sxates

Bay Area California. December has been highs in the 40s-50s, lows 30s-40s (Fahrenheit). I definitely benefit from living in a place that's not extremely cold or hot, which reduces our energy needs.

You just moved the goal posts from "impossible" to "not economically feasible" - those aren't the same thing. I agree, economically, it's very difficult. We need governments to help with the cost, because it will be enormous. The cost of not doing it is even higher.

Also, the % of people who live in climates like yours is relatively small, so everyone who doesn't live in those places should not be using this as an excuse for inaction.

OP here - we upgraded to 400 amp service, but 200 would still be sufficient for us. I just have a hard time saying no when 'overkill' costs only 10% more.

I'm in the Bay Area. Net electric bills for the year are $0 or <$0. Hard to compare to 'before' because the EVs were added after solar, but my next door neighbor with a somewhat larger house, no EVs, and both gas and electric has $1200 energy bills in the winter. I don't think ours would have been that high, but at least half that.

I don't! But that was also true when we had gas.

I agree that heat is more challenging in climates like yours. But it's not impossible. Extreme insulation and smart energy management goes a long way (check out passive houses), and if thermal is really needed natural gas is not our only option. Do trees grow near you? Grind them up and burn them, they're carbon neutral. Better yet, geothermal heat pumps which I'm hopeful will become more cost effective in the near future.

The cost is enormous for older houses. It's prohibitive for most people, thus my advocacy for incentives. We did a lot of the work as part of larger renovations, but I'd expect for most homes the cost to convert all the gas appliances to electric and bring everything up to code is at least $30-40k. If you're adding solar and home batteries to that, then even more. We're probably in >$100k gross, though we've taken advantage of probably $30k in incentives for solar and batteries.

The batteries are the backup. Keeping gas service "just in case" comes with it's own risks in terms of leaks, and where I live, with major earthquakes. Disconnecting it means I don't have to worry about that, or pay the $4/mo minimum to keep it active.

I believe this is the future we need if we're serious about eliminating CO2 emissions. It's not just power plants and cars - my house put out just as many emissions in the winter as my car did. Probably more. In a world where we're getting CO2 to zero there's no place for gas appliances. We need everyone to accept that, and it's going to take a while.

The main thing I'm looking at is eliminating CO2 emissions as best I can. I'm not in control of them all, but where I am in control I'm working to eliminate. Bottom line is that we need to get emissions to zero as fast as possible. With that in mind, the energy cost of new appliances that are run on renewable energy pays dividends before those appliances are at end of life, and existing working gas appliances fall into a sunk-cost fallacy IMO.

It doesn't matter if I have 1 GW of solar and batteries and EVs and the whole grid is converted to renewables and I only eat vegan from my own back yard, etc. If my home furnace runs on gas it's emitting CO2 to run. There was literally an exhaust pipe running out the side of my house for the furnace, water heater, etc. The only way to eliminate those emissions is to eliminate the appliance.

I don't know what the break even cost on all this stuff is, because I frankly don't care. I did do the math on the heat pump water heater vs. what we were paying for the gas water heater (there was a time where the water heater was the only gas thing running), and the new water heater saved us about $30/mo in energy costs just comparing gas to electric. And with solar panels the savings over a gas heater are even greater. I figure break even on a very high end water heater is <4 years.

[edits because I mixed up answers to another comment]

I have 2 Tesla Powerwalls. I'm not too worried about the fire risk, as I haven't heard of any case of powerwall fire. The city seems worried about it though, my permits and inspections all have to go through the fire department which has slowed things down a lot.

Probably a good idea to install them somewhere that would be easy to flood with water if there was a problem though.

Sibling comment about electric loads is accurate - we had 100amp service which was insufficient (though we almost made it - we added an ADU (also all electric) which needed it's own big breaker and we didn't have space for that - so that's what really put us over. I ended up going a bit crazy and installing 400A service because it wasn't that much more that 200. Cost was about $11k. We also redid most of the electric wiring in our house as part of renovations.

What I had in mind with the comment above though is that it's just a shift in mindset. In the past I had no idea what a 'therm' of gas was, or how much that was, or any way to connect "run the heater for an hour" to a unit of energy or cost. With everything electric, and everything monitored in detail, and production of electricity on the roof, now everything in the house is on the same unit of energy which I can at least wrap my head around. I can connect "run the heater for an hour (3.5kwh)" to "2 hours of shaded solar power" or "a whole day of hot water" or "a 10 mile trip to the shops in the car". With data comes awareness, and with awareness its inevitable that you'll shift your behavior to be more efficient.

The benefits of electrification are not limited to those with local solar production. But obviously if you are generating your own power, running everything on that same fuel type has big benefits.

I haven't had the batteries long enough (just a couple months at this point - took more than a year to get them) to work that into our habits in all seasons. I expect for 6+ months of the year the batteries will enable us to run virtually off-grid, with minimal draw from the grid, perhaps with the exception of charging the cars. Power production in those months vastly exceeds our usage.

