I had my energy company remove their LVTC smart meter this week after they started using it to shut off our condenser unit during our 100 degree days
The fact that it exists at all is bad enough, but they were doing this at a time when our AC was already malfunctioning due to low refrigerant. On the day they first shut it off, our house reached 94 degrees.
The program that the previous owner signed up for that enabled them to do this gave them a fucking two dollar a month discount.
I use a smart thermostat to optimize my home conditioning - having a second meter fucking with my schedule ends up making us all miserable. Energy providers need to stop fucking around and just build out their infrastructure to handle worst case peak loads, and enable customers to install solar to reduce peak loading to begin with.
The other thing that kills me about this is that our provider administers our city’s solar electric subsidy program themselves. When i had them come out to give us a quote, they inflated their price by more than 100% because they knew what our electricity bill was. All they did was take our average monthly bill and multiplied it by the repayment period. I could have been providing them more energy to the grid at their peak load if they hadn’t tried scamming me.
FUCK private energy providers.
Peak load of households is not during peak solar power generation. Households installing pv isn’t a solution to what you described.
Today, you could also use a battery to buy power during mid day and use it in the evening when you need it the most.
In moderate climates in the US, peak loads are typically the hottest and sunniest hours of the day since condenser units are the most energy-hungry appliance in most homes. Clouds notwithstanding, peak solar generation would typically align (or closely align) with peak load time.
Batteries would also help a lot - they should definitely be subsidizing the installation of those as well but unfortunately they aren’t yet (at least not in my state).
This is incorrect. Look up the “duck curve” or if you prefer real-world examples look at the California electricity market (CAISO) where they have an excellent “net demand curve” that illustrates the problem.
This curve has changed somewhat since this study in 2016. More efficient home insulation, remote working, and energy-efficient cooling systems have large impact in this pattern. But assuming you have a well-insulated home, setting your thermostat to maintain a consistent temperature throughout the day will shift this peak earlier and lower the peak load at sunset, when many people are returning home. More efficient heat pumps with variable pressure capabilities also helps this a lot, too.
Given just how many variables are involved, it’s better to assume peak cooling load to be mid-day and work toward equalizing that curve, rather than reacting to transient patterns that are subject to changes in customer behavior. Solar installations are just one aspect of this mitigation strategy, along with energy storage, energy-efficient cooling systems, and more efficient insulation and solar heat gain mitigation strategies.
If we’re discussing infrastructure improvements we might as well discuss home efficiency improvements as well.
Do you have a source for the cooling off effect of the duck curve?
Following is a 2 year old article hinting an increase in the effect https://www.powermag.com/epri-head-duck-curve-now-looks-like-a-canyon/ afaik it hasn’t changed much but I’m open to news
I’m not really saying that the curve itself is changing (sorry, I was really not clear), only that those other variables reduce actual energy demand later in the day because of the efficiency gains and thermal banking that happens during the peak energy production. The overproduction during max solar hours is still a problem. Even if the utility doesn’t have a way of banking the extra supply, individual customers can do it themselves at a smaller scale, even if just by over-cooling their homes to reduce their demand after sundown.
Overall, the problem of the duck curve isn’t as much about maxing out the grid, it’s about the utility not having instantaneous power availability when the sun suddenly goes down. For people like me who work from home and have the flexibility to keep my home cool enough to need less cooling in the evening, having solar power means I can take advantage of that free energy and bank it to reduce my demand in the evening.
I get what you were saying now, but having solar would absolutely reduce my demand during peak hours.
It’s a neat idea to over-cool in order to reduce consumption later on!
Study or no study, you can see this problem in the real world https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook#section-net-demand-trend
Ok now go just one step further and ask yourself what variables factor into this.
There’s a reason that pattern exists, and it isn’t because solar and cooling hours don’t align.
the difference between demand and net demand in that graph is purely solar/wind generation, isn’t it?
I watch big state and national grid loads (for fun) and I see two distinct peaks: 7-8AM when everyone goes to work, and then around 5-7 PM when people commute home and heat up dinner.
Otherwise it’s a linear diagonal curve coinciding with temperatures.
I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).
Your personal energy use pattern does not determine where you are drawing your power from, wtf logic is this?
I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).
