If you're wondering why NYC wants to get a heat pump for every apartment, consider this.

cross_skier

In Iowa landowners can make $20k/year per turbine.  The pad for the turbine is huge, 60' across and that's a lot of concrete.

We parents grew up on farms in Iowa, we still own them

fentonc

@DanHolohan - in addition to the 11% electric increase, that article mentioned an 18% gas increase! At ~80% efficiency, with my current rates a heat pump only needs to hit an average CoP of ~2.3 to be competitive with gas for heating - I think those rate changes would make it closer to 2.15 for me next year.

delcrossv

cross_skier said:

In Iowa landowners can make $20k/year per turbine.  The pad for the turbine is huge, 60' across and that's a lot of concrete.

We parents grew up on farms in Iowa, we still own them

Do they take the pad out at the end of the lease?

Jells

ChrisJ said:

@DanHolohan Has there been any discussions on how the electric will be generated in the future for this?

Are there any nuclear plants planned?

Don't know if you guys have talked about this annual report on the levelized (long term) cost of alternative energy from Lazard. They are money guys, not tree huggers. Safety issues aside, nuclear is among the most expensive sources. Wind and utility PV is among the cheapest. Obviously cost effective storage is the big roadblock.



https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/

delcrossv

I've seen the Lazard reports (they're several) and they conveniently leave out a lot of end of life costs.
Tread carefully, they're salesmen too.
Note the actual costs of delivered electricity in countries with a high percentage of renewables. (E.G. Germany). That's the real cost.

Nuclear is expensive because regulation has made it so (purposefully).

cross_skier

@delcrossv

Pad removal is not called out on the contracts.  We had that discussion over Thanksgiving, our farmer is really good and pointed that out

delcrossv

cross_skier said:

@delcrossv

Pad removal is not called out on the contracts.  We had that discussion over Thanksgiving, our farmer is really good and pointed that out

Yep. Thought so.

Jells

Jamie Hall said:

Sure, we can put up solar panels. Here in New England we get almost 3 hours of sunshine per day on the average, year 'round. Which means you need a lot of panel area to be close to breaking even for ordinary domestic use, never mind heating -- and you also need a lot of battery capacity, since it is not uncommon to go three or four days with negligible solar input.

Perfectly reasonable, yet 50% of the nation's population resides in.....the sunbelt! And FL is fighting enabling net metering solar.

wmgeorge

ChrisJ said:

cross_skier said:

@wmgeorge

Don't you mean wind turbines?  You guys in Iowa are leading the country in wind

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/iowa-view/2021/06/11/wind-energy-is-should-remain-iowa-success-story/7640696002/

I don't think homeowners can install wind turbines

If I was not living in a town I could. But when you buy power at 8 cents a kWh hard to get excited, solar for my RV camper. You guys are getting price gouged big time.

Jells

delcrossv said:

I've seen the Lazard reports (they're several) and they conveniently leave out a lot of end of life costs.
Tread carefully, they're salesmen too.
Note the actual costs of delivered electricity in countries with a high percentage of renewables. (E.G. Germany). That's the real cost.

Nuclear is expensive because regulation has made it so (purposefully).

Those end of life costs are frequently left out of pricing any energy source, whether it's coal mines, hydro or nuclear. Plus 'delivered cost' rarely include the many traditional subsidies and externalized costs like environmental damage, pollution and healthcare. No doubt, these comparisons are hard.

delcrossv

Jells said:

delcrossv said:

I've seen the Lazard reports (they're several) and they conveniently leave out a lot of end of life costs.
Tread carefully, they're salesmen too.
Note the actual costs of delivered electricity in countries with a high percentage of renewables. (E.G. Germany). That's the real cost.

Nuclear is expensive because regulation has made it so (purposefully).

Those end of life costs are frequently left out of pricing any energy source, whether it's coal mines, hydro or nuclear. Plus 'delivered cost' rarely include the many traditional subsidies and externalized costs like environmental damage, pollution and healthcare. No doubt, these comparisons are hard.

End of life costs are never left out of nuclear. Including spent fuel storage costs (even though the facility isn't built yet).

jumper

Jells said:

Jamie Hall said:

Sure, we can put up solar panels. Here in New England we get almost 3 hours of sunshine per day on the average, year 'round. .....

Perfectly reasonable, yet 50% of the nation's population resides in.....the sunbelt! And FL is fighting enabling net metering solar.

Can Floridians install PV disconnected from grid? Why not use PV to power ice maker for inexpensive energy storage for air conditioning? That nobody does that in hot sunny climates indicates how inexpensive PV is NOT. Net metering means other customers subsidize electric distribution.

Jells

jumper said:

Jells said:

Jamie Hall said:

Sure, we can put up solar panels. Here in New England we get almost 3 hours of sunshine per day on the average, year 'round. .....

