- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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I had my energy company remove their LVTC smart meter this week after they started using it to shut off our condenser unit during our 100 degree days
The fact that it exists at all is bad enough, but they were doing this at a time when our AC was already malfunctioning due to low refrigerant. On the day they first shut it off, our house reached 94 degrees.
The program that the previous owner signed up for that enabled them to do this gave them a fucking two dollar a month discount.
I use a smart thermostat to optimize my home conditioning - having a second meter fucking with my schedule ends up making us all miserable. Energy providers need to stop fucking around and just build out their infrastructure to handle worst case peak loads, and enable customers to install solar to reduce peak loading to begin with.
The other thing that kills me about this is that our provider administers our city’s solar electric subsidy program themselves. When i had them come out to give us a quote, they inflated their price by more than 100% because they knew what our electricity bill was. All they did was take our average monthly bill and multiplied it by the repayment period. I could have been providing them more energy to the grid at their peak load if they hadn’t tried scamming me.
FUCK private energy providers.
How tf can a meter shut of an applience? Did you also have smart breakers from them?
Anyway absolutely ridiculous
It’s separate from the main meter and connected directly at the condenser unit.
It monitors power draw and acts as a relay when the provider sends a shutoff signal. The thermostat thinks the system is still going, and the fans still push air through the vents, but the coils aren’t being cooled anymore so the air gets hot and musty.
Peak load of households is not during peak solar power generation. Households installing pv isn’t a solution to what you described.
Today, you could also use a battery to buy power during mid day and use it in the evening when you need it the most.
In moderate climates in the US, peak loads are typically the hottest and sunniest hours of the day since condenser units are the most energy-hungry appliance in most homes. Clouds notwithstanding, peak solar generation would typically align (or closely align) with peak load time.
Batteries would also help a lot - they should definitely be subsidizing the installation of those as well but unfortunately they aren’t yet (at least not in my state).
This is incorrect. Look up the “duck curve” or if you prefer real-world examples look at the California electricity market (CAISO) where they have an excellent “net demand curve” that illustrates the problem.
This curve has changed somewhat since this study in 2016. More efficient home insulation, remote working, and energy-efficient cooling systems have large impact in this pattern. But assuming you have a well-insulated home, setting your thermostat to maintain a consistent temperature throughout the day will shift this peak earlier and lower the peak load at sunset, when many people are returning home. More efficient heat pumps with variable pressure capabilities also helps this a lot, too.
Given just how many variables are involved, it’s better to assume peak cooling load to be mid-day and work toward equalizing that curve, rather than reacting to transient patterns that are subject to changes in customer behavior. Solar installations are just one aspect of this mitigation strategy, along with energy storage, energy-efficient cooling systems, and more efficient insulation and solar heat gain mitigation strategies.
If we’re discussing infrastructure improvements we might as well discuss home efficiency improvements as well.
Do you have a source for the cooling off effect of the duck curve?
Following is a 2 year old article hinting an increase in the effect https://www.powermag.com/epri-head-duck-curve-now-looks-like-a-canyon/ afaik ot hasn’t changed much but I’m open to news
Study or no study, you can see this problem in the real world https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook#section-net-demand-trend
Ok now go just one step further and ask yourself what variables factor into this.
There’s a reason that pattern exists, and it isn’t because solar and cooling hours don’t align.
I watch big state and national grid loads (for fun) and I see two distinct peaks: 7-8AM when everyone goes to work, and then around 5-7 PM when people commute home and heat up dinner.
Otherwise it’s a linear diagonal curve coinciding with temperatures.
I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).
Why do you want a subsidy for batteries? Installing batteries at a large scale at homes is incredibly expensive compared to an off site battery. Especially with regards to the move towards hydrogen.
For the same reason we want to subsidize solar production in residential construction even though it’s more efficient and cost-productive to do it at-scale. Having energy production and storage at the point of use reduces strain on power infrastructure and helps alleviate the types of load surging ayyy is talking about.
It’s not a replacement for modernizing our power grids, too - it simply helps to make them more resilient.
That’s understandable but do we need it now? Neither pv nor batteries last forever. I’m just not sure if we need them now (or short-medium term future). But I’m not in the position to decide upon it
I don’t know how to answer that question.
our city’s solar electric subsidy program
It sounds like there’s two different things there. There’s a solar installation (hardware, etc.), and there’s likely some kind of net metering program (where they pay you or give you credit for electricity you generate). That paragraph sounds like the first, but the phrase sounds like the second.
