Energy Prices Are Driving Demand for Solar Panels and Heat Pumps | Hacker News Reader

Energy Prices Are Driving Demand for Solar Panels and Heat Pumps

nytimes.com

35 pointslxm15 comments

Electrification is a no brainer.

Electricity is essentially an abstraction layer that decouples the source of energy from the consumer.

Even if you want to remain 100% fossil fuel dependent, it still makes a lot more sense, outside of some industrial uses, to generate electricity with those fossil fuels and then use the electricity to power your actual device, whether it’s your air conditioning unit or your automobile, than to ship liquid gas to hundreds of thousands of gas stations all over or build pipes to send gaseous natural gas to every house.

Not only is it more efficient, as any abstracted system, it allows far more flexibility and resilience due to that flexibility.

100%. Also, fossil fuel is a bit ridiculous compared to renewables because you have to spend a huge amount of effort to find a new resource patch, extract the fuel, ship it all over the planet… just to burn it and it’s gone forever. Not a sustainable system for our energy at all.

> Electricity is essentially an abstraction layer that decouples the source of energy from the consumer.

Highly recommend a visit to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI. They have a belt-driven workshop that demonstrates that this abstraction/desire has existed for a very long time. Electricity is currently our best-known way to put it into practice.

PS - depending on their schedule of interactive demos, you might even be able to make something in the workshop :)

Running an entire workshop from a shared overhead pulley seems very akin to running individual thin-clients off a mainframe.

Remember how fossil fuel promoters always say its big advantage over solar and wind energy is reliability?

Some discussions:

Heat pump sales rise across Europe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012003

Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601310

https://archive.is/zCa4t

Interesting timing that China is ending solar panel and battery export subsidies this year.

Panel I've bought 15 months ago is 20% more expensive now.

Isn’t a lot of that due to currnecy and inflation?

12 months ago 4300 yuan would cost 1000 NZD. 4400 yuan today (3% increase) would be about 1100 NZD.

Federal tax incentives in the US are also drying up and not being renewed. Unfortunately, the same thing is happening with state incentives in California. Many of these programs ended in the beginning of this year.

No worries! We just install our own oil wells and refineries for energy independence to take advantage of those sweet federal subsidies that have shifted back to fossil fuels.

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