If you consume energy during peak hours you are a peak load consumer. Consuming in other hours doesn’t change this fact.
Why do you want a subsidy for batteries? Installing batteries at a large scale at homes is incredibly expensive compared to an off site battery. Especially with regards to the move towards hydrogen.
For the same reason we want to subsidize solar production in residential construction even though it’s more efficient and cost-productive to do it at-scale. Having energy production and storage at the point of use reduces strain on power infrastructure and helps alleviate the types of load surging ayyy is talking about.
It’s not a replacement for modernizing our power grids, too - it simply helps to make them more resilient.
That’s understandable but do we need it now? Neither pv nor batteries last forever. I’m just not sure if we need them now (or short-medium term future). But I’m not in the position to decide upon it
I don’t know how to answer that question.
How tf can a meter shut of an applience? Did you also have smart breakers from them?
Anyway absolutely ridiculous
It’s separate from the main meter and connected directly at the condenser unit.
It monitors power draw and acts as a relay when the provider sends a shutoff signal. The thermostat thinks the system is still going, and the fans still push air through the vents, but the coils aren’t being cooled anymore so the air gets hot and musty.
our city’s solar electric subsidy program
It sounds like there’s two different things there. There’s a solar installation (hardware, etc.), and there’s likely some kind of net metering program (where they pay you or give you credit for electricity you generate). That paragraph sounds like the first, but the phrase sounds like the second.
You shouldn’t have to go through them for the solar installation, if your conditions accommodate it. Granted, the conditions don’t apply to everyone. You’ll want to have a suitable roof that ideally faces south-ish, own your home, and plan to stay there for at least 10 years. In the US, you also kind of need to get it done within this calendar year, which is a rough ask, before the federal 30% tax credit goes away. But maybe you can find an installer that isn’t trying to scam you quite as much.
(It’s early and cloudy today.)
Your HA dashboard derailed this conversation for me. lol.
I would love to know more about the equipment you are using to push this info into your HA.
I’ll write up a post now in [email protected]
Sorry, maybe I wasn’t being clear.
My area has solar incentive programs that are run through the energy utility - meaning the state makes available zero-interest loans for the purposes of solar installation, but those loans are only available through an entity partnered with our utility. They limit the number of homes in each area that are eligible through this program so that solar generation never exceeds demand. Our home was eligible through the program, so I had them come out to give us a quote. Our utility is also transitioning to surge pricing and smart metering, so there’s a pretty high demand for solar installation in my area and they know that they’d lose out on a lot of revenue if everyone installed their own solar systems.
A part of that process was them asking for the last year of energy bills, along with taking measurements and doing daylighting analysis on our roof area. At the end, they gave us a quote for a 15 year loan for the equipment and installation, and it just so happened that the monthly payment was the same as our average energy bill. I work in AEC and I know what solar panels cost, and they had inflated their price by more than double what it would cost at market rate.
Of course I could install my own panels, but it would be out-of-pocket and I would have to seek out and apply for out-of-state incentive programs myself, but I can’t afford the up-front costs and the loan terms don’t make sense for how long we’ll be in this house. Id love nothing more than to do it myself, even at a loss if that’s what it took, but I have a spouse that is less spiteful than I am.
more than double what it would cost at market rate
I definitely paid more for labor than for materials. My payoff time is about 13 years with a Tesla Powerwall 3, maybe a bit less now that I have an EV. I had a team of 4 guys plus an electrician here for about five days.
I did go with a slightly more reputable company that charged slightly more, but I would have gone elsewhere if it was a huge difference.
Maybe I should get around to making a post in [email protected] or something, even though it isn’t very punk.
I’m factoring in labor. It was an extremely bad deal - they were praying on the fact most home owners do not have familiarity with solar installation pricing.
Like I said, I would love to still do it on my own, but it just doesn’t make sense for our household.
Smart meters with this ability are great, when done well. Without them they have the ability to turn off all of your power if they need to. If they can’t keep up with demand, they have to turn things off. It’s better for them to have the ability to shut off a few appliances or decrease your AC usage rather than shut people down entirely.
People always complain that they don’t want to give the energy company power over their electricity, but they already do. However, without this their power is total, and only total. With it they can moderate it. It’s better if everyone has a smart meter instead of only people who care about others, and greedy people only look out for themselves.
