Electrifying everything in your home (and garage) can improve comfort and quality of life, but right now, it's often an expensive hassle. These guys have ideas about how to make it cheaper and easier.
Great podcast, but the smart panel product being hawked is too expensive for us. even though in the next year we'll be replacing our filled-up panel and adding breakers to the new panel, requesting increased service run from the utility, and having wiring/outlets installed to be ready to electrify our gas appliances as they die out in the near future (and a second car charging breaker is needed too, as well as panel space for home storage tie in, but we think purchasing storage for ourselves is ten or more years away).
But I was struck by the argument about batteries and home batteries at the end. We used to have a 2014 Nissan LEAF with a 24 kwh battery, about two tesla powerwalls. We sold the car, but I was frustrated we had to sell it for so little when the batteries still had so much value than the actual used selling price.
If we'd had the opportunity to keep our paid-off LEAF, store it permanently in the garage and plug it into our grid (like the future Ford F150) we would have done so, because that would have given us home storage, and more home storage than we could ever expect to buy outright.
On the other hand, the batteries themselves are only part of the cost. there's the hardware, software, installation labor and the wiring infrastructure to run the house off the car storage, but I would think that those are fairly solvable small problems. and as the first generation of electric cars continue to reach the end of their usable battery life I would think there's a strong home market to turn those paid-off first gen electric cars into home storage.
There's another angle in terms of removing the battery from a first gen car and placing it into storage/wall enclosures, but I think you would have tremendous labor costs in doing so, not to mention having to create thermal management systems for such a set up. probably easier and cheaper to simply develop a product that transforms an old generation electric car into home storage, whilst leaving the car itself intact.
Thanks so much for tackling this topic. I was one of the many suggesting it. Home electrification is so critical, and yet it's ALL hand-to-hand combat, like the opening scene of Lincoln. Just this week, contractors I hired just finished replacing my gas furnace and gas water heater with two air-source heat pumps (Bay Area, CA). I also piled on wall and ceiling insulation, and they upgraded the ductwork. All told it was 12 days of work. OK, take out the insulation, and just do the HVAC, and it's still 6-8 of those days. And the guy I used is booked well into next year. We are in a sweet spot for these conversions, despite PG&E forming an obstacle, with probably over a million single-family homes in the Bay Area, and more across California. Developing the labor pool, and the companies to hire them, is a first-order scale problem, no?
Back in 2013-14 MIT did a series called The Future of Solar. I read the studies and watched the talks and came away with one resounding conclusion -- rooftop solar is not the way to go if you want to achieve anything like 100% emission-free energy in time to avoid catastrophic climate change. For one thing, it costs too much when compared with grid solar. At the time, the MIT engineers said at least twice as much and as much as 8 times as much as single axis solar installed with modern technology in very large arrays. More importantly, it takes too long. In my part of Northern NM the oldest solar installer in the U.S. plies his trade. A couple years ago he installed a 3 MW solar array for our rural electric cooperative. I spoke with him as he was completing the installation, and he said that he had just installed more panels in 2 months than his company installed in the previous 18 years of installing rooftop grid-tied solar arrays. Kit Carson's first goal was to reach what the Coop's CEO called 100% daytime solar - the point at which local solar regularly exceeds daytime demand on the grid. We'll get there in November, a year late because of the pandemic. But every distribution area in the country could reach this point within a couple years. It represents a little less than 40% of our total (pre-EV) load. We're also installing 30 MWHs of Tesla batteries along with the last arrays which total 21 MWs of solar. You can do this really fast anywhere, and we should demand that every utility do it. For one thing, if provides dirt-cheap energy that may, if things work out the way I hope, not entail any transmission costs. Bigger solar arrays in NM and other sunny states now produce electricity at less than 2 cents per kWh. If we also build large scale solar arrays for export to population centers, the transmission lines that feed us electricity when the sun isn't shining will always be full. When the sun does shine and we produce our own solar electricity for local use, the transmission line will be full of solar going to Denver or San Diego or wherever. That means we will not pay a capacity charge for transmission, and our Coop's solar cost will be around 2 cents with no transmission charge. This model works for any rural area where solar is plentiful and land is cheap. The wholesale costs from new large scale arrays will go down to 1 cent per kWh by 2025 and .5 cent and then .25 cent by the turn of the decade. In other words, generation will be a marginal cost. Storage, distribution, and transmission will be the big costs, but with storage prices falling faster than solar generation, we have a completely new price structure from when I first got involved -- back in 2011 I dreaded what warming would do to the world and my family. Then electricity generation exceeded the cost of transmission and distribution combined in wholesale electricity market. And, in 2011 storage was just a glimmer in Elon Musk's and Tony Seba's and Mark Jacobson's eyes. I don't think we should throw away rooftop, but it's just too slow and time-consuming compared to very large arrays. Just as that MIT scientist recommended then, focus on big systems. In Taos NM this winter when you plug into the wall on a sunny day your home will be running on solar. Now we just need to add wind and a lot more batteries, transition our fleets to EVs, and make our homes all-electric. Sorry if this is a little long-winded -- blame it on my Mom and my good luck in landing in Taos after retiring.
