Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

U.S. residential sector accounts for 21 percent of all energy consumption and is responsible for 20 percent of our country’s carbon emissions.
Heating is the largest energy expense in most homes, accounting for 35-50 percent of annual energy bills in colder parts of the country.

Home air conditioning accounts for almost 6 percent of all the electricity produced in the U.S.

https://www.c2es.org/content/home-energy-use/

As of Feb. 17, energy was out for 2.7 million households, officials said. With freezing temperatures expected through the weekend, getting the lights back on will be a slow process, as the state has lost 40% of its generating capacity, with natural gas wells and pipelines, along with wind turbines, frozen shut.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-texas-wind-turb...

So extremely quick and dirty: If we moved to passive solar, we could potentially save as much as 10 percent of energy usage and it would be the part that's really critical in a crisis induced by an extreme weather event: The lifesaving ability to stay warm without power.

With climate change making extreme weather events more common, promoting passive solar ought to be a policy around the world. It also helps disrupt that positive feedback loop that we run the AC more because of climate change and running the AC more helps promote climate change.

Heat Pump technology is pretty awesome and more efficient, when your circumstances and weather patterns support it. Since they move heat from one place to another, they have to work harder as the difference between the temperatures increase.

The ideal solution is a ground-source heat pump, where a closed loop is buried underground to take advantage of the very stable and reasonable subsurface ground temperature.

If you can afford to put in a geothermal ground loop and use a heat pump, you can have a very stable heating and cooling solution that is energy efficient and works well in a super-insulated passive home.

Solar won't help in a winter storm when the sun is not shining and all your panels are covered with snow. Wind power also tends to go down when there's too much wind.

Everyone loves to pick on air conditioning, but the recent disaster has shown that heating is also a huge problem. As your statistics show, heating can consume more energy than air conditioning depending on the region. AC only needs to lower the indoor temperature by 10-20F, whereas heating requirements can exceed 50F. This makes it a much harder problem to reliably produce the amount of energy needed to keep people from freezing.

Climate change can bring not only hotter summers but also colder winters and more energetic storms. We desperately need methods to generate clean energy even during extreme weather. Especially during extreme weather.

Solar won't help in a winter storm when the sun is not shining and all your panels are covered with snow.

I am not talking about solar power generation. Quite the contrary.

Passive solar is about building design and orientation. One of the techniques it uses is thermal mass.

I’d love to know the all-in energy and ecological footprint of building for passive solar. I could imagine it is significant. Sure you save lots of energy over its lifetime but you likely have a huge deficit to start with.

I doubt that, but I will add a link to this comment to my file and see if I can find anything when I get around to trying to do some kind of write up about it.

Completely passive buildings are a thing:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

Though generally one gets to a point of diminishing returns. It's probably better to get to a certain efficiency point, and then throw some solar/PV panels on the roof and become 'net zero', producing the electricity you need on-site:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_building

Residentially, you can built a 5000 square foot (500 sq. m) home that needs only 1500W (1.5 kW)—basically a hair dyer—to heat/cool:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA

Using an HRV/ERV with an air filter per ASHRAE 62.1 and 62.2 gives you very good air quality.

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