2000-Watt Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society

by privong • 4 years ago

194 296 4 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

I don't see how this is possible with modern technology, unless you limit people to low power laptops or chrome books.

If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh [1]. That's already 1.2kwh over, without accounting for anything else.

I see the solution as providing renewable electricity at low cost, rather than reducing the amount of electricity.

[1] https://www.inchcalculator.com/watts-to-kwh-calculator/

mech987• 4 years ago

You are confusing the watt and the watt-hour. Running a 2000 watt load for 24 hours will use 48,000 watt-hours (48 kilowatt-hours).

smoldesu• 4 years ago

Your desktop is not going to spend 8 hours running at max TDP, even if you're gaming or doing CAD work. The majority of that time it will be close to idle, pulling no more than 40w from the wall (and thats if you have a poorly optimized system).

bwestergard2• 4 years ago

Watts are a unit of energy per unit time. So not like a fixed budget in dollars, but rather a recurring budget in dollars per hour. Obviously, our energy use varies a great deal over time (just as our monetary spending tends to), so we can smooth that out (amortize it) to get a rough idea of our average rate of energy use.

If you use a 400 watt computer all of the time your personal remaining energy budget is 1600 watts. I use a computer around 10 hours a day during the week, and three or four on weekend days (so around a third of the time). Amortized, that means I would be using on average around 133 watts on computing, if I used such a desktop. But I actually use a Thinkpad T420, and its consumption averages out to around 30 watts when in use (so amortized to 10 watts).

PopAlongKid• 4 years ago

I just checked my HP Pavilion business-class desktop purchase a couple of years ago, it has a 180W power supply.

thatfrenchguy2• 4 years ago

No-one uses 400w computers anymore for working though?

Gordonjcp• 4 years ago

No-one? Really? What do you do with your computer?

Tepix3• 4 years ago

First of all, your calculation is completely wrong. 400W * 8h would be 3,2kWh which is a lot less than 2000W * 24h = 48kWh per day that is advocated here.

Second, the Macbook Pro which i use 8 hours a day has a 140W power supply but I'm sure it uses less than 50W on average.

- 50W * 8h = 0,4kWh

- 2kW * 24h = 48kWh.

The laptop isn't going to be the problem! Heating OTOH uses lots of energy so good insulation is the key.

ginko• 4 years ago

It's shocking how hard of a time people have distinguishing watts from watt hours. Even in a forum aimed at technical people.

benj111• 4 years ago

On top of misusing watts and watt hours as already pointed out. The issue of computers is the embodied energy in actually producing it. So you're better off just using your existing pc for longer, that will make more difference.

nicolaslem• 4 years ago

The average person doesn't use desktop computers anymore, hell the younger generation barely use laptops.

Also a high end desktop computer might pull 400 W from the wall while gaming, but that's not something the average person does 8 hours a day. Light work on a desktop computer with a monitor should be around 80 W on average.

fomine3• 4 years ago

Measure is the best way to know how much energy actually used. Let's check your own computer.

rsynnott• 4 years ago

If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply.

Well, first of all, the 400w is a limit, not a _target_. A computer with a 400w power supply does not generally run at 400w. If it did, you'd notice it; that's not an insignificant amount of heat.

However, more importantly, you've misread the article significantly:

which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day)
Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh

So well within budget, then.

FabHK3• 4 years ago

400W is, well, 20% of 2000W.

lm284695• 4 years ago

If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply.

The average person doesn't have a desktop, let alone a 400w one, it's all phones and laptops these days

daneel_w6• 4 years ago

A 400 watt power supply doesn't consume 400 watts by just being powered on. It just means it can deliver 400 watts of power if necessary, sometimes briefly, sometimes continuously.

dredmorbius2• 4 years ago

Much the same as a 400 horsepower automobile isn't generating that output all the time, but can reach a peak output of that amount.

In the case of power supplies, both total capacity and durability are indicated by the power rating. I don't know what current thinking is, but recall when overspeccing the power supply was often recommended for reliability and cooling considerations.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

That's an astonishingly small minded and fractally incorrect take.

First 400W is peak not average.

Second Wh isn't W. 400W is 400/2000ths of 2000W

Third 500mW can provide a reasonable amount of compute for most tasks as evidenced by my 2 yo phone being a perfectly usable desktop when plugged into a monitor. The 10W to run peripherals vastly exceeds the compute needs and is mostly in the form of light being absorbed by an lcd. Before that I had a 6yo laptop that used around 3-10W including screen. Phone hardware is perfectly capable of gaming, local document editing, compiling, and even running small scientific workloads.

Fourth you're completely ignoring embodied energy, transport and climate control which are the things that actually matter.

Fifth. You can do things that aren't sit at a computer.

Sixth. A high power desktop isn't that common even amongst people who play new AAA games a lot.

Seventh. The attitude of 'we can't possibly deviate even miniscully from having everyone on earth follow my exact lifestyle (even the 90% of people who have no access to it) right down to one particularly wasteful aspect of it that has only been around for fifteen years in its current most wasteful form' is unfathomably small minded and entitled.

skot9000• 4 years ago

This wouldn’t really be necessary if we had cleaner power generation.

bwestergard2• 4 years ago

It's a quantitative question. How much cleaner can each energy source be made, what is a feasible energy mix, and which ecological and climate constraints are we trying to stay within? It seems 2000-watt vision provides realistic answers to these questions that are compatible with an overall improvement in human well being in the developed countries.

ZeroGravitas5• 4 years ago

Yeah, this talk of 'energy' rather than 'pollution' seems to be growing recently. Presumably some attempt to capitalise on the Russian gas crisis to undermine net zero goals and keep fossil fuels burning a tiny bit longer.

This group seems to get it as they're talking about reducing Primary Energy without reducing standard of living (mostly done by "electrifying everything") but I don't think that would be clear to most readers, who will just ignore the "same standard of living bit" and feel they are being oppressed.

prottog4• 4 years ago

most readers, who will just ignore the "same standard of living bit" and feel they are being oppressed.

I think this is an uncharitable view, but that aside, is that not a reasonable assumption for "most readers"? This group is exceptional in that they explicitly state maintaining the same standard of living as a goal. In what I know of most modern climate-related discourse, there are very few such mentions.

eternityforest3• 4 years ago

There's no pollution free energy. Even solar is not perfect, there's only so much land that is suitable.

If you don't focus on efficiency they might just invent new ways to use energy that don't really improve standard of living.

It's a lot easier to switch to renewables if you don't need as much energy in the first place.

Tepix3• 4 years ago

Power generation isn't the only thing causing issues.

