While 'smart' uses will be very helpful in routine circumstances, they likely will not reduce peak demand all that much.
That is because in heating climates (Ontario will be one when heating is electrified) the peak typically comes in an extended period of elevated demand. This limits how effectively the peak can be shifted. It will reduce the absolute peak somewhat, but the excess energy required over the available is not going to change much as the 'smart' systems time shift over the course of a day or two, not enough to avoid the whole peak demand period.
Peak cold (woth low sunlight, and typically low wind at the kost extreem low temps) is the design case for temperate climate energy systems.
You said "All the engineers say we need hydrogen and nuclear and a massive increase in clean electricity supply." but it's definitely not all engineers.
The drive towards supply-side-only solutions, batteries, and other high-tech solutions is not coming from the engineering community. It is coming from the investor community. High-tech solutions and big capital projects are catnip to them, because they represent an opportunity to concentrate and capture profits.
More rational solutions - energy efficiency, demand management, weatherization - can provide far more climate benefit for far less money. But those technologies do not provide the same opportunity for concentrated profits or the high-tech sexy buzz (which is key to drawing in marks so that the VCs can unload their essentially useless startups onto the broader market) so they are ignored and remain underfunded.
We saw this ten years ago with "advanced" biofuels, which absorbed $billions but failed to produce even one scalable solution. We're seeing it again with hydrogen and carbon capture. Same song, different day. New con same as the old con. People are apparently incapable of learning the lesson that just because tech is shiny doesn't mean it's actually good or useful.
If you approach an engineering problem from an architectural viewpoint, you're going to sorely miss the mark. In the U.S. alone there are approximately 140+ million households (apartments and condominiums counted via individual renter-owners despite being multi-family housing units.) We're only building at ~1.5M units per annum—so as Lloyd points out, the majority of benefit from an architectural perspective is in retrofitting existing housing to higher standards of efficiency.
The problem is that it requires money to do so, and for the past 40+ years or so, real wage growth has been in a slow decline. Add to that a wide array of advancing technologies, all of which requires more energy both to produce and operate, and we easily see the demand for more energy is baked into the overall energy budget from a demand side perspective.
When your argument revolves around the ideological POV of "This is why we have to think like the 'less is more' demand-side people" ask yourself, WHAT DOES THAT ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE? Does it mean you have the freedom to do what you want, when you want, as much as you want? Or does it mean that all your activities are dependent on a limited quantity of energy meted out by a faceless entity in the form of a bureaucratic algorithm?
I know which side of the equation I want to live on.
Translation: Government is going to force you into a lower standard of living because Greenies have taken control of the levers of Government. With "Electrify EVERYTHING!", as Lloyd has said for years, he's basically saying the an "Energy Monoculture" is great even as he's said, in the past, that "agriculture crop monocultures" are bad. Sorry, the problem is "monocultures" no matter what you're talking about.
Now add mandatory 15 minute cities (which increasingly lowers your standard of living in other ways), the removal of all but government approved modes of transportation, one can think of this as an encroaching "wall-less prison" of how mandated living will be.
Just like over at Treehugger, I was always bringing up the idea of "what happened to the Western Classical idea of Liberalism" (that would be TRUE philosophical Liberalism and not the political label which has come to mean, in words and deeds, illiberalism). I do that today as well.
If your energy source is controlled by Government, if your movement is controlled by government, if your 15 minute apartment is no larger than a small closet (and I could go on for a while - just ask Lloyd), are you truly free?
Or is that some old-fashioned and trite notion nowadays? After all, the Slippery Slide does exist. Just look at the US and gas stoves and what's happening since that first Trumka announcement.
Good article but I felt like you didn’t elaborate on the Australian study or the possible implications of it specifically for water heating very much. We have a system operating here in NZ to control water heating and reduce peak demand and have had it for decades. It’s predicted to reduce due to regulatory changes to the electricity market and more adoption of distributed smart tech over time though. More in this report https://www.eeca.govt.nz/insights/eeca-insights/ripple-control-of-hot-water-in-new-zealand/
Overbuilding solar and wind will probably be much cheaper than trying to retrofit existing buildings up to anywhere near PH levels of energy efficiency. Obviously, for new buildings, high efficiency standards should be done.
