The washer and dryer primarily spend their energy on heating, not on running the motor. Using less water means savings on electricity because there is less water to heat. Dryers jump dramatically in efficiency when you switch to a condensing dryer, since you save most of the heat that went into turning water into steam.
Clothes dryers made an enormous jump when they switched to condensing operation. After that, the improvements have been smaller. It is quite likely that a 10 year old dryer is non-condensing, and so the gains are huge.
They did not spend millions of dollars looking for the microwave oven, and they knew all along that the signal was man-made. Figuring out precisely which item made it is the kind of thing that gets you in the newspapers, so they did a little PR stunt.
Their usual work changes our understanding of the universe but does not have a chance to make it into the mainstream news. Can you begrudge them their 15 minutes of fame?
If you have a 10 year old washing machine, the likelihood is that a new one will pay itself back in energy + water savings in a few years. The efficiency improvements in white goods over the last decade have been astounding.
Plus those installations can provide a shedload of REACTIVE power, very, very useful for grid stabilization.
They can, but are they? I have only seen residential solar which reacted to grid overload/underload situations (i.e. situations which should never occur in an ideal world), not any which reacted to constant requirements for reactive power. Do you know of any which take part in the standard grid stabilization in normal use, outside of grid emergencies?
Will Windows Phone thrive by being a better iOS than iOS and a better Android than Android? It did not work for OS/2 20 years ago.
With the same reasoning, schools in Europe are taking the holocaust out of the history lessons, to avoid nasty remarks from muslim kids in the classroom.
No, they are not. You may be thinking of this: http://www.snopes.com/politics...
When electricity is cheap, it is because the marginal cost of producing it is low. The marginal cost is low because it does not take very much extra fuel to produce it. In other words, when electricity is cheap, its production is also less environmentally harmful. (This only holds as long as the power stations are unchanged of course.)
The Economist regularly gets this wrong by saying that electric cars are polluting more if they charge at night rather than during the day. They base this on the average pollution per kWh being higher at night. However, the average pollution does not matter. It is the marginal pollution which matters, and that is very low at night. This is really the kind of thing that economists should be specializing in getting right; I do not understand how you can be an economist and get it wrong.
Another problem is that if they do accept your CA certificate, you can issue a certificate for irs.gov and they will believe that.
The trust system in TLS is really lousy.
Deorbit is what happened... If you mean actually escape from Mercury gravity, that would have shortened the mission due to the need to save fuel for a last burn. What would be the point?
Coal plants are certainly capable of throttling their output and using less coal. But if what you say was true, my point would only be reinforced: Marginal CO2 emissions by using an extra kWh at night would be zero, because the grid would otherwise have to stabilize by dumping electricity in resistors.
DSB (Danish Railways) has a table on http://www.dsb.dk/om-dsb/dsbs-... saying that their long-distance trains do 33g CO2 per person km. Regional trains are considerably worse. Modern cars should hopefully do better than 133g per km.
Urban trains do better because people are standing up, which significantly lowers the train weight per person.
Now, Denmark is admittedly a bit of a developing country when it comes to trains. Obviously a pure electrified system running on hydro power would do a lot better. DSB's long distance trains use 0.12kWh per person km. A Tesla uses about 0.35kWh per km, which comes to 0.09kWh per person km with 4 people.
That would be pointless because practically no one uses oil to produce electricity. Electric cars tend to charge at night where the coal plants are running at very low power and low efficiency. An idling coal plant has a very high average pollution per kWh produced but a very low marginal pollution per extra kWh.
Of course if it is a windy night the coal plants might just give up and shut down overnight, and then you really get your zero emissions.
Most other forms of transport have no chance against a decent modern passenger car with 4+ passengers. Most passenger cars are comparatively light, well below 500kg per passenger, which is very hard to beat. They do that because there is hardly any wasted space. A bus needs a walkway and it has to be tall enough to stand in, and trains are just horrendously heavy. While rubber-on-tarmac is a bit wasteful compared to metal-on-metal, it is not that bad, and the lower weight helps a lot.
Electric trains can sometimes play in that efficiency range, but it is tempting to make them faster and then the savings mostly evaporate. Cars are useful despite their lower speeds because of the time saved by almost going door-to-door.
24kWh/day = 24kWh/24h = 1kW. Which is a completely ridiculous amount of electricity.
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
