To be fair, all appliances with lights and clocks suck out electricity when not in use to fuel these lights and clocks. It actually has a name; it is called Vampire Electricity Use and it is real. A microwave can suck out up to one watt of electricity per hour while not in use and more if the door is open and there is a light in it. Ovens and coffee makers the same, computers, and power bars as well. It is no wonder that my new roommate told me when I left the house I had to unplug everything. I respected his wishes, as I wanted to be a good roommate. But, I looked in to it. It turns out that if you turn off a power bar, you stop the appliances plugged in to it from draining power, the power bar still drains power though. So, I did that, because unplugging the power bars was a real pain. Two power bars, two watts per hour during the day.
Okay, so I just painted a picture of not a crazy guy but a power wise person that we all should follow because it is smart. Except, he did not actually follow what he preached. He had a very big screen TV in the living room and a stereo system that he never unplugged, because it would wipe his settings, he said. Plus, when he worked from home, the TV and the stereo we're both on while he worked on his computer. So they were draining power all the time. The Vampire drain of those appliances is about fifty watts per hour when not in use. Additionally, he had another TV and stereo in his bedroom that I assume he did not unplug as well. So, the Vampire drain of his appliances when he was not using them, like when he was out is about 150-200 watts per hour, and mine is 2. I am not sure, but I suspect that there is a battery that will save your settings in your TV and stereo for power outages. The other thing that makes him crazy is that he only changes some of his power usage behaviours. Like washing during off peak times, but he showers when ever he wants a shower. Hot water generation is the most expensive part of your electric bill. It costs 4200J to raise one liter of water 1°C. Typically hot water is 60°C and starts out cold at 5°C, so since a Joule is a Watt second, it costs 55x4.2kw per liter of water used. A tank is drained in 20 minutes so, enter math, a 100L tank costs about 23,000 Kw. My roommate showers in peak costs. So I call him crazy because he worries about the small stuff to the point of anger, but ignores the huge costs because they inconvenience him. Crazy.
The other reason why I call him crazy is that he constantly complains about the cost of electricity and he blames the current Government. The government did do a few things that upped the cost of electricity, but so did every other government in the last thirty years. To be clear, there is a urban/rural divide in the cost of electricity and this is unfair. I have a friend who moved to the city and her rent in the city is 33% higher than her hydro bill in the country. Did you catch that? The cost of living in a rural location is much much more expensive. Land taxes, home ownership costs, heating, water and other little things are all covered in her City apartment as well as electricity. The cost of living in the expensive city is less than the country. When you pay for electricity in general you pay for the distribution too. I don't know how they calculate that, but I assume that it is the cost of the distribution network divided amongst the people who use it. So, in the city the network costs millions to maintain, but it is divided by millions of users, so the cost is low. In the country the cost is much less, because there are less lines, but the numbers of people are in the thousands, so the millions are divided by much less people, so the costs are much higher than in the city. The theory is that you pay per kilowatt hour that you use. You use less and you are charged less for your delivery too. The problem is that there is a wealth disparity in that. Wealthy people have more efficient homes so they use less electricity, poor people have cheaper homes that use more electricity and so they pay more too. Country homes tend to be less energy efficient, so country homes cost more than city homes in this respect too. Also, city homes are newer, because the cities have been growing steadily over the century. Rural populations have been dropping, so the homes are older on average and less efficient.
Governments. In Ontario it started with the Conservatives in the late 70s, Bill Davis. I remember his election ads contained a bright new technology of solar cells, but when he gained power he did not go solar, he went Nuclear. Nuclear is the way to go. All power generation results in pollution, all or it. Flooding of land to create hydro reservoirs creates methane from rotting plants, trees and soil. Solar and Wind produce pollution when the materials are made. Nuclear produces tiny amounts of difficult to store waste material. Fossil Fuel power is the worst by producing waste at all stages of the process. The Conservatives started to build massive Nuclear power plants, which produce very little pollution compared to coal, but are very expensive ways to make power. The Liberals who replaced them continued to build the power from nuclear. The NDP deferred passing the cost on to the public for the future, and the Conservatives cut taxes that went to service the cost of the electricity and keep it inexpensive.
