Written by Elly
I have a confession to make: I am terrified of (post-)apocalypse movies. Not because of the zombies/plagues/large-scale natural disasters, but because of the complete collapse of civic infrastructure. That is my nightmare scenario, folks. No running water. No electricity.* No laws. No law enforcement.
Written by Elly
This article came across my Facebook news feed last weekend. Germany was able to meet 50% of its electricity demand with solar energy. It’s from last year so it isn’t totally current. I still find it interesting, though, given the generation theme that’s been going on here for a couple posts.
Mmmmmmm…Baaaaaaaaaaacon. We all love it. It’s the most delicious cut of meat on Earth and that’s not really up for debate.
Every year, more than two billion pounds of bacon is consumed in the US alone. If the average piece of bacon is 1 oz, then that’s about 32 billion pieces of bacon or roughly 107 slices per person. That’s a lot of hog. We love bacon so much, a recent survey found 43% of Canadians would choose it over sex. We literally love bacon.
It got me thinking – since we’re so infatuated with bacon, what’s the most energy efficient way to cook it?
Written by Elly
Since my last post about Ontario’s generation mix, I’ve been wondering about the interplay between time-of-use and power generation. We all understand that, under a time-of-use pricing scheme, on-peak hours are the most expensive. And we understand that they are the most expensive because on-peak hours are when demand is highest.
Charging more for electricity at these times is an attempt to encourage conservation, or, in other words, reduce demand on the grid. Simple, right? Pretty straightforward stuff. But is it really just about said grid? And what does this mean in terms of generation?
Happy Friday SwitchHoppers. We’re pretty excited to announce a new feature we released – household level information. If you provide this information (which is totally optional), your peer comparisons will be more precise (since you’ll be compared to homes with similar characteristics).
Written by Elly
Recently, my husband and I moved from a house with natural gas heating to an apartment with baseboard heaters. This will be our first winter with electrical heat and we were a bit worried about how this would affect our electricity bill.
Luckily, our landlord was willing to install programmable thermostats for us. While we were trying to figure out what combination of settings worked best for us, my brother-in-law suggested we set the heat to come on for an hour before each on-peak period started (which is a great idea and seemed so ridiculously obvious to me once he said it).
We were on CBC Radio yesterday rapping about SwitchHop with host Alan Neal (rapping as in talking, not actually rapping. Although, that would have been pretty cool too). Hit the link if you’re interested in hearing it. Cheers.
