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0 pointscoldpie3y ago0 comments

Nice. I just looked up last February's bill for my ~1700sqft detached SFH in Saint Paul. It was apparently 6.8 therms/day (12 deg F average temp for the month). That maths out to about 5916 kWh for the coldest month (6.8 therms * 29 kwh/therm * 30 days), or a little more than double your estimate. March was 5.9 therms/day and Jan was 5.4 therms/day. So I think your costs are on the conservative side of things... or possibly my home is very inefficient :)

E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG boiler.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

_ea1k3y ago· 2 in thread

Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing.

Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.

foota3y ago

I realize this isn't relevant for a discussion about future investment, but the current "value" of the whole energy infrastructure for a state is probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars, right? It's been built out over decades, of course, so the actual costs per year are much lower.

_ea1k3y ago

That's definitely possible. Going based upon the output of something like Catawba, that looks like ~3 nuclear plants. I bet that could be done for less than 100B, though I'd just be guessing. I also don't know anything about operations costs for that.

Also, I estimated solar at $1.5/watt. That's probably at least 50% too high.

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