I agree though, fuck private providers.
I agree though, fuck private providers
If it was a public utility i’d feel very differently.
Let’s do the math.
Let’s take an SDXl porn model, with no 4-step speed augmentations, no hand written quantization/optimization schemes like svdquant, or anything, just an early, raw inefficient implementation:
So 2.5 seconds on an A100 for a single image. Let’s batch it (because that’s what’s done in production), and run it on the now popular H100 instead, and very conservatively assume 1.5 seconds per single image (though it’s likely much faster).
That’s on a 700W SXM Nvidia H100. Usually in a server box with 7 others, so let’s say 1000W including its share of the CPU and everything else. Let’s say 1400W for networking, idle time, whatever else is going on.
That’s 2 kJ, or 0.6 watt hours.
…Or about the energy of browsing Lemmy for 30-60 seconds. And again, this is an high estimate, but also a fraction of a second of usage for a home AC system.
…So yeah, booby pictures take very little energy, and the usage is going down dramatically.
Training light, open models like Deepseek or Qwen or SDXL takes very little energy, as does running them. The GPU farms they use are tiny, and dwarfed by something like an aluminum plant.
What slurps energy is AI Bros like Musk or Altman trying to brute force their way to a decent model by scaling out instead of increasing efficiency, and mostly they’re blowing that out of proportion to try the hype the market and convince them AI will be expensive and grow infinitely (so people will give them money).
That isn’t going to work very long. Small on-device models are going to be too cheap to compete.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kc978dg
So this is shit, they should be turning off AI farms too, but your porn images are a drop in the bucket compared to AC costs.
TL;DR: There are a bazillion things to flame AI Bros about, but inference for small models (like porn models) is objectively not one of them.
The problem is billionaires.
I don’t disagree with you but most of the energy that people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them. Once they are trained it is fast to get what you need out of it, but making the next version takes a long time.
Only because of brute force over efficient approaches.
Again, look up Deepseek’s FP8/multi GPU training paper, and some of the code they published. They used a microscopic fraction of what OpenAI or X AI are using.
And models like SDXL or Flux are not that expensive to train.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but they can get away with it because being rich covers up internal dysfunction/isolation/whatever. Chinese trainers, and other GPU constrained ones, are forced to be thrifty.
And I guess they need it to be inefficient and expensive, so that it remains exclusive to them. That’s why they were throwing a tantrum at Deepseek, because they proved it doesn’t have to be.
Bingo.
Altman et al want to kill open source AI for a monopoly.
This is what the entire AI research space already knew even before deepseek hit, and why they (largely) think so little of Sam Altman.
The real battle in the space is not AI vs no AI, but exclusive use by AI Bros vs. open models that bankrupt them. Which is what I keep trying to tell /c/fuck_ai, as the “no AI” stance plays right into the AI Bro’s hands.
This is a specious argument.
Once a model has been trained once they don’t just stop training. They refine and/or start training new models. Showing demand for these models is what has encouraged construction on 100s of new datacenters.
people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them
that’s absolutely not true. In fact, most people who complain don’t even know the difference.
I’m really OOTL when it comes to AI GHG impact. How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
How do their outputs stack up to traditional emitters like Ag and industry? I need a measuring stick
How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
These two things are so different.
Streaming services are extremely efficient; they tend to be encode-once and decode-on-user’s-device. Video was for a long time considered a tough thing to serve, so engineers put tons of effort into making it efficient.
Crypto currency is literally designed to be as wasteful as possible while still being feasible. “Proof-of-work” (how Bitcoin and many other currencies operate) literally means that crypto mining algorithms must waste as much computation as they can get away with doing pointless operations just to say they tried. It’s an abomination.
I legit don’t know much about tech, and it ts showing. I didn’t know streaming was so efficient.
What I. Trying to get at (I still have to read that article in the parent comment) is that how is AI any worse than crypto? As far as I can tell crypto impact, while bad, was relatively minor and it drastically decreased in popularity; it’s kind of logical AI does the same, unless it’s impact is way higher.
Meanwhile we have cargo ships burning bunker crude .
