Because less then ideal conditions for vision exist? Heavy snow/rain/fog, sun shining into cameras at dawn and dusk etc
It’s not hard to be better then an average human generally, the issue is liability as when a driverless taxi hits or hurts someone you can’t just go “but we are safer then human drivers!”
You aren't required to invest in the stock market. There is nothing stopping you from exclusively investing in CD's, corporate bonds, Government bonds, or even cash for your retirement.
Of course those are less volatile, and therefore provide lower returns, hence you will need to save significantly more and spend significantly less, but that's not you being forced to invest in the stock market. That's just the reality of risk/return trade-offs.
You are so conceited. I had to replace a heat pump system at great expense in my brand new house with a gas furnace so my family would not freeze in the winter. This was a direct tax on my home purchase for which the home builder was given tax incentives to install a useless heatpump and electric backup furnace which had an element the size of a kitchen toaster that if it ran enough to heat the house would cost a thousand dollars a month.
This is not Oil and Gas marketing. This is REALITY.
Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.
If you were to confront these lack of choices yourself you would get a chance to live in the prison you see fit for everyone else.
There’s a challenge in that different heat pumps have wildly different performance characteristics, and they’re not widely understood by people. Some can’t heat effectively below 47 degrees F, others happily keep pumping out lots at -13 degrees F.
Even worse is that it seems most HVACs are totally incompetant when it comes to heat pumps too. Bunch of guys who closed the book after getting out of school and never bothered to learn anything new again.
I would be willing to bet OP got bent over by an idiot HVAC and now will never go back thanks to it. Meanwhile with a competent tech they would instead be here glowing about their experience.
Yeah, a lot of HVAC guys don’t install anything but the big chonky outdated single/dual stage domestic brands. I read this comment as he got one built in with the house, and unfortunately, since they tend not to be understood by buyers and therefore command any premium in the sale process, there’s not much of an incentive to install anything but the crappiest pump on the market. This happened to us, the last homeowners wanted to replace their old furnace right before selling, so they installed the lowest efficiency heat pump that’s legal to sell. It’s trash in cold weather. I DIY installed a cold weather rated mini split myself later, it’s incredible in cold weather, and sips power.
I went down a big rabbit hole when I installed it a couple years ago and made a little calculator to compare heat pumps based on the weather in your area and the pump temperature-efficiency curves: https://heatpushers.com
It needs some revisiting, though, I’m guessing half the links are broken by now.
> Its the conceit of people who refuse to accept reality and their willingness to make everyone else suffer for their phony promises of saving the planet.
Sounds to me like you're the one unwilling to accept reality.
BTU's are BTU's regardless of their source. It sounds like your brand new house was not built to spec, or poorly designed. Any certified ASHRAE technician should be able to meet the required demand load with properly sized equipment. The consequences of fuel type should manifest in differences of up-front and ongoing expense, not comfort.
Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets. Take the highest kW use period of the month, and multiply kW demand by $20. Run the oven; pulls 3kW; $60. Run the oven and the stove top (1.8kW) at the same time $96. Screw up one time during the month and you might as well not care about the rest of the month.
I’m being a bit hyperbolic - it’s averaged over the highest 1 hour peak demand period (4pm-7pm, M-F), but it does limit what things can be run simultaneously (no dryer, oven and AC at the same time, for example). We schedule things around that, Our peak demand for this past month was 2.3kW. That single line item charge is higher than our entire gas bill.
There’s a separate use charge as well, but per kWh that’s pretty low. Then, of course, there’s the dozens of other random charges and fees ($86) that have nothing to do with electricity generation and everything to do with being a monopoly (court resolution surcharge: $3.58). The idea of moving more things to electric is nauseating.
I agree it's not common. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone with demand charges on a residential account. That's typically for large industrial and commercial ratepayers.
It sounds like your electric company is straight up corrupt, which would indeed be a barrier to electrification. For reference, the main demand reduction my municipal electric company does is to send text messages on hot days asking us to use less air conditioning.
