Readit NewsPerhaps worth noting that Ben Bernanke, who was the chair of the Fed at the time, was/is one of the most top experts on Great Depression (it's the work he later won the Nobel Prize for). So as bad as the GFC was, Bernanke thought it could get really bad and pushed for measures that he probably thought would prevent another 1930s scenario.
People who want a society-wide crisis so they can profit off it are far more morally reprehensible than people who said "we'll loosen the mortgage criteria a bit so people can buy houses, houses always go up in value right?"
A lot of people I’ve talked to about it weren’t even adults when the bailout happened. They weren’t watching the news and didn’t care at the time. They only know it through pop culture and from fiery speeches from politicians and influencers.
The idea of a bailout has become synonymous with the government handing hard-earned tax dollars over to banks, no strings attached. The facts don’t really matter.
The fix was for the government to pick some winners, coercively lend them money and force them to buy the failing banks.
Now we have fewer, bigger banks. People who were conservative with money, saved instead of over-leveraging, did not get to buy assets cheaply, because the government propped up asset prices with unlimited, cheap money.
And TARP did eventually produce weak positive returns. So I'm glad they didn't lose money, but I'm not happy I was prevented from buying fire sale assets. I'm also not happy residential housing prices are 2x what they were in 2010 (and still well over 1.5x the peak of the bubble).
No one is storing 1000C water at home.
It is true that the temperature deltas affects efficiency. You can use the thermocline to draw from the cooler lower portion of the storage tank to push this further. Or less technically, just a bigger tank, though this has some tradeoffs.
In warmer countries they are set up differently can act as free air conditioning by extracting heat from indoor air at the same time as heating water.
Right, but UK has/had "storage heaters" which were bricks with nichrome wire. They would heat the bricks really hot during cheap electricity times, and use that heat the rest of the day.
EDIT: I misread "ripping out these energy storage devices" as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater
Of course heat pumps for DHW should all have a tank for smoothing demand across several hours.
>Versus resistance, which is exactly as efficient at 0°C and 1000°C
It isn't. The difference is smaller than for a heatpump tho obviously.
2. The electrical to heat conversion efficiency is indeed 100% regardless of the temperature of the resistor. And if you're putting out 1000W, then all input losses are also identical. If you put a 1000W light bulb in the middle of your room, or 2 of them but run both at 500W, you'll get EXACTLY the same heat output in your room, but the single bulb is much hotter.
It is true that heat pumps coefficient of performance drops as the output temperature increases. So you need a proportionally larger hot water tank to store the same amount of energy. So it is fair to say there are tradeoffs. But hot water storage is still a necessary part of most heat pump installs - because peak output of heat pumps tends to be below the heat demand of showers.
You're right, of course heat pump water heaters use tanks to smooth out DHW demand, but that same thing isn't feasible for space heating.
In the UK there was a unfortunate trend of ripping out these energy storage devices and replacing hot water tanks with on demand electric hot water heating ( only heat the water you need ). And new builds often have no tanks ( as it saves space in the new tiny homes ).
Very short sighted in my view - a very simple way to store energy and everyone uses hot water directly.
Versus resistance, which is exactly as efficient at 0°C and 1000°C, and why those storage heaters used to make sense.
(And storage is directly proportional to temperature differential above interior ambient)
Yes. It's mostly wasted as heat inside the battery. I think there's also a temperature relationship to open-circuit voltage? But the predominate effect is from elevated internal resistance.