If all new construction is done in compliance with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code, we'd be in good shape. But enforcement is uneven, at best. To meet Code, most houses being built in most of the US must have blower door tests to establish that they meet the airtightness required of 3ach50. But that doesn't happen. Those houses also need mechanical ventilation. That doesn't happen either.
All forms of generation have a destructive ecological footprint and a significant embodied energy and and carbon cost. Renewables are VASTLY better than fossil fuels but the fact remains that they are also costly and destructive. We cannot simply generate our way out of this mess. Efficiency is messy, and unsexy, and gets no investment support because there's no opportunity to make a killing. It is nonetheless essential and either we figure it out, or we're just kicking the can down the road a bit.
I agree. But deep energy retrofits of existing buildings use staggering amounts of resources and are almost never close to cost effective. Putting solar on ones' roof uses fewer resources than a PH retrofit.
Going to PH levels on existing buildings is usually impractical. But there's a lot of room between typical building condition and PH. Comparing PV to a PH retrofit is comparing apples to broccoli.
Insulation and weatherization suffer natural diminishing returns but if your building is underinsulated or leaky then a PV system is really putting lipstick on a pig. Passive systems also have inherent advantages vs. any technological system (PV, heat pumps, etc). They last much longer, and do not depend up on the grid to operate, so they are more resilient in a crisis.
Simple weatherization is relatively cheap and should be a universal starting point. But adding insulation is frequently very difficult and costly. If it's feasible, great, do it.
But, unless I misunderstood him, Lloyd is suggesting a need for PH level retrofits.
In the US, you can get solar panels installed for around $2 a watt, after federal credit and even less in states with incentives. With little, if any maintenance, the panels will produce power for 30 + years.
I live in a PH level house and I'm aware of the efficiency benefits. But still, even though my heat load is low, everything else still uses energy. If my house didn't require any heat at all, I'd still use a fair amount of electricity for cooking, well pump, appliances, heat pump water heater, etc. But my electric bills are minimal because of my solar panels.
The climate change deniers and the much larger group of people who just don't think about this stuff can be brought on board if they are convinced it saves them money.
Not really. Hydro Quebec studied this years ago and abandoned the idea, as it was too risky from a health point of view. If the water temp gets too low, Legionella grows.
Based on my reading (e.g., https://www.cashacme.com/ca/en/resources/hot-water-safety), Legionella takes at least a week to grow but will be eliminated in about 30 minutes at 140 F / 60 C, so there's essentially zero risk of contamination as long as the water is reheated daily.
The setup I plan to use is an electric resistance water heater set to 140 F with a thermostatic mixing valve and a smart timer (https://aquanta.io/) in Time-of-Use mode, so the element only turns on when power is cheap (and green). As a secondary benefit, increasing the temperature increases capacity, apparently by 40% or more, so I expect that I won't ever run out of hot water during the day. I may also switch to Ontario's ultra-low overnight rate plan so I can heat all my water at 2.4 c/kWh overnight. It's also possible to avoid smart tech altogether and add a dumb timer that turns the element on overnight, as long as you're confident that you'll never run out of hot water during the day. The advantage of something like the Aquanta is that it uses an algorithm to calculate the amount of hot water used and ensure that you never run out, while still favouring heating water during off-peak hours.
I'm also using a Rheem Marathon tank with extremely low standby heat loss. Their specs claim that it loses only 5 F per 24 h. Also cheaper and more reliable than a heat pump water heater. I expect it to last 30+ years.
It's probably more efficient to leave the water heater at a high enough temperature to stop Legionella growth than to drop the temperature by 20° C every day and then boost it. But shutting off the water heater from say 2-6 PM would reduce peak demand without lowering the temperature too much.
While 'smart' uses will be very helpful in routine circumstances, they likely will not reduce peak demand all that much.
That is because in heating climates (Ontario will be one when heating is electrified) the peak typically comes in an extended period of elevated demand. This limits how effectively the peak can be shifted. It will reduce the absolute peak somewhat, but the excess energy required over the available is not going to change much as the 'smart' systems time shift over the course of a day or two, not enough to avoid the whole peak demand period.