If you are expecting AI to not have much impact and turn out to be a bubble, then I guess there isn’t much reason to believe it it will have much environmental impact. If you expect AI to not be a fad, then yeah it could have big environmental consequences if we can’t find renewable power and coolant. If AI is all it is hyped up to be, then it would dwarf the rest of humanity’s power consumption down to a footnote. So it really depends on how bullish you are about AI, or at least how bullish you expect the market to be going forward.
Regarding proof-of-work crypto, well, bitcoin is currently at its all-time high in terms of value, exceeding USD$100k/BTC. So I’m not sure I exactly buy the idea that it’s less popular, though perhaps people aren’t reporting on it as much. If the power consumption of crypto has levelled off, which I don’t know if it has, then it might be because it’s expensive to build a mining rig and the yield goes down over time as more bitcoin is mined. (It’s presumably true of other proof-of-work crypto, too, but as more BTC is mined, the marginal yield of mining more BTC decreases.)
Honestly, all of this is really interesting. It’s a whole side of humanity that I very much do NOT think about or follow. I previously spent the last decade much, much, too busy stomping through the forest, so I really didn’t follow anything during that time. A new game or phone came out? sure, cool, I might look that up. When I finally emerged from the fens, sodden and fly-bitten, I was very much out of the loop, despite the algorithm trying to cram articles about NFTs, crypto etc., down my throat. I actually tend to avoid tech stuff because it’s too much of a learning curve at this point. I get the fundamentals, but beyond that I don’t dig in.
I agree with you on the bubble - it depends on the size. I guess my original take is how could it actually get bigger than it is? I just don’t see how it can scale beyond begin in phones or used in basic data analysis/like another google. The AIs can definitely get more advanced, sure, but with that should come some sort of efficiency. We’re also seemingly on the cusp of quantum computing, which I imagine would reduce power requirements.
Meanwhile (and not to detract from the environmental concerns AI could pose) we have very, very real and very, very large environmental concerns that need addressing. Millions of cubic metres of sulphur are sitting in stockpiles in northern Alberta, and threatening the Athabasca river. That’s not even close to the top of the list of things we need to focus on before we can get out in front of the damage AI can cause.
We’re in a real mess.
The AIs can definitely get more advanced, sure, but with that should come some sort of efficiency.
This is what AI researchers/pundits believed until roughly 2020, when it was discovered you could brute force your way to have more advanced AIs (so-called “scaling laws”) just by massively scaling up existing algorithms. That’s essentially what tech companies have been doing ever since. Nobody knows what the limit on this is going to be, but as far as I know nobody has any good evidence to suggest that we’re near the limit of what’s going to be possible with scaling.
We’re also seemingly on the cusp of quantum computing, which I imagine would reduce power requirements.
Quantum computing is not faster than regular computers. Quantum computing has efficiency advantages for some particular algorithms, such as breaking certain types of encryption. As far as I’m aware, nobody is really looking to replace computers with quantum computers in general. Even if they did, I don’t think anyone has thought of a way to accelerate AI using quantum computing. Even if there were a way to, it would presumably require quantum computers like, 15 orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones we have today.
We have very, very real and very, very large environmental concerns that need addressing.
Yeah. I don’t think AI is really at the highest level of concern for environmental impact, especially since it is looking plausible it will lead to investing in nuclear power, which would be a net positive IMO. (Coolant could still be an issue though.)
How do they brute force their way to a better algorithm? Just trial and error? How do they check outcomes to determine that their new model is good?
I don’t expect you to answer those musings - you’ve been more than patient with me.
Honestly, I’m a tree hugger, and the fact that we aren’t going for nuclear simply because of smear campaigns and changes in public opinion is insanity. We already treat some mining wastes in perpetuity, or plan to have them entombed for the rest of time - how is nuclear waste any different?
The UC paper above touches on that. I will link a better one if I find it.
But specifically:
streaming services
Almost all the power from this is from internet infrastructure and the end device. Encoding videos (for them to be played thousands/millions of times) is basically free since its only done once, with the exception being YouTube (which is still very efficient). Storage servers can handle tons of clients (hence they’re dirt cheap), and (last I heard) Netflix even uses local cache boxes to shorten the distance.
TBH it must be less per capita than CRTs. Old TVs burned power like crazy.
