Electricity is essentially an abstraction layer that decouples the source of energy from the consumer.
Even if you want to remain 100% fossil fuel dependent, it still makes a lot more sense, outside of some industrial uses, to generate electricity with those fossil fuels and then use the electricity to power your actual device, whether it’s your air conditioning unit or your automobile, than to ship liquid gas to hundreds of thousands of gas stations all over or build pipes to send gaseous natural gas to every house.
Not only is it more efficient, as any abstracted system, it allows far more flexibility and resilience due to that flexibility.
100%. Also, fossil fuel is a bit ridiculous compared to renewables because you have to spend a huge amount of effort to find a new resource patch, extract the fuel, ship it all over the planet… just to burn it and it’s gone forever. Not a sustainable system for our energy at all.
I can’t say too much, but electricity and petroleum are only temporary energy sources for me. Once waste heat can be turned into usable energy, electricity becomes cyclic. Through energy recovery, electricity can produce fuel, and fuel can be converted back into electricity, forming an energy‑conversion loop.
The only drawback is that the system can recover only 98.04% of the energy, which is not what I originally designed. If this were a phone battery, my initial design was that a phone would never need permanent charging again. Now it seems it might need to be charged once every six months or a year.
All of this was originally designed for my future long‑term stay on Mars — I never intended to implement it on Earth
Electricity is essentially an abstraction layer that decouples the source of energy from the consumer.
Even if you want to remain 100% fossil fuel dependent, it still makes a lot more sense, outside of some industrial uses, to generate electricity with those fossil fuels and then use the electricity to power your actual device, whether it’s your air conditioning unit or your automobile, than to ship liquid gas to hundreds of thousands of gas stations all over or build pipes to send gaseous natural gas to every house.
Not only is it more efficient, as any abstracted system, it allows far more flexibility and resilience due to that flexibility.
Panel I've bought 15 months ago is 20% more expensive now.
Heat pump sales rise across Europe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012003
Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601310