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Judging from the picture: single-family home with no access to public transport. I’m guessing my emissions from a small apartment close to urban rail is still lower than theirs, even if I heat with gas.
I’m not saying it’s a useless project, but the root problem in America is urban sprawl, making almost every aspect of life overly wasteful, in material and energy.
Given how close heating and residential gas use emissions are to personal vehicle emissions it’s likely to come down to efficiency of the cars involved and if their solar powered or not.
As long as residents have access to local, durable energy generation that isn’t at risk of outages: very cool.
That’s where local battery storage/EVs come in. Also passivhaus in and of itself is a form of resiliency - if the power goes out during a cold snap, the house will stay warm for quite some time, and the dozen kWh in a battery or the several dozen in an EV go alot further. Efficiency has a multiplying effect.
Absolutely, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
One of the current benefits of having natural gas piped into a house is having a completely distinct power supply system, where one could cook, heat the home, heat water (sanitation), power a generator (plumbed in line), etc.
I’m not saying this is a bad project, I’m just saying that is an adoption challenge to be addressed (resiliency, failover)
Right, but remember only like 60% of homes have gas anyway, so that’s not necessarily the baseline from a resiliency perspective. And a huge chunk of those aren’t actually prepared to operate without electricity either. So while I agree that resiliency is worth focusing on, we should also look holistically about what gas can/cannot do and the associated costs relative to electrification/solar/storage. A modern gas home will still need a backup generator to run condensing hot water/furnace and there’s a significant cost to whole home generators, so it’s not all fun and games just having gas appliances.
Yep. We just installed a small generac to support us during increasingly regular power outages, with automatic failover. 7k all in.
This is in addition to a small thermal solar array, and a small pv solar array with 5kwh (but expandable) storage that we previously had.
So as you can imagine, resiliency is high on my mind lol
It’s a fascinating topic. It’s top of my mind too - we have had very reliable power historically (Colorado) but in the last year had a major preemptive wildfire shutdown and a few other shutdowns (whereas literally less than 5 minutes of outage the last decade). I also got rid of my gas service last year and fully electrified. I have solar, but was waiting until battery prices dropped before going that route. Figured I’d yolo in the meantime, but that assumption has me increasingly on edge. From a climate perspective, I do hate to see a renewed interest in gas but I get why. We need cheaper batteries and standardized V2H/V2G asap.
Great points
Is it possible to scale it up, like a condo? To limit the urban sprawl?
The Passive House concept by itself can scale up. However, it is expected that you might need to bring in more power from elsewhere at one point when solar alone isn’t sufficient to cover local demand.
Somewhat; the highest-density housing is going to be a net consumer of energy from elsewhere though.
