Energy

Most Common Heating Fuel

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Most Common Heating Fuel

This map is based on a very popular Washington Post map of a few years back. Basically for all 84,000 or so US Census Tracts, it compares the method most common for heating.
 
As New Yorkers, we might think it's odd that electric heating is the most popular way to heat houses in great parts of country, and it's not just in warm climate south -- electricity is popular where electricity is cheap, like in the Northwest and much of Appalachia.
 
Oil is odd fuel, not widely used outside of the rural areas in the Northeast and Alaska. Propane dominates the rural Midwest, where it is cheap due to farms using to dry corn.

Heating with fuel oil, which is essentially dyed diesel, seems like an odd choice. Oil is expensive, but also is electricity in the Northeast.

In the 1940s through the 1970s, there was a big push to retire both coal power plants and coal heating for reasons of pollution and convenience, and oil seemed like a good drop in replacement, when oil was cheap. But the northeast relying on oil so heavily for power generation, caused electricity to spike in 1970s, which ironically caused some people to swap out electricity for fuel oil. Natural gas supply has traditionally been constrained in New England, which is another reason why the Northeast likes oil so much.

 

Why solar panels hate shadows ☀

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Solar panels are made up of solar cells which are diodes or silicon junctions or check valves that put out 0.5 to 0.6 volts each without load (open circuit). To charge a 12 volt battery, you put 10 solar cells in series to get roughly 20 volts which under load will drop down to closer to 15 volts.

Every solar cell is a diode and not only prevents the backwards flow of current it also prohibits forward flow of current without sunlight to excite the electrons and bridge the junctions.

As solar panels are strings diodes wired in series, if you partially block one diode by providing less light due to a shadow the performance of the entire panel suffers disproportionately. It’s actually bad for the panel to be exposed to shadows continously as when you are blocking flow of current due to shadows you are starting to wear down the silicon junctions in other cells eventually causing permanent damage to the panel.

Little Blue Run Lake

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  • Left: Little Blue Run Lake in 1993, prior to dewatering
  • Right: Little Blue Run Lake in 2019 after partial dewatering

Little Blue Run Lake or Little Blue Run is the largest coal ash impound in the United States. FirstEnergy owns the site, located in Western Pennsylvania and parts of the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, and has disposed of billions of gallons of coal waste into the body of water. The lake contains 20 billion gallons of coal ash and smokestack scrubber waste. The northern coast of the lake is only a few hundred meters from the Ohio River, which is the drinking water source for more than three million people.