Commercial electric rates have long worked that way. The cheap coal power plants that were used commonly 40 years ago did not like to throttle down and so it made sense. Of course things have changed and Peak has a completely different cost structure now and so it no longer makes the sense it did 40 years ago but
Sure? I understand the fundamental problems here, but it's a residential electrical company's job to solve them as best they can with things statistical modeling and buying capacity ahead of time - not to pass them on and leave customers over a barrel!
I do understand that mine lands on the opposite side of not being the most economically optimal, compared to say variable time of use rates. I was just illustrating how out of wack the explained pricing structure is. At that point, why even bother upgrading from a 60A service?
If this is really a modern competitive cost structure with nearly free incremental electricity (great for running computers etc!) then the obvious answer is to get some batteries rather than contorting your life around the POCO's hyper-discretized schedule. But it reads to me like an electric company just putting customers over a barrel because it can. I would have to know the actual $/kWh incremental rate to think otherwise.
I don't quite understand what you're saying, and this seems like a recipe for talking past one another. In general of course there are many ways to individually mitigate a market failure, but this doesn't make it any less of a failure. And as described, OP's rate structure seems like the product of a market failure.
They themselves said that such charges aren't common from other providers, and that their POCO acts with unrestrained monopoly power to tack on a bunch of arbitrary fees. My only point was that this is part way to not even having electrical service in the first place, and is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be reigned in if we want more things to be electrified.
I don't know where OP lives or his situation. I know a few people have chosen to put their house on a rate such as he lives in because by managing of themselves they can get a better better deal overall. Those people though do have a choice and they could go on the slightly higher constant rate per kilowatt hour price that most residential, customers have.
I chose to interpret it as his choice, but if - as you seem to think - he has no choice and this is how his electric is billed, I would agree that his utility is stupid.
OP doesn't sound very happy about the arrangement to me. If it were consensual due to saving money from running a bunch of steady heavy loads (a bunch of computers etc), I wouldn't expect words like "nauseating" but rather more of a recognition that intermittent heavy loads are incompatible with something they've chosen for another reason.
You could game the crap out of this with a small home battery or a V2H capable EV.
Though, at the prices and idiocy you are citing, you could probably just cancel your electrical service and get a big house battery. If they don't allow that, you could just stop paying your electric bill entirely. They'd cut you off the grid eventually, stop billing you. Good riddance, I suppose.
> Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets.
That would be correct, I had never heard of this. it seems extremely punishing and something I would hope your government regulators are trying to fix.
The problem for you isn’t electricity it’s your local laws favouring gas and the utility extracting wealth. 86 usd in fees is more then my entire electric bill has been in the summer (the monthly fees here are 15cad a month)
I imagine your per kWh cost is also much higher too
That said I still don’t think on your math entirely holds up. Ovens and electric elements (even more so for induction) do not just draw their rated power continuously. Once they heat up they drop to a much lower duty cycle like 50%. But that is besides the point now.
A demand charge is a charge based on the highest power drawn during the billing period rather then on the amount of energy drawn.
It is more common with medium to large commercial users than with residential users.
The bill will have both the per kWh energy charge to cover energy usage and the demand charge.
So in his case it means if he cooks one meal on an induction stove that month, with no other high loads at the same time, it sets a floor of $36 on the demand charge.
I think normal people would, couple projects I needed features added/bugs fixed and checked first if there were ai rules, there was, so instead of opening a pr just forked fixed and use my fork now. Not a big deal.
I had one a decade or so ago and I did use it because it was there, sometimes. But it’s not a feature I would ever go out of my way to get or pay extra for - the only thing I was looking forward to here is the oled so guess I’ll find out if I will use it.
Apparently arc silos players based on aggression so if you don’t engage in pvp it puts you with other players who don’t and if you do with those who do
Everything is not built on top of it.
> It's the language powering the whole web
It’s also not powering the whole web, just a significant part of the client frontend inside browsers.
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