Peak cold (woth low sunlight, and typically low wind at the kost extreem low temps) is the design case for temperate climate energy systems.
You said "All the engineers say we need hydrogen and nuclear and a massive increase in clean electricity supply." but it's definitely not all engineers.
The drive towards supply-side-only solutions, batteries, and other high-tech solutions is not coming from the engineering community. It is coming from the investor community. High-tech solutions and big capital projects are catnip to them, because they represent an opportunity to concentrate and capture profits.
More rational solutions - energy efficiency, demand management, weatherization - can provide far more climate benefit for far less money. But those technologies do not provide the same opportunity for concentrated profits or the high-tech sexy buzz (which is key to drawing in marks so that the VCs can unload their essentially useless startups onto the broader market) so they are ignored and remain underfunded.
We saw this ten years ago with "advanced" biofuels, which absorbed $billions but failed to produce even one scalable solution. We're seeing it again with hydrogen and carbon capture. Same song, different day. New con same as the old con. People are apparently incapable of learning the lesson that just because tech is shiny doesn't mean it's actually good or useful.
If you approach an engineering problem from an architectural viewpoint, you're going to sorely miss the mark. In the U.S. alone there are approximately 140+ million households (apartments and condominiums counted via individual renter-owners despite being multi-family housing units.) We're only building at ~1.5M units per annum—so as Lloyd points out, the majority of benefit from an architectural perspective is in retrofitting existing housing to higher standards of efficiency.
The problem is that it requires money to do so, and for the past 40+ years or so, real wage growth has been in a slow decline. Add to that a wide array of advancing technologies, all of which requires more energy both to produce and operate, and we easily see the demand for more energy is baked into the overall energy budget from a demand side perspective.
When your argument revolves around the ideological POV of "This is why we have to think like the 'less is more' demand-side people" ask yourself, WHAT DOES THAT ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE? Does it mean you have the freedom to do what you want, when you want, as much as you want? Or does it mean that all your activities are dependent on a limited quantity of energy meted out by a faceless entity in the form of a bureaucratic algorithm?
I know which side of the equation I want to live on.
“design for intermittency.”
Translation: Government is going to force you into a lower standard of living because Greenies have taken control of the levers of Government. With "Electrify EVERYTHING!", as Lloyd has said for years, he's basically saying the an "Energy Monoculture" is great even as he's said, in the past, that "agriculture crop monocultures" are bad. Sorry, the problem is "monocultures" no matter what you're talking about.
Now add mandatory 15 minute cities (which increasingly lowers your standard of living in other ways), the removal of all but government approved modes of transportation, one can think of this as an encroaching "wall-less prison" of how mandated living will be.
Just like over at Treehugger, I was always bringing up the idea of "what happened to the Western Classical idea of Liberalism" (that would be TRUE philosophical Liberalism and not the political label which has come to mean, in words and deeds, illiberalism). I do that today as well.
If your energy source is controlled by Government, if your movement is controlled by government, if your 15 minute apartment is no larger than a small closet (and I could go on for a while - just ask Lloyd), are you truly free?
Or is that some old-fashioned and trite notion nowadays? After all, the Slippery Slide does exist. Just look at the US and gas stoves and what's happening since that first Trumka announcement.
Added: Kinda hard to run a biz with intermittent energy: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/18/grid-asks-factories-to-use-less-energy-next-winter-under-blackout-prevention-plan/
Good article but I felt like you didn’t elaborate on the Australian study or the possible implications of it specifically for water heating very much. We have a system operating here in NZ to control water heating and reduce peak demand and have had it for decades. It’s predicted to reduce due to regulatory changes to the electricity market and more adoption of distributed smart tech over time though. More in this report https://www.eeca.govt.nz/insights/eeca-insights/ripple-control-of-hot-water-in-new-zealand/
You are correct, I was using the Australian study as a hook for the post. I will elaborate.
They had this in New Zealand decades ago, it was called ripple control.
Overbuilding solar and wind will probably be much cheaper than trying to retrofit existing buildings up to anywhere near PH levels of energy efficiency. Obviously, for new buildings, high efficiency standards should be done.
