https://cdn-ilcjnih.nitrocdn.com/BVTDJPZTUnfCKRkDQJDEvQcUwtA...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/battery-storage-is-dramatically-...
Solar + hot water tank can provide any house in US with 100% solar hot water (from PV!) for 80% of time, remaining 20 % of time you can have 10-99% solar heated water.
So we should focus on saying to people that if they buy solar and add electric heating element to hot water tank, then PV system will pay itself much sooner and their batteries will last longer. Becasue it is known and predictable load, you need hot water every day. And hot water is order of magnitude more energy then TV, lighting...
By lowering household usage like this we can make energy transition faster, cheaper.
Also proper construction - house heated only 10 days in a year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHScgjTJtE
I realize that some people won't be willing to have a very warm/very cold house that gradually shifts to the more ideal comfortable range, but for people who are willing to deal with that (it personally doesn't bother me), it's a pretty easy way to shift a lot of power use and, if you have Solar or Time of Use billing, save a lot of money.
time of use billing - tool to incentivie you to use "off-peak" power, but i guess it will be deprecated in favor of "realtime" billing in future, because there will be so much solar (almost zero $ per kWh on market) that your energy provider will incentivize you to draw energy during peak solar "activity" AND off-peak hours. it will be simpler for them to give you market price every 15 minutes window than 4hour window at same time every day.
energy generated by big wastewater plants is methane from microbial activity. also waste water plant can not remove a lot of stuff like medicine, hormones...
you can construct wastewater tank with integrated coil connected to heat pump. so you can take all heat back. if you have house with integrated waste water treatment, this should be no brainer. houses with existing heat pumps can "just add another heat exchanger circuit"
but i do not personally like heatpumps because working fluid can be in orders of 10 000 times more harmful to greenhouse effect than co2. and compressors using CO2 as a working fluid are rare.
heatexchangers connected to vertical wastewater pipe are showed in tradeshows. but i do not understand how that makes sense price wise. im not sure they recover as much heat as advertised.
You seem to have concluded energy use for hot water cannot go lower by excluding any approach that would lower it, not because it's physically impossible, but simply because such technology isn't being used.
Isn't this a vacuous argument?
