Fuel Cell Performance

> Keep in mind that if you zip yourself tightly into a arctic-quality
> sleeping bag outside, you can warm yourself via body heat. This way
> you can use no electric heat at all!

That's the whole point of superinsulated homes! This concept can be
extended to the whole house with fairly minimal or no impact on the
user, where body heat and electricity and incoming sunlight provide this
heating, and the home insulation functions like a very large sleeping
bag around the house. You try to paint it otherwise (people growing fur
through genetic engineering), but that's the concept -- the house acts
as people's fur in an unobtrusive way.

I have provided you examples where this is done in Toronto and Amsterdam
(and to a lesser extent in my own home -- which still has a ways to go).
When done properly, superinsulation reduces heating and cooling costs
greatly (even in hot places) without sacrificing air quality (using
air-to-air heat exchangers and/or proper humidity barriers to prevent
mold growth). Remember the solid mass of the home is perhaps around 100X
the mass of the air in the home -- so once you have that solid mass
conditioned to the right temperature, you only need to make up for heat
loss or gain from small amounts of airflow when opening external doors
or vents. Good insulation lets the solid mass maintain its temperature
against the outside climate, with only minor supplementation for a
trickle of heat flowing into or out of the building via transfer through
the insulating layers. Windows typically let more heat in or out of the
system, but they work on an averaging basis if reasonably well
insulated, requiring a large thermal mass in the home to average out
heat loss and gain in cold climates over a day/night cycle. In hot
climates, awnings or shade trees can prevent too much direct sunlight
from entering. The ideas of passive solar architecure are now well
understood -- and even go back thousands of years if you look at earlier
civilizations (Tibet, Hopi, etc.).

Citing current averages for energy use in homes in the US is meaningless
in the context of long term US energy strategy since you are talking
about *obsolete* construction methods (and they've been known by some to
be obsolete for thirty years, it's just been a hard cultural shift among
home builders) and the housing stock in the US can more or less turn
over 80-90% in terms of new construction, demolitions, and retrofits
over a twenty year timeframe before SSPS becomes available. Your agument
is somewhat like saying 1970s era IBM mainframes still in use somewhere
use a kilowatt-hour or whatever to produce a MIPS of computation and
thus we need SSPS to power all our antique mainframes, rather than
replace them with more energy efficient computers at much less cost than
building SSPS. I can now produce that same MIPS on a handheld using less
than a watt-hour, which is easily supplied by local PV. Better ideas
lead to more efficient power useage, allowing one to do more with less.

Superinsulation, energy efficiency, etc. is an idea whose time has come,
yet it is being actively resisted in Congress by those who profit from
current energy monopolies. I'll agree insulating homes to create tight
homes has had its problems in the past with mold and indoor air quality
issues and bad installation and retrofits in some cases like any new
technology, but people have learned from that and it's much more
feasible now. The fact that US building codes do not insist on something
like R80 and double or triple pane windows etc. in new construction or
major retrofits is a national security tragedy -- especially IIRC when
the amount of money spent on defense over the last few decades (twenty
to thirty trillion in current dollars?) is enough to tear down and
rebuild every structure in the US twice.

--Paul Fernhout