Do you have hills? We don't try to dig out basement on flat lots; we dig basements into the side of a hill (such that at least one side is a walk-out).
Lets take your typical home of 2,000 sq/ft that uses a more modest amount of power, say 1/3 of what I use.
Their average monthly bill is about $100 a month and it'll cost about $30,000 worth of solar panels and batteries to remove it.
I live in a home very close to average (a little smaller in square footage, with insulation that met code about 20 years ago)
I've averaged 740 KWh per month of electricity over the last 12 months, and my average power bill was $105.79. This calculator suggests that I'd need about 5500 watts of capacity to replace 100% of my usage, which would cost less than $10,000 for most of the choices on that page (plus installation). Even if installation doubled the price to $20K, your estimate is still 50% too high.
And that, by the way, is ignoring (a) tax credits (and Georgia's state tax credit is quite good), (b) the fact that I'd insulate some more before buying a solar system, reducing the capacity needed further, (c) the fact that I'd probably DIY most of it, and (d) the fact that electricity prices keep going up over time. Considering those factors, I'd probably spend $7000 or less and break even within 6 years.
In fact, pretty much the only reason I don't already have a solar system is that my roof will need to be replaced relatively soon, and I don't want to have to remove and reinstall the panels when that happens. Actually, looking this stuff up now makes me want to go ahead and replace the roof this year, rather than continuing to wait...
Hmm... I don't get it then. Here in Georgia we're famous for our impenetrable red clay, but somehow we manage to dig basements (at reasonable cost) anyway.
So I guess if you put out a carbon tax high enough to triple my power bill, I'd take some small measures to change, but you'd crush the average american's budget in the process.
Bull. The "average American" uses way less carbon than you do. The median home size in the US (note: not the median new home size; the medium size of all homes that currently exist, including old ones) is certainly less than 2000 sq. ft., and (counting apartments) is probably closer to 1500. Tripling the average American's power bill would raise it from $100 to $300, not make it skyrocket from $300 to $900 like yours would.
Which is why we aren't going to get a carbon tax and if we do, it will be too small to actually effect change.
No, we aren't going to get a carbon tax because there are too many people with your kind of wasteful attitude in office.
Your ideas and suggestions are great examples of someone who is coming up with solutions to problems without having to pay for them.
Can we do all these things? Yes, it is technically possible using the technology we have to do all that you are suggesting. I have no doubt about that. But it just isn't going to happen.
Between the cost of solar panels, the cost of the battery, the cost of insulation, new windows, etc. I could easily spend over $100,000 to "solve" this problem you think I have. All to remove a $300 a month electric bill.
That is just nuts and silly. It is a poor use of capital. That money would be much better spent building nuclear power plants and just running the systems we have.
Here's the problem: your entire outlook is based on the presumption that everybody's house is as ridiculously wasteful as yours. This is not the case. You are an outlier. And just because you can't manage a transition to solar, that doesn't mean it isn't a good solution for just about everybody else. You dun goofed; sucks to be you.
Now, quit trying to screw it up for everybody else with your naysaying!
Of course they don't, because that would make too much damn sense!
(I figured as much; I just wanted to see you admit it for pure schadenfreude. I bet your air handler and ductwork is in your attic, too. Like I said, pathologically bad...)
When the temp is in the 80's, it is starting to get humid. One of the benefits of running the AC isn't just the reduction in temp of the air, it is the humidification of the air. 82 degrees and 10% humidity is not the same as 82 degrees and 35% humidity in terms of "feel".
Setting up stack-effect cooling with a dehumidifier on the cool-air input end would still be much more efficient than AC.
But that just points out a problem, what is the solution? Telling me to move doesn't solve anything, someone else would just move here. Rebuilding or redesigning the house is too expensive, and we aren't going to tear down half of the houses in the country.
The reality is that we have what we have in terms of homes, that isn't going to change within our lifetime. So now we have to figure out how to provide the power required to run these houses.
Many houses are not as pathologically bad as yours. In fact, horrible McMansions have only been built for the last 20 years or so; houses built earlier (ranches and split-levels) are less horrible, and houses built before 1950 or so (craftsman bungalows and Victorians) are actually pretty decent. They had to be, since AC didn't exist yet!
For example, my house in Atlanta is a single-story home built in 1948 (in a transitional post-WWII style halfway between a bungalow and a ranch) and I plan on keeping my HVAC system completely turned off between now and about halfway through June. The technique is to open the windows whenever the temperature is between 60 and 80 (or 65 and 75 for a pickier person), close them otherwise, and rely on the insulation and thermal mass to to maintain the temperature gradient between open-window, er, "windows." If I had a whole-house fan and deep overhangs / awnings, I'd be able to do better.
