badtension

Interesting, I would have thought in many cases it is maybe not trivial, but easily doable at worst. Do you have some personal experience with that?

Water heating, AC, fridges and freezers, maybe even EV charging (in some cases) could be done at any time during the 24 hour period, if setup with proper hysteresis.

Making thermostats that are aware of dynamic energy pricing or, better yet, are in part controlled by the energy company (I want my house to be 21-24 C, I don't care when the cooling happens) would give us massive flexibility.

All power hungry devices should at least have that capability (maybe other than the kettle, lol). This is literally a cost of $20 hardware in many cases.

I feel like this is one of the biggest missed opportunities. Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? Is a habit of doing the laundry at night worth more than additional millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere?

I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?

Dynamic energy pricing with smart power-hungry appliances controlled by the energy producer would be a great start.

I see, thank you for explaining!

Fair point about shared roadways that probably split communities.

Do kids attending the same school really live that far apart? Seems like a very long distance, especially in a suburbian neighbourhood.

Thanks for the info! What system / DE do you intend on using? What type of work do you do on your computer?

I was thinking about getting a wireless keyboard+mice and attach RPi at the back of my monitor to have a clean and very low-power setup.

I get the joke but let me just mention that wood campfire is one of the worst solutions (if done at scale). This may sound idealistic (like the other comments mentioned) but I think we just have to reduce our energy footprint and then many solutions will be green again.

One great example (some will say absurd and impractical) is just using energy whenever it is available, with minimum storage. That means cooking, heating water etc. during the day (or when the wind is high) and only using lighting and low-energy devices at night. Factories could work on a similar principle (producing more in the summer) but then we would have to rearrange a lot more stuff to suit the seasonal renewable energy production capabilities.

This may sound absurd but it only shows how much we are locked in our way of thinking about how reality is supposed to work, not what it is. There's no reason to have high quality on-demand electrical energy available 24/7/365 other than convenience. Convenience that fossil fuels brought us.

Why can't they just walk or bike to their friends? 2-3 km walking distance is perfectly fine, bike extends that range significantly (10 km at least). This was the case for me.

Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.

That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly.

We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.

Just nod and smile.

I've been washing dishes by hand my whole life and just recently got a dishwasher. When washing by hand pre-rinsing and soaking is essential so I kept doing that even after getting the machine, only recently discovering that I am wasting water this way.

Thanks for the tip about the old dishwashers.