I don't think you need to be that hopeful. Population dynamics are very predictable. Yes a person is unpredictable, but the population isn't. With proper incentives people will absolutely do it. I'm less certain on vehicle batteries though because of life cycle issues. The small amount used and the slow rate of charge probably wouldn't affect the life of the battery but I'm not sure too many will be into risking that. The bigger one will be distributed home storage I think and I don't see why that would be a problem.
In order for any of these solutions to work though you'll need dynamic pricing and incentives to match
Could we see utilities subsidizing EVs in return for using the storage dynamically?
There's already been a number of successful trials, so I think it's inevitable it's going to happen. To what extent remains to be seen.
There's a few hurdles. First, in most jurisdictions only utilities can sell electricity, so they're the only entity that can decide to do this and there's negative inventives to do so. Secondly, customers will have to be ok with a utility or other entity using their battery which will have some impact on its life span. It'll likely be extremely negligible, but these are a new technology for most buyers and this will be a hurdle for many. Thirdly, you need scale for it to work. It's hard for a company to sell this service to a utility if they don't have enough vehicles to provide predictable availability. That means you need to have a good number of people with the expensive electrical upgrades required to have vehicle to grid.
Tesla investor day on now. They are focusing on the energy transition, so seems suitable here. I'm not sure I accept some of the assumptions they've made so far...but his goal seems to be to convince us the Earth can support more than 8 billion people sustainably.
Boring as ####. People wanted to hear about Cybertruck and the next generation platform instead we get super fine grained technical info hardly anyone cares about.
Boring as ####. People wanted to hear about Cybertruck and the next generation platform instead we get super fine grained technical info hardly anyone cares about.
Have you met Tesla owners?
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The point about heat pumps is interesting. Seems like we are just on the verge of really adopting that technology on a bigger scale, including warm & cold weather climates.
The point about heat pumps is interesting. Seems like we are just on the verge of really adopting that technology on a bigger scale, including warm & cold weather climates.
Heat pumps are excellent technology but even the best air-to-air units lose significant efficiency as the environmental temperature becomes much lower than the desired indoor temperature.
And they themselves use a lot of power, a typical 38K BTU/hr unit can consume over 6 kW, even more if you need backup heating. Given the increasing precarious state of many grids in the Western world, I doubt they could support it anyways, especially when peak demand from very cold periods correlates with no solar and little wind.
Heat pumps are excellent technology but even the best air-to-air units lose significant efficiency as the environmental temperature becomes much lower than the desired indoor temperature.
And they themselves use a lot of power, a typical 38K BTU/hr unit can consume over 6 kW, even more if you need backup heating. Given the increasing precarious state of many grids in the Western world, I doubt they could support it anyways, especially when peak demand from very cold periods correlates with no solar and little wind.
Good cold-weather heat pumps can maintain their rated output down to about -20ºC. And while that might not be good enough for the colder parts of Canada, those are generally outliers. Something like 85-90% of the world's population lives in areas where the mean temperature is over 10º C (Victoria is about that). Obviously mean temperature isn't a perfect corollary for winter design temperature, but it's close. So most of the world can benefit from the efficient heating/cooling that heat pumps provide.
In those kinds of climates, a COP of 3 is relatively easy to achieve even in colder periods, which means a 3-ton heat pump would max out at about 3.5 KW at its rated capacity. That's not exceptionally high.
Yeah, Norwegian cities are good examples of places with sub-10º annual mean temperatures that can still use heat pumps very effectively. Because their normal lows aren't all that low (Bergen's January average low is above 0º), heat pumps have absolutely no problem working efficiently.
The problem with heat pumps (particularly mini splits) in North America is that they're overpriced and HVAC companies way overcharge for installing them, making them less viable. I installed 2 at my house with an HVAC tech friend's help and with him getting me the units at cost. Had I paid the company he works for it would have been a $13-15K project; it ended up costing me about $6K, with me paying him $100/hr for his 4 hours work to install them. So basically the company would have pocketed about $7-9K on a half-day installation just with their markups on the units and labor. And it's not like they're holding inventory; he just drove to the supplier, bought them for half what his company would charge customers, and brought them to my house.
There's a reason why you see mini splits all over the side of apartment buildings in lower income countries, and that's because for most of the world they're cheap heating/cooling sources. In a lot of countries, you can just buy mini splits off the shelf from Walmart or Costco (or the equivalent) for under $1K CAD.
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In Norway almost 50% of houses have heat pumps, so it's not like they don't work in cold climates
My Folks installed one. It works well between +30 and -20. They like it fine, but they are always been early adopters when it comes to environmentally friendly technology.
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I wonder how much faster this is going to grow now
There is already additional solar connected to the grid. AESO shows 1165 MW in the grid, although there is a lag between connection, and when they start putting power into the grid.
Something I haven't seen much of in the past, but we are using some of the battery storage capacity that has been installed.
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In Alberta, our grid emissions have finally gotten low enough that a Heat Pump system is roughly as emissions intensive as a high-performance combustion system. Heat pumps have an average operating COP=~2.5 in Alberta (including time spent below -15°C, where the switch to back-up heat and have a COP=1) and currently the grid is roughly 2.5x more emissions intensive than natural gas per unit of energy delivered.
Is is still currently much more expensive to use heat pumps, as electricity is still ~5-6 times more expensive than natural gas. The long term plan seems to be to keep increasing carbon taxes and clean up the grid to push people towards electrification, but this doesn't seem viable as you'd have to crank carbon taxes to the moon to get electricity on par with gas, but that's where things seem to be going.
In Alberta, our grid emissions have finally gotten low enough that a Heat Pump system is roughly as emissions intensive as a high-performance combustion system. Heat pumps have an average operating COP=~2.5 in Alberta (including time spent below -15°C, where the switch to back-up heat and have a COP=1) and currently the grid is roughly 2.5x more emissions intensive than natural gas per unit of energy delivered.
Is is still currently much more expensive to use heat pumps, as electricity is still ~5-6 times more expensive than natural gas. The long term plan seems to be to keep increasing carbon taxes and clean up the grid to push people towards electrification, but this doesn't seem viable as you'd have to crank carbon taxes to the moon to get electricity on par with gas, but that's where things seem to be going.
I don't know Alberta's rates for gas and electricity, but the costs are already at par in BC assuming a 2.5 COP. 1 GJ of gas in a 95% efficient furnace will output about 260 kWh of heat. To achieve the same output with a 2.5 COP heat pump, you'd use just over 100 kWh of electricity. So the math is pretty simple; $10/GJ is equivalent to ~$0.10/kWh with that COP.
BC's current all-in rate for gas (including gas, storage, delivery/transmission, etc.) is about $12.50/GJ, while electricity is about $0.12/kWh (though that can go up or down depending on how much from each rate step a household uses). I'm having trouble believing that Alberta's gas costs and electricity costs work out to being 5-6x off of what BC's are, though I could be wrong.
In Alberta, our grid emissions have finally gotten low enough that a Heat Pump system is roughly as emissions intensive as a high-performance combustion system. Heat pumps have an average operating COP=~2.5 in Alberta (including time spent below -15°C, where the switch to back-up heat and have a COP=1) and currently the grid is roughly 2.5x more emissions intensive than natural gas per unit of energy delivered.
Is is still currently much more expensive to use heat pumps, as electricity is still ~5-6 times more expensive than natural gas. The long term plan seems to be to keep increasing carbon taxes and clean up the grid to push people towards electrification, but this doesn't seem viable as you'd have to crank carbon taxes to the moon to get electricity on par with gas, but that's where things seem to be going.
It's both ends of the equation though isn't it?
Increasing supply of cheap wind/solar should push down electricity rates at the same time as carbon taxes push natural gas costs up.
I don't know Alberta's rates for gas and electricity, but the costs are already at par in BC assuming a 2.5 COP. 1 GJ of gas in a 95% efficient furnace will output about 260 kWh of heat. To achieve the same output with a 2.5 COP heat pump, you'd use just over 100 kWh of electricity. So the math is pretty simple; $10/GJ is equivalent to ~$0.10/kWh with that COP.
BC's current all-in rate for gas (including gas, storage, delivery/transmission, etc.) is about $12.50/GJ, while electricity is about $0.12/kWh (though that can go up or down depending on how much from each rate step a household uses). I'm having trouble believing that Alberta's gas costs and electricity costs work out to being 5-6x off of what BC's are, though I could be wrong.
Alberta's energy costs aren't 5x BC costs. I mean that in AB a kWh of electricity is ~5x more expensive than a kWh of natural gas (1 GJ = 278 kWh). Natural gas rates in AB are currently in the $5-6/GJ range, so 1/2 of BC's rates. Electricity rates in AB are typically +$0.10/kWh, usually close to but a little lower than BC.
Lots of places in BC don't have the extremely low temperatures that switch off the heat pumps, so their average operational COP gets to be in the COP 3.0-3.5 range in the lower mainland. So having double the cost of natural gas and better performance due to a milder climate makes heat pumps cost effective in BC, plus the BC electric grid is very clean and would have a small fraction of overall emissions, making them much more attractive from an emissions perspective.
It's both ends of the equation though isn't it?
Increasing supply of cheap wind/solar should push down electricity rates at the same time as carbon taxes push natural gas costs up.
No ones projecting the cost of electricity to go down. You can expect rates to increase by ~4% year over year, natural gas is projected at a 2% year over year increase.
