Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half
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2) Heatpumps are 4 - 5X efficient
3) Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)
Transportation, heating and cooling, cooking are all 4 - 5X efficient.
Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).
There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra, fossil fuel subsidies, ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water, externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes). Fossil Fuels Are Half the fossil fuels of shipping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619394
My natural gas bill for a month is around $40 with no time of use restrictions. Effectively cheaper than turning any one of those things on during peak demand hours.
Per energy unit, all of those may be more efficient. Per dollar, they are not.
The other issue is the for-profit electric monopoly. The elimination of gas will just mean they can extract even more from their customers.
Speaking for myself (and I suppose the millions that are on the same utility), the only time when it's cheaper for us to use the heat pump over the gas furnace is from midnight to 6am and when the temp outside is below 20F.
Is that accurate?
They use a tankless water heater so electrical use is ~zero when nobody is using hot water, which is most of the time. If you use a tank - heating ~40 gallons of water 24/7/365 - that's hard to compete with by just being more efficient.
Is there such thing as a heat pump-powered tankless water heater? I expect the challenge is the surge of energy needed to instantly warm heating elements to functioning temperatures.
There are all-electric tankless water heaters but in my limited experience they need ~120A available, which is prohibitively expensive. (Why not just a capacitor that can surge the startup energy?)
Let's say you want to run a single shower at 2.5gpm, the water comes into the home at 55F (12.8C, pretty temperate!) and you want your shower at 100F (37.8C), so a 25C rise. 2.5gpm = 9.463 L/min = 158mL/sec. Water's heat capacity is 4.184* J/mL/degC, so the sustained thermal power you need to deliver is:
4.184 x 158 x 25 = 16.5kJ/s = 16.5kW
At 240V, 16.5kW would be almost 70A.
* Yes, yes, per gram/K but 1mL of water is close enough to 1g for this.
The energy transition to clean energy is to a cheaper energy future.
Fossil fuels are not only more expensive, they cause tons of health problems from their pollution, in addition to climate change.
For one meal? For the month? How did you even this? What is your cost per kWh?
I’m being a bit hyperbolic - it’s averaged over the highest 1 hour peak demand period (4pm-7pm, M-F), but it does limit what things can be run simultaneously (no dryer, oven and AC at the same time, for example). We schedule things around that, Our peak demand for this past month was 2.3kW. That single line item charge is higher than our entire gas bill.
There’s a separate use charge as well, but per kWh that’s pretty low. Then, of course, there’s the dozens of other random charges and fees ($86) that have nothing to do with electricity generation and everything to do with being a monopoly (court resolution surcharge: $3.58). The idea of moving more things to electric is nauseating.
That would be correct, I had never heard of this. it seems extremely punishing and something I would hope your government regulators are trying to fix.
The problem for you isn’t electricity it’s your local laws favouring gas and the utility extracting wealth. 86 usd in fees is more then my entire electric bill has been in the summer (the monthly fees here are 15cad a month)
I imagine your per kWh cost is also much higher too
That said I still don’t think on your math entirely holds up. Ovens and electric elements (even more so for induction) do not just draw their rated power continuously. Once they heat up they drop to a much lower duty cycle like 50%. But that is besides the point now.
It is more common with medium to large commercial users than with residential users.
The bill will have both the per kWh energy charge to cover energy usage and the demand charge.
So in his case it means if he cooks one meal on an induction stove that month, with no other high loads at the same time, it sets a floor of $36 on the demand charge.
I’d rather costs of all energy be reduced than people be priced out.
It's going to cost everyone money to get off fossil fuels. Everyone needs to understand that. We've all been individually dumping carbon into the atmosphere, and we will all need to pay individually for it.
The difficult part is that as demand for petroleum products drop, they will get cheaper (at least initially). Electricity costs need to fall faster than oil prices as oil demand drops.
Climate change and natural gas's contribution to it are well-established facts. It's too easy for someone to politicize anything at all - climate change, vaccines, etc. - and then part of the population says, 'oh, we can't touch that'.
