> Norway has been almost all-in on electric for a good while now.
According to a quick Google search: "The current population of Norway is 5,483,767 as of Friday, December 24, 2021" and NY state is estimated at 20.2 million as of April 2020, and New York City at 8.8 million. It seems you appreciate that Norway is a special scenario. It seems silly to assume something that works there would work in a country that has single cities with larger populations, and states with around four times the population of your entire country.
Economies of scale make energy distribution more efficient as you scale population not less. New York City could for example use a relatively shallow bore hole to gather geothermal energy and get “low grade” heat (50-100C) for district heating where such systems don’t really work for single family homes.
> Economies of scale make energy distribution more efficient as you scale population not less.
This may be so, but New York also has one of the oldest electrical grids on the planet. Upgrading it to support larger and larger populations is a challenge, not just to manage it overloading with the density, but also in terms of logistics.
You can't just tear up a major street in New York and upgrade the electrical for a block, without causing massive logistics problems for the city. Upgrading New York's grid is going to be a huge challenge
It seems worse simply because it’s concentrated in a small area. The project would actually be less disruptive in NYC than doing the same thing for 8+ million people in the suburbs somewhere. Especially if they could reuse tunnels built for deprecated systems like copper phone lines.
Off topic meta point: The narrative "X wouldn't work here because of [size/population]" where X is unrelated or even helps the argument seems to be reproduced almost exclusively by (often highly informed) Americans, from personal anecdotal experience. Does anyone have a theory about the origins of this thought pattern?
“X wouldn’t work here” probably stems from generations of institutional belief in American Exceptionalism, the “because” part is probably attempting to justify that (unconscious) view
> It seems silly to assume something that works there would work in a country that has single cities with larger populations
it would also be silly were we to imply that scaling up automatically means less efficiency. in many situations things get significantly more efficient the more they scale.
it also would seem silly to assume that we couldn’t take many of the pieces that are actually working in an entire country and adapt to our situation. We are very good at adapting things for various situations.
Also - isn't >90% of all Norway's electricity production hydro?
It would seem a lot more feasible to go all in on electric when you have that much hydro. Since that much of the production is hydro - I'm assuming it's relatively economical, and not just Norway paying a massive premium to be green.
According to a quick Google search: "The current population of Norway is 5,483,767 as of Friday, December 24, 2021" and NY state is estimated at 20.2 million as of April 2020, and New York City at 8.8 million. It seems you appreciate that Norway is a special scenario. It seems silly to assume something that works there would work in a country that has single cities with larger populations, and states with around four times the population of your entire country.