You shouldn’t have to go through them for the solar installation, if your conditions accommodate it. Granted, the conditions don’t apply to everyone. You’ll want to have a suitable roof that ideally faces south-ish, own your home, and plan to stay there for at least 10 years. In the US, you also kind of need to get it done within this calendar year, which is a rough ask, before the federal 30% tax credit goes away. But maybe you can find an installer that isn’t trying to scam you quite as much.
(It’s early and cloudy today.)
Sorry, maybe I wasn’t being clear.
My area has solar incentive programs that are run through the energy utility - meaning the state makes available zero-interest loans for the purposes of solar installation, but those loans are only available through an entity partnered with our utility. They limit the number of homes in each area that are eligible through this program so that solar generation never exceeds demand. Our home was eligible through the program, so I had them come out to give us a quote. Our utility is also transitioning to surge pricing and smart metering, so there’s a pretty high demand for solar installation in my area and they know that they’d lose out on a lot of revenue if everyone installed their own solar systems.
A part of that process was them asking for the last year of energy bills, along with taking measurements and doing daylighting analysis on our roof area. At the end, they gave us a quote for a 15 year loan for the equipment and installation, and it just so happened that the monthly payment was the same as our average energy bill. I work in AEC and I know what solar panels cost, and they had inflated their price by more than double what it would cost at market rate.
Of course I could install my own panels, but it would be out-of-pocket and I would have to seek out and apply for out-of-state incentive programs myself, but I can’t afford the up-front costs and the loan terms don’t make sense for how long we’ll be in this house. Id love nothing more than to do it myself, even at a loss if that’s what it took, but I have a spouse that is less spiteful than I am.
more than double what it would cost at market rate
I definitely paid more for labor than for materials. My payoff time is about 13 years with a Tesla Powerwall 3, maybe a bit less now that I have an EV. I had a team of 4 guys plus an electrician here for about five days.
I did go with a slightly more reputable company that charged slightly more, but I would have gone elsewhere if it was a huge difference.
Maybe I should get around to making a post in [email protected] or something, even though it isn’t very punk.
I’m factoring in labor. It was an extremely bad deal - they were praying on the fact most home owners do not have familiarity with solar installation pricing.
Like I said, I would love to still do it on my own, but it just doesn’t make sense for our household.
Your HA dashboard derailed this conversation for me. lol.
I would love to know more about the equipment you are using to push this info into your HA.
I’ll write up a post now in [email protected]
Yeah, that thing that nobody wanted? Everybody has to have it. Fuck corporations and capitalism.
Oh, and you don’t want it and want the stupid model? You can still buy it for 3x the price.
Just like screens in cars, and MASSIVE trucks. We don’t want this. Well, some dumbass Americans do, but intelligent people don’t need a 32 ton 6 wheel drive pickup to haul jr to soccer.
Massive trucks? They need those trucks for truck stuff, like this giant dilhole parking with his wife to go to Aldi today. Not even a flag on the end of that ladder, it filled a whole spot by itself.
My couch wouldn’t fit in that bed, and every giant truck I see is sparkling shiny and looks like it hasn’t done a day of hard labor, much like the drivers.
You underestimate the number of people you wouldn’t class as intelligent. If no one wanted massive trucks, they would have disappeared off the market within a couple of years because they wouldn’t sell. They’re ridiculous, inefficient hulks that basically no one really needs but they sell, so they continue being made.
It’s actually because small trucks were regulated out of the US market. Smaller vehicles have more stringent mileage standards that trucks aren’t able to meet. That forces companies to make all their trucks bigger, because bigger vehicles are held to a different standard.
So the people who want or need a truck are pushed to buy a larger one.
Do you have any data to support this is actually the case? I see this all the time but absolutely zero evidence but a 2015 Axios survey with no methodology or dataset. Nearly every article cites this one industry group with 3 questions that clearly aren’t exclusive categorical and could be picked apart by a high school student.
I ask this question nearly every time I see this comment and in 5 years I have not found a single person who can actually cite where this came from or a complete explanation of even hope they got to that conclusion.
The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.
The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.
