> your hand wringing over heat-pump induced blackouts seems misplaced.

I would very much appreciate it if we could keep to a mutually-respectful conversation rather than resorting to insults. We only learn if we respect each other's positions. I have no problem being wrong. Show me how and will forever be grateful.

I have no problem with anyone challenging anything I say. Thanks for questioning my claim.

I can't get into numbers for Chicago without doing much research. Not sure that data exists. This is what I was able to find quickly though:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/220357/manufactured-ship...

According to this information over six million HVAC systems were sold per year in 2021. I think it is fair to assume these systems were installed. They don't provide information on the geographic distribution, kind or type of installation (residential, commercial or industrial).

What it says for me is that there's a great deal of installation capacity. This page gives us a sense of the concentration of contractors per state:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1243016/plumbing-and-hva...

This association link gives us an idea of how many HVAC contractors exist in the US:

https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-busi...

Their number is 145K.

The first link says Illinois has about 4100 contractors, or 2.8% of the national number.

I am just trying to get a sense of proportion here with some quick math. I do realize these numbers come from different years.

If I take the 6 million annual HVAC system sales rate for the US and calculate 2.8% of that, we get 168K units per year. Per this metric, installing a million units would require just 6 years.

If the million units, on average [0], require 3 kW of power, we are adding a power requirement of 504 MW per year. I am trying to keep it simple. In terms of power demand, the average is meaningless [0], what matters are outliers on the high side of the distribution curve. Keeping it simple...

By this metric we would need to build half a nuclear power plant [1] per year in Illinois, for a total of three brand-new nuclear power plants in six years.

I think these numbers more than support my thinking that power problems might be severe. If we understand that, once again, averages are a horrible metric [0], the numbers are likely much higher than this.

Over that period of time electric ground transportation would experience significant growth, further exacerbating the problem.

BTW, I have not addressed the issues we will have with the grid itself --power transmission lines, substations, transformers, etc.-- not being able to handle the increased load.

The current estimate is that a full transition to electric vehicles will roughly require a doubling of the entire US power generation and transmission infrastructure [3]. This means the equivalent of 1200 brand new nuclear power plants. By this I do not mean we have to build that many, I am using them as a unit of measure for a sense of proportion [1]. Electric heat pumps will add significant demand on top of this.

As I said in another post, this, I feel, is a cart before the horse situation. There's nothing wrong with electrification. What's wrong is that we need to put the horse (power generation) ahead of the cart. As far as I can tell, we are not doing that, at all, anywhere. Solar and wind are not enough. We need a non-trivial program to boost energy generation and transmission capacity. This, in my opinion, must include nuclear power.

Notes:

[0] I truly hate using averages because it is a horrible figure that has no merit when applied to the entire population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_averages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

[1] I like to use nuclear power plants for a sense of proportion because the typical plant is rated at 1 GW and people can understand the severity of needing new nuclear power plants.

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s