Facts matter, but not nearly as much as emotions do. Talking about problems is important, but the impact is much greater if you can put it in context of a single person or very small group of people that you can name. As soon as the effect is on thousands or millions of people, the impact tapers off.
I agree with you though about politicization. It’s too easy and effective. It can be used for good though. Nixon passed most of the US’ environmental legislation. He created or passed the EPA, the NOAA, the endangered species act, marine mammal protection act, and clean water act. The political influence of hunters and the NRA at the time was a big driver of those changes.
What isn't on the bills but still affects people's pocketbooks is climate change, military funding (for countries without domestic natural gas), etc. People in Los Angeles don't see the fire damage on their gas bills, but they sure pay for it.
1) heat pump appliances are much more energy efficient (they move heat rather than convert it from electronics or molecules, and modern heat pumps work well in most cold climates (and you can also utilize resistive heating for the short period your outside of their optimal operating range)
2) time of use charges can be managed by smart applications and/or a whole home battery (and the battery gives you extra resiliency in case of an outage)
3) this is probably a problem with how your local electricity market is structured. ERCOT (Texas) developed and energy-only and has the cheapest electric rates in the nation (granted lots of this is due to abundant natural gas and renewables in the state) while other markets (say PJM in the north east) have energy + capacity markets and have seen huge (11x) increase in prices on the capacity market side.
Electric utilities are trying to manage not use resource adequacy (having enough generation) but transmission adequacy as well (having enough head room on transmission line to move power around without the lines burning up). But many utilities have been slow to adopt new technologies that would allow the to squeeze more capacity out of their existing infrastructure (things like dynamic line ratings, or distributed energy resources)
We need to do the work to align the economic/market incentives so that using more efficient technologies is actually cheaper.
Suggesting someone spend $25-$30k to transition gas infrastructure to electric ($6k furnace, $2k cooktop, $4k water heater, $15k battery) to offset their $40/month gas bill is also not a winning argument.
Without market pressure, what incentive is there for an electric company to optimize anything? Transitioning away from gas only makes them more entrenched.
Demand charges will come to everyone. It's clearly the end game. When everyone is bullied/tricked/enticed into smart meters, the temptation will be too strong.
> time of use charges can be managed
You responded to someone who mentioned dinner. Are people to cook dinner at 2am? People in apartments to ruin their sleep with the washer running at midnight?
Smoothing out household demand on the grid is the future.
The whole transition away from gas is a "never waste an opportunity" situation for the energy companies/billionaires. Through smart meters enabling 'peak demand management' (and other similarly innocuous sounding phrases), the masses are going to royally shafted.
I hope a case could be made that there is less supply chain to defend though at a lower cost.
Go take a hike.
This is not Oil and Gas marketing. This is REALITY. Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.
If you were to confront these lack of choices yourself you would get a chance to live in the prison you see fit for everyone else.
(Also wow does running your kitchen toaster really cost thousands a month? Maybe move somewhere where power company is not trying to gouge you?)
Sounds to me like you're the one unwilling to accept reality.
Have you watched the Don't look up movie?
I would be willing to bet OP got bent over by an idiot HVAC and now will never go back thanks to it. Meanwhile with a competent tech they would instead be here glowing about their experience.
I went down a big rabbit hole when I installed it a couple years ago and made a little calculator to compare heat pumps based on the weather in your area and the pump temperature-efficiency curves: https://heatpushers.com
It needs some revisiting, though, I’m guessing half the links are broken by now.
This reads like something from The Honeymooners.
Sure you're putting the heat directly into the pot, OK I get that part. But a gas stove doesn't waste 80+% of the energy to the house. And any pot on an induction stove will also heat up and lose some energy to the house as well. Induction isn't magic that just puts the energy into the food. A quick Google search shows that gas stoves are 30-55% efficient and induction are 80-95%. So maybe 3x at best, and probably more like 2x.
Or maybe I missed something! Very open to that idea.
Even being very experienced with a given range I'm still tempurature surfing for the most part where with induction I can set it to an exact 165F.
