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IWEA:
"Wind energy is an Irish success story, driving down electricity costs for consumers, cutting millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions every year and securing a homegrown energy future that doesn't depend on importing fossil fuels."
The 37 per cent share of electricity demand amounted to more than 2.8 million MWh of electricity, compared to 2.7 million in the first quarter of 2018. The average Irish household uses approximately 4.5 MWh of electricity every year.
The total installed capacity of Ireland's wind farms has now risen to 3,700 MW, approximately enough to power 2.2 million Irish homes annually.
Ireland is becoming green in more ways than one.
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Wind Provided 37 Percent of Ireland's Electricity in Q1 2019
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I'm mentally OVERDRAWN! What's that SIGNPOST up ahead? Where's ROD
STERLING when you really need him?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 21 2019, @05:18PM (4 children)
That's way better than the US. Through the late 1970s to the early 2000s, my parent's 4 bedroom 2 bath house used roughly 10 MWh/year. Some years it was 11, and some it was 9. That doesn't count gas, which was used for the furnace, water heater, and clothes dryer, but not the stove. I started trying to reduce electricity usage, but it wasn't until CFLs, low power computers, the 80plus program to make more efficient computer power supplies, the arrival of 32W fluorescent replacements for 40W fixtures, and flat screen TVs and monitors, and more efficient A/C that I began to make real progress. The big electricity burner was the A/C. Cooling and heating (still need electricity to run the blower) accounted for about half the electricity usage. The shade trees on the south side of the house growing large enough by the 1990s to seriously shade the house undoubtedly helped.
I got electricity usage down to 5.2 MWh/year. Door to door power plan salespeople told us that we were way ahead of all our neighbors, had the lowest energy usage on the whole block by far. And now I hear this, that Irish households use 4.5 MWh/year? Probably it's the climate. Mild climate is why California and Florida are the 2 lowest household energy using states in the US. I'd guess their houses are smaller, too, the McMansion craze hasn't been as strong there.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 21 2019, @06:30PM (3 children)
There are plenty of McMasnions around SoCal. Worse, the land is expensive, so most are of the tinylawnus neighborlookis subspecies.
As far as the total power used, it's a matter of wanting to save. Weather in Europe is overall extreme than in the US, and part of the difference is the smaller homes and less availability of AC. It's also about having less wooden homes, a history of strong building codes, and the most important : expensive energy.
I'm cheap. I don't mind making the kids wear a sweater, or sweat a bit. Optimize when to open the windows or the garage door, unplug the useless stuff, and stay away from IoT crap. The other people with the same floorplan as me, in the same street, use up to 5 times more electricity and gas than we do. Even my water consumption report says we are over 20% better than the average of the best households nearby. Sure, the grass isn't very green in summer, but we're still comfortable. The neighbors don't quite understand how wasteful they are. They've never seen those negative bills we get once a year from CA rewards for those who save.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 21 2019, @10:06PM (2 children)
I meant, that Ireland isn't afflicted with the McMansion craze. At least, not as much as the US is. Yeah, California has it bad. I know, I lived there for a year.
Yes, being willing to live with a little more seasonal temperature swing is a huge, huge energy saver. We settled on 83F as the warmest we felt comfortable with in the summer. In the winter, we were okay with 70F, even 68F, until my parents got older.
The daily shower is another huge user of energy, especially if you aren't fast, and insist on taking more than 5 minutes. Army veterans like to brag about taking just 1 minute in the shower, but I'm okay with not rushing through a shower that fast. The hot shower wouldn't be such an energy hog if we had such things as decent solar water heaters. But no, the US is still stuck on gas or, worst of all, resistive heating with electricity. And then our systems, or more like, lack of any recapture systems, send much of that heat straight down the drain, regardless of it being winter or summer. A criminal waste of heat to do that in the winter. The only improvement on hot water systems in the US is better insulation for the water tanks.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 21 2019, @10:17PM (1 child)
Newer tankless heaters (like mine) are over 95% efficient. They even use PVC exhaust, because so little of the heat is wasted.
I have no guilt taking a nice warm shower (it helps when the house drops under 65), yet my furnace-off gas bill went down to less than 20 bucks when I got rid of the stupid wasteful tank.
You are correct that the water is still reasonably warm as it goes down the drain, but grey water systems are not easy to retrofit to old houses.
The US should eliminate the top loading washers, the low-insulation tank heaters, and a whole long list of shitty appliances which seem to ignore that we should have moved away from wasting cheap energy and water. CA is ahead of many other states (drought and smog will do that to you), but I'm still appalled at the cheap-buy-costly-operated applicances Americans seem to find acceptable.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:39PM
Oh yes, there's a whole lot of low hanging fruit on the efficiency tree that America ignores. For instance, most Americans won't accept a few simple measures to improve vehicle aerodynamics, such as vortex generators, smooth panels for the underside, and skirts over the rear wheels. That's ugly and effeminate.
I looked into converting my parents' home to tankless. It would have cost roughly $1000 for the tankless gas powered water heater itself, plus $500 more in materials to modify the house. Need a bigger diameter gas pipe and flue, since the tankless uses big blasts of energy over a short time span, rather than a steady trickle like the tank does. The tankless was not freestanding, so need to contrive a wall mount for it. And the tankless needs electricity, but the house didn't have an outlet in the closet where the tank goes. Gas leaks and electrical work too, yay, fun. If I wasn't willing or able to do the work myself, doubtless labor would double the cost. Or I could get a cheap tank heater for $300, and that's what I did. Would've taken 20 to 30 years of lower gas bills for the tankless to pay for the difference. That's too much for me. Besides, I really didn't want a half measure like the tankless, if I was going to do all that work, I wanted to go all the way to solar.
I looked into solar as well, and that was outrageously expensive. Couldn't be done for less than $5000. Got to send off to California for the system. There was a local business that did solar water heating installations, but their price was $17,000! They talked that down to a bit under $10,000, with various rebates and government programs and the like. Still way too much. Texas was a big oil state. Oil and cattle. Using solar power was practically treasonous. Vegetarianism was bad too. Attitudes have changed in recent years, but that still lingers.
When it broke down after some 25 years of service, we dumped the top loader for a front loader. But the front loader had plenty of problems. We replaced the Hall effect sensor twice, and the gasket once. At 7 years, the "spider", the piece that connects the motor to the drum, broke. It had been corroding all that time, but we didn't know it, it was out of sight. LG had a lifetime warranty on the stainless steel drum, and a 10 year warranty on the motor, but the spider didn't count as part of either of those. A protective coating on the spider would have prevented that problem, but that costs them more money. Yeah, they only warranty the parts that don't need covering. And, oh, even for a covered part the warranty isn't worth using, since it does not cover labor, and to get parts under warranty, the machine has to be taken to an approved shop that charges inflated rates for labor. Cheaper just to buy a new washer than deal with that. By far the least costly thing to do was just buy the parts and replace them ourselves.
A final note. The gas powered dryer ambushed us on electricity use. The stupid thing used 5W 24/7, to keep the control panel powered despite supposedly being "off". What alerted me was noticing that the control panel was warm to the touch when I rested my hand on it. If not for that, I would never have suspected the gas dryer was such a big waster of electricity. I stuck a power strip with a switch between the dryer and the wall outlet, and kept it switched off when the dryer was not in use. Anyway, that one is like fixing a dripping faucet while overlooking a massive leak in the water main. Powered clothes dryers are ridiculously wasteful. The age old technique of using a clothesline still works fine.