Also, one other thing is that Nvidia clocks their GPUs (aka the world’s AI accelerators) very inefficiently, because they have a pseudo monopoly, and they can.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and likely wont in the future.
Thx for doing the math
Not only are they cheaper than AC, but doing the math shows that they are more energy efficient than a human doing the same work, since humans operate at around 80-100W, 24 hours a day. (Assuming that the output is worth anything, of course.)
let’s not use the term “efficiency” with humans making art, please. you’re not helping anyone with that argument, you’re just annoying both sides.
Well if humans could run on coal it would be a valid argument…
Humans essentially do run on fossil fuels. Modern agriculture is very energy intensive.
Humans at least run on renewable energy.
The computer you draw your art on, not so much. Reject modern art, embrace traditional carvings and cave paintings!
I think that’s going a bit far. ML models are tools to augment people, mostly.
Oh for sure. But if (for example) an artist can save time by tracing over an SDXL reference image, that is energy-efficient as well as time-efficient, despite most people claiming the contrary.
Also they can build nuclear power generators for the data centers but never for the residential power grid.
There’s no money in selling residential energy.
Laughs in total recall
Can we not all just organise to go and shut these places down?
Could someone please help me save some power and just post the image with the 5tits so I don’t need to have it regenerated de novo?
I don’t think it follows that the people asking you to reduce your AC usage are also the same people able to control AI power consumption.
We have got a stop treating our institutions as monoliths so we can effectively interact with the individual pieces that construct them. If you go into a place of power ready to heap all your gripes with the system on the single person who’s only job is to allow you to interface with that system, you’re not going to make headway.
Energy providers should install smart meters that shut off the power to AI server farms instead of residential air conditioners during peak loads.
what would you do if you asked llm master what fourier means and municipal grid said “no” ☝️😑
I mean it’s usually the power utility telling you to do that and they’re the ones making deals with the data centers so I think the criticism is fairly directed.
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Climate change is unstoppable. Humanity is mostly doomed very, very soon.
So, fuck y’all, my two window units are running 24/7 @ 69F for the foreseeable future.
At what point is self-defence justifiable?
I’d need clarification…
If by “climate change” you mean societal climate, then yes, i’d see your point. Society feels more angry year after year, it’s definitely heating up.
If you mean “climate change” as is typically understood, then no. The solar revolution is progressing quite swiftly. We’re probably gonna reduce CO2 emissions by 50% in 2032 (my personal guess).
lol
The rapid progress of renewables is barely treading water next to increases in demand. Global fossil fuel consumption has still increased despite lots of that new solar and wind capacity added over the last few years.
The way i see the data renewables are going to have to speed up quite a bit faster to actually start replacing fossil fuels in a significant way. But problem is the fossil fuels will then just get cheap and people will find new or increased other uses for them - so the emissions will probably still happen from one source or another however many solar panels get added.
Oil, and to a lesser extent natural gas, are such a convenient source, store and means of transporting energy that no way are all humans going to leave it underground or put it back down there.
The best proven method to reduce GHG emissions seems to be widespread economic recession (demand reduction) - but the bounce back has been pretty quick after 2008 and 2020 - so it’s not all that beneficial in the medium to long term. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-change-in-energy-related-co2-emissions-1900-2024
Lets cut to the chase and just reduce overall consumption and change shopping habits (think five times before you buy something). The only people who will be sorry of this in the long term will be billionaires (there will be some withdrawal syndrome for people who use shopping as an anti-depressant).
absofuckinglutely, take some simple pleasures out of the stuff wherever you are. Overground, underground wombling free . . .
You’re not saving the planet. Obviously, Earth will continue, but, without the human parasites.
Classic neo-liberalism - privatize the benefits, socialize the costs.
Corporations : “We should get to gobble all power with our projects… and you should have the personal responsibility to reduce power usage even though it would - at best - only improve things at the very edges of the margins… and then we can get away with whatever we want.”
Just like with paper straws. You get crappy straws and they hope you feel like you’re helping the environment (even though the plastic straws account for like 0.00002% of plastic waste generated) … meanwhile 80% of the actual pollution and waste being generated by like 12 corporations gets to continue.
I feel like i’ve read a very similar argument somewhere recently, but i have difficulty remembering it precisely. It went something like this:
- If a company kills 5 people, it was either an accident, an unfortunate mishap, a necessity of war (in case of the weapons industry) or some other bullshit excuse.