In any case the amount of energy used for cooking is dwarfed by other energy use in the home, a rounding error. The real reason to prefer induction is that it's more powerful and easier to control, in addition to being far easier to clean and also keeping the air far safer to breather.
Not even close
> Heatpumps are 4 - 5X efficient
Compared to heating elements, possible, but that's cause heatpumps do not create heat, but move heat. They come with the disadvantage of being really slow, and would increase baseline load during nighttime.
> Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)
Nope
> Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).
How are you planning on powering all your electric appliances? And before you say solar, you are aware that the sun only shines during daytime, while peak energy usage happens in the morning and late afternoon. It would also mean that car chargers would have to be installed at workplaces for EV's to take advantage of cheap daytime energy. Good luck convincing your employer to eat that cost.
> There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra
Your fighter jets are not going to be powered by batteries any time soon.
> fossil fuel subsidies
The government also taxes fuels, I am too lazy to calculate if they are net taxed, or net subsidized (excluding externalities, of course).
> ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water,
Sure, ethanol sucks.
> externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes)
Energy ain't free, you know. Without an abundance of renewable sources available like Norway or Iceland, there is going to be a cost payed to maintain the lifestyles people have gotten used to. Solar is only a partial solution. I cannot see how grid scale chemical batteries are as clean as people make them out to be.
This is a good thing, because you’ve shifted usage from a peak time to a low usage time. The more uniform consumption is, the cheaper it is to supply.
Also, it’s rude to be dismissive of people’s comments, but especially so when you’re actually wrong.
They said an EV is 4x more efficient than an ICE car. You dismissed the claim with “not even close”.
Would it surprise you to learn that a 45mpg car takes about 1kwh of energy to run a mile while an EV uses 0.25-0.35 kwh per mile. That’s 3-4x more efficient.
Are you seriously using this as some kind of gotcha? Who the hell cares whether it creates heat or merely moves it?
Cybercab is supposedly >200 mpge.
> How are you planning on powering all your electric appliances? And before you say solar, you are aware that the sun only shines during daytime, while peak energy usage happens in the morning and late afternoon.
You’re aware that levelized power source price comparisons quote “solar+storage”, not just solar, right? And that that price is now cheaper per MWh than combined cycle Nat gas?
Battery prices and solar prices have come down so rapidly that anyone operating on knowledge from even a few years ago are going to have a very inaccurate understanding of the landscape.
Can I ask if you are in the US?
It seems better in the EU where a lot of people happily embraced residential solar
Most of the EU has higher household electricity bills so rooftop solar makes faster economic sense. So that's probably part of it. A capital expenditure now which pays back in 5-10 years is quite different from one which pays back over 20 years.
Had the house been uninsulated it'd be another story, but such houses are very rare in the Nordics.
I've looked at improving old houses in Australia, and you would usually be better off putting the cash in the bank. (After heat pumps, and sometimes a battery).
Real question: As I understand, good insulation in your home helps two ways: Keep the heat inside in the winter, and keep the cold inside in the summer. Do I have that right? If yes, I understand there are lots of places in Australia with very light winters (or none at all), so they are mostly focused on cooling with A/C. Are you saying that installing significantly better insulation is not economically efficient for many Australia homes?
It's a big place, the north is essentially a cooling year round climate.
Most of the older places have very little insulation, lots of airflow, single pane leaky windows.
Usually the areas you need to fix are air leakage, better windows (double glazing), then in ceiling insulation. In order of impact.
Our construction industry is pretty much broken, and considers double glazing advanced luxury alien technology... So it can cost so much to replace the old windows that you can run heat pumps as much as you like with the interest on the sum.
And without that the improvement from more diy insulation upgrades don't really achieve much in a monetary sense.
On the other side, we have a much better solar and battery uptake, and the cost to install is fair. So a typical house might be a leaky wooden crate, but with enough solar and battery to be comfortable anyway.