We also don't have to keep building houses stupidly; if we switch to energy-efficient designs now, energy pigs like your house will be a diminishing fraction of the total housing stock.
I vote for nuclear, it is the only replacement for coal and natural gas that can provide base load for billions of people. The waste can be contained if we can get over our political issues, the waste from coal and natural gas cannot be contained, it goes into the air.
This isn't a "vote!" There's no such thing as picking some kind of silver-bullet absolute winner and ignoring everything else; the choices are not mutually exclusive. The correct solution is to use whatever technology is most appropriate for a given situation. Solar and nuclear (etc.) can coexist perfectly well.
Unlike the GP (who appears to live in some kind of horrible McMansion), your 100+ year old house was designed. In fact, it's perfectly livable without air conditioning at all, proven by the fact that people actually lived in it for decades before air conditioning existed! You just need to go re-learn how to operate itproperly.
I live in Georgia; I'm well aware of the fact that desert architecture doesn't work in hot-humid climates like (eastern) Texas.
However, the fact that your house was built stupidly doesn't mean that we should throw up our hands and ignore the problem. There are new houses being built every day, and those should be designed smarter (and in the our case I don't mean with qanats; I mean things like verandas, lots of attic ventilation, and choosing not to cut down the surrounding trees). In the South you may not actually be able to eliminate AC entirely, but you can get prettyclose.
By the way: clay soil is not why houses in your area don't have basements. I'm guessing you're on the coastal plain, with a high water table and without hills, and that's why. In the Piedmont, where I live, we have clay soil and basements.
The total efficiency (70%-87%) is quite good, which means that this is not just a good idea but can pay for itself anywhere the difference between peak and off-peak energy costs are larger than the ~20% that is lost to pump friction.
...and where you have the right geographic features to install a dam. As I understand it, most places in the US that are suitable for dams already have one, but we'd need a lot more to compensate for widespread solar. That doesn't make pumped storage a bad idea, it just means it isn't a complete solution.
I could have mistyped but from what I can figure (6.7M acres / 15 sqft solar panels) that would take a mind boggling number of solar panels, almost 20 Billion. At current rates that would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $19 Trillion dollars.
Somebody else calculated that it would cost $26,000 per person (which implies that your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude). Lots of people spend more than that on their car.
At $150/m^2, that would be approximately $1E12. That's [only] $26 000 per citizen.
And your point is...?
Keep in mind, those citizens are driving around cars that cost $26,000 (when new). They're living in buildings that cost much more than $26,000 per resident to build. They're driving around on a road network that I'm pretty sure cost more than $1E12 (in 2015 dollars) to build.
The point is that while $26,000 per person isn't cheap, it isn't insurmountably expensive either, especially when you consider spreading that cost over the life of the equipment.
I suspect that the Egyptians and so forth also know a thing or two about keeping buildings cool in hot places without having to run a compressor.
Yes, but they don't get it down to 74 degrees without one either.:)
What makes you think that? Between windcatchers and qanats, traditional desert architecture is good enough to maintain "a greater than 15 C reduction in the air temperature." That's a lot!
We also have very tall ceilings which don't help (our great room/family room has 24' ceilings with floor to ceiling windows).
On days that are only a little too hot (e.g. low 80s, not 100), try opening the windows on the first floor rooms other than the great room, and the upper windows in the great room. Your house should stay cooler than it would have been otherwise, hopefully cool enough to avoid AC.
That's your real problem: your house "wasn't remotely designed" at all, such that it's energy usage is pathologically bad. It should never have been built the way it was in the first place.
What type of battery is going to run my AC in the summer? A total of 8 tons of cooling, plus the rest of the house?
If your AC has 8 tons of capacity, then your house is either gigantic or incredibly inefficient. Normal-sized houses have ACs closer to the 2-3 ton range.
In your case, it's entirely appropriate that a battery to run your system would be huge and expensive compared to a normal house's!
I suspect that the cost of such a battery would be cost prohibitive.
You sound like somebody who buys a 10 MPG Ferrari and then complains he can't afford gas.
You're asking people to switch to a new type of lifestyle, one in which they may or may not have power to last through the night. Make your power during the day, charge your battery, then use it at night.
What if the weather is bad for a few days? No power?
Those problems are trivially (albeit perhaps not inexpensively) solved by simply specifying a big enough battery.
We often run our AC at night, it gets quite warm and without it it would be nearly impossible to sleep.
I'm 99% certain you have poor insulation (compared to what anyone who was trying to run their AC off solar power would have), and that's your real problem.
Besides, almost everywhere except the tropics gets cool enough at night that opening windows and running a whole house fan should be able to let people avoid running the AC at night. (And houses in warm areas like that should be designed so that windows can be opened at night, by (for example) having wide enough roof overhangs to keep rain out. If you live in Florida and your house is designed the same way as one in New England, you're Doing It Wrong.)