Then you put it beside a truck from 30 years ago that’s a quarter the overall size but has the same bed capacity and towing power along with much better visibility instead of not being able to see the child you’re about to run over. And then you understand what people mean when they say massive trucks - giant ridiculously unnecessary things that are all about being a status symbol and dodging regulations rather than practicality.
Absolutely 100% incorrect on towing. The 95 top f150 towed about 7700 compared to 13500 today. That’s an f350 in 95. It’ll also fit a family of 4 comparable to a full size sedan eliminating any need of a secondary vehicle. The old f150/1500s were miserable in the back.
As for the safety I find the argument disingenuous not based on reality. Roughly 160 kids were killed in 23 with the EU27. It was 220 in the US. Much of that could be correlated to traffic density as well.
Country / Region Est. Fatalities/Year Child Pop. (0–14) Fatalities per Million
United States ~225 ~61 million ~3.7 United Kingdom ~22 ~11.5 million ~1.9 Canada ~12 ~6 million ~2.0 Australia ~11 ~4.8 million ~2.3 Germany ~20 ~11 million ~1.8 France ~18 ~11 million ~1.6 Japan ~18 ~15 million ~1.2 India ~3,000 (est.) ~360 million ~8.3 Brazil ~450 ~50 million ~9.0 European Union (EU-27) ~140–160 ~72 million ~2.0–2.2
I think we should offer incentives for manufacturers to start reducing size and weight, but things you are saying here aren’t really based off of any data nor was it what I was asking.
I just wish I could find one person to show me what they are referencing when they repeat that seemingly false fact.
Let me express it to you with some numbers… The US is ~3.81 million square miles in size.
The F150 has sold 8.810 million units in the US in the last 10 years.
There are ~ 2.3 F150s fewer than 10 years old for every square mile in this country.
There is no way the majority of those trucks are going to job sites, or hauling junk, or pulling a trailer, just look around. That’s not even all trucks. Thats just one model, from one brand, for a single 10 yr period.
These trucks are primarily sold as a vanity vehicle, and a minivan alternative, and that’s what I think when I see one.
Nonsense. This is some Trump style math.
No, trump style math would be saying that The number of Trucks Towing has gone DOWN 400% PERCENT after the EVIL AMERICA HATING COMMUNIST Dems elected a soon-to-be-illegal Migrant Gang member as Mayor of New York NYC.
Also they can build nuclear power generators for the data centers but never for the residential power grid.
Let’s do the math.
Let’s take an SDXl porn model, with no 4-step speed augmentations, no hand written quantization/optimization schemes like svdquant, or anything, just an early, raw inefficient implementation:
So 2.5 seconds on an A100 for a single image. Let’s batch it (because that’s what’s done in production), and run it on the now popular H100 instead, and very conservatively assume 1.5 seconds per single image (though it’s likely much faster).
That’s on a 700W SXM Nvidia H100. Usually in a server box with 7 others, so let’s say 1000W including its share of the CPU and everything else. Let’s say 1400W for networking, idle time, whatever else is going on.
That’s 2 kJ, or 0.6 watt hours.
…Or about the energy of browsing Lemmy for 30-60 seconds. And again, this is an high estimate, but also a fraction of a second of usage for a home AC system.
…So yeah, booby pictures take very little energy, and the usage is going down dramatically.
Training light, open models like Deepseek or Qwen or SDXL takes very little energy, as does running them. The GPU farms they use are tiny, and dwarfed by something like an aluminum plant.
What slurps energy is AI Bros like Musk or Altman trying to brute force their way to a decent model by scaling out instead of increasing efficiency, and mostly they’re blowing that out of proportion to try the hype the market and convince them AI will be expensive and grow infinitely (so people will give them money).
That isn’t going to work very long. Small on-device models are going to be too cheap to compete.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kc978dg
So this is shit, they should be turning off AI farms too, but your porn images are a drop in the bucket compared to AC costs.
TL;DR: There are a bazillion things to flame AI Bros about, but inference for small models (like porn models) is objectively not one of them.
The problem is billionaires.
I don’t disagree with you but most of the energy that people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them. Once they are trained it is fast to get what you need out of it, but making the next version takes a long time.
Only because of brute force over efficient approaches.
Again, look up Deepseek’s FP8/multi GPU training paper, and some of the code they published. They used a microscopic fraction of what OpenAI or X AI are using.