Great podcast! I'd take issue with Saul's cost trade-offs on efficiency versus electrification, especially if you move into an old house (built 1937) like I did last year. I spent a few hundred bucks on an energy audit, weatherization and upgraded insulation in my attic and basement. That reduced my heat loss by 30%. I'm not sure what kind of house Saul lives in that upgrading insulation would cost 28k! You don't have to rebuild the wall to get an improvement.
Another good podcast. I take exception to a couple of points-
* No, wood stoves are not an option for getting us to 1.5, or even close. Wood pellets are proving to be a bad solution at best--borrowing from the future and considering the account to be balanced. It conveniently ignores the environmental/ecological impact during those many years. Creatures live in those forests, and the combustion impacts nature in multiple ways.
* The different heat pumps were not defined and explained. Water source heat pumps are used mostly in institutional and commercial facilities, and generally can be upt to 400% efficiency even in cold climates. Air heat pumps--mostly residential, are getting better at 200-300% efficiency.
They do not do so well in cold climates, or in excessively hot climates--like too much of the west now. Water sources is excellent for even the hottest climates, as water sources can be cooled by ground thermal cooling--around 56 degrees F, year around.
A community approach to water source heat pumps--a Community Unit Plan, or CUP, is an excellent idea that is about 60 years past due. It was first realized in the 1960s along with underground homes--which remain rare, but are enormous energy savers--as well as being disaster resistant when properly located.
When geothermal becomes ubiquitous the surplus heat could readily be used by water source heat pumps nearby. That same kind of savings could be used to utilize waste heat from many facilities when there are people to think this through. The best work being done on this IMO, is in the UK. They are using old coal mines that have flooded to act as water sources for heat pumps in London. Great savings for a bargain price.
It sounds like we are going to have consider the trade-off between the advantages of integrating the household into the grid and the risk of giving institutions (and hackers) control over our homes.
Hi David,
I'm hoping you can do more transcripts of your podcasts--or Canary will do them for you.
Trying to listen to the podcasts in their entirety but reading them is faster and more convenient to start and come back to throughout the day.
I don't what's possible or practicable for you, but I'm voting for transcripts of all podcasts if that is feasible.
Thanks,
Ron Sykes
Great podcast, but the smart panel product being hawked is too expensive for us. even though in the next year we'll be replacing our filled-up panel and adding breakers to the new panel, requesting increased service run from the utility, and having wiring/outlets installed to be ready to electrify our gas appliances as they die out in the near future (and a second car charging breaker is needed too, as well as panel space for home storage tie in, but we think purchasing storage for ourselves is ten or more years away).
But I was struck by the argument about batteries and home batteries at the end. We used to have a 2014 Nissan LEAF with a 24 kwh battery, about two tesla powerwalls. We sold the car, but I was frustrated we had to sell it for so little when the batteries still had so much value than the actual used selling price.
If we'd had the opportunity to keep our paid-off LEAF, store it permanently in the garage and plug it into our grid (like the future Ford F150) we would have done so, because that would have given us home storage, and more home storage than we could ever expect to buy outright.
On the other hand, the batteries themselves are only part of the cost. there's the hardware, software, installation labor and the wiring infrastructure to run the house off the car storage, but I would think that those are fairly solvable small problems. and as the first generation of electric cars continue to reach the end of their usable battery life I would think there's a strong home market to turn those paid-off first gen electric cars into home storage.
There's another angle in terms of removing the battery from a first gen car and placing it into storage/wall enclosures, but I think you would have tremendous labor costs in doing so, not to mention having to create thermal management systems for such a set up. probably easier and cheaper to simply develop a product that transforms an old generation electric car into home storage, whilst leaving the car itself intact.
Thanks so much for tackling this topic. I was one of the many suggesting it. Home electrification is so critical, and yet it's ALL hand-to-hand combat, like the opening scene of Lincoln. Just this week, contractors I hired just finished replacing my gas furnace and gas water heater with two air-source heat pumps (Bay Area, CA). I also piled on wall and ceiling insulation, and they upgraded the ductwork. All told it was 12 days of work. OK, take out the insulation, and just do the HVAC, and it's still 6-8 of those days. And the guy I used is booked well into next year. We are in a sweet spot for these conversions, despite PG&E forming an obstacle, with probably over a million single-family homes in the Bay Area, and more across California. Developing the labor pool, and the companies to hire them, is a first-order scale problem, no?
