[wavegeek]

The problem with your great ideas, and "great ideas"generally is the lack of proven numbers.

As the poster above you pointed out the capacity of LI batteries is tiny. Yet you tout car batteries as though that were a new idea and a meaningful solution. And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.

You also ignore the losses from your solutions. What is the round trip loss from heating up rocks and getting the energy back? It is huge. And you artfully forgot to mention all the equipment needed to get the energy back out in usable form such as electricity.

All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many. If you shut a factory down to spare the grid, then it is not producing. So all else being equal, you need more factories for the same production. Building and maintaining those extra factories takes labor, management, and energy.

Getting people to turn off air conditioning means that they are less comfortable, or perhaps unable to sleep, or unable to work. The South of the US more or less became viable economically due to air conditioning.

This is not unique to you, but I am really fed up with people spouting half-assed ideas and thinking that they constitute a solution.

As they said in the dot.com era - ideas are cheap.

[WalterBright]

> What is the round trip loss from heating up rocks and getting the energy back? It is huge. And you artfully forgot to mention all the equipment needed to get the energy back out in usable form such as electricity.

If you store the energy by heating the rocks, you can recover it to heat your house by simply blowing air over the rocks. No need to convert it to electricity, which would indeed be silly.

The same goes for air conditioning. Excess electricity could be used to cool the rocks, which then can be used to cool your house when electricity is expensive.

The detour through the rocks (or anything with thermal mass) costs next to nothing.

I am not talking about using the EV battery to run the house. I am talking about using the EV battery to run the EV. Simply charge it when electricity rates are cheaper. It's shifting the demand.

> thinking that they constitute a solution

They are perfectly and cheaply implementable, and are part of the solution.

> half-assed

I actually have a degree in mechanical engineering. You shouldn't be so hasty in your inferences.

[daddylongstroke]

I don't understand the animus in replies to your post. It's as if people want to deny that people like myself heat our homes in the winter by blowing air over hot water in a heat-exchanger. We can and many do heat that water during the day with the magic of the sun's rays or by burning wood (the only true renewable we have). Humans have been using thermal property of rock (not concrete, concrete doesn't match rock's efficiency) and water to heat ourselves and our homes for hundreds of years, and will likely continue to do so for hundreds more.

[eesmith]

> The South of the US more or less became viable economically due to air conditioning.

I don't think that's the right way to phrase it. The South was clearly economically viable before A/C. It's kinda like saying that New York City wasn't economically viable until the invention of the safety elevator.

Overall I agree with your views on "half-assed ideas". I want to elaborate on this one topic a bit more, because it presses a button of mine.

On thing A/C did was make it possible to build cheap homes following northern tastes and styles, on the assumption power would remain cheap. Northerners could move in without having to adapt their customs and practices much.

Southern vernacular architecture includes high ceilings (so the heat rises above the people), lots of windows (to let the air go through and heat escape), and with the house raised off the ground (so cooling air flows underneath). This describes the A/C-less Florida house I grew up in. An even more traditional design would have a wraparound porch, to provide extra shade and let the windows stay open even when it rains.

OTOH, A/C encouraged house designs which require A/C to be comfortable - a sort of co-dependency. These vernacular features make the A/C bill higher, so they weren't included in newer homes. I tried living in a Florida home designed for A/C, but without using the A/C. Not only was it much less comfortable, as you write, but we started getting mold because of the humidity. A house made for A/C doesn't have much air flow.

So I don't think the argument is simply 'getting people to turn off air conditioning', but 'getting people to design houses which are a better fit for the local climate and have better long-term sustainability.'

That's of course hard, and expensive.

It's also hard to change lifestyles to fit the climate. Eg, the dominant US culture doesn't appreciate or tolerate siestas, even if it's locally more appropriate.

Oh, and this isn't unique to the South. It's cheaper to build a frame house in Arizona, which requires A/C to be livable, than to build an house (like an adobe house) with thick walls that moderate the temperature fluctuations.

Nor is it just A/C. Earthship designs, for example, show what is possible ... for people who are willing to put more work into daily maintenance. Which is part of the lifestyle change that's hard to do.

Okay, depressing button. :)

[simiones]

One thing to note about the A/C issue is that, as global warming progresses, passive cooling will become strictly necessary for survival - most parts of the South will start reaching higher and higher wet bulb temperatures.

[ifdefdebug]

> And you artfully forgot to mention

No he didn't, the rocks are for asynchronous heating/air conditioning, all you need to get the energy back is a water pump or air blower and tubes.

