This story is also a good illustration of why local government matters. National races get most of the media attention, but your personal day-to-day is more affected by your local government.
This story is also a good illustration of why local government matters. National races get most of the media attention, but your personal day-to-day is more affected by your local government.
> Republicans expanded their majority on the utility commission to 4-1 in 2022 and have taken steps since then to reverse clean energy mandates. Most recently, the panel voted 4-1 to sunset rules that required regulated utilities to set energy efficiency requirements and get 15 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2025.
> This story is also a good illustration of why local government matters. National races get most of the media attention, but your personal day-to-day is more affected by your local government.
Arizona is getting what it voted for. At the generation capacity amounts needed to replace fossil generation (a handful of GWs, 15k-20k acres of leased land assuming ~4.5k-5k acres per GW of solar capacity) [3], this is simply a lack of desire and will. Someone else in the thread mentioned peaker plants; utility scale batteries are cheaper than peakers in most (but not all) cases [4] [5].
[1] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2024/02/12...
[2] https://www.eenews.net/articles/can-arizona-revive-its-bipar...
[3] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-SW-AZPS?wind=false&s...
[4] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/12/battery-storage-syste...
[5] https://www.cesa.org/replacing-fossil-fueled-peaker-power-pl...
This infuriates me. They're being oppositional simply for the sake of being oppositional.
Fuckers.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61242
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2024.01.16/chart2.s...
https://www.wri.org/insights/clean-energy-progress-united-st...
https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/responding-to-growing-...
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/05/22/huge-1-2-million-pan...
Thermal storage systems have a big chunk of concrete or tank of water under the house which can be cooled or heated by the air conditioning system. Then, at peak power demand times, that hot or cold is transferred to the living space of the house.
It effectively allows time-shifting of power use. It also lets you buy a smaller AC unit, since the AC unit can be operating 20+ hours a day, yet providing more cooling in the daytime and less at night when the need is lower.
Currently such systems cost more due to their novelty, but I am reasonably confident that if hour by hour electricity pricing becomes common, they will soon be widespread (in new builds at least, probably not worth retrofitting).
More complex versions of the same system allow many sources and sinks of heat - eg. they can heat/cool waste water, heat/cool the roof, heat/cool the ground under the house, heat/cool the outsides of the walls or the air outside the house. That means clever software can maximize efficiency - for example by radiating heat to the sky at night, dumping heat into north-facing walls in the daytime. Then, in the winter when it's cold it can scavenge heat from south facing walls.