And models like SDXL or Flux are not that expensive to train.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but they can get away with it because being rich covers up internal dysfunction/isolation/whatever. Chinese trainers, and other GPU constrained ones, are forced to be thrifty.
And I guess they need it to be inefficient and expensive, so that it remains exclusive to them. That’s why they were throwing a tantrum at Deepseek, because they proved it doesn’t have to be.
Bingo.
Altman et al want to kill open source AI for a monopoly.
This is what the entire AI research space already knew even before deepseek hit, and why they (largely) think so little of Sam Altman.
The real battle in the space is not AI vs no AI, but exclusive use by AI Bros vs. open models that bankrupt them. Which is what I keep trying to tell /c/fuck_ai, as the “no AI” stance plays right into the AI Bro’s hands.
people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them
that’s absolutely not true. In fact, most people who complain don’t even know the difference.
Thx for doing the math
I’m really OOTL when it comes to AI GHG impact. How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
How do their outputs stack up to traditional emitters like Ag and industry? I need a measuring stick
The UC paper above touches on that. I will link a better one if I find it.
But specifically:
streaming services
Almost all the power from this is from internet infrastructure and the end device. Encoding videos (for them to be played thousands/millions of times) is basically free since its only done once, with the exception being YouTube (which is still very efficient). Storage servers can handle tons of clients (hence they’re dirt cheap), and (last I heard) Netflix even uses local cache boxes to shorten the distance.
TBH it must be less per capita than CRTs. Old TVs burned power like crazy.
Also, one other thing is that Nvidia clocks their GPUs (aka the world’s AI accelerators) very inefficiently, because they have a pseudo monopoly, and they can.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and likely wont in the future.
Not only are they cheaper than AC, but doing the math shows that they are more energy efficient than a human doing the same work, since humans operate at around 80-100W, 24 hours a day. (Assuming that the output is worth anything, of course.)
let’s not use the term “efficiency” with humans making art, please. you’re not helping anyone with that argument, you’re just annoying both sides.
Well if humans could run on coal it would be a valid argument…
Humans essentially do run on fossil fuels. Modern agriculture is very energy intensive.
Humans at least run on renewable energy.
The computer you draw your art on, not so much. Reject modern art, embrace traditional carvings and cave paintings!
I think that’s going a bit far. ML models are tools to augment people, mostly.
Oh for sure. But if (for example) an artist can save time by tracing over an SDXL reference image, that is energy-efficient as well as time-efficient, despite most people claiming the contrary.
Crossposted to fuck ai community
Classic neo-liberalism - privatize the benefits, socialize the costs.
Corporations : “We should get to gobble all power with our projects… and you should have the personal responsibility to reduce power usage even though it would - at best - only improve things at the very edges of the margins… and then we can get away with whatever we want.”
Just like with paper straws. You get crappy straws and they hope you feel like you’re helping the environment (even though the plastic straws account for like 0.00002% of plastic waste generated) … meanwhile 80% of the actual pollution and waste being generated by like 12 corporations gets to continue.
I feel like i’ve read a very similar argument somewhere recently, but i have difficulty remembering it precisely. It went something like this:
- If a company kills 5 people, it was either an accident, an unfortunate mishap, a necessity of war (in case of the weapons industry) or some other bullshit excuse.
- If the people threaten to kill 5 billionaires, they’re charged with “terrorism” (see Luigi Mangione’s case).
I have a crazy theory that requests like these will actually push people to care more about and take action on global warming.
I know she’s exaggerating but this post yet again underscores how nobody understands that it is training AI which is computationally expensive. Deployment of an AI model is a comparable power draw to running a high-end videogame. How can people hope to fight back against things they don’t understand?
She’s not exaggerating, if anything she’s undercounting the number of tits.
I mean, continued use of AI encourages the training of new models. If nobody used the image generators, they wouldn’t keep trying to make better ones.
you are correct, and also not in any way disagreeing with me.
I try lol.
It’s closer to running 8 high-end video games at once. Sure, from a scale perspective it’s further removed from training, but it’s still fairly expensive.
really depends. You can locally host an LLM on a typical gaming computer.
You can, but that’s not the kind of LLM the meme is talking about. It’s about the big LLMs hosted by large companies.
