Power Demand From US Homes Expected To Fall For a Decade 261
We hear all the time that household energy consumption is rising, both in the U.S. and around the world. That's been true in the big picture for several decades at least, but reader captainkoloth, with his first accepted submission, points to an Associated Press article with some encouraging news on this front: the rate of growth in U.S. household energy use, and household energy use itself, is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years. Take it for what you will, but that conclusion is drawn by the Electric Power Research Institute, "a nonprofit group funded by the utility industry."
Re:Not a huge surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not a huge surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Fractional HP motors are not the problem. Bad motors are a problem. Case in point, the circulation pump on a solar installation used a 1/10th HP pump. The pump drew about 300 watts or about the energy of 1/2 hp. The pump was replaced with a DC brushless motor. A single 60 watt PE panel was placed on the roof. Now when the sun shines on the collector the pump runs. This eliminated the differential thermostat controller and 3/4 of the power use to circulate the water. It removed 100% of the need for utility power to run the pump.
The move was made for two reasons. One was power efficiency. The other was for reliability. The old system would boil over in a power outage. The new one is unaffected by power outages.
Re:Not a huge surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only does it not harm the economy, it helps us all save money because we're paying for less energy, and we're paying less per unit of energy because demand is lower.
Maybe in California, but some parts of the country have seen almost [ksdk.com] yearly [stltoday.com] rate increases [linncountyleader.com], so cutting your energy usage by 30% doesn't help much when they raise rates 30%.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
Of-course, this is consistent with the depression that US and many other Western nations are in.
Depression is huge loss of production capacity - too few people have meaningful goods producing jobs in the market. The way USA is dealing with the loss of production is by abusing the status of its reserve currency, so it's printing dollars to buy consumer goods and the producers also vendor financing this spending.
So there are fewer and fewer jobs, the production capacity is going down (53Billion USD/month trade deficit), the debt is growing because government spending is constantly increasing in absolute numbers. The so called main stream 'economists' are saying that commodity prices do not matter because consumers are not buying commodities, this is completely dismissing the fact that somebody must buy the commodities to build all those consumer goods. Gold is going up only relative to the destroyed currency. Silver is almost a monetary metal itself, and Apple is selling not only in USA (which has no real purchasing power left since it has almost no production capacity left), but it's selling world wide. Of-course at some point the government will come after all of these American companies that are still making money abroad, saying that they must pay more for 'fairness' sake and will force them to liquidate various assets and to pay gigantic taxes on what will be called their "windfall" profits.
Money destruction [slashdot.org] is the same reason HFT [slashdot.org] is up, and bogus government "Job Acts [slashdot.org]" will only worsen the situation, while the crowd will be calling for various misplaced [slashdot.org] solutions that come out of general misunderstanding of what is happening.
Re:Not a huge surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a huge surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
VFD's are the cats meow, but too expensive and complicated for most applications.
PFC's are becoming insanely popular though, especially in heating and air. anything with 90+ AFU in a furnace will have at least a pfc motor, and the really high end stuff (98+AFU) has continuously variable VFD's for the blower motors. the problem with these motors is that they are MUCH more sensitive to power spikes. after replacing my pfc blower motor for the second time i wised up and put a whole house MOV in the electical panel, a surge suppressing outlet, and three MOV's inside the furnace for the mains power supplied to the motor, and three MOVs across the 24VAC supplied to the motor. haven't had a problem since.
oh, and PFC's cost 3-5 times as much as a shaded pole motor!
air conditioning compressor design is changing as well, almost all are scroll-type instead of the old piston style. and the super efficient ones are using variable speed motors in the compressor coupled to a variable rate TXV that adjusts to ambient conditions to eke out the last little bit of efficiency (20+ SEER). add a variable speed fan and the units suck about half the power of a traditional unit.