- If the people threaten to kill 5 billionaires, they’re charged with “terrorism” (see Luigi Mangione’s case).
Two wrongs don’t make a right. And if your neighbour is dosing the neighbourhood with gasoline while wildfires are on the horizon, you smack him, you don’t go and get your own can.
Great, now this might work with my neighbor, but how exactly do I smack mega corps and the state? Are we talking eco terrorism here or do you have some other idea that hasn’t been tried in the last decades?
I mean, climate change isn’t new but humanity still fucks up the planet and that does not seem to change. Why should we have to sweat at home while professionalized greed burns down everything around us? I will gladly take individual responsibility, but not alone.
Actually, a failing power grid here and there might act as a wake-up call and then we can start talking about solutions, not just symptomatic treatment.
Talking about direct action or even a mildly disruptive protest will probably get you moderated here, and in trouble in real life. It feels like the only options “allowed” are stern words. At least a progressive like Zohran won the primary in NYC, but we’ll need a lot more of that to make a difference.
On the other hand, Luigi is considered by many a hero.
Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps, destroy all private jets, ban recreational flights and power AI responsibly or not at all.
ban recreational flights
No. Either ban all flights (excluding medical) or none. Otherwise, it will be something only available to those gambling the system.
People have family they should be allowed to see and work they need to travel for.
Yup like my meeting in the Bahamas
If your meeting requires you to go to the Bahamas, so be it. But there are doctors and nurses that have been travelling around the world, educators that travel, carers, archeologists. Yes, some will attempt to game the system, but there’s a lot of good people doing vital work that need to travel.
Man, this is one I’ve tried to wrestle with multiple times. I feel like there are monumental benefits to trans-Atlantic/trans-Pacific recreational flights (really just most long international flights). Banning those would almost certainly increase feelings of isolation, and probably make the already-rampant xenophobia plaguing the world even worse. There really aren’t viable alternatives to flying for getting across a multi-thousand-mile-wide ocean - boats are too slow for the average person, and building trains over the ocean is impractical. Maybe the focus should be on making planes more environmentally friendly, instead of outright banning them?
The thing is tourism does more damage than good, hence saying frig recreational flights. If people are determined to travel, make them sign up to educational holidays.
Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps
Aren’t traditional AC’s (assuming you are somewhere where AC is a thing used to cool the air) already heat pumps?
In my attempt at brevity, I articulated myself wrong, totally my bad. I would like the old school systems replaced with either air source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps, backed up with on-site solar and batteries. Modern heat pump systems can heat and cool and are much more efficient than AC as generally installed.
An AC is an “air heat pump”. The only difference between an AC and what we call a “heat pump” is a reversing valve, which can send refrigerant the other way to heat the interior instead of cooling it.
They’re literally the same thing.
They’re literally the same thing.
A traditional air conditioner provides only cooling by moving heat out of your home, primarily contributing to summer electricity peaks. In contrast, a heat pump offers both heating and cooling by simply reversing the refrigerant flow, making it a more versatile and energy-efficient solution for year-round comfort. While heat pumps increase overall electricity demand by electrifying heating, they also shift energy consumption patterns, creating a new winter peak for the grid to manage. However, this increased electrical load presents an opportunity for demand response, allowing smart heat pumps to adjust usage during peak times to balance the grid. Ultimately, widespread heat pump adoption, powered by a decarbonising electricity supply, is crucial for reducing fossil fuel reliance and achieving a greener energy system, albeit requiring significant grid infrastructure upgrades.
Is this an AI-generated response? On a post demonizing AI? Lol bold
That’s the only definitional difference. In practice there are other differences. My modern cold climate heat pump has a variable speed compressor whereas my previous traditional AC did not. The variable speed allows the system to ramp up and down on both heating and cooling, letting the system run all the time even at a very low level when the demand is low.
The traditional AC’s single speed compressor ended up doing a lot of short cycling when cooling demand was low and shutting down completely when cooling demand was too high (to prevent overheating and compressor damage). The variable speed compressor of the modern heat pump is designed for continuous operation over many hours, even when the temperature outside is extremely high, without overheating. I believe it’s able to back off the compressor speed when the cooling demand exceeds capacity though I have yet to see the system be unable to keep up, despite the unit itself being a lot smaller than the old AC.
