NYS electricity costs

Coach Z wrote

The .065 is only a small part of the Total cost for the electric.  As noted the LP area gets a special rate hold over from the Olympic deal.

LP is not the only one getting that rate, from Buffallo to Albany have similar supply rates. Just go on to the energy supplier comparison sites and start putting in zip codes. You are correct that the supply rate is not the whole cost. You have to include distribution. Distribution is the cost of the wire, transformers, protection equipment and all the maintenance associated with it. More NG will not change the distribution costs so don't get stupid. Haven't you read anything in this thread or have you been hitting the sauce again.

ScottyJack wrote

your above post is a result of corporate capitalism practiced by the likes of OrangeTopTinyHands....

I vote PeeTex for smartest guy on this forum!  I'm being sincere!  I love reading PeeTex's post!  I'd really enjoy having a beer with Mr.PeeTex!

Now please school me in this thermal solar..  My first priority is to continue to tighten up the old house with insulation and all new windows (probably a two-three year project) then I'd like to argument my oil furnace use with some kind of renewable - the best way possible...

Solar thermal is just like solar electricity, except instead of using a photo-voltaic cell to convert energy in photons to electromotive force, you use those photons to heat a medium, like water.

It's actually almost entirely the process that creates our weather.

It's not a new thing, hippies used to put black drums on their roof to get heated by the sun for hot water.  Solar thermal hot water heating!

The real step is designing it into useful and efficient ways to trap solar energy (and perhaps store it).  If you could create enough heat you could move a turbine and create mechanical energy.  If you could store the heat in some large thermal mass underground through the summer, you could potentially have a large heat source for the winter.

Either way, as we've argued before on here, there's only so much energy from the sun we can trap here in NY throughout the year.  We inadvertently trap some more of that energy by tapping into wind and ocean currents, but it's still all energy coming from the sun.

I still think for rural heating purposes, wood is the way to go.  It releases greenhouse gasses but not those that were sequestered underground in fossil fuels for millions of years.  The carbon you release was carbon that the tree used throughout it's life, and if you use in a small enough quantity, the forest replenishes this naturally.  It's a terrible idea for cities though.

When I was in HS and taking architectural drawing, I always had the grand idea of building a hill house.  Basically an underground home with a solar room that was clear and south facing.  If you design the pitch of the roof properly for your latitude, you'll capture more light in the winter and block out more in the summer, giving the house a regulating heat property.  Fill the solar room with plants and they'll help oxygenate and control the humidity in the house.  By building underground and into a hillside, you take advantage of the thermal properties of the ground - mainly the frost line, and keep the house at a more stable temperature year round, therefore requiring less energy for heating and cooling.  The other step is to add heat ex changers deeper into the ground to capture and release heat throughout the year.

Reducing your energy need is the biggest step toward using renewables.  SJ you should probably pull that house down, rebuild and recycle the wood and reconfigure it in a more economical way.  

ScottyJack wrote

I vote PeeTex for smartest guy on this forum!  I'm being sincere!  I love reading PeeTex's post!  I'd really enjoy having a beer with Mr.PeeTex!

Now please school me in this thermal solar..  My first priority is to continue to tighten up the old house with insulation and all new windows (probably a two-three year project) then I'd like to argument my oil furnace use with some kind of renewable - the best way possible...

Thank you, but there are a lot of really smart people which hang out here. Yes - would be glad to discuss the affairs of the world over a brew sometime with you as well as quite a few others here sometime.

With regards to home energy, it very much depends on your site. I south facing home built into a hill with a built in thermal mass can almost heat itself except for the coldest darkest days of winter where a wood stove or baseboard or geothermal can carry the load. Hot water and additional heat can be harvested by solar water heaters. A good designer can give you a home with very little energy costs.

One of my personal vows was never to build a new house.  

 So, I need to retrofit a 1935 bungalow. We have a relatively recent oil furnace that pushes heated water through baseboards.

Couple years from now well being doing over main roof which gets good southwest exposure to sun. I am really interested in learning how to integrate some type of solar to reduce oil consumption.