Perfectly reasonable, yet 50% of the nation's population resides in.....the sunbelt! And FL is fighting enabling net metering solar.

Can Floridians install PV disconnected from grid? Why not use PV to power ice maker for inexpensive energy storage for air conditioning? That nobody does that in hot sunny climates indicates how inexpensive PV is NOT. Net metering means other customers subsidize electric distribution.

That would be interesting, though I'd do it with batteries and a disconnect like for a generator, to flop your AC from battery to grid when you run out of juice. I doubt that making ice for AC is very efficient. I don't have the answer to the net metering issue, but the best answer can't be to discourage solar installations.

delcrossv said:

Jells said:

delcrossv said:

I've seen the Lazard reports (they're several) and they conveniently leave out a lot of end of life costs.
Tread carefully, they're salesmen too.
Note the actual costs of delivered electricity in countries with a high percentage of renewables. (E.G. Germany). That's the real cost.

Nuclear is expensive because regulation has made it so (purposefully).

Those end of life costs are frequently left out of pricing any energy source, whether it's coal mines, hydro or nuclear. Plus 'delivered cost' rarely include the many traditional subsidies and externalized costs like environmental damage, pollution and healthcare. No doubt, these comparisons are hard.

End of life costs are never left out of nuclear. Including spent fuel storage costs (even though the facility isn't built yet).

Wait, you just said "Those end of life costs are frequently left out of pricing any energy source, whether it's coal mines, hydro or nuclear."

BobC

Nuclear is really the only way out of this crunch but it can't be you grandfathers boiling water reactor. Those are huge and expensive because they operate at very high pressures and most use fuel rods, anything operating at those pressures is going to fail unless you let the navy run it. If cooling fails those fuel rods swell and people start running for the exits.

You need to use something other than water for primary cooling so you don't need high pressure reactor vessels, this is safer and a lot cheaper. Some of the new modular gen 4 designs can burn nuclear waste, they are starting to use these in Canada. This gives you a way to get rid of nuclear waste and make power ast the same time. Now if we could only get the fossils in charge of nuclear power regulation in in this country to take their blinders off.

@Jamie Hall A whole 3 hours is a lot better than we usually see out here on the coast. Solar is a great choice for the southwest but up here it can't be relied on, wind is better but neither can be counted on for base power without humongous battery farms for backup and who do you suppose is going to pay for those/

Bob

SlamDunk

<

DanHolohan said:

@SlamDunk, the Fort Independence Houses are in the Bronx, just 3.3 miles from Riverdale.

I should have said worlds apart.

I grew up four-five blocks South of Ft Ind. Used to hang out in Riverdale in my teens. The two places are worlds apart socio-economically speaking.

wmgeorge

Agree with Bob, one new tech for nuclear is using gravity instead of pumps for the cooling in case something goes wrong. French seem to have it figured out and most of Europe is going back to Natural Gas anyway.

ChrisJ

wmgeorge said:

Agree with Bob, one new tech for nuclear is using gravity instead of pumps for the cooling in case something goes wrong. French seem to have it figured out and most of Europe is going back to Natural Gas anyway.

Banning natural gas in apartment buildings, single family homes etc because it's not "green" and then using it to generate the electric at less than 50% efficiency will be a great improvement.


/Sarcasm.

DanHolohan

And then there's this in the works to consider:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90717968/these-12-mile-deep-holes-could-convert-power-plants-from-fossil-fuel-to-geothermal

DanHolohan

“Deteriorating infrastructure as a result of ongoing disinvestment is still a critical issue, but NYCHA has taken and will continue to take any available actions to address service outages.”

The result of "ongoing disinvestment."

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-hot-water-outages-nycha-increased-data-20220208-dbkaqfbsvnbqrlpfavcvepeq5e-story.html

It's like owning a boat. You can't just fix one of the holes.

ChrisJ

DanHolohan said:

“Deteriorating infrastructure as a result of ongoing disinvestment is still a critical issue, but NYCHA has taken and will continue to take any available actions to address service outages.”

The result of "ongoing disinvestment."

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-hot-water-outages-nycha-increased-data-20220208-dbkaqfbsvnbqrlpfavcvepeq5e-story.html

It's like owning a boat. You can't just fix one of the holes.

No, but fixing one hole is better than fixing none.
Each tiny improvement helps.

delcrossv

Jells said:

jumper said:

Jells said:

Jamie Hall said:

Sure, we can put up solar panels. Here in New England we get almost 3 hours of sunshine per day on the average, year 'round. .....

Perfectly reasonable, yet 50% of the nation's population resides in.....the sunbelt! And FL is fighting enabling net metering solar.

