Daylight Savings Rant
It’s looking bleak for my annual predictions from January. I must come from behind to realize a 50% hit rate. Last week, Trump implored Congress to make daylight saving permanent. Zerohedge provides a comprehensive assessment of issues from economic to safety.
I sum it up this way – people like to complain. They don’t like to think. If daylight savings is locked in, it will be dark until 9:00 AM in the winter. If standard time is locked in, the sun will rise at 4:00 AM in the summer. Which would you like?
I remember when coming off daylight savings time, aka, falling back, was moved from the last weekend in October to the first weekend in November. One reason noted was that trick-or-treaters could roam the hood to extort candy from their neighbors in the safety of daylight. Don’t believe it? Test my memory? Booyah – here it is.
So, we moved the end of daylight savings for one night of safety a few years ago, and now they want to make “daytime” commutes for kiddos in the pitch black for, I don’t know, maybe 80 days per year. Are you sure you want that?
Back in the day, we had to manually adjust a dozen clocks: VCR, microwave, alarm clocks, kitchen clocks, car clocks, etc., while today, it’s all automatic. The cable box, computer, phones, tablets, the clock in the car, and my watch all change automatically. My clocks change 15-20 times a year when counting traveling to different time zones – so give me a break. Center the daylight around the business and school day, maximizing it into the evening in summer, as we have now.
Powering Data Centers with Natural Gas
Switching subjects and thinking things through, what about heating electrification? Data centers are coming online by the gigawatt. Last week’s Rant referenced Meta’s largest-ever data center campus, which will be in Louisiana, where there is ample access to natural gas for power generation and transmission lines for resiliency year-round. Specifications noted a $10 billion price tag for the data center and $3.2 billion for three natural-gas-fired power plants to support the facility. A rule of thumb I discovered from recent experience is that $1 billion in data centers requires roughly 200 MW of load. Therefore, the Meta campus would have about 2 GW of load. The average new-build capacity of a combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) in 2023 was 680 MW; therefore, the three plants slated for Meta would have a capacity of about 2 GW! Insert bowing emoji here.
Here’s another called shot. Sixteen months ago, I published the 24-7 Carbon-Free Energy Hall of Mirrors to describe the phoniness of big tech going zero-carbon. Fast forward 13 months, and Cook, Bezos, Pichai, and Zuckerberg are suddenly collaborators with the new climate-change denier-in-chief, DJT. Not to be left out, Microsoft is also throwing in the carbon-free towel for its $3.3 billion data center under construction in Southeast Wisconsin. That article confirms the 2 GW for Meta’s Louisiana facility. Insert the bowing emoji again.
A Forbes headline from last August asked, Why Big Corporations Are Quietly Abandoning Their Climate Commitments? The answers are in this blog before it happens, but “Big Corporations” are not going to hold pressers to announce their surrender to thermodynamic realities.
The future of round-the-clock power generating capacity for the next five years, at least, is natural gas. Trump’s executive order to reinvigorate “beautiful clean coal” will go nowhere. The lower cost of natural gas power generation, particularly its displacement of Appalachian coal, led to the substantial decarbonization of electricity in the last thirty years, per Figure 1[1]. It’s all about low cost. Fortunately, combined-cycle natural gas power plants emit about 70% less CO2 per kWh of electricity than coal.
Figure 1 Electricity Generation by Source
Similar economics will keep us with natural gas rather than renewables.
Electrifying Heat with Cold Climate Heat Pumps
This brings me to the point of electrifying everything, considering natural gas will be the fuel of choice for new power plants in the next five to ten years—power plants that will generate electricity for 40-50 years each. What does this mean for carbon emissions if all heating is converted to electric heat pumps, considering they are relatively efficient, but so are gas furnaces? Would anything be gained?
Fortunately, I have a vast library of electrification analyses, so it’s easy to draw these comparisons. Figure 2 shows pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per million Btu of heat[2] delivered for air-source heat pumps compared to an ENERGY STAR gas furnace over a range of typical outdoor temperatures. Heat pump performance declines as ambient (outdoor) temperature falls. EGRID provides carbon intensity over time with analysis shown in Figure 3. The national average carbon intensity nationwide is 0.82 lb/kWh. Emission rates for a combined cycle natural gas plant are slightly less than that; therefore, carbon intensity will continue to inch downward, but 0.7 lb/kWh is likely to be a floor for decades.
Figure 2 Heat Pump vs. Gas Furnace Carbon Emission Comparison
Figure 3 Electricity Carbon Intensity
The problem is electricity costs are rising as a lot of new gas generation and renewable resources (see FCOE) are coming online, and it doesn’t matter if natural gas prices are dirt cheap. Although the low cost of natural gas to fuel our largest source of electricity generation isn’t affecting average electricity prices, it directly benefits the cost of heating residential and commercial buildings, as shown in Figure 4[3]. Upper-middle and high-income households won’t care about the heating cost differential, but lower-income and commercial, including institutional customers, will.
Figure 4 Heating Costs – Heat Pumps vs. Natural Gas Furnaces
As luck would have it, after my analysis was complete on Monday, the WAPO delivered a comprehensive analysis of heat pumps and other electrification technologies. Their analysis corroborates mine in Figure 5.
Figure 5 WAPO Heat Pump vs. Natural Gas Heating
Conclusion: Cold-climate heat pumps are the preferred choice in warmer climates and where electricity prices are relatively low. This is precisely what I explained back in February. Intuitive analysis.
[2] Typical amount of heat for a home in Minnesota’s coldest day.
[3] Xcel Energy Wisconsin retail residential rates.
