people plugging in ICE car block heaters ~600W at night so their car will start
Thans interesting , its a shame they dont put these on a timer and have them warm up the car an hour before drive time....or does the car need to be kept warm all night i wonder
One hour in advance is really enough unless the engine or battery is pure shit. But people are lazy and stupid and simply do not care.
My engine block heater is broken and blows the fuse, but the car starts just fine at -25degC. Yeah, it might not be optimum for the engine or emissions, so better would be to heat it up for an hour beforehand. But keeping it on all the night is massive waste.
You don't even need a timer, just plug it in and start making breakfast.
Though, if everybody drives to work at the same time, then the heaters are all on at the same time, too. Maybe just heat for 30mins, that's better than nothing at all, and spreads out better.
Here, a cold snap where it was dancing around -30°C for three weeks and we ran out of electricity, demand around 13GW and pool price peaked over $1.00/kWh
Had the same thing here in December. Close call on energy sufficiency, pool price peaked at 1.24€/kWh, that's 1.42USD! We are used to 0.05€/kWh energy pricing so obviously this pissed people off. Meanwhile, government is heavily subsidizing removal of oil burners and transition into electric heating. At -25degC if not earlier, all those fancy air source heat pumps have turned into COP=1 direct electric heaters. I'm still running oil in parallel with the heat pump during <-18degC, and it even has lower CO2 footprint than the grid has during those peak days, when back-up stations are brought up, so it's win-win for absolutely everybody/-thing, climate included, but it isn't media sexy, even if you just burn 200 liters of oil for heating, per year, to avoid burning a lot larger equivalent amount of coal elsewhere!