Conversely, this time of year (winter) the way our house is positioned with the sun (on a hill, surrounded by tall trees) we generate a pretty small amount of solar, and are running the heaters a lot, so very grid dependent. The batteries would power the house for maybe 12 hours in an outage.

Last summer I'd often charge a car during the day instead of at night because we were generating more than the draw of the EV charger. I have an internal debate about whether this is better, because the power company's time-of-use structure incentivizes me to not do this, but instead export the power to the grid. So I'm not actually sure whether maximizing my energy usage at the time of production is less carbon intensive than exporting it to offset the rest of the community's usage. I guess it all depends on what's generating that grid energy at night.

For the most part within the house though, the batteries let you not care too much about what energy you're using when.

For the doubters - I've completely converted my 1962 house to electric over the last few years. Gas furnace > Heat pump. Gas water heater > Heat pump water heater. Gas range > Electric Oven, Induction Cooktop. Even has a heat pump clothes dryer. We had the utility company come out and permanently disconnect our gas service.

AMA.

In addition to electrifying the house, both cars are electric, I've got 12kw of solar on the roof, and 26kwh of battery storage. My house is a case study in electrification and what we need all homes to look like in the next 20 years. It's not without it's challenges, and it requires some adjustments, but really not much. I contend everything being electric is awesome, not compromising.

The main problem I see is that these sorts of retrofits are expensive, and I don't see how most Americans (let alone the rest of the world) do it without incentives.

My house used to have a gas furnace, gas water heater, and gas cooking. When our power was out, none of those appliances worked. Gas doesn't save you in a power outage, unless you have some kind of gas fireplace, but even then a widespread long-term outage is likely to affect the gas infrastructure as well.

No doubt this car would have weighed a fraction of what a modern Prius weighs.

Has anyone found info on power consumption? Still 100+ W?

Quick anecdote.

I bought my first house in Garland TX for $119,000 in 2003. 3 beds, 2.5 baths, a 'not bad' neighborhood. My wife was a teacher and we could afford it just on her income.

Looked up that house recently and it was for sale, now at $250,000 18 years later. Someone had updated it with typical flipper grade stuff, but ok it's double what it was even 5-10 years ago.

So then I go do the math on monthly payments for it. The interest rate back in 2003 was like 7-8%, and now we're down to 3%. Turns out the monthly payments I made 18 years ago and today are about the same.

We bought our second house in 2007, and similarly the price it fetches now is much higher, but the payments would be similar.

If you look at housing affordability like rent affordability; that is, what monthly payment can you afford, it seems like house prices are increasing to match interest rates decreasing. That house in Garland TX, inflation adjusted, is now MORE affordable than it was 18 years ago, even though it's purchase price has doubled.

EDIT to add - I now live in the Bay Area and this pattern doesn't hold up here. But most nation-wide patterns don't really hold up here. The house we bought in Oakland in 2016 has doubled, but we were already at like 4.25% back then, so the lower interest rate doesn't offset the whole increase.

Its a little weird that the catastrophe described is about the warheads, not the loss of the whole crew. Though I'm sure it's about a billion dollar loss of hardware as well.

It sucks to lose something you always had and took for granted. I wonder what the reverse situation would look like - if everyone on the planet had easy access to high speed satellite internet, and astronomers came along and insisted we had to pull the whole thing down so we could study stars. Would that be an equal or un-equal tragedy?

How would Florida enforce this for a company that isn't based in Florida? Or for deplatforming politicians outside Florida? I don't see how they have jurisdiction here.

Why is the 5 year payback critical, as opposed to 7 or 8? You're still coming out ahead.

I actually talked about this in a previous comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283461

My house in California is peaking around 70kWh this time of year (April, 14kw system), well more than we're using. I can charge my tesla during the day and still be exporting to the grid. Most afternoons my house is probably powering every house on my street.

Potentially on descent, but I think it's a much smaller potential benefit in an airplane, and perhaps tricky because you don't want to extract so much energy that you lose speed and stall.

Would someone call Michael Lewis and make sure he's looking into this story?

Those intros are where a lot of the recurring inside jokes originate, don't skip them!

I've certainly wondered many times why we don't wire homes for DC right now. Almost everything in my house runs on DC, and the Solar Panels on the roof generate DC, but it gets converted to AC in between with losses on both sides of that conversion.

Solar (DC) > AC Inverter > DC Converter > Device. (And in the future, there will be a home battery in there that converts that Solar Inverter AC back to DC, then discharges DC back to AC)

All the electronics, all the LED lights, everything that charges, even my car, all are native DC. What's stopping us from have a parallel DC connection for these things in homes that could be powered directly (ahem) via DC without the conversion?

Yes, I’d watch this movie.

To be fair, I think setting up a raspberry pi or an AWS instance isn't 'mom friendly' either. Still more friction than Facebook, which this is positioning itself against.

Thanks for sharing this link, I had been looking for something like this!