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GAIA Host Collective
Excellent post, and the electricity usage should be split into two categories.
1) Electricity used for Heating and cooling
2) Electricity used for Lighting, computers and other uses.
The point being that we should NOT be using high quality electricity for cooling and heating. It is very wasteful. Heat pumps do a much better job and can be run directly from the sun's heat. It makes no sense to burn fossil fuels to:
You are wasting close to 90% of the fossil fuel. Heat pumps are much more efficient. It is like using incandescent light bulbs vs CF. Solar thermal has a huge growth potential here.
Interesting supposition, but not true. Heating through heat pumps is much more efficient than burning the fuel directly if the temperature outside is not too cold. As for cooling, how praytell do you plan to cool a building by burning fuel without converting this to electrical or mechanical energy first?
Solar heatpumps would be nice, but the highrise buildings pretty much torpedo that idea from the getgo. If you want solar heatpumps then you require suburbia to do it, with all the associated additional costs. I think the curren tradeoff is a good one, NYC uses 1/3 the average of the nation, but no solar heat pumps, sounds fine to me.
1) use nuclear to produce power.
2) Get rid of all nat-gas/oil fired heating. That would slash CO2 by what, 1/3 or so, above and beyond the savings from the electricity section? Not a bad trade off.