Quote:
Originally Posted by Fat Charlie
Co-gen all the way. Instead of just burning your favorite fuel for heat, burning it for power and harvesting the waste heat makes a lot more sense.
But with power brought in from the grid and heat being a modular thing in the corner of the basement, no builder is going to upgrade the electric service or add heat storage on a house that he's trying to build as cheaply as possible- he's not sticking around to pocket the savings. Homebuyers and realtors won't go for it either, because realtors can't properly price a feature whose savings build over time, and homebuyers just want to buy the house, not the next several years' worth of heat.
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That's why we need regulations about efficiency, and our long-term consequences. When the oil rigs first came to Canada, they struck very high pressure natural gas. They only had a market for naptha, so they collected drops of that and vented the rest. If they had been allowed to continue, all the oil below would have been unrecoverable.