Back in 2013-14 MIT did a series called The Future of Solar. I read the studies and watched the talks and came away with one resounding conclusion -- rooftop solar is not the way to go if you want to achieve anything like 100% emission-free energy in time to avoid catastrophic climate change. For one thing, it costs too much when compared with grid solar. At the time, the MIT engineers said at least twice as much and as much as 8 times as much as single axis solar installed with modern technology in very large arrays. More importantly, it takes too long. In my part of Northern NM the oldest solar installer in the U.S. plies his trade. A couple years ago he installed a 3 MW solar array for our rural electric cooperative. I spoke with him as he was completing the installation, and he said that he had just installed more panels in 2 months than his company installed in the previous 18 years of installing rooftop grid-tied solar arrays. Kit Carson's first goal was to reach what the Coop's CEO called 100% daytime solar - the point at which local solar regularly exceeds daytime demand on the grid. We'll get there in November, a year late because of the pandemic. But every distribution area in the country could reach this point within a couple years. It represents a little less than 40% of our total (pre-EV) load. We're also installing 30 MWHs of Tesla batteries along with the last arrays which total 21 MWs of solar. You can do this really fast anywhere, and we should demand that every utility do it. For one thing, if provides dirt-cheap energy that may, if things work out the way I hope, not entail any transmission costs. Bigger solar arrays in NM and other sunny states now produce electricity at less than 2 cents per kWh. If we also build large scale solar arrays for export to population centers, the transmission lines that feed us electricity when the sun isn't shining will always be full. When the sun does shine and we produce our own solar electricity for local use, the transmission line will be full of solar going to Denver or San Diego or wherever. That means we will not pay a capacity charge for transmission, and our Coop's solar cost will be around 2 cents with no transmission charge. This model works for any rural area where solar is plentiful and land is cheap. The wholesale costs from new large scale arrays will go down to 1 cent per kWh by 2025 and .5 cent and then .25 cent by the turn of the decade. In other words, generation will be a marginal cost. Storage, distribution, and transmission will be the big costs, but with storage prices falling faster than solar generation, we have a completely new price structure from when I first got involved -- back in 2011 I dreaded what warming would do to the world and my family. Then electricity generation exceeded the cost of transmission and distribution combined in wholesale electricity market. And, in 2011 storage was just a glimmer in Elon Musk's and Tony Seba's and Mark Jacobson's eyes. I don't think we should throw away rooftop, but it's just too slow and time-consuming compared to very large arrays. Just as that MIT scientist recommended then, focus on big systems. In Taos NM this winter when you plug into the wall on a sunny day your home will be running on solar. Now we just need to add wind and a lot more batteries, transition our fleets to EVs, and make our homes all-electric. Sorry if this is a little long-winded -- blame it on my Mom and my good luck in landing in Taos after retiring.
Great podcast! I'd take issue with Saul's cost trade-offs on efficiency versus electrification, especially if you move into an old house (built 1937) like I did last year. I spent a few hundred bucks on an energy audit, weatherization and upgraded insulation in my attic and basement. That reduced my heat loss by 30%. I'm not sure what kind of house Saul lives in that upgrading insulation would cost 28k! You don't have to rebuild the wall to get an improvement.
Another good podcast. I take exception to a couple of points-
* No, wood stoves are not an option for getting us to 1.5, or even close. Wood pellets are proving to be a bad solution at best--borrowing from the future and considering the account to be balanced. It conveniently ignores the environmental/ecological impact during those many years. Creatures live in those forests, and the combustion impacts nature in multiple ways.
* The different heat pumps were not defined and explained. Water source heat pumps are used mostly in institutional and commercial facilities, and generally can be upt to 400% efficiency even in cold climates. Air heat pumps--mostly residential, are getting better at 200-300% efficiency.
They do not do so well in cold climates, or in excessively hot climates--like too much of the west now. Water sources is excellent for even the hottest climates, as water sources can be cooled by ground thermal cooling--around 56 degrees F, year around.
A community approach to water source heat pumps--a Community Unit Plan, or CUP, is an excellent idea that is about 60 years past due. It was first realized in the 1960s along with underground homes--which remain rare, but are enormous energy savers--as well as being disaster resistant when properly located.
When geothermal becomes ubiquitous the surplus heat could readily be used by water source heat pumps nearby. That same kind of savings could be used to utilize waste heat from many facilities when there are people to think this through. The best work being done on this IMO, is in the UK. They are using old coal mines that have flooded to act as water sources for heat pumps in London. Great savings for a bargain price.
It sounds like we are going to have consider the trade-off between the advantages of integrating the household into the grid and the risk of giving institutions (and hackers) control over our homes.