Hacker News Reader

NYC has more people then all of Norway. So any redundancy Norway has needs to be scaled to account for that.

I would be curious though; as where i grew up in the upper midwest USA, there were always concerns of ice-storms or blizzards knocking out power lines. I'd assume norway would have similar concerns so i wonder how the problem is solved there.

If your power goes out you're not running a natural gas furnace anyway

Why not? Mine growing up worked despite power outages IIRC.

You need electricity for the blower motor to force the air through the ducts of your house

The original comment is comparing to radiator heat not forced air.

My boiler system has an electric pump. I'm not sure my boiler would run without electricity either.

~30% of the NYC area is still probably running steam heat which just uses physics to get where it's needed.

Depending on the system size a car battery and inverter can run a forced hot water system for a pretty long time.

Forced hot air is gonna be worse than that but the electricity to run the blower is still peanuts compared to a heat pump system.

Forced air natural gas furnaces need electric power for ignition and the blower motor that moves hot air out of the combustion chamber.

Most high efficiency gas furnaces use an electric ignition system and cycle on/off based on thermostat input. It does seem like they should have a battery backup or a way to manually ignite it in an emergency, but most don’t as far as I know. However if they’re just on already and continuously running rather than cycling, then they don’t need electricity. These furnaces are also typically coupled with a fan (a blower) to force the air through ducting and take air back through a return vent. Those also tend to be electric.

Gas furnaces can heat water or oil for radiators too, which requires no fan.

Water radiators often have a pump attached to force the hot water to move more than with a gravity system. A couple years ago, the pump on our radiator boiler went out. Only half of my house ended up with heat without it.

Norway is approx 5.4 million people and NYC is about 8.8, so while the population is greater, it’s not by an order of magnitude or anything.

Norway is also much colder than NYC. I would imagine in terms of energy needed for heating, the two would be comparable.

300 sq miles vs 150K sq miles too…

Of course cooling NYC is what strains the electrical grid.

Burying power lines is a thing. I don't think it is cost effective to bury the big high voltage lines though.

Great! That means NYC can get more economies of scale and be even more efficient!

Huge dense city like NYC would be a perfect place for district heating and cooling. No reason for apartments to have boilers, really.

Norway is almost entirely hydroelectric, which is pretty close to ideal in terms of providing reliable non-fossil-fuel power - and unfortunately something most countries don't have the geography to pull off, which is why Norway ended up so much more electricity-centric. I think they also accept the odd multi-day outage affecting small numbers of customers like everywhere else, especially in urban areas, just because weather gets in the way of providing 100% reliable power. Also, remember larger-scale outages are long-tail events which means it's not really possible to measure exactly how likely they are especially with a small country like Norway.

NYC increasingly depends on power imported from Quebec. The grid is a complex system that won’t age well.

There’s a new line being built from Quebec to nyc area In the works.

This is not the one that’s being killed in Maine.

https://gothamist.com/news/canadian-renewable-hydropower-hea...

Sure. The point is a big portion of the base load for the city was generated by a nuclear plant a few miles away, and will shift to a foreign hydroelectric system hundreds of miles away.

When you think of a place as large as NYC and the scale of making any kind of change, it certainly adds an element of risk if conditions in Canada or failures between NYC and Canada take place.

Knowing what (little) I know about the Quebec/NY grids, I’d put my money on Quebec-sourced power for reliability.

> Norway has been almost all-in on electric for a good while now.

According to a quick Google search: "The current population of Norway is 5,483,767 as of Friday, December 24, 2021" and NY state is estimated at 20.2 million as of April 2020, and New York City at 8.8 million. It seems you appreciate that Norway is a special scenario. It seems silly to assume something that works there would work in a country that has single cities with larger populations, and states with around four times the population of your entire country.

Economies of scale make energy distribution more efficient as you scale population not less. New York City could for example use a relatively shallow bore hole to gather geothermal energy and get “low grade” heat (50-100C) for district heating where such systems don’t really work for single family homes.

> Economies of scale make energy distribution more efficient as you scale population not less.

This may be so, but New York also has one of the oldest electrical grids on the planet. Upgrading it to support larger and larger populations is a challenge, not just to manage it overloading with the density, but also in terms of logistics.

You can't just tear up a major street in New York and upgrade the electrical for a block, without causing massive logistics problems for the city. Upgrading New York's grid is going to be a huge challenge

It’s going to have to happen eventually. Why keep putting it off?

That’s something for future Ted…

High-population means high complaining ratio. Also lots of rich companies there who will sue when things go wrong.

Why pay for today when tomorrow’s shareholders will pay for it instead? See also: PG&E

How much would the upgrade cost, can anyone estimate?

It seems worse simply because it’s concentrated in a small area. The project would actually be less disruptive in NYC than doing the same thing for 8+ million people in the suburbs somewhere. Especially if they could reuse tunnels built for deprecated systems like copper phone lines.

Hell NYC already has district heating, adding a tunnel under the existing building could swap things over for 1700+ customers with minimal disruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system

Off topic meta point: The narrative "X wouldn't work here because of [size/population]" where X is unrelated or even helps the argument seems to be reproduced almost exclusively by (often highly informed) Americans, from personal anecdotal experience. Does anyone have a theory about the origins of this thought pattern?

“X wouldn’t work here” probably stems from generations of institutional belief in American Exceptionalism, the “because” part is probably attempting to justify that (unconscious) view

Also - isn't >90% of all Norway's electricity production hydro?

It would seem a lot more feasible to go all in on electric when you have that much hydro. Since that much of the production is hydro - I'm assuming it's relatively economical, and not just Norway paying a massive premium to be green.

> It seems silly to assume something that works there would work in a country that has single cities with larger populations

it would also be silly were we to imply that scaling up automatically means less efficiency. in many situations things get significantly more efficient the more they scale.

it also would seem silly to assume that we couldn’t take many of the pieces that are actually working in an entire country and adapt to our situation. We are very good at adapting things for various situations.