But very high levels of insulation may never repay their carbon (and financial) cost when a home is heated with a heat-pump from a very low-carbon grid. It's the next part of my research programme: "understanding first" vs "fabric first".
We have added a small solar installation (7kWp) and a battery pack (18kWh). It provides 90% of power needed in the summer and allows for decent peak shaving in the winter, to lower network costs.
Additionally we are Co-owners in a windpower cooperative that provides more than our share of electricity into the network. So we are essentially operating our home on wind and solar, as well as powering the electric car.
Unless there's a particular good reason to it's actually not too bad of an idea (with a hot water radiator loop in the home at least) to keep a fuel burning radiator loop heater around and just valve it off to not interfere on normal days. Especially if the heat pump is air source (which the mentioned swedish one isn't).
It's not that I'm against full electrification, but peak cold spell heating in excess of the heat pump capacity is among the last things we ought to "electrify by force."
We'd have massive summer overcapacity at the point where we can generally afford to "just do that". And chances are that it'd not be a resistive heater but a heat pump freezing a pool worth of water to cap the cold side temperature at just under 0C, or something the like, just because of how grid intensive the correlated load of those resistive heaters is.
It might even be cheaper to use synthetic fuel produced in summer than to 100% electrify that cold spell heating capacity. Carbon capture is expensive but there are options from e.g. domestic waste incinerators, paper making, and generally waste wood/plant matter decomposition, where hydrogen can cheaply be added to produce methane (pipes) or propane/butane (tanker trucks with liquified gas).
For example, evaporating a 40,000 L solution of calcium chloride brine can store 4.6 megawatt-hours(*) of thermal energy and release it in the winter by passing water vapour over the solution to dilute it. This can heat geothermal temperatures from 10°C to 27°C which can be used in in-floor heating.
But the big asterisk is that only 11% of that 4.6 megawatt-hours of that thermal energy being "stored" is held in the enthalpy of dilution, and 89% of that heat is coming from the enthalpy of vaporization, and acquiring water vapour in winter isn't so easy.
One would probably need a source of water and use geothermal heat to raise dry cold air temperature to the needed 10°C, while absorbing water vapour from a (relatively small) tank of water. The net result is more of a thermochemical heat pump rather than a thermochemical battery per se. But the point is that, other than some fans, this is not electrically powered.
Then there is the issue of storing such tanks safely underground, and more problems. Still, there might be some innovative solutions lying in this direction. For example, one can replace this open-loop system with a closed-loop vacuum system to boil water, but at the cost of far more complex and dangerous engineering.
In general, using heavily salted water (not sodium chloride that's quite ineffective) to dehumidify humid cold air during heating and reject heat with a wet interface without having to source potentially scarce water to evaporate, is quite an intriguing alternative to classic fan-laden AC "condenser" coils.
Incidentally, KOH is also interesting as it dehumidifies down to quite low humidity (at least indoor-facing) before it saturates (and precipitates out), and as a side-gig scrubs CO2 that can be precipitated out with CaO/Ca(OH)2 as CaCO3 (limestone).
This can be thermally recovered at around 800~900 C to essentially "boil" the CO2 off.
IMHO a chemically appropriate wet heat exchanger based on (cross flow: easy) or (counter-flow: harer to prevent droplet formation) with just a simple corrugated structured packing should be able to operate more hygienically than a theoretically dry, practically humidity-condensing classic mini-split AC coil. And allow most dust to be washed off fully automatically from normal operation. It'd "just" need a regenerator to dry out excess unwanted humidity, but I'd assume there's a reasonable way to boil off the excess humidity from the "salty water". Maybe the common reverse-osmosis filter materials can resist these chemicals; in that case it'd sound like a question of pressurization energy recovery; or it could be put under vacuum and a small heat pump could transfer the enthalpy of vaporization from the condenser [distilled water plus dissolved gasses, vacuum] (that isn't fully flooded due to presence of dissolved gasses in the feed) to the evaporator [salty water, same vacuum]. If the ratio of dissolved gasses relative to the extracted condensate is small enough, I'd guess a water jet "ejector pump" using that very condensate (after it's cooled down enough to not boil in the ejector) would actually work to provide the vacuum for continuously pumping the dissolved gasses that boil out along the humidity... A small centrifugal pump for that can easily be made completely sealed using magnets to transmit the torque to the impeller and a long life ceramic bearing, at least if there's a long enough pipe down to the pump to build minimum inlet pressure (against cavitation).
