113
submitted 1 year ago by pizzaiolo@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Uranium3006@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

we need to be electrifying buildings today while we continue to develop and decarbonize the electric grid. also on all but the coldest days a heatpump powered by a natural gas power plant is more fuel efficient than burning the gas locally. technology connections did a few vids on the subject:

https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto

https://youtu.be/43XKfuptnik

https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI

[-] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I agree with you that electric is the future and maintaining two separate utility infrastructures to every building that can do the same thing is sorta silly.

Technology Connections is always fun, but it seems you might have glossed over where he discusses the drawbacks that mean a heat pump isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. It's just much better than most people realize and the technology gets better each year.

Where I live it gets too cold for a heat pump to work very well for weeks at a time in the winter so supplemental electric heat is a must if fully switching off the gas (and that poor heat pump will be having to defrost the coils a lot). The issue with that is natural gas is still a good bit cheaper than electricity (we use gas for water heating, and sometimes dryers too because of this). It is viable for a good chunk of people in many other areas though so moving in that direction is still worthwhile where is does work.

I'm not sure what you mean about burning the gas locally being less efficient though? Home furnaces are commonly around 95% efficient these days. Is a natural gas power generation plant (with transmission losses on top) operating at a level even close to that?

this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
113 points (97.5% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5243 readers
183 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS