Featured Gen 6 Prius engine will be a “game changer,” achieve a 53% thermal efficiency

Is anyone predicting that it will get colder ( ice age ) any time soon or, later?

I was wondering if I was the only one believing in the cons piracy of the rise in utility prices as more energy is need ed to fuel demand.
I'm thrilled that someone else said it, so I didn't have 2 get shot down, again - four ! - Not Knowing how government works. Thanks.

State advertising Cold weather heat pumps for all - - - - - . . . . .

300 % theoretical efficiency gains for heat pumps to move thermodynamic heat instead of producing it in it various forms.

300% compared to what ?
electrical resistive heat production Resistive heating explained in details
joule heating Joule heating - Wikipedia

youtube rs are a;ready advertising their heat pump installations showing 500% efficiency gains. (compared to what? )
Gotta love the new ,mafhs . . . . . . . I can't wait to see those algorithms in practice.

Where is Nikola Tesla when we need him most? On vacay in the classified archives?

 

It could regionally. If the gulf stream stops, no more equatorial warmth will be carried to the UK, which sits at the latitudes of Anchorage, Alaska.

Electricity use is mostly during the day. The capacity is built for that heavy use. That leaves unused generation at night. Plenty for charging EVs. Fuel prices for the power plants might go up, but they'll be running for longer periods at their efficient point, so fuel use isn't a linear increase with electric production. Electric rates could go down. Lots of variables.

 

wait for it !

 

Back before AGW became better known and more clear, several decades ago, numerous people were predicting that we'd start sliding into the next Ice Age very soon. Or already were starting to inch that way. The geological evidence so far suggests that entrances into Ice Ages are very long, slow, and gradual, much slower than the warmup process when the most recent Ice Age ended.

But AGW has cancelled the next regularly expected Ice Age, at least for now. With a vengeance, far far beyond any 'balance point'.

Compared to direct electric resistance heating, which is as close to 100% efficient -- at the wall plug, not at the generating plant -- as any consumer heating product gets.

300% is not theoretical, it is typical performance with today's products. The theoretical limit is several thousand %, though varying very strongly with your local climate conditions.

With the best available products, in milder climates, that is very believable. But not yet for colder climate zones, so advertisers must not be 'promising' such results in areas where it can't yet be achieved.

Try taking Thermodynamics 101. That will explain it, in the same chapter where it explains how your kitchen refrigerator works, and the minimum power / energy needed to make it work. Heat pumps and kitchen refrigerators are conceptually the same thing. Today's consumer products still perform well short of their theoretical limits.

 

Or a scientist said it could cause temperature drops in some regions, and then the reporter/editor conflated that as an oncoming ice age.

 

Make that "And", not "Or". And plural, not singular.

Those would mostly be a separate batch of stories. The ones I was remembering were definitely global, not regional. But with the quality of science reporting in too many places, especially these days, I don't doubt that the version you describe has also happened, repeatedly, especially more recently.

Here is one that I picked up long ago, nowhere near the first. While the strongest projected current effect would have been regional, IIRC it would continue to become global over time. But not currently having a paid subscription, and having greatly slashed my hardcopy library, cannot go back to re-read the whole article right now.

SciAm: How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?
'A bold new hypothesis suggests that our ancestors' farming practices kicked off global warming thousands of years before we started burning coal and driving cars'

"New evidence suggests that concentrations of CO2 started rising about 8,000 years ago, even though natural trends indicate they should have been dropping. Some 3,000 years later the same thing happened to methane, another heat-trapping gas. The consequences of these surprising rises have been profound. Without them, current temperatures in northern parts of North America and Europe would be cooler by three to four degrees Celsius--enough to make agriculture difficult. In addition, an incipient ice age--marked by the appearance of small ice caps--would probably have begun several thousand years ago in parts of northeastern Canada."