Are you suggesting we would have a big enough battery to run the AC for several days of no solar power?
Yes!
You might also want to keep in mind that if there's no solar power, there's not much solar heat gain either, so your AC will require less power at that time (if it needs to run at all).
Do you have any idea how big that would have to be?
By the time you've increased the efficiency of your house to the point that solar makes sense to begin with, the answer is "not all that big."
It may be a problem without a solution, as it my be impossible to store enough energy in a small enough space to use for powering a car without it costing more than the people can afford. It might just not be doable.
This is clearly not true, because we can already do it. What is this amazing energy storage medium called? Gasoline (or Diesel)!
In a world where electricity is really cheap, hydrocarbon fuel is as simple as H2O + CO2 + electricity.
It was the largest [known] animal on Earth at the time, and therefore also the largest arthropod at the time. Bigger arthropods have existed, but they came later. For example, the modern Japanese spider crab could be considered "bigger" (depending on what you're measuring) because it can have an almost 4 meter leg span. And of course, Wikipedia lists Jaekelopterus (2.5 meters), a sea scorpion, and Arthropleura (2.1 meters), a millipede, but they both lived about 100 million years more recently than the species in TFA.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have hills? We don't try to dig out basement on flat lots; we dig basements into the side of a hill (such that at least one side is a walk-out).
I live in a home very close to average (a little smaller in square footage, with insulation that met code about 20 years ago)
I've averaged 740 KWh per month of electricity over the last 12 months, and my average power bill was $105.79. This calculator suggests that I'd need about 5500 watts of capacity to replace 100% of my usage, which would cost less than $10,000 for most of the choices on that page (plus installation). Even if installation doubled the price to $20K, your estimate is still 50% too high.
And that, by the way, is ignoring (a) tax credits (and Georgia's state tax credit is quite good), (b) the fact that I'd insulate some more before buying a solar system, reducing the capacity needed further, (c) the fact that I'd probably DIY most of it, and (d) the fact that electricity prices keep going up over time. Considering those factors, I'd probably spend $7000 or less and break even within 6 years.
In fact, pretty much the only reason I don't already have a solar system is that my roof will need to be replaced relatively soon, and I don't want to have to remove and reinstall the panels when that happens. Actually, looking this stuff up now makes me want to go ahead and replace the roof this year, rather than continuing to wait...
Hmm... I don't get it then. Here in Georgia we're famous for our impenetrable red clay, but somehow we manage to dig basements (at reasonable cost) anyway.
Maybe y'all just suck. ; )
Bull. The "average American" uses way less carbon than you do. The median home size in the US (note: not the median new home size; the medium size of all homes that currently exist, including old ones) is certainly less than 2000 sq. ft., and (counting apartments) is probably closer to 1500. Tripling the average American's power bill would raise it from $100 to $300, not make it skyrocket from $300 to $900 like yours would.
No, we aren't going to get a carbon tax because there are too many people with your kind of wasteful attitude in office.
Here's the problem: your entire outlook is based on the presumption that everybody's house is as ridiculously wasteful as yours. This is not the case. You are an outlier. And just because you can't manage a transition to solar, that doesn't mean it isn't a good solution for just about everybody else. You dun goofed; sucks to be you.
Now, quit trying to screw it up for everybody else with your naysaying!
Of course they don't, because that would make too much damn sense!
(I figured as much; I just wanted to see you admit it for pure schadenfreude. I bet your air handler and ductwork is in your attic, too. Like I said, pathologically bad...)
Setting up stack-effect cooling with a dehumidifier on the cool-air input end would still be much more efficient than AC.
Many houses are not as pathologically bad as yours. In fact, horrible McMansions have only been built for the last 20 years or so; houses built earlier (ranches and split-levels) are less horrible, and houses built before 1950 or so (craftsman bungalows and Victorians) are actually pretty decent. They had to be, since AC didn't exist yet!
For example, my house in Atlanta is a single-story home built in 1948 (in a transitional post-WWII style halfway between a bungalow and a ranch) and I plan on keeping my HVAC system completely turned off between now and about halfway through June. The technique is to open the windows whenever the temperature is between 60 and 80 (or 65 and 75 for a pickier person), close them otherwise, and rely on the insulation and thermal mass to to maintain the temperature gradient between open-window, er, "windows." If I had a whole-house fan and deep overhangs / awnings, I'd be able to do better.
We also don't have to keep building houses stupidly; if we switch to energy-efficient designs now, energy pigs like your house will be a diminishing fraction of the total housing stock.