Can Floridians install PV disconnected from grid? Why not use PV to power ice maker for inexpensive energy storage for air conditioning? That nobody does that in hot sunny climates indicates how inexpensive PV is NOT. Net metering means other customers subsidize electric distribution.

That would be interesting, though I'd do it with batteries and a disconnect like for a generator, to flop your AC from battery to grid when you run out of juice. I doubt that making ice for AC is very efficient. I don't have the answer to the net metering issue, but the best answer can't be to discourage solar installations.

delcrossv said:

Jells said:

delcrossv said:

I've seen the Lazard reports (they're several) and they conveniently leave out a lot of end of life costs.
Tread carefully, they're salesmen too.
Note the actual costs of delivered electricity in countries with a high percentage of renewables. (E.G. Germany). That's the real cost.

Nuclear is expensive because regulation has made it so (purposefully).

Those end of life costs are frequently left out of pricing any energy source, whether it's coal mines, hydro or nuclear. Plus 'delivered cost' rarely include the many traditional subsidies and externalized costs like environmental damage, pollution and healthcare. No doubt, these comparisons are hard.

End of life costs are never left out of nuclear. Including spent fuel storage costs (even though the facility isn't built yet).

Wait, you just said "Those end of life costs are frequently left out of pricing any energy source, whether it's coal mines, hydro or nuclear."

Nope. Excluded for renewables, included for nuclear. Actually to finance a nuke, the financing has to include decommissioning and spent fuel storage costs- up front.

DanHolohan

Unless it's a boat, Chris.

delcrossv

BobC said:

Nuclear is really the only way out of this crunch but it can't be you grandfathers boiling water reactor. Those are huge and expensive because they operate at very high pressures and most use fuel rods, anything operating at those pressures is going to fail unless you let the navy run it. If cooling fails those fuel rods swell and people start running for the exits.

You need to use something other than water for primary cooling so you don't need high pressure reactor vessels, this is safer and a lot cheaper. Some of the new modular gen 4 designs can burn nuclear waste, they are starting to use these in Canada. This gives you a way to get rid of nuclear waste and make power ast the same time. Now if we could only get the fossils in charge of nuclear power regulation in in this country to take their blinders off.

@Jamie Hall A whole 3 hours is a lot better than we usually see out here on the coast. Solar is a great choice for the southwest but up here it can't be relied on, wind is better but neither can be counted on for base power without humongous battery farms for backup and who do you suppose is going to pay for those/

Bob

Yep. Chloride molten salt. Runs at atmospheric pressure, no fuel rods (liquid fuel), fast spectrum so it burns actinides (waste). What's not to love?

Fortunately there's pressure on the NRC to exclude Gen IV designs from the regulatory morass plaguing light water reactors. Hope it gets though.

wmgeorge

The Greenies in Europe got the nukes shut down, it was going to be all "renewable" but that could not hack it, so its back to Natural Gas and that was decided a few weeks ago by the EU. Zero issues with NG except GWP and that is a lot of... well BS and they want to ban it (BS) also!

delcrossv

And a lot of lignite in Germany. A big step....backwards.

ChrisJ

p

DanHolohan said:

Unless it's a boat, Chris.

Depends Dan,
If you can fix enough holes to allow the pump(s) to keep up...

Nothing's perfect but we still need to try.

DanHolohan

Just add heat pumps!

https://www.amny.com/news/bronx-residents-of-fort-independence-houses-continue-to-suffer/

cross_skier

Should have used Encore

DanHolohan

Here's more on the reasoning behind all of this:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-city-lower-greenhouse-gas-emissions-improving-public/story?id=82811254

reggi

DanHolohan said:

Here's more on the reasoning behind all of this: https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-city-lower-greenhouse-gas-emissions-improving-public/story?id=82811254

Sigh... Their "Magic Bullet" .... the long term cost... immeasurable 

ChrisJ

@DanHolohan. @Erin Holohan Haskell

Time to start writing "We've got heat pumps" and "The lost art of mini splits".


People will need them in the future.

DanHolohan

Or perhaps The Found Art of Mini Splits, @ChrisJ?

Jamie Hall

The level of ignorance is really enough to make one cry. Not stupidity -- some of these people are quite intelligent. Ignorance. The problem is figuring out how to stay out of the blast radius when the whole unicorns and rainbow dream comes crashing down.

DanHolohan

Jamie, I love how you turn a phrase. Thanks. 

luketheplumber

I have a 1989 Sanyo mini fridge running with r12. I picked it up free on the side of the rode. All it needed was a cord and a scrubbing.

luketheplumber

I've saved every penny since I started working. I'm still living at home and am looking to possibly put a down payment on an old fixer upper in the next town over.

