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| ▲ | scottLobster 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | To be fair induction ranges aren't without issues, not due to the concept itself but failures in implementation. Touch screen controls are rife and not only become impossible to use when, say, grease is splattered on them or your hands are wet/wearing gloves (common when cooking on a stove top), they can even be falsely activated by such things. Cold spots can also be a concern depending on your cookware. Unfortunately a lot of promising technology has matured in a time of consumer product enshitification, and there is no established track record for people to be nostalgic for. | | |
| ▲ | helterskelter 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | At least as recently as a few years ago, a lot of induction ranges on the market would tend to break and need expensive repairs. I've forgotten which part it is, I think it's the inverter or something. I've seen it happen once at somebody's house then I remember reading about that very same problem on reddit from a repair guy IIRC. I think some of the electrical equipment is somewhat under spec'd and can't handle the current. Repairs tend to be in the several hundred dollar range and can happen somewhat frequently, like annually. (This may not be a common problem anymore) | |
| ▲ | scoofy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Again, I’m talking about someone who has never used one who has their mind made up. I don’t think there is anything wrong with preferring gas. It has many superior use cases. My point is that “no, I like things this way and won’t ever consider trying the other thing, much less changing, even though the other thing ends up being effectively free in the long run” is silly, and almost certainly based in some kind of identity. Where as I think most curious people would think "Oh, neat, a new cooking surface. I'd like to try that thing." | |
| ▲ | stickfigure 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | LG makes an induction range with knobs. I have one. It's wonderful. | | |
| ▲ | tmoertel an hour ago | parent [-] | | > LG makes an induction range with knobs. I have one. It's wonderful. It is encrapified with a bunch of intrusive "smart" features that nobody asked for? |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy," It's not free. It costs trilliions of dollars to build and maintain. I think it's worth it. But one place where the climate-change movement lost the plot was in underplaying costs and overplaying the doom. | | |
| ▲ | scoofy 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If I install solar panels, a battery, and a next gen breaker box in CA, even with premium equipment and no subsidies, I'm looking at a max payback period of like 20 years, right? At that point yea, it's effectively free energy. Is it an investment? Sure, but it's an investment that trivially pays for itself. | | |
| ▲ | hansvm 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | To be fair, CA is one of the only places that's true, largely due to PG&E fuckups paired with a legislature keen to grant them unlimited money to kick back to shareholders. | | |
| ▲ | scoofy 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That’s just not true, there are plenty of places where the math works easily without subsidies. |
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| ▲ | VK-pro an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? Yes. Also, the risk for industry is going all in right before a new technology comes out. At that point, you either write off your original investment and deploy the new kit. Or you accept a structural energy-cost disadvantage. I am massively pro renewables. But you have to ignore a lot to pretend it's without risk. | | |
| ▲ | scoofy an hour ago | parent [-] | | The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you. This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood. | | |
| ▲ | hansvm 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a sort of mixing of units happening here, and I think it's causing some confusion. Here's an example (greatly simplified) scenario highlighting a flaw in your rationale: 1. Energy at your normal usage costs $1000/yr. 2. You can spend $20k now to have access to equivalent energy output for the next 40 years before it degrades to unusability. 3. Next year, somebody invents a flux capacitor bringing all energy costs for everyone down to $1/yr. If you don't buy the thing, you spend $1039 over the next 40 years. If you buy the thing you spend $20k, and it's hit is expected lifespan, so you don't recoup any further benefits. The real world has inflation, wars, more sane invention deltas, and all sorts of complications, but the general idea still holds. If you expect tech to improve quickly enough and are relying on long-term payoffs, it can absolutely be worth delaying. If you predict massive improvements in solar/battery/etc tech, the only way it makes sense to invest now is if those improvements aren't massive enough, you expect sufficiently bad changes to the alternatives, etc. I.e., you're playing the odds about some particular view of how the world will progress, and your argument needs to reflect that. It's not inherently true that just because solar pays off now it will in the future. | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > system already pays for itself No, it yields savings. This is a massive difference. > You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you This is a real concern for any long-term investment, particularly when we're talking at utility/industrial scales. Dismissing it like this is basically arguing that solar is too new to be properly talked about, which is nonsense. | | |
| ▲ | scoofy 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I guess, though, the actual “solar” part of the solar set up is by far the cheapest part. The vast majority of the set up costs are just getting electrification done right. Like, even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand. This is why I’m confused: for this to me remotely a bad investment, basically everything possible has to go wrong for you, whereas the risks associated with carbon energy production are very obvious and very likely. Do you have some more likely counter scenario? |
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| ▲ | scoofy an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return. Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a blackout, and having the option of getting an EV in the future. I think most sensible people who are even moderately risk-averse would think that's a fairly winning deal when we're only talking about a small amount of up front capital. | | |
| ▲ | Fr0styMatt88 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way. It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates. For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day. Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system. Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons. For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’. But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that. | |
| ▲ | Someone 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free One could even say it is risk-negative. It decreases the risk one runs of future oil price hikes. If you buy solar cells, you buy futures on energy delivery at a guaranteed price. |
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| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | zahlman an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | ...What does induction cooking have to do with renewable energy? | | |
| ▲ | ctjr 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Some people (myself included) are quite attached to cooking with gas. Induction seems to be the best alternative and doesn't require non-renewable fuel. | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > What does induction cooking have to do with renewable energy? Gas stoves aren't renewable. For most countries, they're dependent on volatile exports. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Resistive electric stoves aren't super popular for cooking on. Gas stove use gas which can't be powered by traditional renewables. Induction cooking is competitive with gas cooking and can be powered by renewables. |
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