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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?
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.
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.
Dude, take the L.
For heating purposes, Nat gas systems will be cheaper than electric for at least the next 50 years.
Itnets out at .47 cents perk kWh …it was about .30
You must be including delivery charges and taxes. The supply charge per kWh is what went up a lot. The delivery charge per kWh is within a penny or so (12.4 cents vs 13.5 cents/kWh). My supply charges went from 7.7 cents per kWh on the January bill to 18.8 cents per kWh on the February bill.
Yes , that is net …I take the total bill and divide by the kWh ..it was .30 cents , now .47 cents
When I compute it that way my bill went from .32 cents to .43 cents per kWh. I expect with all the bad publicity Con Ed will find a way to reduce supply charges for next month’s bill.
When I compute it that way my bill went from .32 cents to .43 cents per kWh. I expect with all the bad publicity Con Ed will find a way to reduce supply charges for next month’s bill.
We may get a cheaper rate since we are a very large building and also have gas heat.
But tenants don’t pay a gas bill
If natural gas is the reason electricity prices soared, why didn’t natural gas prices soar on the same bill? My gas price per therm went down slightly this month from last month. Maybe there is market manipulation going on by hedge funds in the futures market affecting prices (just a wild guess).
If natural gas is the reason electricity prices soared, why didn’t natural gas prices soar on the same bill? My gas price per therm went down slightly this month from last month. Maybe there is market manipulation going on by hedge funds in the futures market affecting prices (just a wild guess).
Cant say what they did but I invest in the commodity itself …it’s crazy how much it’s up.
It’s is up 100% since I am in it but I think it is up 400% over all .it just sky rocketed
Last edited by mathjak107; 02-11-2022 at 03:35 PM..
If natural gas is the reason electricity prices soared, why didn’t natural gas prices soar on the same bill? My gas price per therm went down slightly this month from last month. Maybe there is market manipulation going on by hedge funds in the futures market affecting prices (just a wild guess).
When I compute it that way my bill went from .32 cents to .43 cents per kWh. I expect with all the bad publicity Con Ed will find a way to reduce supply charges for next month’s bill.
They applied for another increase
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