PS,

Your Trump position is, for me, a befuddling one.  And on a personal level, challenges my vote for you as most intelligent on this board.....   

ScottyJack wrote

PS,

Your Trump position is, for me, a befuddling one.  And on a personal level, challenges my vote for you as most intelligent on this board.....

That's OK - it really shouldn't. If I say I think Trump will win doesn't mean I think he should win. If I defend him when people exaggerate or twist what he has said to support their agenda does not mean I support what he said in the first place.

You are a deep one!  

ScottyJack wrote

One of my personal vows was never to build a new house.  

Just curious, why?

What if you just reshaped an old house?  Is that the same?



I love old houses for their history and architecture, but they are nightmares.  I grew up in one from the 1880s.  Granted it was somewhat updated, what it really needed was to be doused in gasoline.

My wife and looked at buying a real old, early 1800s, historical home here in Rochester.  The locations was perfect, the previous owners had added a nice new garage (which is rare where we were looking) and the price was within our budget.  5 minutes into the tour and I had the sweats.  My wife loved it.  She'd never lived in a house that old.  I wasn't going to do it again.  Life was much, much different back then, and it shows.  Also they are horribly inefficient no matter what you do to update them.

My current house is early 60s and it drives me crazy.  It's fairly small, has newish windows and is well insulated (some of that we fixed) except we have a partial cathedral ceiling upstairs which gives no air space to the roof in those locations.  We added insulation and air ducts to the soffet, but it's still not enough... just a shit design.  We get a giant ice dam every winter and you can just see where the heat is escaping.  We also have an addition with a small crawl space that is a block of ice.  Tried to insulate it but it's always cold and being away from the core of the house, which heats really easily, never gets enough heat flow.  Stupid, half-assed add on to turn a half bath into a full bath.  Would have been better w/o it.  And the electric is the worst.  No house from the 60s had any clue of what and how our electrical needs would be today.  I'd love to rip it all out and rewire it but I can't justify the cost.  If I had the money and planned on staying where I am, I would rip it down and recycle everything I could, but redesign it to be more modern and efficient.

<quote author="Coach Z">
6.49 cents per kw/hr

its not just the electric its heating too.  There is not much home heating with Nat Gas in NYS and New England.

Can I just say you are welcome to your opinion but not your facts.  Nearly ALL of upstate major suburban and metropolitan areas use natural gas to heat there home.  Even small towns all over the other part of the state have natural gas.  In fact, I don't know a single person that doesn't use natural gas.

Your electric is cheaper than mine and I have one of the largest hydro-electric power plants in the world in my backyard.  Why?  Because the STATE that you claim to be anti-buisness gives large-businesses cut-rate electricity to provide job growth (you know, that shit you claim the state ignores).  

More corporate welfare that I have to pay for!!!!

You got me googlin...

Awesome map.

A lot of that seems to line up with what I was saying that wood still makes a hell of a lot of sense in the rural areas.  If I had a place in the Adirondacks, I'd surely use wood.

Most everyone where I live use NG (Monroe County) - it's cheap, easily available and super efficient.  What comes out of our furnace exhaust is cool CO2 and water vapor.  Unfortunately for carbon offset, it's shit.  If we all burned wood, we'd deforest the whole state and pump too many particulates into the air.

This is again why I'm really hopeful on the reformed NG home power plant.  It's the only thing that even remotely makes any sense in this climate where NG is readily available.  The real key is to sequester the carbon that is made from the process.  Combine home electric + heating can approach efficiencies of 98%.

http://energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-natural-gas-reforming

http://www.fuelcelltoday.com/media/1637150/using_fc_residential_heat_and_power.pdf

https://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint%20archive/Files/49_1_Anaheim_03-04_0949.pdf

Large scale FF power is also looking at ways to sequester carbon from plants, but it seems to me if NG is available, that the entire process could be much more efficient for combined HVAC and power than power alone, because power alone does not address heating issues unless everyone were to switch to electric heat.  And as we hashed out earlier, converting the NG to electricity, then distributing, then to heat would be less efficient overall.