Well that’s sort of half right. Yes you can run the smaller models locally, but usually it’s the bigger models that we want to use. It would also be very slow on a typical gaming computer and even a high end gaming computer. To make it go faster not only is the hardware used in datacenters more optimised for the task, it’s also a lot faster. This is both a speed increase per unit as well as more units being used than you would normally find in a gaming PC.
Now these things aren’t magic, the basic technology is the same, so where does the speed come from? The answer is raw power, these things run insane amounts of power through them, with specialised cooling systems to keep them cool. This comes at the cost of efficiency.
So whilst running a model is much cheaper compared to training a model, it is far from free. And whilst you can run a smaller model on your home PC, it isn’t directly comparable to how it’s used in the datacenter. So the use of AI is still very power hungry, even when not counting the training.
True, and that’s how everyone who is able should use AI, but OpenAI’s models are in the trillion parameter range. That’s 2-3 orders of magnitude more than what you can reasonably run yourself
This is still orders of magnitude less than what it takes to run an EV, which are an eco-friendly form of carbrained transportation. Especially if you live in an area where the power source is renewable. On that note, it looks to me like AI is finally going to be the impetus to get the U.S. to invest in and switch to nuclear power – isn’t that altogether a good thing for the environment?
Yeh but those local models are usually pretty underpowered compared to the ones that run via online services, and are still more demanding than any game.
nice name btw
How exactly did you come across this “fact”?
I compared the TDP of an average high-end graphics card with the GPUs required to run big LLMs. Do you disagree?
How about, fuck AI, end story.
how about, fuck capitalism? Have you lost sight of the goal?
I did, as a matter of fact, fuck AI.
You thought blind anger came from well informed opinions?
But then the rage machine couldn’t rage
there is so much rage today. why don’t we uh, destroy them with facts and logic
Hahaha at this point even facts and logic is a rage inducing argument. “My facts” vs “Your facts”
1 prompt is avg 1Wh of electricity -> typical AC runs avg 1,500 W = 2.4 seconds of AC per prompt.
Energy capacity is really not a problem first world countries should face. We have this solved and you’re just taking the bait of blaming normal dudes using miniscule amounts of power while billionaires fly private jets for afternoon getaways.
They are blaming the billionaires (or their companies), for making the thing nobody wanted so they can make money off of it. The guy making a five-breasted woman is a side effect.
And sure, that one image only uses a moderate amount of power. But there still exists giant data centers for only this purpose, gobbling up tons of power and evaporating tons of water for power and cooling. And all this before considering the training of the models (which you better believe they’re doing continuously to try to come up with better ones).
nobody wanted according to whom? It’s literally the most used product of this century stop deluding yourself.
All datacenters in the world combined use like 5% of our energy now and the value we get from computing far outweighs any spending we have here. You’re better off not buying more trash from Temu rather than complain about software using electricity. This is ridiculous.
Where are you getting your false information. Its certainly not the most used. And, the reason it’s used at all is from advertising and ownership of the media by the billionaire class to shove the gibbity in our faces at every waking moment so people use it. They’re losing money like never before on ai.
This level of collective delusion is crazy. I don’t think any amount of stats will change your mind so you’re clearly argueing in bad faith but sure:
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users says 5.2B monthly visits compared to Facebook 12.7 and Instagram’s 7.5. Chatgpt is literally bigger than X.com already. Thats just one tool and LLM’s have direct integrations in phones and other apps.
I really don’t understand what’s the point of purposefully lying here? We can all hate billionaires together without the need for this weird anti-intellectual bullshit.
Nah dawg im pretty sure the most used product this century is food.
the most used product of this century is actually your momma
People hate AI so much (for many good reasons!) that they can’t see or accept the truth: many many people want to use it, not just “billionaires”
A lot of things are solved, but capitalism means that we need a profit motive to act. World hunger is another good example. We know how to make fertilizer and how to genetically alter crops to ensure we never have a crop failure. We have trains and refrigeration to take food anywhere we want. Pretty much any box that we need to check to solve this problem has been. The places that have food problems largely have to do with poverty, which at this point is a polite way to say “I won’t make money, so I am okay with them starving”
Im not sure what’s the point here? If we dont like LLMs and data centers using power then we use existing strategies that work like taxing their power use and subsidizing household power use which btw we’re already doing almost everywhere around the world in some form or another.
The data centers are actually easier to negotiate and work with than something like factories or households where energy margins are much more brittle. Datacenter employs like 5 people and you can squeeze with policy to match social expectations - you can’t do that with factories or households. So datacenter energy problem is not that difficult relatively speaking.