Power consumption can also generate a lot of heat. I'm not sure how much of a factor it plays in the big picture.

supertrope2• 4 years ago

Almost none. Combustion heat is a rounding error compared to sunlight heat trapped by greenhouse gases.

elihu2• 4 years ago

Power generation creates a lot of heat too. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants usually all operate by boiling and recondensing water, and as a consequence they have cold water as an input and warm/hot water as an output. That's a problem for rivers. France recently had to reduce output on their nuclear reactors because running them full power would make the rivers unacceptably warm.

I suppose it's less of an issue if your power plant uses sea water as coolant.

thot_experiment• 4 years ago

This is absolutely doable, I've been off-grid for almost 3 years now with a very minimal setup and for the most part I have no complaints outside of a couple weeks in the dead of winter, and the one week that gets really really hot in the summer. I'm not sure how to calculate my total embodied energy but in terms of electricity I have never used more than 7kWh in a single day, which works out 300W and includes all of my computing needs as well as refrigeration, lighting, minor heating/cooling, some small amount of cooking and at least a couple lattes every day.

On the worst day in winter my consumption is usually ~1kWh, limited by solar production.

Tepix3• 4 years ago

Sounds interesting, are you writing down what you are doing somewhere?

brianwawok• 4 years ago

So easy enough if building a new small house or a cabin.

The US has many many houses with 4000+ square feet, and no good way to heat it cool outside if AC and a furnace. Are we going to bulldoze all existing houses to meet this goal? What’s the impact of that to the environment?

Forge36• 4 years ago

We can require higher standards for new houses. Renovating existing houses will need to focus on the worst ones first. Possibly at sale time.

evilduck• 4 years ago

Less dramatically they could also close some vents and doors.

ben_w2• 4 years ago

Four thousand square feet? That's more than ten times the area of the apartment I own back in the UK.

Big is generally easier to keep warm than small thanks to the square cube law, but even in pathological cases it's never harder when scaling up.

Even assuming that 4000 sq ft is spread over 4 levels, that's a ground area of just under 93 m^2, and even in Anchor Point Alaska [0] with 15% panels, that roof can make more on average than the other poster says they're using.

[0] This map doesn't go as far north as Anchorage: https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

Are we going to bulldoze all existing houses to meet this goal?

Nah, we can retrofit. There are more efficient means of heating/cooling, like mini-splits and heat pumps, insulation, geothermal, etc. With more local and energy-efficient methods (and better insulation) we can get much better efficiencies.

Back in the day, for heating you would have one or two fireplaces. The home was configured so that rooms would get progressively colder away from the heat source. You wouldn't heat the whole home, just one or two rooms, unless there was a special occasion, and then you'd open all the doors. For passive cooling, house facing was critical, as were ventilation, cross-breezes, and later on fans. Homes located in places with extreme temperature shifts were designed to open or close up more or less over the seasons, although they were never "efficient" as they often had no insulation.

wongarsu2• 4 years ago

4000+ square feet

For reference, that's 370m². In European terms that's probably double what you would expect for a typical family of four.

lotsofpulp3• 4 years ago

4,000 sq ft is a 95th percentile home in the US.

https://www.frugalfringe.com/calculators/compare-your-homes-...

immibis8• 4 years ago

Just spray the walls full of aerogel using a process that hasn't been invented yet. Optionally, board half the windows (with aerogel).

homerowilson2• 4 years ago

My partner and I have been living "off grid" using PV + battery for electricity for the last 5 years in the Appalachian mountains. We track energy use meticulously. We try to use mostly wood heat in winter, but also have a buried propane tank for supplemental heat and hot water in winter. So that is arguably not fully off grid? We have a 2,400-sq. ft. A-frame house with R-52 insulation in most walls (closed-cell + batt) and low-e glass windows (but, alas, lots of windows). We mostly cook with electric or the woodstove in winter. Our woodstove is a massive, pretty efficient soapstone masonry stove central in the house by design. South-facing windows are backed by local stone floors that capture and radiate heat in winter. The house is angled to allow sun to enter windows in winter and block sun in summer for passive heating/cooling.

The two of us use just under 5kWh / day average electricity. Our big energy use is heat in winter though! Here is the breakdown:

5kWh/day electric * 365 days = 1825 kWh/year electrons

2.5 cords wood (mostly oak) = 17584 kWh/year wood heat

300 gal. liquid propane = 8400 kWh/year propane heat

That's a total of ~27800 kWh/year for the two of us including heat. That's about 76 kWh/day or 38 kWh/day per person on average. *This includes charging my e-bike for my work commute--but we also have a gas car so not nearly all transportation energy costs.[edited to add this]

I can't see any way to go much lower than that without freezing in the winter. 2 kWh/day seems crazy low to me.

norenh• 4 years ago

The article mentions "no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) by the year 2050, without lowering their standard of living" so it is not 2kWh/day but 2kWh/hour. You are already below it in your household.

realreality5• 4 years ago

The easiest way to go lower is to live in a smaller house. Two people don't need 2,400 square feet.

archi422• 4 years ago

If you aimed to reduce your heat requirements further you can either improve the insulation or reduce your living space (or add a person to improve efficiency :P).

For comparison, we're currently working on our home (bought last year around this time). The new insulation will be U=0.1455 for walls & roof (R-68?) and U=0.29 to the basement. I don't recall the values for windows & the front door. We'll also replace oil with a heat pump and add a ventilation system with heat exchanger. And we only have 1500sqft for two (no additions planned). That will probably be still miles away from those 2kWh/d/person, but much better than the status quo (~2.5kW of heat alone, per person).

Obviously you're already in a good ball park, but GPs value of 2kWh/d/person is just really amazing.

homerowilson2• 4 years ago

as others pointed out i misread the article, which says 2kwh per hour. indeed that is easily do-able.

calaphos• 4 years ago

I can't see any way to go much lower than that without freezing in the winter. 2 kWh/day seems crazy low to me.

Apart from insulation energy required for heating changes massively with local climate and scales directly with living space. So directly comparing those numbers without additional information is quite meaningless.

Here in Germany, which seems to have a roughly similar climate, ~120kwh/m2 and year is the average for a detached home. Modern buildings are usually a lot less though, 30-50 kWh/m2year seems standard. With specialised construction ('passive house') and heatpumps 10 kWh/m2year is well feasible.

badpun• 4 years ago

I can't see any way to go much lower than that without freezing in the winter.

Since your house is very large for just two people, you could occupy only a fraction of it, and heat only that part. Or, just move to a smaller house.

bruckie• 4 years ago

The article suggests aiming for 2 kWh per hour (why don't they just say 2 kW?), not 2 kWh per day. So you're already there: 38 kWh/person/day = 1.6 kW/person

I'm not entirely sure if the article intends to measure embodied energy, though, which your calculations don't capture.

socialist_coder• 4 years ago

low-e glass windows South-facing windows are backed by local stone floors that capture and radiate heat in winter.

Have you done any analysis or testing on low-e vs normal glass windows in the wintertime? In summer, obviously you want the low-e glass to block the radiant energy. But in the winter, you'd want to allow that radiant energy through, which the low-e glass is not doing.

It seems like low-e glass is only good for summer, and not winter. Have you put any thought into this? Maybe I am missing something crucial about the situation though.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how to calculate my total embodied energy

It's probably dominated by your vehicle if you have one (decent rule of thumb is abkut equal to the fuel you'd put through an ICE of the same size in a given time)

lotsofpulp3• 4 years ago

It is dominated by the infrastructure around the vehicle.

Personal vehicle means space to park it. Space to park it means things are further spread out. This leads to a few inevitabilities:

Things being further spread out means walking and public transit are less feasible.

Individual vehicles means insufficient political support for infrastructure for walking, cycling, and public transit.

The mass required for living (water, food, energy, trash, sewage) has to travel further, and energy = force * distance.

Of course, people’s desire to have backyards and space in general contributes to even more spreading out, but individual cars go hand in hand since they enable being able to consume more space.

In other words, there is no getting around the fact that energy and distance scale with each other, so anything that allows one to consume more space, and hence cause mass to travel more distance, has a multiplier effect on energy consumption.

turtlebits• 4 years ago

If you're off-grid, it's generally because you have to, and you reducing energy consumption is a must.

That said, I have an off-grid office (w/ ~5kw of storage and 1.5kw of solar) and it has definitely changed the way I use energy at home, and what my expectations for my next home will be.

hedora2• 4 years ago

Huh. We're absolutely crushing this at our house. We averaged 486 watts per person in the worst month this year so far. I cheat and charge the car at work, but even when I commute every day (40 miles round trip, half-mile elevation change), it's only half our energy consumption, so we're easily below 1kw per person. I'm not including embodied carbon of stuff we buy, but still...

We did buy energy efficient everything: Induction range, hybrid heat pump water heater, spent extra on insulation, heat pump furnace, LED lights, medium-wattage desktop computer, high MPGe EV, etc.

However, we live in a normal US house with few compromises (though we don't need air conditioning or heating most days, due to the local climate).

It makes me wonder how the average US household is at 12KW. That's roughly two of our house's air conditioners running full blast, per person, 24 hours a day.

codefined• 4 years ago

The number also appears to include 'upstream' energy usage, things like how much energy was used to transport food to you. How much energy to produce the items you consume. I imagine raw household electrical usage is only a small fragment of this.

johngalt2• 4 years ago

wonder how the average US household is at 12KW

If you've eliminated transportation and heating that is #1 and #2 for most people's energy consumption. Third place would likely be air-conditioning, and you've eliminated that too.

hedora2• 4 years ago

I’m including transportation and heating/cooling.

Even if we kept the thermostat at 120F in the winter and 32F in the summer, we’d still be under 3kw per person (due to our furnace being on 100% of the time and never reaching temperature).

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

Food (and discretionary transport) is the second-highest number (1100w of 5100w) in their Swiss energy use table, between heat and electricity.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

The 12kW includes producing and shipping that car battery every 7 years, and the fossil fuel derived fertilizer on the corn that feeds the beef you eat. And the distillation of the tonnes of ultra pure water required to make your phone. And so on.

But yes. It is relatively trivial to come closer to a sustainable level than the US average.

mikewarot• 4 years ago

There's more to this than just energy, we're all about to get a very strong lesson in the fact that fertilizers require fossil fuels as chemical feedstock. The Ukraine conflict has already lead to a steep drop off in the availability of fertilizers for many countries across the globe. Those will result in greatly reduced harvests and food scarcity.

The next few years are to be very rough, and nothing can be done to fix it. Deglobalization will make things even worse for countries that can't produce or purchase enough fuel, food or fertilizers.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

Luckily you can make them from sunlight as well (either through PV or sustainable agriculture)

Unluckily none of our governments seem to have had the forethought to either make the massive capital investment required for the former or the even bigger labour and knowledge investment to do the latter when this became obviously important.

knoebber2• 4 years ago

I'm living/working remotely off grid with a solar panels, batteries, and a 2000w inverter. It's comfortable. I usually have a few lights, the wifi router, a monitor, laptop charger, and a fridge plugged in. This comes out between 100w and 300w, so I have room to spare for bigger items like power tools.

I do cheat by using a propane range for cooking and wood for heat. At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are.

bob10292• 4 years ago

At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are.

I know for a fact that the induction cooktop is the epitome of efficiency. Virtually every watt that passes through the switching electronics and coils winds up somewhere in the cookware.

I've got a Breville control freak and a 750w microwave oven as my emergency cooking gear for when I am stuck on solar battery backup.

jollyllama• 4 years ago

Have you looked into home biogas digesters? They can turn waste into cooking fuel.

knoebber2• 4 years ago

I haven't, I'll check them out, thanks!

bombcar6• 4 years ago

Pressure and slow cookers are beasts for energy efficiency - pressure winning because they’re on for shorter time, but slow cookers can do things too (especially if you have “waste solar” during the day).

bob10292• 4 years ago

I had a non-optional experience along this axis living thru the 2021 Texas grid crisis.

Being in the gulf coast region automatically makes it nearly impossible to fit a 2kW budget during the summer (unless you live in a large walk-in freezer), but during the winter I was able to get down to 800 watts continuous for a period of a few days. This included my computer, fridge, some lights and central furnace blower. The furnace is kind of cheating though - replacing the natural gas with a heat pump would instantly blow my 2kW budget all on its own. That said, you could probably get really close if you tried to hit the target with a modern heat pump and good insulation throughout.

The only reason I voluntarily subjected myself to this was because I was being billed $9/kWH thru Griddy (a wholesale, real-time rate provider) during the entire, multi-day incident. I did run a one-off load of laundry that probably cost me ~$50.

Requiring use of variable rate energy providers and forcing consumers to adapt habits to the available resources seems like one way to get people to pay attention to how much energy various things consume. It also seems like an effective way to mitigate one-off generation shortfalls.

Gravityloss3• 4 years ago

I come from a country where the average temperature is the same as in a refrigerator.

I sometimes think it would be a lot easier to just move most people away from here... at least those living in big badly insulated electrically heated houses. Some pensioners actually do move to Spain, maybe visit the summer cottages every now and then (when it's too hot in Spain and the cottage doesn't need heating). Birds certainly follow the seasons.

I guess the same applies to very hot climates. You could move away for the summer at least, if not completely.

bombcar6• 4 years ago

In both places you may get most of the benefits from moving down - underground rooms mitigate temperatures.

etothepii3• 4 years ago

An interesting question springs to my mind. How does the carbon omissions of having a summer and winter house and flying between them compare to heating the summer house in winter or cooling the winter house in summer.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

Being in the gulf coast region automatically makes it nearly impossible to fit a 2kW budget during the summer (unless you live in a large walk-in freezer),

Metric R5 insulation is quite achievable, and you don't need to keep things at a perfect 24C year round in the whole building.

I live in an area that has plenty of 35-40C days and have never used more than 1kW on average even in a poorly insulated rental. On the really bad days you just cool one room.

Also the 2kW is entire primary energy (ie. including fuel and the energy to drill for and refine the fuel and make the AC etc. etc.). In a western country it's almost impossible to get your share of the total energy budget that low because you likely are not allowed to go many places without being in a car (or travelling 5x as far and waiting 10 minutes to cross each road) and the shops will all be blasting AC with the doors open.

perilunar• 4 years ago

I did run a one-off load of laundry that probably cost me ~$50.

So ~5kWh for a load of washing? Use a cold wash and a clothes line instead of the tumble dryer and you'd be well under a single kWh.

johngalt2• 4 years ago

Aiming at the wrong goal. A "10kw society" on solar or nuclear is better than "2kw society" on coal.

ZeroGravitas5• 4 years ago

Because they specify Primary Energy, coal does get penalised more than solar or nuclear, so that part is kind of implied, plus it's from the 80s.

Generally negawatts (watts you don't use due to efficiency or insulation) have always been the cheapest watts, that's only recently become less true because of solar price declines.

etothepii3• 4 years ago

It did mention getting 500W from carbon based means.

I'm in the lets use as much green energy as we want camp. The hair-shirt stuff from many in the green movement is the main reason I don't take them seriously.

Agreed that GW and sea level rise are existential issues for coastal communities (and possibly the human race as a whole) but why cap energy usage from Nuclear, Wind and Solar.

I'd sign up for a 100W cap on carbon faster than a 10kW cap on energy.

titzer• 4 years ago

They are independent variables. In practice the "10kw society" solar/nuclear society that economic-growth-above-all people push means "2kw coal + 4kw solar + 4kw nuclear". Growth is just cover for not replacing the dirty sources.

mtmmtm• 4 years ago

I live in Sweden. I have a large house. It consumes 14 MWh/year. I have not sacrificed anything. I use a heat pump (using energy from the ground).

ROTMetro• 4 years ago

I wish someone would setup neighborhood geothermal heat pumps as a heating utility or coop model. It's so expensive for everyone to bore into the ground for this.

ZeroGravitas5• 4 years ago

Modern new builds of housing do this, at least in some countries. At that stage you can not bother installing gas pipes and come out financially ahead.

Though air source are getting so good that places that require ground source are getting smaller.

2000UltraDeluxe• 4 years ago

Similar situation here, but in Finland. I use 14 MWh of /electricity/ each year (medium-sized house, three-person household). That excludes the firewood that we use for heating the sauna, and to keep the house warm during winter, when the cold is too much for the heat pumps to manage. Oh, and travel.

In order to reach the goal in the article, a three-person household would need to restrict energy use to 52560 KWh/year, /including/ all those things AND the production of everything that household consumes.

I can't see how it's even remotely possible with today's technology and societal climate. That being said, there's no harm in researching and developing more efficient technologies. I don't even want to think about how bad the energy crisis would be if we were all still using 60w/40w lightbulbs.

Havoc• 4 years ago

Comments here seem to be missing a key detail

including embodied energy

Which is

Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself.

I'm far below the 2k limit on mains energy usage, but I suspect after factoring in above it'll be comically far off. Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...

bombcar6• 4 years ago

You can get a rough estimate based on cost (not perfect but it can be usable) and then own the thing long enough that the energy cost to make drops to negligible. A made in USA toolset from USA sourced materials is unlikely to cost less than the energy needed to make it.

Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.

netjiro3• 4 years ago

Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.

When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.

netjiro3• 4 years ago

The "embodied energy" calculation is always going to be somewhat arbitrary based on what one wants to include. With more or less relevance.

E.g: human rest power is ca 100W at ca 20% efficiency. The agricultural production is at best 2% efficient. That's already 25kW, just to survive. * Edit: partially wrong, see comments below. *

But it is perhaps relevant to exclude all non-CO2 energy sources? Thus putting the agricultural efficiency much higher since the sunlight would be "0".

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

You're double counting that 20% the 100W is thermal output of a resting human, not work done. As evidenced by not needing 5000 Calories a day just to survive

It's still about 50-150kW average of sunlight for the absolute minimum to sustain a person with a mostly closed ecosystem (this will also feed numerous insects/bacteria/fungi/etc). A very optimized hydro setup might do it with 2~kW based on C4 photosynthesis being about 4%.

But yes, excluding sunlight of a reasonable amount of agricultural and urban land seems sensible.

ben_w2• 4 years ago

Absolutely. I've just done a naïve calculation, and Apple's self-reported 33kg CO2 emissions for a new Apple Watch Series 8 45mm Aluminium, at an equivalent power level of "0.85 pounds of CO2 emissions per kWh" from my first result on Google, suggests 85.6 kWh embedded energy, or 9.772 W if the device only lasts one year before replacement (divide according to expected lifetime).

kurthr4• 4 years ago

It's not the watch, it's your house... and the roads, sewer, power etc. It's the $$$s!

Furthermore, don't forget your investments! Those are earning money BECAUSE they are consuming power. The workers build more houses, drive more cars, and consume more power to go on vacation to Tahiti. Profit is reinvested to consume more power. You own/rent it, you're responsible.

eternityforest3• 4 years ago

If this chart is accurate, it seems like there are bigger problems than plastic. It's bad, but I'm guessing a lot of people don't even see some of their biggest resource intensive purchases as an issue, while feeling guilty or criticizing stuff that isn't as bad as they think.

Disposable stuff in general is a big issue, but lots of natural fiber clothes get landfilled too without much thought.

https://www.eupedia.com/ecology/carbon_footprint_consumer_pr...

bryanlarsen3• 4 years ago

Plastic is a great carbon sink, and could be quite carbon negative if it is used as feedstock for carbon capture (either bio-capture or artificial). Micropollution is why plastic gets such a bad rap.

fdewrewrewf3• 4 years ago

Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...

Plastic is relatively cheap, energy-wise. Your embodied energy usage is dominated by semiconductors.

Edit: Google tells me that a laptop takes 4500MJ to manufacture. If you were living in a 2kW society, you'd have to save up 1250kWh, or about a month, to get your laptop.

Obviously personal car ownership is right of the question.

littlestymaar2• 4 years ago

Plastic is relatively cheap, energy-wise. Your embodied energy usage is dominated by semiconductors.

Given how energy costly cement is, and how much quantity we use, I'd be really surprised if it didn't dwarf semiconductors by several orders of magnitude.

nicoburns5• 4 years ago

If a laptop lasts 5 years then a month doesn't seem too bad. That's only 1/60th of your allowance. It shows the importance of continued software support for old hardware though. It's a hell of a lot better if a laptop can be used for 10 years rather than 5.

wongarsu2• 4 years ago

In the (2008) Swiss example, the 2kW are already spend on public infrastructure, food and consumer discretionary alone. So even somebody living in an unheated cottage without electricity, using only public transportation, would exceed the 2kW as long as they otherwise eat and spend like the average Swiss.

(though I would assume public infrastructure to use less energy now, with the efficiency improvements in lighting)

mattmaroon2• 4 years ago

Making plastic stuff is energy cheap, relatively, that’s why plastic is cheap. Plastic packaging uses a lot less energy (to produce, ship, and dispose of) than metal, wood, etc. Though of course with cheapness comes increased usage, so the net effect is probably difficult to determine

anonporridge5• 4 years ago

Though of course with cheapness comes increased usage, so the net effect is probably difficult to determine

Induced demand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand.

jl62• 4 years ago

Plastic is also cheap because it draws down on a stockpile of oil that nature has been saving for us for the last few million years.

It won’t be so cheap when we have to synthesize the feedstock.

RobinL2• 4 years ago

Absolutely. For many (perhaps most) people in the rich world, embodied energy in the stuff we buy is our greatest source of energy consumption.

Very rough breakdown here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/

Steltek2• 4 years ago

That calculator is super helpful! Thank you! Is the water usage meant to encompass energy to heat said water?

Also, this sadly puts even my household's meager (by US standards) car mileage (6k miles/yr) as the bulk of our energy usage. Cars are such a waste of life, energy, and space...

bee_rider• 4 years ago

That is neat.

Not sure how to quantify taking a bus to work.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

I want a personal cold fusion reactor and to be a 2000 MW person, not this unviable milquetoast degrowth.

lm284695• 4 years ago

Unviable degrowth or unliveable planet

prottog4• 4 years ago

Degrowth will absolutely remove more enjoyable life-years from the planet than even maintaining the status quo, let alone achieving technological progress that will allow carbon-free 2000MW per person. The latter is certainly preferable to the former.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

Yeah. Screw this 'climate change' nonsense. Let's see if we can vaporize the mantle by 2100.

The second law exists and climate change is just the first of many symptoms of running face first into it.

2kW is a sensible limit for living on a planet and having it still be a planet worth living on. You might push it up an order of magnitude or two without cooking humans by fully transforming most habitable land and carefully rejecting 30% of the sunlight whilst using the rest, but that would destroy most ecosystems.

If you want a barren rock to bake, go live on the moon.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

Just to check, have you ever looked up the total solar irradiation wattage? You might be surprised.

Climate change isn't "Grug burn too many fire, fire make hot.", it's a comparatively tiny shift in a delicate balance.

aqwsde2• 4 years ago

Oh, this is not a Michael Jackson reference ...

aqwsde2• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/VA5hpF7PH1Q

ksimukka2• 4 years ago

Currently averaging about 9.75kWh per day during spring/summer/fall. However, come winter the max average will probably be 50kWh per day.

My latitude is about 60 (59.9139) degrees north and electric heating panels don’t seem to be the most efficient when it is below freezing.

With improved insulation and a modern heat pump, I’d be curious to see how much energy we would consume.

niklasrde• 4 years ago

Assuming you're talking about heating & electricity in your accommodation only?

The vision here encompasses all energy use if I understand correctly.

ksimukka2• 4 years ago

Yes, I’m referring to electricity as it is my largest source of energy use.

Aside from that, accounting for the energy used to produce the food and consumables is somewhat challenging, so I don’t really consider it. But I suppose it would be worth trying to guesstimate? I’m not that familiar with the 2000-watt society.

FabHK3• 4 years ago

Some people here seem to be confusing electricity usage and energy usage.

As the Wikipedia article highlights, the average Swiss uses about 5kW (that's 5kWh per hour), of which only about 10% are electricity.

Similarly, about 10% are car usage, or about 0.5kW. If we take the average car to develop on average 50kW, and assume an efficiency of 1 (for the sake of the argument), then they use a car around 1% of the time or about 15 minutes a day (less if efficiency is <1, as it is).

ETA some more reference points:

A human eats around 10,000kJ per day = 86400 seconds, let's call it 100,000s, so 10,000kJ/100ks = 100J/s = 100W, about as much as a bright lightbulb (the old fashioned ones, not LED).

The sun gives us about 1kW of power per square meter. Say photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of 10%, and the sun shines 6 hours a day (=25%), then we are talking around 25W/m².

So, the average Swiss uses the energy corresponding to about 50 people working for him or 200m² of PV, the average US citizen of 120 people or 480m² (5000 sq feet), and the goal here is to push it down to 20 people or 80m² PV.

Great reference: the books by Vaclav Smil, eg. How the World Really Works.

markvdb• 4 years ago

15 kWh of electricity for 100 km of car transportation is realistic for a defensively driven modest electric car. At 500W, that's about 80 km of car use per day. In an electric Hummer or similar, your car energy budget would be gone in 35 km. In a fossil fuel Hummer, getting to the bakery 10 km away might be possible, but only one way.

phkahler2• 4 years ago

A good EV will get about 3 miles per kWhr. So 20kwh recharged over night will get you 60 miles per day. IMHO EVs need MUCH larger batteries to facilitate longer range driving or deviations from a daily routine, but that doesn't change the typical energy usage much.

neon_electro7• 4 years ago

How much longer range driving do you personally need?

I drove a 2018 Chevy Bolt EV 12,000 miles per year on average for four years (totaled it this past Memorial Day weekend). Never got stranded/ran out of juice. Plenty of fast charging (55kW doesn't even reach 1 C (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rate) so I can basically fast charge with no concern for my long-term battery health), plenty of slow charging (1kW on my home 120V EVSE), 60kWh was more than enough for trips to Montréal, Vermont, and Chicago (from Philadelphia) over those four years.

ericmay2• 4 years ago

What EVs are you using for comparison?

For something like a Standard Range Tesla Model 3 where you have around 260 miles of range when charged to full you don't really need to make any different life decisions w.r.t daily routine or even longer distance travel. I think the main problem is affordability right now there. But EVs that satisfy basically all of someone's need have been in the market for years.

Though the real change needs to be in using cars for daily needs in the first place.

thatfrenchguy2• 4 years ago

A good EV will get about 3 miles per kWhr

A mediocre one will, à good one will do ~4-4.2, especially if you don’t drive at 80mph/130kph.

netsharc2• 4 years ago

Makes me wonder if the next invention would be battery packs that you can put into your car for long trips, so your car stays light for the majority of the time, when you just need it for in-city commute. Ideally the battery packs would be shared so the "gas" station of the future has them ready for you to rent. Obviously the issue is high demand during weekends and school vacation times, and much lower demand otherwise...

OJFord2• 4 years ago

[Ignore me, I misread. Original comment below.]

5kW (that's 5kWh per hour)

It's 5kW for an hour - but I think you understand that, and implicitly mean something like 'per hour continuously/on average over time' (where the 'over time' makes us dimensionally ok again).

japanuspus• 4 years ago

OP's comment makes perfect sense to me, but how I have read your comment three times without understanding what it is you want to communicate?

ddalex• 4 years ago

A "normalized" person eats about 2000 kilocalories per day, so that's ~95W. Math checks out.

solardev• 4 years ago

Great breakdown!

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

Related to this, one of the most brilliant insights about "how the world works" is the term: energy slave.

A good question to ask people is: How much work do you think can be done using the energy in a barrel of oil? As in, how much equivalent labour can you get out of it? Think of lifting heavy objects, pumping water, that kind of thing where it can be done by either a person or a machine fueled by oil.

Most people will say something like "a few days of work" or somesuch. The reality is closer to a fit adult male doing backbreaking labour all day every day like a slave for a full year.

Using up a barrel of oil is the same as having a slave toiling away for you for a year! One barrel = one energy slave for a year.

Put in those terms, a few things start to make sense:

At about $100-$150 per barrel, energy slaves are fantastically cheap, undercutting even the most impoverished human labourers in the most economically disadvantaged countries. Even some of the poorest people on Earth make about $300 annually. This means that having and using oil is an incredible boost to an economy, as each barrel burnt is effectively a very-nearly-free labourer adding to the output of the workforce. This is why many countries are so obsessed about controlling their supply of oil. The United States, of course, but also many western countries.

People in the US use an average of about 20 barrels of oil annually, which is the equivalent of having 20 slaves, each! That's not even counting coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Effectively, each person in the United States is about as wealthy as a very rich person in Ancient Rome. Think senator, or similar. But this makes sense: a typical person in the US can travel internationally on a whim, and enjoy fantastic luxuries that Romans couldn't even dream of.

Take the oil away, and the wealth goes away. Of course, other energy slaves can be substituted, but the point is the same -- our wealth is largely due to this "uncomplaining" workforce that is cheaper than the cheapest human labour.

daneel_w6• 4 years ago

... (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) ...

That's just over 1400 kWh per month. As a reference of personal and immediate consumption, most central- and north European apartment dwellers consume around 2000 kWh per year.

Anecdote: my household - two adults, two terrible cats, dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer, no TV, two bicycles and feet instead of a car - have consumed 160-170 kWh per month steadily, around the year, for as long as I can recall.

lm284695• 4 years ago

It specifically mentions that it's about the overall energy used (housing+food+car+plane+&c.). 2000kWh per year in europe is just about household consumption

daneel_w6• 4 years ago

Yes: personal immediate consumption.

fuzzy22• 4 years ago

Maybe continue reading a little…?

The concept addresses not only personal or household energy use, but the total for the whole society, including embodied energy, divided by the population.

Filling up my car’s gas tank once is roughly 444 kWh in fuel value alone. Add to that gas refining, logistics and whatnot.

daneel_w6• 4 years ago

I read all of it, not just a little of it. I'm commenting on personal, immediate consumption.

stephc_int13• 4 years ago

Watt could be used as kind of universal physically based, end-game-level currency, sounds better than crypto or fiat IMHO.

nine_k• 4 years ago

As envisioned by sci-fi authors like Heinlein.

The only problem is storage. Carrying a wallet with a few MJ in it may be just hazardous, even if transferring funds is 100% efficient (using superconductivity). So any realistic scheme would include some tokens, with associated energy stored / generated elsewhere.

More realistically, these tokens are associated with the economic and military might of the issuing party; this is similar to what modern fiat money is.

pjc50• 4 years ago

To a great extent this is what the oil economy is like.

anonporridge5• 4 years ago

It's bitcoin. Bitcoin is electricity money. The universal electro-dollar.

Because the miner reward for securing the monetary network is intrinsically linked to electricity availability, there will always be fundamental link between cost of electricity and value of bitcoin.

immibis8• 4 years ago

No, this is nonsense. In reality, there is a link between cost of electricity, value of bitcoin, hashing rewards, and electricity used in hashing. And the dependent variable is the electricity used in hashing - not the cost of electricity, nor the value of bitcoin.

ElevenLathe2• 4 years ago

Naive utopian solution: Distribute a fixed amount of energy credits equally among the population on a regular basis and let the market determine what is best to do with them. Peg the amount of such credits to the dirtiness of the global energy mix, including transportation, gas usage, etc. such that, if we clean up our energy usage this month, everybody gets to spend more credits next month. Eventually we have more tokens than we know what to do with because our energy supply is nearly free of emissions. There may still be some niche uses for carbon-emitting fossil energy (running helicopters to inspect electrical transmission lines, for example) but market forces will have pushed them to the absolute minimum level.

This is of course all a way of getting everyone on board with our real, material situation, which is that there is a finite amount of carbon that we can afford to dump into the atmosphere in the immediate next few centuries.

This is basically just cap-and-trade with extra steps but has the advantage of novelty, and that it is graspable by the average voter who (rightfully) views cap-and-trade schemes as being 1) really boring and 2) mainly a way for Wall Street types to scam money out of productive enterprises. Under this scheme, we can generate huge public support for green energy schemes since each new watt of generation installed this month will mean everyone is better off in real terms next month.

immibis8• 4 years ago

This is a dystopia. Utopia is where everyone can just do whatever they want, because the human population is lower than the carrying capacity.

restore_creole_• 4 years ago

A Tesla Model 3, the most efficient EV, uses 240 Wh/mile. You could not drive more than 8.3 miles without exceeding the 2 kWh/h.

sokoloff3• 4 years ago

You get all day to average 2kW, or 48kWh/day, or 200 miles/day [if you spent no other energy, of course].

If you drove 20 miles, that’s 10% of your energy budget for the day, even if you did it all in a single hour.

slackfan• 4 years ago

Might as well just use a horse and buggy at that point.

mrtksn2• 4 years ago

If it was possible to move multiple persons with electric vehicles and if those people lived in close proximity that don't require driving long distances everyday then just going to the shop wouldn't exceed the goal.

neon_electro7• 4 years ago

Sounds logical to me! Put more people in the car and the total energy budget for car travel goes up, right?

lm284695• 4 years ago

Almost as if hauling 2 tonnes of metal and batteries to transport a single 70kg person is inefficient as hell no matter the energy source...

realreality5• 4 years ago

And if you factor in the embodied energy from building the car, you wouldn't be able to drive it, at all.

tecleandor• 4 years ago

Well, it depends on the length of the measurement. If you build up the calculation for the total consumption for a year, then you can do spikes of energy use.

simonebrunozzi• 4 years ago

Nah. Sorry but I don't like it at all.

Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one.

But, let's make sure that the production, storage and distribution of energy, in all its forms, is sustainable, and available to every country.

The trend is already here: cheaper than ever solar and wind energy, cheaper and cheaper energy storage, new energy breakthroughs, promising ones like nuclear, etc.

It means the world will be able to soon produce much more energy, using only sustainable sources.

Let's make energy available to everyone, at an affordable rate. That's my dream. Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.

nathanaldensr• 4 years ago

Couldn't have said it better. At a certain point--and I think some are past this point--it becomes a death cult of "any energy used is evil."

hcarvalhoalves• 4 years ago

Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one.

You know this really means “let’s keep the average per capita consumption high, so I can keep spending the 10x more than a third world citizen” right?

Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.

Rational usage of resources is very far from “starvation”.

seper8• 4 years ago

Agreed 100%

Article from MIT regarding Solar energy: "The potential is enormous, says MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable — at least, for the lifetime of the sun. "It's finite, but we're talking billions of years," Taylor says. "

tims33• 4 years ago

Totally agree. I think the premise of maintaining quality of life while dramatically reducing energy consumption won't bear out.

There is no successful path to stopping global warming that dramatically drives up energy cost or reduces quality of life. Plentiful zero carbon energy is the path forward.

zb1plus• 4 years ago

Agree 100%. We should be building mega-factories for solar cells, nuclear plants and pumping trillions of dollars into fusion research. Pivoting to renewable energy should be giving the same society wide focus that nation states gave to warfare and the production of weapons during ww2.

stkdump• 4 years ago

Nice fantasy. Note that building up that infrastructure at scale itself (within decades) overconstrains resources already.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

2kW isn't starvation, it's abundance, luxury, and leisure for all. Especially if used efficiently (medium sized buildings, mass transit and low speed transport, power efficient durable applicances. We can have rich fulfilling lives on a fraction of that.

20kW is obscene needless waste, wholesale destruction of anything near a city or industrial area, exhaustion of every scarce resource and with the albedo increase and waste heat it entails will give us climate change just through sheer thermal output.

kazinator• 4 years ago

20 kW is a little more than the 25 hp engine of a VW beetle from the 1950's. (1 hp ~= 0.75 kW).

A PA system for a rock concert might be 20 kW.

concordDance• 4 years ago

This seems very misguided. The problem isn't energy usage its the side effects of the energy production. If everyone was using a megawatt but this was in the form of some factory on the moon being incredibly inefficient as they make the new Must Have MoonRockTM that gets teleported to your living room this would actually be just fine.

Bud3• 4 years ago

Not misguided. Because here in the real world, both now and for the foreseeable future, especially the near future in which we have to urgently deal with climate change impacts, energy production does indeed have those side effects.

condour75• 4 years ago

Solar is getting cheaper by the day, batteries are getting cheaper and more efficient by the day, and there's a ton of money pouring into research. Maybe I'm crazy, but I can see a future, maybe a few decades from now, when power is "too cheap to meter" because of renewables.

NegativeK• 4 years ago

I think that taking it outside of the context of today and adding in moon rock energy sources might be a bit more misguided.

anonporridge5• 4 years ago

It's well guided as a goal from a social planning level. When thinking about what to incentivize and penalize with governmental regulations, it makes sense to drive out living environments and industry towards more efficiency.

But I agree it's very misguided if it gets turned into strict quota system that everyone is locked into. We don't want to turn civilization a zero sum game.

probablypower• 4 years ago

As someone who works at a utility, I respectfully disagree. From the wholesale energy market perspective, demand must be met.

Sure, you can slowly switch out old production for new cleaner sources of energy. The fastest way to reduce carbon footprints (and cheapest) is to reduce demand.

Growing consumer awareness over their over-consumption, to change their behaviour, is one of the most powerful and direct solutions we have.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

Growing consumer awareness over their over-consumption, to change their behaviour, is one of the most powerful and direct solutions we have.

Actually, that has been shown time and time again to be false. Asking consumers to change their behavior to lower energy consumption is about as effective as telling people to diet and exercise to lose weight: it may work on an individual level, but it is a complete failure at a societal level, and when it comes to decarbonizing the economy, the societal level is all that matters.

If we want to lower people's energy consumption, we need to make policy and economic changes, e.g. raising the cost of certain types of energy use so that it causes people to reconsider their use of it, or redesigning spaces so that less energy use is needed (e.g. making public transportation, or human-powered transportation, a more viable alternative to driving).

lultimouomo2• 4 years ago

If everyone in US and Europe were using only 2kw, we would probably be carbon negative today, as renewable + nuclear + storage might be enough for all our needs.

Reducing consumption is a huge part of the solution, especially because it makes the extremely hard energy storage problem way more tractable.

anonu• 4 years ago

48kWh per person per day? That seems like a huge amount. I live in an a place where we have to run the AC almost all day and we use less than this along with all the other electric appliances.

phkahler2• 4 years ago

> I live in an a place where we have to run the AC almost all day and we use less than this along with all the other electric appliances.

They're including transportation costs.

function_seven• 4 years ago

It's all energy consumption by a person, not just their residential electrical usage. So the gas you may use to heat your water, or the gasoline in your car, or the fraction of the street light outside your home. The energy that runs your local grocery store, hair salon, or Chick-fil-a. The energy that went into growing your food, making your clothing, and shipping your monthly Chewy.com order.

48kWh is a much smaller amount when it includes all of our per capita economic activity.

moralestapia• 4 years ago

which pictures the average citizen of energy poor countries reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts

Why the distinction? Why not all citizens?

outside1234• 4 years ago

Its not about the watts - it is about the composition of those watts.

You could use 2000Wh of electricity in Texas, but that would still only be 29% zero carbon.

You could use 5000Wh of electricity in Norway, but 99% of that would be zero carbon. This is superior to the 2000Wh approach.

megaman821• 4 years ago

Wow, I just calculated my direct energy usage. Now I live in Texas where it is hot so I only required heating 2-3 months of the year, and have one electric and one gas car.

* Electricity - 13,000 kWh * Natural Gas - 7,000 kWh * Gasoline - 14,000 kWh

Burning stuff is just so wildly inefficient. A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half.

anonporridge5• 4 years ago

A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half.

That's more due to the seemingly magical properties of heat pumps producing 2-3x as much heat as energy input.

Burning nat gas to create heat in your home is nearly 100% efficient, which is why resistant electric heaters generally can't compete. Though resistant heaters might be more carbon neutral depending on your local grid.

Of course, burning stuff to do mechanical work is quite inefficient, especially in a small scale engine like a car. If we must burn stuff, we should do it is massive thermal plants that have the money and expertise to squeeze out the maximum efficiency possible, and deliver electricity to do the small scale work, like driving.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

It's staggering how old these topics were. Club of Rome: 72, never heard of it until few years ago. 2kW society .. 1998, first time I hear the name, even with all the fuss about climate change, it didn't hit my radar. So strange.

narrator• 4 years ago

Everybody move to the tropics, get used to the heat and ride motor scooters just like India and Bangladesh. Cold climates that require a lot of energy just to live in are going to empty out in the next decades.

