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So what's the cheapest way to generate and provide electricity for NYC?
There really isn't a "cheapest" way, since NYS forced ConEd and other ultitlies to divest themselves of power generation plants. So ConEd must buy juice from various sources. Some may have lower costs than others, but main problem usually always comes down to getting juice into NYC's grid.
Only if it already is operating. Building nuke plants is hellaciously expensive and takes forever. Natgas is much quicker and cheaper to get builtvand operating. But then there's fuel costs, which can fluctuate wildly.
I buy friman ESCO. As of my last bill, I didn’t see any huge jump.
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Originally Posted by BugsyPal
There really isn't a "cheapest" way, since NYS forced ConEd and other ultitlies to divest themselves of power generation plants. So ConEd must buy juice from various sources. Some may have lower costs than others, but main problem usually always comes down to getting juice into NYC's grid.
Yet another, “everyone knew this exact thing was going to happen but no one cared.” Thank god we moved, my Tesla can have all the juice she wants here.
These idiots are legislating you all into forced usage of electric appliances and vehicles, while simultaneously and intentionally driving up the cost of power. If you don’t think this is being done purposefully, I have a bridge to sell you. Two in fact.
I don't think natural gas utility companies are particularly less profit driven than electric utility companies and for the most part these are generally both publicly listed companies whose ultimate goal is to make money. Are they purposefully trying to sway things in one direction towards them rather than another? Absolutely, that is how that works. Is the way this happened still stupid and people are profiting off of this, yes, definitely. It's a lot of Cuomo snap decisions that helped lead to this though it's also a pretty global supply chain issue that factors into this as well.
That Tesla's neat. They've rolled out an incredibly clever heat pump systems around in mass production though it's so clever that I think it probably has some kinks to work out. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla or an offshoot of it directly or its employees in the next few years ends up creating a home use heat pump / HVAC system. Do you own your place? Are you possibly looking at solar and/or stationary storage?
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Originally Posted by nightcrawler
also, anyone that uses an electric space heater, that will consume more electricity.
Any type of appliance that has heat with electric will drive the price right up.
Just be me using my little space heater in my kitchen a few weeks drove my electric bill up an additional 30 bucks. So, the following month, I stopped using it, and it went back down.
But, the rates are still astronomical, none the less.
everything here in NYC is criminal, simply criminal, and our leaders of our nation both have their heads up thieir azzes and are doing absolutely nothing for the American people.
A space heater consumes a lot of power to heat things up. It's a resistance heater and not a heat pump as it'd be pretty weird to make a portable heat pump that runs standalone in a room without a source. Resistance heaters, like natural gas heaters, have a theoretical efficiency of 1 and get pretty close to it. So if they have similar efficiencies, then why does electrical resistance heating cost so much more? Bugsy essentially had the answer to that which is a huge chunk of our electricity generation for here is derived from natural gas generators. That conversion from natural gas to electricity at *best* is an operational efficiency of about 60% in a combined cycle generator which isn't necessarily what the source plant will be. You also have some transmission and distribution loss and so by the time you get to the space heater, even a good one operating close to a coefficient of performance of 1, you've already expended about twice the amount of natural gas for heating compared to using the natural gas directly. Now that's a *best* case scenario for electrical resistance heating, and in terms of actual practical usage, it's likely much lower and you can easily be consuming three times the amount of natural gas for the same amount of heating that piping that natural gas directly in would do. This means that if the cost of natural gas spikes as it has done as a global commodity, then that spike on just sheer natural gas supply hits someone with an electrical resistance heater at best doubly as hard and more likely closer to threefold.
This is very different in operation to a heat pump though. Heat pumps do generate heat themselves as the process of doing work itself generates heat. How it differs and how a heat pump works, similar to your air conditioner (and many heat pump designs can reverse and function as air conditioners as well) or refrigerator / freezer, is that its primary function is to *move* heat. This might sound counter intuitive because when it feels cold outside to you, you might start wondering, well, where's it getting the heat from? The answer is that there is still actual heat in the air as long as it's not at absolute zero which would be -459 degrees Fahrenheit. The thing is, the work to move heat gets harder and harder with a higher and higher temperature differential. However, for the temperatures we saw this past January and for what NYC's winter temperatures are on average and the extremes it gets, that's generally not an issue because getting to a pretty toasty interior temperature like 85 degrees from the average we had just this past January would have had around a COP of 4 with a modern air-source heat pump which is four times the amount of heat for the amount of energy used.
Now you may then reference the cost of running air conditioners in the summer which can be pricey--so why does a heat pump do better? In the case of cooling, the work that needed to be done in moving heat from your home out itself generates heat. It obviously generates less heat than the amount of heat moved otherwise A/Cs would just make things worse, so that still works out but it is more energy expenditure. Meanwhile, a heat pump in doing the work to move heat by dint of doing that work is also generating heat that can be used as well.
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Originally Posted by Esacni
Take the L.
Just a few weeks ago you called me "stupid" for claiming people would pay out of their ass running electric for heat in NYC. Of course, now it's not the RIGHT type of electric heating system. Total clown show.
Drop your inane heat pump argument. Heat pumps were never meant for -10 temperatures. They're great for FL or TX but not NYC winters unless you want to keep indoor temps at 50.
Do you think Germany, the greatest industrial power in Europe relies on Nat Gas to the tune if munching on Putin's dong because they're stupid? Per unit of energy, Nat gas is the most efficient ...by far.
I've repeatedly said resistance heaters are not a solution for replacement--it is specifically heat pumps that make sense. Depicting this as "Of course, now it's... " as if the argument has only recently changed from heat pumps being the better choice *is* actually stupid and mendacious--at least try to put some effort into being a weasel, yea? Heat pumps never being meant for -10 temperatures is ridiculous because they are already in places with -10 temperatures and lower and have been for a while now especially in East Asia where there are parts that get much colder than NYC does.
You literally don't understand how heat pumps work, right? Do you yell at your freezer for using the devil's physics and ask how this is possible when the ambient temperature is so much higher? You don't understand what a Carnot cycle is, right? You clearly have no STEMs training and wouldn't be able to hack it in a real engineering school. If you're going to have a fight with actual engineering and the laws of physics, then sure, have a losing battle against physical reality but I'm pretty sure it isn't going to bend for anyone.
Germany is interesting because they took a while to come around on heat pumps and it was and still is an industry that is dominated by East Asian manufacturers. People don't generally switch out their heating system unless there's an issue or it's a new construction so uptake had initially been slow especially with older, cheaper multi-unit dwellings. That's less the case in recent years, but it's not like construction and gut renovations are booming nonstop so a full changeover will take a while. Scandinavia, which is generally colder, generally moved a lot faster and earlier though some of that was an early dive into ground source heat pumps for SFHs.
Now if anyone reading this is someone getting screwed on their bills with an electrical resistance heater, the best path forward is probably to explore if you can get a heat pump installed. It'll likely bring down your electricity consumption to a quarter of what your resistance heater did in weather similar to last month's average and will likely bring it down even further for simply chilly days in the next couple of months ahead. It is a larger upfront capital cost to get one suitable for the lowest extremities of NYC winters, but it'll end up saving you a lot in a pretty short amount of time and it also likely replaces your air conditioner.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 02-11-2022 at 11:25 AM..
Mine went up significantly since last month and I haven't been using more. Ridiculous.
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