I don’t know the ratio but I wouldn’t be surprised if you can push 10% more power through a cold grid than a hot one.

When I saw futureproofness I thought you were going to talk about repairability. Thats probably my biggest concern. My heating system is largely made out of commodity parts. Aquastats and zone control boxes form the control system, copper pipes soldered on, pex crimped on. All parts you can buy at any hardware store in the country, and all interchangeable. As long as the actual tank and fire tubes in my boilers are intact, I can keep them running as long as there is oxygen. While I know the basics of refrigeration, I don't actually know how interchangeable any of the internals are, but I kinda expect them to be less interchangeable than my old boilers.

I am with you.

I live on a small remote island. Over the past number of years there has been a boom in heat-pumps here due to government subsidies. A local company appeared and was happy to fill the demand for new units. Eventually the new installs dried up and the company disappeared.

This winter there has been a number of desperate pleas on facebook for people seeking repairs on their heat pumps and split units. Unfortunately, the nearest company who can service these units is a half day ferry away.

Once more start getting thrown out I'll have to pick a couple of trashed ones up and see how hackable they are. I wouldn't be surprised if a good amount of the parts besides the control board ended up being interchangeable just due to sourcing parts from the same suppliers. I'll feel a little more confident in them after that.

Whether electric companies have that kind of pricing isn't a pure economics question, it's a question of what regulators will alow, and I'm pretty skeptical that regulators would allow that.

But "how does the grid handle spikes in demand" is the really interesting question there, and why more transmission lines (to smooth out supply/demand geographically) and reliable sources of "firm" power are important. Energy storage at scale is potentially really important here, too (and one of the reasons why home batteries are more important to the grid in some ways than home solar).

It's not about regulators, it's that you need something rarely, but it's capital costs aren't less than something you need often, so it's going to be really expensive for the short time you need it. Even if you spread the cost out over the year, consumers are paying it one way or another. Our only plan for seasonal change in production and demand is to over-build gas turbines.

You forget that if you could earn 50x the price regularly, then there would be people willing to invest in say batteries, and those people would compete and bring the price down.

Of course, if it only happens rarely, there would not be enough money in it, but then it wouldn't be a problem for the home owners either.

Also note that while electricity is expensive to store, heat storage is actually pretty cheap. It works much better at scale with say a district heating system where you can economically do seasonal storage. But you can do it on an individual level too over shorter time spans.

Utilities are well-regulated. There may need to be some adjustments to policy but it's solvable so long as we vote for the right people (a big if, for sure). Increasing adoption of heat pumps and EVs is also going to require a ton more electricity generation which is another policy issue to solve, but again totally solvable. Most power consumption is during the day and the coldest time is night, so I'd think this is not as bad an issue as it seems. We already support a huge amount of air conditioning during summers with only occasional problems.

You can purchase a very cheap base load that's fixed price. Completely green too. No need for dynamic pricing.

http://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/1261/hydro-que...

What about sand batteries? They're cheap, safe, scalable, extremely durable, and they can take advantage of dynamic pricing (or intermittent energy sources). They are easy to connect to an existing heating system.

They're relatively new, but a few companies are making them now and there's a LOT of handy homeowners playing with that tech right now.

The obvious solution to that is having a home battery. Those are expensive now (although even now, not that expensive in comparison to what a heating system already costs), but in the future they're likely to be cheap.

$300 to keep your house warm (and pipes unfrozen) during extreme cold events doesn't seem that bad to me?

Nuclear and time shifting also would prevent this. The US is instead going all-in on renewables with gas turbines to fill in the (large) gaps, locking us into carbon-based electricity for an additional thirty years, at least.

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