I am agreeing with you that the solutions exist, but the will to implement them is going to be the hard part. A big dampener is simply going to be the profit motive. There is more money in siding with the data center than a the households. Are households okay with an increasing in price? Data center is likely to manage that better, or even just pay a bribe to someone. I used food as another example of a problem that is solved. We can grow food without fail and build the rail to get it to where it needs. We just don’t because need does not match profit expectation. There are talks of building nuclear power for some data centers, but such talk would not happen for normal households.
People definitely underestimate how cooperative big tech is relative to every other business mostly because big tech has a lot of money and very few expenses so friction is relatively a bigger bottle neck than almost any other industry. So I still think that pressuring openAi into green energy is easier than pressuring Volvo (or any manufacturer) which already is really brittle and has huge negotiation leverage in the form of jobs it provides.
Take a look at any other business niche and no one’s comitting to green energy other than big tech. As you said yourself no other niche want to build their own nuclear reactors to satisfy their own green energy need.
I think its OK to hate on big tech because they’re billionaires but people really lose sight here and complain about wrong things that distract from real much bigger issues and paints the entire movement as idiots.
A 12000 BTUs inverter split system at peak capacity requires less than 1500 W to run. After it reaches equilibrium it drops the power requirement significantly.
ok so 5 seconds of AC then? my point still stands.
I’m here for the pic
we had three tiddied aliens in total recall, like 40 years ago. we don’t need AI to give us more tits.
we don’t need … more tits.
Blasphemy!!
I should have figured the Rick and Morty episode was a reference to something.
Makes me think about South Park and watching it as it aired when I was a kid. There were so many things I missed because I hadn’t seen any of the source material for a lot of the jokes.
Watching it all again 25 years later and damn, even better the second time around when you’ve seen all the shit they’re parodying.
I didn’t know Rick and Morty referenced this but I shouldn’t be surprised. Same here with the missed references. It makes rewatching older content not just nostalgic but also a fun discovery.
Can we not all just organise to go and shut these places down?
I tried to make an image of a woman with 5 tits but got distracted and got married to a rock
That looks like fun. How do I play that AI?
It’s from https://perchance.org/welcome and is super cool because it’s like half a soul-less AI and half a super cool tool that gets people into programming and they actually care about the Internet because they encourage people to learn how to code their own ais and have fun with it and I would absolutely have DEVOURED it when I was 13 on Tumblr (I forgot my ADHD meds today sorry if I’m rambling)
We’re going away folks, and nothing of any true value will be lost, except all the species that did live in homeostasis with the Earth that we’re taking with us in our species’ avarice induced murder-suicide
I’ve been trying to write this comment the more concise possible, I’m trying my best. “We’re going away”, yes, that’s true. No matter what we are leaving this place, but, that doesn’t mean that the last days of humanity have to be surrounded by pollution and trash. All I can get of that quote in the image is that we should let big companies shit on us till we die.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. And if your neighbour is dosing the neighbourhood with gasoline while wildfires are on the horizon, you smack him, you don’t go and get your own can.
Agreed, but this is like comparing your neighbor burning 1 million acres to you having a bonfire. The scale is the problem. We should absolutely take individual responsibility; however, our small impact is only felt when we band together.
our small impact is only felt when we band together
It is also offset immediately when unregulated corporations use the saved energy to sell us the next dumb thing.
It is not offset. If you bend together you don’t buy the next dumb thing.
Bending together is the only thing that can create change, billionaires won’t.
Bending together
Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps, destroy all private jets, ban recreational flights and power AI responsibly or not at all.
Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps
Aren’t traditional AC’s (assuming you are somewhere where AC is a thing used to cool the air) already heat pumps?
In my attempt at brevity, I articulated myself wrong, totally my bad. I would like the old school systems replaced with either air source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps, backed up with on-site solar and batteries. Modern heat pump systems can heat and cool and are much more efficient than AC as generally installed.
The efficiency gains from an air source heat pumps are on the heating cycle, not the cooling cycle, since you are moving heat around instead of having to generate heat via combustion or big heating elements. When acting as an air conditioner, the efficiency is the same.
Ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) are generally the most efficient, achieving 350-500% efficiency by leveraging stable underground temperatures, though they have higher installation costs. Air source heat pumps (ASHPs) are also highly efficient at 250-400%, extracting heat from the air, but their performance can be affected by extreme outdoor temperatures. In contrast, a traditional gas boiler for heating is around 90-95% efficient, while separate air conditioning units cool, but neither offers the combined, high-efficiency performance of a heat pump. Therefore, for overall energy savings and reduced environmental impact, heat pumps are the superior choice for both heating and cooling.
An AC is an “air heat pump”. The only difference between an AC and what we call a “heat pump” is a reversing valve, which can send refrigerant the other way to heat the interior instead of cooling it.
They’re literally the same thing.
That’s the only definitional difference. In practice there are other differences. My modern cold climate heat pump has a variable speed compressor whereas my previous traditional AC did not. The variable speed allows the system to ramp up and down on both heating and cooling, letting the system run all the time even at a very low level when the demand is low.
The traditional AC’s single speed compressor ended up doing a lot of short cycling when cooling demand was low and shutting down completely when cooling demand was too high (to prevent overheating and compressor damage). The variable speed compressor of the modern heat pump is designed for continuous operation over many hours, even when the temperature outside is extremely high, without overheating. I believe it’s able to back off the compressor speed when the cooling demand exceeds capacity though I have yet to see the system be unable to keep up, despite the unit itself being a lot smaller than the old AC.
I genuinely think the oversimplification of what a heat pump is and how it compares to AC is malignant. It’s like comparing a rickshaw to a bullet train.
They’re literally the same thing.
A traditional air conditioner provides only cooling by moving heat out of your home, primarily contributing to summer electricity peaks. In contrast, a heat pump offers both heating and cooling by simply reversing the refrigerant flow, making it a more versatile and energy-efficient solution for year-round comfort. While heat pumps increase overall electricity demand by electrifying heating, they also shift energy consumption patterns, creating a new winter peak for the grid to manage. However, this increased electrical load presents an opportunity for demand response, allowing smart heat pumps to adjust usage during peak times to balance the grid. Ultimately, widespread heat pump adoption, powered by a decarbonising electricity supply, is crucial for reducing fossil fuel reliance and achieving a greener energy system, albeit requiring significant grid infrastructure upgrades.
Is this an AI-generated response? On a post demonizing AI? Lol bold
Most domestic flights should be replaced by highspeed rail anyways.
Agreed
ban recreational flights
No. Either ban all flights (excluding medical) or none. Otherwise, it will be something only available to those gambling the system.
People have family they should be allowed to see and work they need to travel for.
Yup like my meeting in the Bahamas
If your meeting requires you to go to the Bahamas, so be it. But there are doctors and nurses that have been travelling around the world, educators that travel, carers, archeologists. Yes, some will attempt to game the system, but there’s a lot of good people doing vital work that need to travel.
Man, this is one I’ve tried to wrestle with multiple times. I feel like there are monumental benefits to trans-Atlantic/trans-Pacific recreational flights (really just most long international flights). Banning those would almost certainly increase feelings of isolation, and probably make the already-rampant xenophobia plaguing the world even worse. There really aren’t viable alternatives to flying for getting across a multi-thousand-mile-wide ocean - boats are too slow for the average person, and building trains over the ocean is impractical. Maybe the focus should be on making planes more environmentally friendly, instead of outright banning them?
The thing is tourism does more damage than good, hence saying frig recreational flights. If people are determined to travel, make them sign up to educational holidays.
AC systems are heat pumps so I’m not sure what you mean there.
Great, now this might work with my neighbor, but how exactly do I smack mega corps and the state? Are we talking eco terrorism here or do you have some other idea that hasn’t been tried in the last decades?
I mean, climate change isn’t new but humanity still fucks up the planet and that does not seem to change. Why should we have to sweat at home while professionalized greed burns down everything around us? I will gladly take individual responsibility, but not alone.
Actually, a failing power grid here and there might act as a wake-up call and then we can start talking about solutions, not just symptomatic treatment.
Talking about direct action or even a mildly disruptive protest will probably get you moderated here, and in trouble in real life. It feels like the only options “allowed” are stern words. At least a progressive like Zohran won the primary in NYC, but we’ll need a lot more of that to make a difference.
On the other hand, Luigi is considered by many a hero.
Look, we don’t mind if you want to make a picture of a dude with five dicks, as an exercise in equality