Also: For vacuum btw. remember the convenience of using gravity to pull a (nearly) 10m column of water down. Dissolved gasses are likely the dominant complication.
> 100 meter borehole into the ground
Expect to pay $10-20k for the hole but it is common in large parts of the world.
If you go heat pump + heat pump water heater + electric washer and dryer + induction stove + electric car, you might want to upgrade, depending on your situation.
Previously, they had had both an oil bill, and a fair amount of electricity that the oil furnace used to operate. After the replacement, their combined gas and electric bill was less than just their electric bill had been before.
Since then they've also added a couple of sets of solar panels, bringing the overall ongoing cost down even further. (Of course, a large portion of their grid power is already renewable—hydro power—because of where they live.)
I live in well insulated house. Big problem is moisture management if I don’t keep indoors fairly warm I will get walls wet especially in bathroom.
Heating up just bathroom is hard as outside is well insulated but then internal air flow cannot be blocked.
It is also not that great in the summer when it is hot outside. Cooking or any bigger screen will heat up inside of the house. But then opening windows might not help when it is high heat.
One that knows the more you read, the less inclined you are to want more.
The crux of Jevon's paradox is that you’re lowering the cost of revenue below the sale price.
If I can generate $10 a sale then I’ll do no sales if it costs me $11 . If gas drops from $4 to $2 then I’ll do as many sales as I can as $9 is less than $10.
Pre-industrial revolution most people in my country own enough clothing for everyday and then maybe some extra stuff for "best" appearance like church. Making a shirt requires hours of labour from skilled workers. The machines eliminate one of those jobs ("hand" weaving, using a loom that you operate at human scale, replaced by enormous machine looms which produce much more fabric and much faster with far less human labour) and streamline others so that the price of a garment collapses. So people buy a lot more garments. You probably own enough clothes that you can wear different clothes each day for at least a week, likely more, and you think nothing of it.
Most people won't buy so many clothes that they can't even wear items once, but many get pretty close, and so worldwide we produce hugely more clothing per person than before the textile mills were first built.
Just took my house onto off-grid solar, yet my energy consumption now exceeds when I was on utility grid power.
Naturally we ration things when they're expensive. But now I don't feel the need to turn off the lights or appliances when I leave my home, and my EV driving has gone up knowing that "fuel" is essentially free from here on out. And to soak up excess solar, I run multiple computers and servers 24/7 with reckless abandon.
"Free" fuel for you just pushes the externalities elsewhere.
I was brought up to "save energy ". Lights switched off when not in thevroom, that sort of thing.
Now I gave solar on the roof. There's an excess production capability, so now, during most days it doesn't matter if stuff is on or off. That especially applies to AC which I'll happily turn on on hot summer days. In effect I use more "because it's there to be used".
My EV is coming soon and given I can charge it on solar I plan to do a lot more day-trips-out over weekends etc.
So you're right, availability and affordability- but electrifying is great (for me) for both those things.
Meanwhile, fossil fuels are only 'cheap' because the users are pushing the negative externalities off on everyone else in the world. Priced properly they'd be even more costly than they already are.
If 1kg of coal represents 1000 Wh, your generator loses 1/2 to waste heat, you only generate 500 Wh of usable electricity. Some analyses will state that renewable power has to replace the 1000 Wh of embedded energy within the coal, when it only needs to output 500 Wh.
If you use solar panels and generate 500 Wh directly, you have cut your energy use in half, even though the output has remained the same. An EV has a battery of ~80 kWh, equal to 2-3 gallons of gas, yet it can go a few hundred miles, a 3-4x ratio of efficiency, compared to an ICE.