Your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. All of those ideas are easy to do projects for individuals.

The only thing you need to implement on a global/national/regional scales is a spot market for electricity accessible for everyone. Then you can lean back and watch people implement all those simple ideas and many more.

All in all, your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. Those ideas are not "brilliant ideas" (btw you should learn about correct quoting). Of course those won't solve the problem all at once, but they will have a huge impact.

[bryans]

Try not to get suckered into the notion that all ideas are cheap. Bad ideas are cheap and come from a place of either arrogance or ignorance. Great ideas are not cheap, as they typically come from folks who expended the required effort to become a subject matter expert, which gives them foundational knowledge and a better view of the whole picture -- both at a high and granular level.

That said, the parent comment's ideas are bad and ignorant, for the reasons you mentioned and more.

[thelastgallon]

> That said, the parent comment's ideas are bad and ignorant, for the reasons you mentioned and more.

The parents comments are neither bad nor ignorant. They can be summarized as demand management.

Utilities hate demand management. If they run an efficient market with incentives to shift demand, profits drop. Their profits are based on cost, increasing costs is how they improve their margins. Same as healthcare, band-aids cost $1400 at a hospital. When profits are capped by regulation, this is the workaround.

Don't get suckered into fossil fuel narrative. All the narrative against any kind of progress comes from industry that benefits from status quo and regurgitated by media.

[bryans]

I never purported that fossil fuels are a good thing. In fact, I never mentioned them at all and was only discussing the concept of "ideas being cheap." Honestly, it's rather troll-ish and shameful that you've concocted this arrogant rant against an imaginary argument that nobody was making.

You also just bolstered my point about the OC's ideas being bad, because you admitted that the utility providers aren't motivated to do such a thing, which was the entire foundation of his argument -- that some imaginarily ethical regulatory organization is going to force utilities to be equally ethical, efficient and technologically progressive.

And just to be perfectly clear, using a pile of heated rocks as primary energy storage is beyond ridiculous and entirely ignorant of thermodynamics and physics in general.

So, yes, the ideas were both bad and ignorant.

[tga_d]

You're being unnecessarily confrontational. You're also incorrect: there are already utility providers that have started pricing based on load (my provider bases rates on season, day of the week, and time of day, updated annually, so a sort of aggregate estimate that I suspect will become finer grained in the coming years), and thermal energy storage via mass is a very common technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

edit to add more specific link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater

[bryans]

How exactly am I being unnecessarily confrontational? The OC constructed an entire argument based around something I never said. That is called gaslighting and is the very definition of confrontational, and I have every right to defend myself from it. For you to suggest that I should just accept being gaslit, is both absurd and its own form of gaslighting.

Also, you just made the exact opposite point of the OC in regards to rates, and then provided a link about thermal energy storage that proves the only point I made, which is its inefficiency[1] at small scale -- and at large scale it is not a pile of rocks inside every home.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Heat_st...

[WalterBright]

> using a pile of heated rocks as primary energy storage is beyond ridiculous and entirely ignorant of thermodynamics and physics in general.

Except there are many examples of such in common use. For example, passive solar houses use this technique.

> some imaginarily ethical regulatory organization is going to force utilities to be equally ethical, efficient and technologically progressive.

Current(1) regulatory organizations fix electricity rates. Electric utilities are already heavily regulated.

[bryans]

Again, just because people use the technique, doesn't make it the best or even most appropriate method. It is incredibly inefficient and no technology can make it more efficient, because it is limited by the laws of physics -- which you keep insisting don't matter for some reason.

And again, you're making a sweeping generalization about regulatory organizations that isn't even remotely true, and you have nothing to base it on. In the US alone, the majority of states have systems that combine both regulated and unregulated rates, and even in the states where the regulators decide on the rate, a utility can request rate increases at any time.

Your entire premise is based around some mystical altruism that doesn't actually exist in government or business.

https://content.next.westlaw.com/Document/Ieb49d7b91cb511e38...

[WalterBright]

> It is incredibly inefficient

Please elaborate how heating a rock, putting it in an insulated box, and taking it out of that box later to release it's heat to the air is "incredibly inefficient" compared to heating the air directly.

[labawi]

You are conflating physically and politically hard problems. It's hard to beat physics, but we absolutely should be talking about, considering and demanding practical yet politically hard solutions. All we have to do is ask, and the alternative is to quietly sink into an abyss.

