This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1446689
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1446689
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Somebody needs to take the leadership role. Apart from energy consumption reduction, I would want to charge a battery backup to accumulate energy during non-peak hours. The goal would be to avoid the peak time of day price rate for electricity. And during daytime hours, solar could shoulder part of the electricity consumption burden.
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For the sake of efficiency, we may have to stop owning cars, and put up with a robot system of public transport and private subscription vehicles. I had an electric car for a 3 year lease period and “servicing” involved little more than checking the tire pressure and washing the damn thing. It had terrible range and the charging station grid in California was less than impressive. Much better to let the robot deal with charging and range anxiety. Perhaps battery swapping is the answer. In any case, cars only spend about 5% of their time moving. The rest of the time they are “parked”, occupying space that could be used to grow zucchini or zinnias. Even Musk’s hyperloop facility was turned into a SpaceX parking lot. The US rail systems are still poorly integrated with transport so still many people commute intracity by car. Ultimately, the current model is inefficient, but using the rule of 10 (ten times cheaper, faster or better) used by angel investors, the new model would have to take vehicle activity from 5% to 50% (on the road half the time) or stated otherwise take 90% of the vehicles off the road. Parking would be replaced with charging or maintenance downtime. It is hard to imagine an America without large parking lots, but that would be a result of such a shift.
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For example, the San Francisco Fire Commission had prohibited batteries with more than 20 kilowatt-hours of power storage in homes, severely limiting the ability to store solar electricity from rooftop solar panels for all those times when the sun isn’t shining.
That’s an interesting wrinkle I hadn’t thought about, but I guess it makes sense. I wonder if that couldn’t be solved by including a fire suppression system in the battery enclosure. Or a waiver if the battery is in a separate structure from the home, like an outdoor shed.
Hydrogen was mentioned, but there are so many problems with that as an alternate energy source that I don’t think it’s going to make a dent in climate mitigation. Sabine Hossenfelder has a recent video diving into whether it’s practical or not:
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Both electrics and hydrogen-based systems will be unpopular for a while. Due to combustion issues, Norwegian ferries are banning them.
There is a subgenre of news reporting devoted to Tesla spontaneous combustion events. E.g
In the end, though, we will adopt a system that makes uses electricity to make hydrogen that can then be converted back into electricity. Meanwhile, it may be many generations before we forget about the Hindenberg.
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20 KWh should be plenty to get most homes through the dark hours.
This is my big thing. Cars are ridiculously inefficient as well as dangerous – for no reason except to (historically) benefit big oil.
Everyone focuses on fuel usage, but every car also has to be manufactured and disposed of as part of its total life cycle and almost no one talks about the energy consumption to do that
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Our local power company encourages people to install Tesla walls. Unfortunately, their contract allows them to drain your batteries whenever they feel like it. Seems like it defeats the purpose. And why would anyone want to pay to install infrastructure for the power company if it won’t be there for you when you need it? The same goes for solar panels. The homeowner buys and maintains the solar panels and can backfeed their meter when they have excess power. The power company, with the OK of the Public Service Board can change the compensation rates, making the solar panels uneconomic at some future time (most people’s solar panels do not provide power to their own residence - they only supply the power grid.)
There is more that needs to be done in this area.
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Three things: Fire danger from home storage batteries, reducing road miles traveled, and the PUC’s bassackwards reduction in reimbursing home generators for electricity they sell to the grid.
First, there are new battery technologies coming. Research has shown that batteries based on iron and sulfur have about twice the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, cost significantly less to produce, and, most important, do not heat up and pose no fire hazard. Additional benefits are that that they will reduce the stranglehold on lithium that China and a few other countries currently have. The battery fire hazard is about to disappear.
Second, significant reductions in road miles traveled could be achieved by scaling up all aspects of public transportation to approach the reach and penetration seen in Europe and Japan. Once upon a time in the US, you could get on an electric trolley in Augusta, Maine, and ride public transportation all the way to Augusta, Georgia. That system was destroyed as automobile use expanded here in the US, but other countries kept their rail systems in place. Electrified public transit would alleviate both road miles traveled and parking issues, and make many cities much more human-friendly than they have become.
Third, the PUC and the California energy giants are going to face a huge backlash after this incredibly inane reimbursement policy takes effect. It may indeed even out the burden of electricity costs over all economic ranges, but at a much higher level than what currently exists. Far from helping the poor, it will only screw them more. I give it five years, maximum, until a PUC actually dedicated to the public (that’s the “P” in "PUC) takes charge and puts things back in order. The current electricity giants will become much smaller.