I’ve never seen anyone measure coal power by the amount of chemical energy stored inside, unless they are specifically referring to using it as a heating source. For electricity generated by coal it’s always measured as output.
Now compare size and weight of the battery with 3 gallons of gas. I can carry hundreds of miles of travel on my person if it's gas, I can't carry much battery though.
Particularly handy if heading off in a straight line, I to the wilderness.
Most of us are running errands around town.
I figured an EV is worth about 60mpg with a fair comparison to a gas car.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles...
Modern internal-combustion engines have 35% to 40% efficiency, with even efficiencies of over 50% for the very big 2-stroke Diesel engines used in ships.
Nonetheless that remains about half of the efficiency of electric vehicles and the energy efficiency of the latter can be greatly increased over this ratio by the recovery of the kinetic or gravitational energy, when braking or descending.
It propels a car about 10 miles. About 1 mile per kWh
Charging my electric car via AC at 7kW to replace the power used to drive 90 miles in autumn takes 26kWh according to the meter, so 3.5 miles per kWh.
Same thing with battery power density - it’s the rocket equation. Heavy batteries don’t go far. To go farther you add battery, then more battery to carry enough power to carry the larger battery. Increase the specific energy rather than the mass, and all the extra power goes into going faster or farther.
It is something overlooked by various reports of "In X amount of time, Y is projected to consume Z% of electricity" that the average increase in world electricity production is about 3% per year.
As fast as solar, wind, etc electricity production grows, the number of people requiring it grows along-side.
Also, 'renewable' is misleading, 'replaceable' is more accurate, all renewable energy generators wear out as everything does and need to be replaced using non-renewable energy mostly (you can't build solar panels from solar panel energy)
... Why?
And relying on trees is not a great idea either, look at Easter Island, lol.
(GPT has all the answers anyway, no need to ask me, I'm an old man with no issue and no stake in this stuff)
Modern PV typically has an EROEI of ~ 15-30, depending on tech, location, system lifetime, and accounting methodology.
From what I've read, coal might still beat that, but modern oil no longer does. Gas is generally also worse than PV in this regard.
Coal is however also very expensive, which is why e.g. the UK completely stopped using it for electricity.
But even then the numbers are positive, they just don't make good economic sense.
Today's numbers embarrass CCGT which is why these same fools will now tell you the problem isn't solar PV it's the batteries, the batteries are too expensive you see, so it's all pointless according to them. Weirdly the answer is always more Fossil Fuels. No matter what the question is, or what the facts suggest, they can assure you that somehow it turns out the answer was Fossil Fuels.
and that production of hydrogen (as a base for either ammonia or methanol production) will likely come via electrical cracking .. but it might also come as a result of atmospheric carbon sequestration in ultramafic rock: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-orange-hydrogen-western-austra...
You mean data centers. Can't ever have enough of those!
The comment below about electricity prices is the real friction point though. Where time-of-use rates exist, running a heat pump with thermal pre-heating during cheap midday solar hours changes the math entirely - the building itself becomes the battery. I got into tracking my own load against TOU windows and ended up building a small tool for it (energy-iq.app); shifting ~40% of consumption off-peak ended up worth more than any single efficiency upgrade. Electrification halves the energy; rate-aware scheduling is what makes it halve the bill.
In Canada I’m a deep valley where it snows a ton.
8.44E+980 watt hours(2.78E-15 exajoules/watthours)= 1.88E-03 exajoules 1.88E-03/600 = 3.12E-6 or .000312% of the global energy use.
In simple words. Banning kettles would do nothing to cut global energy use.
(Also I think bitcoin energy usage is also on the order of 0.001% of global energy use.)
200 twh = 0.72 exajoule
0.72/600 = 0.0012
Which is off by 100 because I forgot to multiply by 100 for percent, so 0.1%.
But if we are in twh we can get the tea numbers as well: ~300 billion liters per year, with ~100Wh/litre that would be ~30TWh.
So 30 vs 200 is about as close as I expected.
But this is all just for fun.