Why Don't We All Use Solar Water Heaters?

[Music] if you look at the rooftops of buildings in Israel you'll notice something all of them have solar water heaters in fact ninety percent of homes in Israel use the sun to heat their water if you look at the rooftops in countries like Greece and Cyprus you'll see the same thing solar water heaters are everywhere you might be thinking of course that's the case all of these countries get a lot of sun But Sunshine alone doesn't explain why some countries have so many solar water heaters after Israel and Cyprus the country with the next most solar water heaters per capita is Austria and after Greece and Palestine the next country with the most solar water heaters per capita is China in rizhou China a city of 3 million people over 98 of homes use the sun to heat their water if Sunshine alone told the whole story here then you'd expect places in the United States like California and Arizona and Texas and Florida to have a lot more solar water heaters but they don't in the United States less than one percent of homes use a solar water heater and while the way that we heat our water might not seem like the most exciting topic I promise it is far-reaching consequences in this video we'll look at why some countries use the sun to heat their water while other countries like mine use fossil fuels okay before we get into this story let's talk quickly about how solar water heaters work in the first place [Music] so most water heaters in the world look like this you've got a tank that pulls in some cold water and a heat source that warms it up these things are incredibly simple a gas water heater is basically just a Zippo lighter sitting under a tank of cold water a solar water heater is a little bit more complex you've still got the tank but obviously the main heat source is the sun throughout the day a solar water heater will pump water through a series of pipes and tubes in the roof where it'll get warm that water then gets pumped into a tank where it can be sent throughout the house just like a normal water heater but what about nighttime or a cloudy day the tank is insulated which means that even at night you can get hot water and if it's cloudy for more than a couple days most solar water heaters have a backup source of heat the overall result is a lot less energy used for water heating this is a map of what's called a solar fraction in different parts of America as the name supplies this refers to the fraction of water that can be heated by the sun each year as you can see even in Northern parts of the country solar water heaters can heat about half of the home's water in any given year in the South they can heat 80 to 90 percent of it so why aren't more Americans using these things in order to understand that we've got to go back in time about 100 Years Happy in the morning the first solar water heater was invented in 1891 by an engineer in Baltimore named Clarence count a few years later Kemp struck a deal with two businessmen in California to sell his water heaters there California was a perfect market for the product the state had a lot of sunshine and Mild Winters but more importantly energy was expensive there at the time many wealthy homeowners used coal to heat their water a solar water heater cost 25 up front but it could save nine dollars per year in energy by the 1920s about 40 percent of all homes in La used a solar water heater pretty soon The Invention spread to other parts of the country like Florida in the Roaring 20s Miami was a boom town but it had a problem the state didn't have access to natural gas and its electricity was expensive a few entrepreneurs spotted an opportunity and started selling solar water heaters they found incredible success doing so by 1940 about half the population was using the sun to heat their water but the growth of the solar water heater Market was short-lived in the 1920s Prospectors found huge reservoirs of oil and gas off the coast of La suddenly it was really cheap to heat water using natural gas by the 1930s electricity was also getting really cheap during the New Deal era the federal government built huge dams and other electricity generation projects all over the country in doing so they drove down the price of electricity significantly meanwhile the cost of solar water heaters was Rising by the middle of the 20th century the reason that Americans weren't installing solar water heaters was simple they were expensive up front and energy was cheap but the era of low-cost energy didn't last long gasoline shortages are spreading across the country odd even service gasoline lines and closed gas stations are becoming increasingly common in the 1970s a series of conflicts in the Middle East caused the price of oil to Skyrocket over the course of a decade it Rose by more than 400 percent in response to the crisis President Jimmy Carter announced a series of policies to support the development of solar in the United States one of these policies was the tax credit where the government would pay for up to 40 percent of a solar water heater in a speech announcing the policy he said nobody can embargo sunlight no cartel controls the sun its energy will not run out it will not pollute our air or poison our Waters it is free from stench and smog the sun's power needs only to be collected stored and used ah Jimmy Carter God bless you Carter was so excited about solar that he instructed his staff to install solar panels and a solar water heater on the roof of the White House thanks to Carter's tax credits and Rising Energy prices economics of solar water heaters suddenly made sense again in just a few years the number of units installed each year Grew From about 10 000 to just under two hundred thousand but this period of growth like the first one would be short-lived [Music] in 1985 President Ronald Reagan allowed Carter's tax credits to expire in a new era of deregulation and free market capitalism began the following year Reagan asked his staff to take the solar water heater off the roof of the White House Reagan but in the 1980s something else was happening Energy prices were declining and so once again solar water heaters were expensive up front and energy prices were cheap as a result the solar water heater Market in America collapsed in ever since it's basically been the same story without much government support solar water heaters have remained expensive in America today they cost between five and fifteen thousand dollars by comparison a traditional water heater cost about a thousand dollars and with the exception of just a few periods energy has remained cheap in America since the 1980s and ultimately that's the main reason that most Americans don't have a solar water heater in other parts of the world however the 1970s oil crisis had a much longer lasting impact on how people Heat their water and nowhere was that more true than Israel throughout its history Israel has been plagued by energy scarcity as one Israeli Prime Minister said Moses took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil during the 1970s oil crisis Israel's government mandated new solar water heaters in all new homes and unlike the United States they never turned back today more than 90 percent of homes in Israel use a solar water heater and because so many of these things are made and installed each year they're incredibly cheap in Israel a solar water heater costs just seven hundred dollars that's less than 10 times as much as a cost in the United States Israel wasn't the only country that supported solar water heating following the 1970s oil crisis if you look at the countries with the most solar water heaters per capita there's a common pattern yes many of them have Sunshine but as I said earlier there's more to it than that all of these countries have a government that got behind solar following the 1970s oil crisis and then stuck with it unlike the United States in Barbados where there are more solar water heaters per capita than any place on Earth the government subsidized the entire cost of a solar water heater in the 1980s they also put a 30 tax on traditional water heaters in Cyprus the government followed Israel's lead and mandated solar water heaters in the 1980s and in mirzao the Chinese City I mentioned earlier the government invested in r d they were so successful that today it cost the same amount to buy a solar water heater as it does to buy a traditional one today countries around the world face similar problems to those faced in the 1970s in the latest on Europe's ongoing energy crisis Nationwide this summer Americans are expected to spend 540 on electric bills 20 percent more than last year in the last few years Energy prices all around the world have skyrocketed due to supply chain disruptions and Putin's war in Ukraine but we also face a much larger problem in climate change in order to reach net zero emissions hundreds of millions of fossil fuel water heaters all around the world will need to be replaced fortunately there are more options available than there were in the 1970s for example there are heat pump hot water heaters which can run on renewable electricity these things are super efficient and use four times less energy than a traditional water heater and importantly they're much cheaper to install in some parts of the world it's going to make sense for people to install these high efficiency electric water heaters in other parts of the world it's going to make sense for people to install solar water heaters but if you look at the history of the solar water heater Market one thing is clear people don't always adopt clean energy technology on their own Reagan's free market isn't going to get more efficient water heaters in homes around the world

Channel: Distilled

Views: 403,001

Keywords: climate change, solar energy, sustainability

Id: fAyY0kGmgmc

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023