Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Gilashot t1_ixqeo11 wrote

Reply to comment by mountainofclay in Best heating oil company to use? We need kerosene but can't afford $7/ gallon at the company we called. New to this type of heating and kinda struggling to figure this out. Company says minimum of 100 gallon order. Our tank is 275g . 275x7= omg in gonna freeze to death. by [deleted]

Good point, and we're getting into interesting numbers here. About 46% of VT electricity comes from hydro. Hydro has it's own issues, but keeping it in the carbon conversation, it's pretty low.

At 17 degrees I'm getting about 12K BTU per kW. 6500 of that comes from non-hydro electricity. So...6500 BTU per kW of "carbon producing" electricity.

I have no idea how much carbon is released to create the 1 kw of electricity, to produce my 6500 BTU. I also don't know how much carbon is released while burning wood to create 6500 BTU. Someone should do a thesis on this.

I'm going to go drive my 6 cylinder 4Runner to Home Depot this morning and buy some insulation to help reduce my carbon footprint from heating my home. Now it's really complicated!

2

mountainofclay t1_ixuiyx4 wrote

The amount of carbon released to burn 6500 btu’s is zero if you consider the other side of the equation which is that the tree will be replaced with another tree. That’s what a renewable resource is. Of course you have the gas in the chainsaw and the trucking you need to consider but nothing is free I guess. Finite resource vs. a renewable resource. It’s not perfect but it’s better than sending dollars to Saudi Arabia I guess.

3