How can the Southern power grid handle months of blistering heat with everyone blasting air conditioners, but can’t handle two days below freezing?
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everything people are saying about ambient temperature versus outdoor temperature is correct but also local adaptive architecture really plays a role in how in efficient it is to heat houses in the south. Southern houses for the most part are specifically designed to stay cool. I grew up in northern Michigan and I’ve lived for the past 15 years in New Orleans. The actual architecture of my house is designed to not hold on to heat; everything from the raised floor, to high ceilings, to transoms, to a shotgun design that encourages airflow, to the fact that our vents are on the ceiling, not The floor. This makes sense when you think about we spend most of our time doing air conditioning and cold air falls, but when you’re trying to pump warm air into a house, it’s incredibly inefficient to have it coming from ceiling vents, especially in a high ceiling house (we keep our ceiling plans on year-round just changing the directions to help push the warm air down)
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