I predict a massive wave of immigration from Europe, Australia, and Canada to Latin America. There are already a ton of people from these countries showing up in Mexico because of Covid restrictions, easy immigration for first-worlders, and a lower cost of living. I suspect the upcoming winter of deprivation and economic crisis in Europe and other cold regions will send a bunch more economic/cold refugees that way.

konschubert• 4 years ago

The facts disprove your hypothesis.

Also, climate change.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

Australia has millions of km^2 in the subtropics. Why would they move due to heating requirements?

Also there will be many, many climate refugees from floods, famines, droughts, super storms, fires, dust storms, and so on. Most of these issues are much harder to overcome than adding insulation, living in a reasonably sized home, sharing a wall or two, installing a heat pump, and putting on a jumper.

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

Unless someone breaks thermodynamics, there is really no way to reduce to 2000W without reducing consumption of goods by a factor of 10 in the west. That means a new phone every 20 years instead of 2 (global mobile device supply chain is huge), getting new shoes every 10 years instead of 1, getting a new car every 50 years instead of 5, etc.

wazoox• 4 years ago

That's perfectly fine, let's build durable goods. I still have some tableware from my great-grandmother, more than 100 years old. It works just as well as new plates and forks.

But more than that, we won't have the choice. Thermodynamics will constrain us sooner or later.

lultimouomo2• 4 years ago

According to the article, the US us by far (very far) the worst offender and yet it is only 6x over the target, not 10. Switzerland, which does not strike me as a country with a low standard of living, is 2.5x over the target. Europe 3x.

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

In terms of globalization supply chain, the west has similar power utilizations.

US has much larger homes and drives far more inefficiently due to individual vehicle usage instead of mass transit.

Reducing those by 6x would be a huge change.

Schroedingersat16• 4 years ago

Or just get rid of the lawn, beef, the 'great room', and 95% of cars (and keep the rest for 30 years). Then make the electronics last at least 5 years, and you're well past target.

thereisnospork• 4 years ago

I can't help but feel like this is an ass-backwards approach to the problem, we should be trying to add a zero to the (greenly produced) energy available for each person instead of bean-counting. Imagine if this was our approach to internet bandwidth? "No you don't need more bandwidth, just compress your geocites webpages by an extra 5x - that's the future of the internet we want to see!"

We could produce far more energy than we could ever save by cutting. It is not an accident that the historical chart of quality of life vs. energy consumption per capita is up and to the right.

programmer_dude• 4 years ago

India experienced a massive heat wave last summer. My electricity consumption exceeded the average US per month figures for the first time (>900 KWh/month). Bulk of it went to airconditioning. Needless to say I am deeply concerned about the times ahead. I am pretty sure increase in electricity consumption is only going to aggravate things further.

kkfx• 4 years ago

It's a bit hard condensate the concept in an HN comment but I'll try:

- the "Green" new deal, originally have imagined (with a classic managerial fallacy) a world made up by single-family homes in places with enough Sun for p.v., BEVs, a little need to move and no industries. Perhaps because this is the way some manager's live and they call it sobriety respect of others who do differently. Than they discover people's in crowd then to behave in stupid ways, like Le Bon describe in his masterpiece BUT not that stupid so grid-connected p.v. without stationary and/or on-wheel storage because cutting electricity bill with p.v. for a significant amount of locations on earth pay back, the rest do not. As a result electricity grids are more and more unstable. Keeping the frequency is always hard and we have chosen to made "large enough" grids to have a "slowly changing mean load" slow enough that big power plants can keep up the frequency; when p.v/eolic start to be big enough the power peaks they produce make's the grid frequency skyrocket or fall too fast for large power plants to lower/step up their generator power. Not counting the fact that most people do not live in single-family homes where a p.v. system and an on-wheel battery can live with;

- some politicians who have blindly follow the initial vague dream have decided the answer is "reduce energy consumption" and have even invented ways to reduce it who actually increase the amount of consumed energy like regulating "how many hour to run the heating" vs "let the system run quietly 24/7;

- since most people DO NOT live on nor have p.v. anyway most home appliance are NOT designed to maximize self consumption witch means run full power as quick as possible when energy from the Sun is available vs try to spread the load as much as possible to keep the grid load as stable as possible. As a result most p.v. systems instead of target maximizing self-consumption target to produce as many kWh as possible. As a result p.v. systems are LESS interesting and the grid is more strained.

A simple example: most hot-water systems try to run few minutes every hours instead of all at once on input. To keep a grid load stable running few minutes every hours and have small quantity of water to heat is IDEAL, you consume less energy and keep the load stable on average. On p.v. it's the exact opposite. Since the Sun shine for limited period of time but when it do it offer much energy what it count is heating as much as possible large amount of water to have enough hot water for the rest of the day, possible for more than one day. Essentially NO system on sale offer such simple regulation, while some offer "grid-backed" regulations like grid energy meters who told "run" or "do not run" depending on current grid load but in ways that are hard to be used on p.v. even if they are very similar. Another example: most appliance start to consume from 0 to max in a snap. For the grid is not an issue, the single appliance consume a very small fraction of power of a power plant and on average that's just noise. Small p.v. inverters on contrary have issues keeping up such peaks, who happen to be big at micro-grid scale. As a result many appliance like ovens who try to use peaks to reduce the total amount of kWh consumed they run very bad on p.v. in self-consumption and inverter stress terms. Again: some appliance try to run for longer time to reduce the amount of peak power usage, while on p.v. it's better run quickly to run an appliance after the other in the limited amount of time the Sun shine and so on.

Long story short if some really want a new deal:

- ALL BEVs MUST have an open standard data port (no matter if canbus or something else) to talk to any p.v. inverter on sale allowing to do the same stationary battery inverters and batteries do: charge ONLY from p.v., offering power from battery to the home to a maximum DOD if the grid do work, another threshold if case of grid blackout and parameters to tell the car ensuring a minimum SOC for a certain point in time allowing to charge from the grid if needed;

- BEV need to cost equally of their correspondent ICE not pushing up ICE and fuel price to makes EV convenient;

- incentive de-urbanization in the sense from a multi-apartments building (sorry I do not know how to name such buildings in English) to a single family home if you live there for a certain amount of years;

- impose a simple and cheap communication mode to power-hungry home appliances like simple modbus to allow their control from a central home system, like a home server/a p.v. inverter etc and allowing communication to tell how much power they going to need to run, in the next few seconds etc to allow inverters compensate peaks less hardly;

- incentives the design of systems targeting maximizing self-consumption instead of grid-tied "metering" like "I give X kWh, get back Y and so...".

Asking for "sobriety" is like asking do not panic on a sinking ship, the rebound effect is higher then else.

2000-Watt Society

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