The current government, did a few things, first they closed the coal and the other fossil fuel plants, they created cheaper energy with hidden costs; the savings future governments will get from lower health care cost will pay for that move. They pushed a plan to get more private citizens to produce electricity and sell it to the grid. The homeowner would sell the power at a better rate than they would charge someone for it for a little while. Then they would sell it at the current rates. They introduced three rates for electricity that reflected when electricity was used. When the greatest usage occurred, the rates were the highest, when usage was the lowest, the rates were the lowest. People started doing the wash at night when the costs were lower and turned lights off during the day. People started using power wisely.
Here is the facts that are obvious, but have been thrown out there as reasons why renewables are bad:
Solar power does not generate power at night, so it can't be used to replace power plants. Solar power is only generated when the sun is out, and that is when people are active and using power and it is when people turn on their air conditioners in the Summer. So building Solar capacity, reduces the amount of power generation needed during the day.
The Liberal plan to buy home owner produced power at three times the rate, passed the costs to other consumers with higher rates. This is true. Obviously true. Here though is the next question, how much would ratepayers have to pay to get another Nuclear power plant operational just for peak demands in the day, billions of dollars. So, increasing the supply of power with homeowner generated power that is bough at three times that rate, is saving people money.
The wind does not blow all the time, so wind generation is not dependable. Up that is correct again. In fact the wind blows mostly at night and more in the Winter. What does having a wind source do then? It reduces the amount of power that is created from Hydroelectric power plants, when the wind blows. Hydroelectric power relies on water storage and once the water is out of e storage area, it most be replenished before it is used again. So, every Kw of power that wind creates is a Kw of hydroelectric power that can be used when the wind is not blowing. Extending the duration that hydroelectric power can be used, reduces the need to create new power for the system, which costs a lot of money, billions.
Okay so, how is power generated? We have two main types of power generation. We have constant power and peak power. Constant background power generation is cheaper power. The maintenance costs of a power plant are constant and the more power that is generated lowers the cost of that power plant. Peak power generation must be turned on and turned off again. This power is more expensive, and the cost of maintaining the plant is the same as the power that is produced all the time. Ideally we would want to have less power plants creating peak power and more creating background power. Solar power is peak power generation and the more of it we have the less we need peak power generation.
There is another problem with peak power generation, it has a lag. It takes time for the system to detect an increase of usage and engage the power plant to create energy. The closer the power system matches the demand the more efficient the system is. Over production can be sold and under production can be bought from other systems, but if the power is not there, it results in brown outs that damage electronics, probably if they can't sell excess energy a similar amount of damage could occur. There is a solution to this issue and it is called storage.
Storage can occur in two ways, battery storage and storage of potential energy. Potential energy storage is the most efficient. Excess power is used to pump water up a gradient into a hydroelectric reservoir to be used later. This is 60% efficient, meaning that it costs 100 watts to pump the water that would generate 60 watts of power, but it is not the most responsive solution. The most responsive is a battery storage. Battery storage would allow instant storage of excess energy and instant release of power for the time that it takes to get the generation of power up and running and to turn off excess production. Which brings up another interesting thing, home batteries.
Home batteries like the ones Elon Musk is touting, can do a number of things they can store your energy production and allow you to stay off the grid forever, or make you money. You could buy energy to store on your battery and sell it during the day, provided that the battery is efficient enough. Electric car batteries could be used the same way, recharge at off-peak times and sell at peak times. You would just have to know ahead of time if you were going to be using the car that day.
The ultimate goal of the Government is have power generation by power plants to be flat all day long and to rely on solar, wind, hydroelectric plants, and storage to provide peak power. Eventually through efficiencies reduce the expensive sources to nothing. It is time for us to do our part and generate as much power as we can, reducing our costs and reducing the demand for new power generation on the government.
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