The future of home electricity is probably destined to be in local microgrids and based on rooftop solar. Large-scale electricity generation will still be necessary for things like public transit and industrial uses, but the need for a huge and outdated grid will be greatly reduced, which will also reduce the danger of wildfires being started from obsolete and/or inadequately maintained long-distance transmission lines.
Sure, it’ll take a lot of investment. And yes, it will face intense lobbying resistance. Good things don’t come free. The largest economy in the world is up to the task.
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Good Article but nicely just glosses over the biggest issue yet to be solved: the massive increase in available electricity to make this happen. California faces rolling blackouts pretty regularly, so if we don’t have enough electrical capacity today, where is the capacity going to come from after outlawing other energy sources?
One other pet peeve, for people that actually like to cook, a gas range is so much better than an electric one. AND if you have a power outage you can still cook if need be. I’m waiting for the ban on natural gas and charcoal backyard grills…
If by electric, you mean a resistance heating unit, yes. They suck. Infrared heaters on ceramic cooktops are much better than resistance coils, but induction is the bomb. (I’ve used induction, and when Mrs Strad and I remodel our kitchen [soon!] the current IR ceramic range is going to be replaced with an induction range.)
Induction is actually better than gas.
- The energy goes straight into heating the cooking surface.
- No indoor pollution from combustion by-products.
- Better thermal control, in that the burner can monitor the temperature of the pan.
Induction is the only cooking method I’ve seen that can melt chocolate and make hollandaise without a double boiler.
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Not for everything. I’ve gone through this here before, but it doesn’t work on my solid copper cookware that’s a lifetime investment and I’m not giving it up. It doesn’t work with enough heat to match my 30,000 btu gas wok burner, and can’t accommodate the shape of my different sized round-bottom woks like that burner can. Other than that I’m sure it’s fine. But not for me and the way I cook.
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Honestly, what we need more than anything is better engineering. The absurd inefficiency of the automobile literally hurts this engineer’s brain and heart every time I contemplate it.
Passive heating and cooling of living structures are ancient techniques that we’ve let fall by the wayside because natgas etc. was so cheap
Check this out, for example:
There’s so much we already know how to do but just aren’t doing and so much we could focus on doing better (why do we throw so goddamn much food away anyhow?!?)
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Living in a house as tightly sealed as that Maine home would make me nervous without some kind of air exchange system that would reduce the heat efficiency. Especially a recently built home. There’s a lot of residual outgassing from construction materials and other things one brings into a house. Even cooking needs decent venting with air exchange, especially if you go in for the more exuberant cooking methods.
Poor or even downright unhealthy indoor air quality is a potential downside of energy-efficient building methods. I may live in a drafty Victorian built in 1888, but at least we get good healthy air exchange in these winter storms blowing through the cracks (at the cost of a massive electric bill).
Yes, it won’t work with non-magnetic cookware.
Yes, copper cookware is a joy to cook on and it’s certainly a lifetime investment. It’s also obsolete in a world where heat conductivity is made irrelevant.
Countertop induction units that work with curved bottom woks are available.
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Says it has a ventilation system.
“There’s more insulation, there’s more care taken to make sure they are airtight, there’s the ventilation system, there’s better windows and doors. And people have a hard time getting beyond that even though we can show them pretty easily that the economic payback is there,” he says.
I’ve looked at them. I haven’t been able to find a way to compare the heat transfer of induction spec’d in watts to the 30,000 btu transfer from a gas burner, and I suspect it isn’t close. As for the shape, the induction wok burner I’ve seen with a curved plate has to use its own dedicated wok, which doesn’t look large enough or deep enough. I have woks in different sizes and some are large. An open-ring gas burner like my built-in Viking unit with a huge single burner accommodates them all.
The last straw is that the “induction wok burners” I’ve seen are portable countertop units you’d have to use on a kitchen island or countertop. Any decently high-heat wok burner needs a strong overhead exhaust vent right over the burner, or you’ll smoke yourself out of the kitchen.
I’m trying to remain open-minded, I just haven’t seen any induction competition for a gas wok burner in this admittedly very specialized use case.
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I’m told that the Chinese have made them work.
I actually use my wok on a charcoal chimney. You don’t need a huge heat source to make a wok work. But most of the time for Szechuan we go out.
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If you can (and want to) find one that is deep and large enough, this sounds like the best design. The induction current circulates, so a curved plate would allow it to do that efficiently along the lower portion of the wok.
ETA: one nice thing about wok cooking though is that it goes fast. I’m not sure that disposing of a good quality wok just to switch to induction has a big benefit
FWIW, I’m looking to set up a ventilation system something like this in my 1923 Craftsman home in Detroit, which has a daylight basement:
You don’t need a drafty home to have good ventilation
There’s also Heat Recovery Ventilation, which is more elaborate but can be quite efficient