If all new construction is done in compliance with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code, we'd be in good shape. But enforcement is uneven, at best. To meet Code, most houses being built in most of the US must have blower door tests to establish that they meet the airtightness required of 3ach50. But that doesn't happen. Those houses also need mechanical ventilation. That doesn't happen either.
All forms of generation have a destructive ecological footprint and a significant embodied energy and and carbon cost. Renewables are VASTLY better than fossil fuels but the fact remains that they are also costly and destructive. We cannot simply generate our way out of this mess. Efficiency is messy, and unsexy, and gets no investment support because there's no opportunity to make a killing. It is nonetheless essential and either we figure it out, or we're just kicking the can down the road a bit.
I agree. But deep energy retrofits of existing buildings use staggering amounts of resources and are almost never close to cost effective. Putting solar on ones' roof uses fewer resources than a PH retrofit.
Going to PH levels on existing buildings is usually impractical. But there's a lot of room between typical building condition and PH. Comparing PV to a PH retrofit is comparing apples to broccoli.
Insulation and weatherization suffer natural diminishing returns but if your building is underinsulated or leaky then a PV system is really putting lipstick on a pig. Passive systems also have inherent advantages vs. any technological system (PV, heat pumps, etc). They last much longer, and do not depend up on the grid to operate, so they are more resilient in a crisis.
Simple weatherization is relatively cheap and should be a universal starting point. But adding insulation is frequently very difficult and costly. If it's feasible, great, do it.
But, unless I misunderstood him, Lloyd is suggesting a need for PH level retrofits.
In the US, you can get solar panels installed for around $2 a watt, after federal credit and even less in states with incentives. With little, if any maintenance, the panels will produce power for 30 + years.
I live in a PH level house and I'm aware of the efficiency benefits. But still, even though my heat load is low, everything else still uses energy. If my house didn't require any heat at all, I'd still use a fair amount of electricity for cooking, well pump, appliances, heat pump water heater, etc. But my electric bills are minimal because of my solar panels.
The climate change deniers and the much larger group of people who just don't think about this stuff can be brought on board if they are convinced it saves them money.
No I am not calling for PH retrofits. I have written that we have to start with simple weatherization and the easy insulation chunks. I wrote when I was still at treehugger: https://www.treehugger.com/modern-pyramid-energy-conservation-treehugger-6835842
I once rented a downtown Toronto townhouse with neighbours both sides and experimented with how long I could go without turning on the heat.
First week of December due to passive heating from neighbours.
And what was the incidental/annoying noise factor that you had to put up with? When I lived in apartment buildings, I hated it.
Not really. Hydro Quebec studied this years ago and abandoned the idea, as it was too risky from a health point of view. If the water temp gets too low, Legionella grows.
I thought legionella was only a problem if the water temperature stayed low.
Based on my reading (e.g., https://www.cashacme.com/ca/en/resources/hot-water-safety), Legionella takes at least a week to grow but will be eliminated in about 30 minutes at 140 F / 60 C, so there's essentially zero risk of contamination as long as the water is reheated daily.
The setup I plan to use is an electric resistance water heater set to 140 F with a thermostatic mixing valve and a smart timer (https://aquanta.io/) in Time-of-Use mode, so the element only turns on when power is cheap (and green). As a secondary benefit, increasing the temperature increases capacity, apparently by 40% or more, so I expect that I won't ever run out of hot water during the day. I may also switch to Ontario's ultra-low overnight rate plan so I can heat all my water at 2.4 c/kWh overnight. It's also possible to avoid smart tech altogether and add a dumb timer that turns the element on overnight, as long as you're confident that you'll never run out of hot water during the day. The advantage of something like the Aquanta is that it uses an algorithm to calculate the amount of hot water used and ensure that you never run out, while still favouring heating water during off-peak hours.
I'm also using a Rheem Marathon tank with extremely low standby heat loss. Their specs claim that it loses only 5 F per 24 h. Also cheaper and more reliable than a heat pump water heater. I expect it to last 30+ years.
It was enough of a problem/risk that HQ abandoned the idea, I attended a presentation where they explained this six years ago.
It's probably more efficient to leave the water heater at a high enough temperature to stop Legionella growth than to drop the temperature by 20° C every day and then boost it. But shutting off the water heater from say 2-6 PM would reduce peak demand without lowering the temperature too much.