I genuinely think the oversimplification of what a heat pump is and how it compares to AC is malignant. It’s like comparing a rickshaw to a bullet train.
The efficiency gains from an air source heat pumps are on the heating cycle, not the cooling cycle, since you are moving heat around instead of having to generate heat via combustion or big heating elements. When acting as an air conditioner, the efficiency is the same.
Ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) are generally the most efficient, achieving 350-500% efficiency by leveraging stable underground temperatures, though they have higher installation costs. Air source heat pumps (ASHPs) are also highly efficient at 250-400%, extracting heat from the air, but their performance can be affected by extreme outdoor temperatures. In contrast, a traditional gas boiler for heating is around 90-95% efficient, while separate air conditioning units cool, but neither offers the combined, high-efficiency performance of a heat pump. Therefore, for overall energy savings and reduced environmental impact, heat pumps are the superior choice for both heating and cooling.
Most domestic flights should be replaced by highspeed rail anyways.
Agreed
AC systems are heat pumps so I’m not sure what you mean there.
Agreed, but this is like comparing your neighbor burning 1 million acres to you having a bonfire. The scale is the problem. We should absolutely take individual responsibility; however, our small impact is only felt when we band together.
our small impact is only felt when we band together
It is also offset immediately when unregulated corporations use the saved energy to sell us the next dumb thing.
It is not offset. If you bend together you don’t buy the next dumb thing.
Bending together is the only thing that can create change, billionaires won’t.
Bending together
Meanwhile I’m down town I’m my city cleaning windows in office buildings that are 75% empty but the heat or ac is blasting on completely empty floors and most of the lights are on.
The HVAC does serve a purpose, it reduces the moisture in the building, which would otherwise ruin the building
Didn’t some legislation come out banning making laws against AI? (which I realize is a fucking crazy sentence in the first place- nothing besides rights should just get immunity to all potential new laws)
So the cities aren’t even the bad guys here. The Senate is.
It’s both. Also don’t let the house, supreme court, or the orange buffoon and his cabinet get out of culpability. Checks and balances can work … when they all aren’t bought and paid for by rich fucks.
I meant to mention the other ones at fault, but I edited what I was typing and backspaced that part.
Thanks
From what I can tell it got stripped from the Senate version that was just approved. They barely have the heads to pass it, so they aren’t going to play volleyball to add it back.
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I think the higher demand for AC is predictable as well, no? Climate change has been known to be a thing for a while now… And every home could have solar to offset the local powersurges (which would lead to problems as well, but what I am trying to say is: its not our fault that the state has not prepared)
I’d love solar to offset electric costs but realistically i don’t have a way to get solar. Contacted 4 companies who all told me the shape of my roof is not good for solar (1890’s house with several extensions not thinking about roof space.
In Germany there is a discussion going on about a stock exchange price for electricity. Ie cheaper price during overproduction and higher price during high demand. Then you don’t need solar to benefit from everyone else having solar. Then you could e.g. “just” fill up a local battery with cheap electricity and use it when power is expensive.
You don’t have rates like that? In Austria you can just get a rate that will charge the 15 minute spot market price. That can be even negative during the day, but then also might be quite high at other periods.
That would be a solution. Public trading of energy by power companies throughout the day has existed for decades (see e.g. EPEX spot). It’s just a matter of exposing these dynamic prices to consumers. This already exists in the Netherlands.
In the US, some of us already have dynamic pricing options available, and they end up with thousand dollar power bills sometimes, because this is America!
AI datacenters are very far from the typical electrical load of a cloud datacenter, no existing data center has planned appropriately for this because we’re only now discovering the bad effects it’s having on the grid
Funnily enough AC usage is very easily modelled because it’s a well understood distributed load, directly linked to weather. Plus large modern buildings should be built with grid aware AC that adjusts load based on grid demand anyway. I know Siemens and Ericsson both have commercial solutions for that, so I imagine there’s more I don’t know about.
Even if it’s predictable, it’s still a big strain on energy production and transportation.
Let’s not forget billionaires in this consideration.
I have a crazy theory that requests like these will actually push people to care more about and take action on global warming.
