Comment by smegger001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smegger001 | Hacker News Reader

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"People will learn to forego "bathing" in electricity at night endlessly. For decades we've been spoiled with ridiculous "energy on a tap" that just gives us oodles at the flick of a switch, and we just need to take that away."

I take it you live somewhere warm in the winter. We are already looking at removing other heating options like propane and natural gas furnaces, coal and oil heating is mostly phased out, and burning wood isn't great for the environment either. So electrical heating is necessary anywhere where its normal to freeze for several months. Telling people to stop bathing in electricity at night when that what keeps them alive is bullshit.

"micro-grids are the future. Small communities with mini-grid-scale batteries and sharing of electricity will take over this stupid "national synchronized grid" idea that has gimped our ability to be agile wrt local energy generation."

Why don't you ask Texas residents how not being part of the national synchronized grid worked out for them 2 years ago?

Storing heat for a few hours can be done pretty easily and cheaply though. Indeed many houses already have technologies like water tanks and storage heaters that do this.

It's normal in many very cold places to entirely switch off your heating overnight.

You heat your home up during the day and evening, and as you retire for the night it's switched off. With sufficient insulation and warm bedding you don't need active heating overnight.

So it's absolutely compatible with an electric supply that's heavily biased towards the daytime.

As an example, it may start becoming more economical to include heat-batteries (I forget the name) in house construction such that they retain heat and radiate it to maintain a not freezing ambient temperature inside a house. That, along with insulation, and some rather moderate changes to behaviour, could entirely eliminate the need for electricity-use during night time hours. We don't know what ingenious and wonderful things people may do when the real-cost of electricity at night is exposed to them.

Ya that's a level of unmitigated bull** where I live there is usually several days out of the year where the temperature is -40 (doesn't matter the units at that temperature it's the same) and massive wind chill. There's not really a reasonable way to heat a houseduring the day and have it remain warm with tempratures like that without major changes to the way houses are built.

This seems like the quintessential example of some Cali tech bro nor understanding that there is anyone outside of their little bubble and assui everyone just lives like them.

Perhaps a Cali tech bro, maybe a standard scandanavian in a passive energy house with tight seals, good insulation, triple glazing, large solar heated hot water tank to hold thermal energy during the night, etc.

There are people outside everbodies particular bubbles.

What percentage of the world's population lives at a place that goes to -40C ever in the year? That's like 0.000001% of the world's population (didn't confirm, thumb sucking).

I think you need to admit, "bro", that you're far from a standard case and that maybe you should suck it up and move to a more hospitable spot instead of forcing the rest of us to subsidize your extreme lifestyle choice at the expense of our environment which we "all" apparently care so much about.

At least I'm suggesting insulation, and alternative methods of heating as opposed to just saying we should chug gigawatts so your butt could be warm at -40C outside.

The cold places are usually extreme latitudes.

I live around 60 latitude and here during the winter it might not be even that cold (tho it can be -20 or -30C).

It’s that the amount of sunshine hours and the angle it shines at means that for about 3 months the PV production is essentially zero.

This is during the time the demand is highest.

> "Telling people to stop bathing in electricity at night when that what keeps them alive is bullshit."

I never said anything of the sort. You're taking a really bad-faith and extreme straw-man of what I said, and I refuse to participate.

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