[darkwater]

Not gonna argue on the rest but

> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.

well, actually car are parked and not used most of the time, even more during nights when there is no solar energy. And TBH this is my mid-term plan: solar panels to charge it by day and use its battery by night for lights and electric appliances (moving to an electric cold/heat pump for heating it's out of my budget currently, I'm on natural gas)

[thelastgallon]

Disclaimer: Founder of Electric Foundation (accelerate EV adoption), Conduit Foundation (require all new construction to be EV ready)

> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.

Most people drive about 20 - 40 minutes per day. In large cities, it is 2+ hours. The remaining 22 hours, EV is an energy sponge. Take the current peak load, produce more renewables than the peak, turn renewables to 11, absorb all the excess free energy. EV is primarily an energy storage device, some people take trips on them once in a while. None of this energy is wasted. There is no need to think of a round trip for this scenario. All energy for transportation can be free and clean, we are capturing excess production. Utilities are curtailing renewable production, this is a shame, we have built solar/wind farms, but not using free energy! This is a huge barrier for new renewables, producers have to consider growing curtailment.

> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many.

Utilities are a monopoly, guaranteed a cost + profit formula. Utilities increase their costs to increase the profit. We see the same formula play out in health care, hospitals charge $1,400 for a band-aid. Energy can be a lot cheaper, and zero. It is entirely possible for Utilities to pay us for using our electric cars storage, they provide the best grid stabilization and smooth out demand and supply curve, flattening the peak rates. Instead of paying 10 - 20x for peaker gas plants, why can’t Americans be paid? There is a nexus of Utilities (generators, producers, distributors) and jacking up capital costs.

> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea".

Because these are produced by the utilities. Economists and scientists are funded by the industry to write their view. This happened and continues to happen. [1]

Lead is a gift of God. [2], this view was supported by scientists, surgeon general, AMA, public health and nearly all Govt bodies. Industry sets the rules for all of us so they can continue to extract profits for as long as possible. With this rule, we are all poisoned by lead for ~100 years. Lead poisoning is permanent! "lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears. modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times" [4]. We not only have polluted ourselves, but made a permanent toxic change for all of humanity. For what? To make the richest people a little bit richer?

Koheo's rule (put in place by the industry) was used and continues to be used for thousands of other toxins.

"Using the Kehoe Rule, Ethyl Corporation was a winner in either situation: if its product was actually safe, Ethyl would be seen as a responsible party. If, however, its product was unsafe, it would take decades to demonstrate that with certainty. The process of getting to certainty could be prolonged by challenging the methods and results and calling for more data, and while it was going on the product would continue to generate profits. Kitman indicates that the strategy taken by the lead industry, referring to use of the Kehoe Rule, similarly "provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other(s)... for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty."[4] Kettering Laboratories under Kehoe's leadership also certified the safety of the fluorinated refrigerant, Freon, "another environmentally insensitive GM patent that would earn hundreds of millions before it was outlawed."" [3]

Innocent until proven guilty is for people. Should we use the same rule for stuff that harms us? How can we prove this harm when all the studies on harm are done only by the insiders?

The internet that we see today, all the things that are happening in the tech space directly result from the breaking up of AT&T monopoly. We went from circuit switched to packet switched networks, built the underlying networks to throw packets at each other."AT&T, a powerful gatekeeper, controlled innovation by controlling access to the resources needed to innovate – the wires – the physical layer of the telephone network. AT&T's view of Paul Baran's packet-switching design was: ‘It can't possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves.’ [5]

The current configuration of the grid is a creation of this utility nexus. We must break this monopoly. If we can figure out how to sling IP packets at each other, surely we can imagine a reconfiguration of the grid that will let us throw electrons at each other. This will result in upto a thousand dollars/month saved for all of us (residential use), as well as making all the energy clean and renewable. Forever.

---

[1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/industry-weaponizing-scie... [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.75.4.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe [3] https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/the-hour-of-lead.pdf [5] ATT and packet switched networks: https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/oucontent/view.php?...

[4] https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/... "Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears.

For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains–in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that “it is doubtful whether any part of the earth’s surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead.”

(edit: formatting)

[WalterBright]

This all reminds me of 18 months ago on HN when I pointed out how a Covid vaccine could be developed and released in 6 months.

Ridicule and condemnation was heaped upon me, all explaining how it simply must take 2 years at least.

And yet it was released 6 months later, more or less doing what I suggested.

I'm going to be proven right on this one, too :-)