Steamhead

luketheplumber said:

I've saved every penny since I started working. I'm still living at home and am looking to possibly put a down payment on an old fixer upper in the next town over.

Does it have radiators?

The Steam Whisperer

delcrossv said:

Jells said:

delcrossv said:

I've seen the Lazard reports (they're several) and they conveniently leave out a lot of end of life costs.
Tread carefully, they're salesmen too.
Note the actual costs of delivered electricity in countries with a high percentage of renewables. (E.G. Germany). That's the real cost.

Nuclear is expensive because regulation has made it so (purposefully).

Those end of life costs are frequently left out of pricing any energy source, whether it's coal mines, hydro or nuclear. Plus 'delivered cost' rarely include the many traditional subsidies and externalized costs like environmental damage, pollution and healthcare. No doubt, these comparisons are hard.

End of life costs are never left out of nuclear. Including spent fuel storage costs (even though the facility isn't built yet).

I think I have to disagree. Right now, I believe the newest nuclear station in the US is in Byron,IL. , built in 1978. The design life of the stations was about 30 years. I don't believe there is a single nuclear station in operation in the US that is not way, way beyond design life. That means all of the current stations should have already been closed decades ago, but haven't. The end of life costs haven't even been realized yet. If you know someone working in these stations, they will tell you that there are failures all over the plant and they are essentially being held together by duct tape. Cooling system leaks from piping buried in concrete etc. are the norm.
I remember many years ago when I was in the Planning Dept program at IIT and this topic came up. France has long been nearly 100% nuclear. The estimated cost of decommissioning thier plants was something like 20 years of the country's GNP.

This seems to go with the whole direction of the country since the early 80's virtually no investment in infrastructure.

The Steam Whisperer

DanHolohan said:

Dave, talking to the folks making this decision is like trying to explain clouds to fish. I’ve tried as hard as I could. I invited them to see The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York’s building, heated by ConEd steam, and where we reduced the usage by 43% with minor changes to the system. They were not interested. “Steam is old and not green. Electricity is clean!”

They’ve made up their minds. 

I was invited to IIT to do a seminar on steam in 2015 by the Graduate Engineering Dept. The department head and professors were quite interested in steam technology and I had personal interviews with a number of them.

This discussion, and the others about NYHA report, have pushed me to reconnect and see about creating a presentation for multiple engineering and architecture schools in Chicago, the utilities, state regulators, the Institute of Gas Technology ( the US gas industries research arm), American Institute of Architects, etc..
I hope to cover the basics ( ie why to fix leaks, why put in the right sized equipment) and then move into advanced technologies...low temperature vacuum systems, outdoor steam reset, one pipe system upgrades to air line systems, mini-tube steam (ala Gerry Gill), controls systems, condensing steam boilers, etc.

I suspect it will need to be about a 4 hour presentation, probably 2 hours for the basics, break, and then another couple on advanced systems.

I need to do some data mining from your books and a lot from the other creative minds here at HeatingHelp. The experiences of so many here on this forum with huge reductions in fuel use and the related emissions should really catch the minds of many. Having the presentation at IIT should provide credibility to the presentation and will also really send a message to the business community, which is intimately tied to the university.

I hope to make initial contact this week, so I may be posting a general call for photos, data, etc. here if it looks like a go.
I expect it will probably take a year or so to pull it all together. The utilities here in Chicago are already mandated to provide energy efficiency programs, so there is already a solid groundswell here

PMJ

I find it astonishing that we have allowed instantaneous fuel/energy transfer efficiency to become the only metric used to determine policy. No matter how thin you make the materials or how many additional moving parts you employ, if you can claim the best instantaneous efficiency you win the race for government support incentives. Those same incentives by default bankrupt other technologies.

You don't need to be an engineer or even need a calculator to see that the daily maintenance of a system with many thousands more moving parts will alone consume far more $$ than the projected fuel savings. And that is before you even get started on the ongoing equipment replacement cost which will be orders of magnitude higher than the systems being replaced.

These considerations have for some time now been completely dismissed because of the supposed certainty of our collective extinction if we don't stop using fossil fuel. It is because this has become accepted science by those in power that we must pay considerably more annually running dramatically more complicated though pathetically less robust equipment to heat our homes.

There is something really wrong in this picture. True science seems to have merged with political science in many areas, with far too many examples of those now steering policy also financially benefitting from the policies selected. That environment will never produce policy based on solid engineering.

Also notice and beware how much is taking place on an emergency basis. Emergencies allow the breaking of rules and discarding of the normal standards and safeguards which protect the public. The outlawing of proven lower total annual cost heating technologies could not happen without being able to claim that there was an emergency to be dealt with. "We had no choice". Every time I see "emergency" I think hmmm. This excuse has been used many times by those in power who have done much harm.