This isn't a "vote!" There's no such thing as picking some kind of silver-bullet absolute winner and ignoring everything else; the choices are not mutually exclusive. The correct solution is to use whatever technology is most appropriate for a given situation. Solar and nuclear (etc.) can coexist perfectly well.
Unlike the GP (who appears to live in some kind of horrible McMansion), your 100+ year old house was designed. In fact, it's perfectly livable without air conditioning at all, proven by the fact that people actually lived in it for decades before air conditioning existed! You just need to go re-learn how to operate it properly.
I live in Georgia; I'm well aware of the fact that desert architecture doesn't work in hot-humid climates like (eastern) Texas.
However, the fact that your house was built stupidly doesn't mean that we should throw up our hands and ignore the problem. There are new houses being built every day, and those should be designed smarter (and in the our case I don't mean with qanats; I mean things like verandas, lots of attic ventilation, and choosing not to cut down the surrounding trees). In the South you may not actually be able to eliminate AC entirely, but you can get pretty close.
By the way: clay soil is not why houses in your area don't have basements. I'm guessing you're on the coastal plain, with a high water table and without hills, and that's why. In the Piedmont, where I live, we have clay soil and basements.
...and where you have the right geographic features to install a dam. As I understand it, most places in the US that are suitable for dams already have one, but we'd need a lot more to compensate for widespread solar. That doesn't make pumped storage a bad idea, it just means it isn't a complete solution.
Hey, nobody said you had to buy them all at once...
Somebody else calculated that it would cost $26,000 per person (which implies that your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude). Lots of people spend more than that on their car.
And your point is...?
Keep in mind, those citizens are driving around cars that cost $26,000 (when new). They're living in buildings that cost much more than $26,000 per resident to build. They're driving around on a road network that I'm pretty sure cost more than $1E12 (in 2015 dollars) to build.
The point is that while $26,000 per person isn't cheap, it isn't insurmountably expensive either, especially when you consider spreading that cost over the life of the equipment.
What makes you think that? Between windcatchers and qanats, traditional desert architecture is good enough to maintain "a greater than 15 C reduction in the air temperature." That's a lot!
On days that are only a little too hot (e.g. low 80s, not 100), try opening the windows on the first floor rooms other than the great room, and the upper windows in the great room. Your house should stay cooler than it would have been otherwise, hopefully cool enough to avoid AC.
That's your real problem: your house "wasn't remotely designed" at all, such that it's energy usage is pathologically bad. It should never have been built the way it was in the first place.
If your AC has 8 tons of capacity, then your house is either gigantic or incredibly inefficient. Normal-sized houses have ACs closer to the 2-3 ton range.
In your case, it's entirely appropriate that a battery to run your system would be huge and expensive compared to a normal house's!
You sound like somebody who buys a 10 MPG Ferrari and then complains he can't afford gas.
Those problems are trivially (albeit perhaps not inexpensively) solved by simply specifying a big enough battery.
I'm 99% certain you have poor insulation (compared to what anyone who was trying to run their AC off solar power would have), and that's your real problem.
Besides, almost everywhere except the tropics gets cool enough at night that opening windows and running a whole house fan should be able to let people avoid running the AC at night. (And houses in warm areas like that should be designed so that windows can be opened at night, by (for example) having wide enough roof overhangs to keep rain out. If you live in Florida and your house is designed the same way as one in New England, you're Doing It Wrong.)
Yes!
You might also want to keep in mind that if there's no solar power, there's not much solar heat gain either, so your AC will require less power at that time (if it needs to run at all).
By the time you've increased the efficiency of your house to the point that solar makes sense to begin with, the answer is "not all that big."
This is clearly not true, because we can already do it. What is this amazing energy storage medium called? Gasoline (or Diesel)!
In a world where electricity is really cheap, hydrocarbon fuel is as simple as H2O + CO2 + electricity.
On the bright side, cheap + cheap + cheap + cheap adds up to expensive, so that's already covered!
Or repair it? Or buy the same model, used?
Some of them do. The ones that don't, however, rely (as far as we know) on 'marine snow', which would not exist on Ganymede.
Considering how much filament costs, the junkyard transmission might be cheaper.
It was the largest [known] animal on Earth at the time, and therefore also the largest arthropod at the time. Bigger arthropods have existed, but they came later. For example, the modern Japanese spider crab could be considered "bigger" (depending on what you're measuring) because it can have an almost 4 meter leg span. And of course, Wikipedia lists Jaekelopterus (2.5 meters), a sea scorpion, and Arthropleura (2.1 meters), a millipede, but they both lived about 100 million years more recently than the species in TFA.
You mean, "the same problems that Sun (SMF), Apple (Launchd) and Canonical (Upstart) had already solved, making SystemD wholly unnecessary?"