Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
kaikenhuippu.com
kaikenhuippu.com
I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, btw), and plenty of people stayed inside. Lots of closed schools, too.
I don't necessarily disagree with the article's central points. But picking up the one outlier in which there's ridiculous amounts of wind and entire countries are working at half capacity seems naive at best.
In seriousness, wasn't Storm Ciara named by Met Éireann ? that was certainly my impression, given that most people in the UK struggled to pronounce it. So there is some unification between The Met offices of Ireland and the UK with regard to naming.
https://www.countryliving.com/uk/news/a28924357/met-office-s...
> The names are a mix of British, Irish and Dutch monikers.
There are now two regions in Europe where names are decided in cooperation: West, and Southwest.
West is Ireland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Belgium, where storms tend to originate in the West.
Southwest is the Iberian peninsula and France.
A third region (Southeast) is being set up for the Mediterranean.
Every region has its own list of names, but when a storm is first named in one region, the other regions will use that name instead of assigning their own (if the storm crosses regions).
This means that everyone called this storm Ciara, except for the Germans. Germany is an exception, and has its own (commercial) naming system at the moment.
Source: https://www.knmi.nl/kennis-en-datacentrum/uitleg/naamgeving-... (Dutch)
To 'raise awareness' of weather events, as if one might not notice them otherwise. To be less cynical, people might pay more attention to weather warnings if they are named storms? Not sure how long that effect will stick if we have a named storm twice a month! I think you might not be far wrong saying it's about grabbing headlines.
Mostly wind turbines have issues with frequency as you don't want to change/adjust frequency too much (adds to cost) to that of the main grid they only generate when within acceptable frequency ranges and internal equipment is able to compensate.
With this storm control the turbines lineally increase the resistance and are only shut down when the wind speed reaches more than 34 m/s as a 10 minute average. That's 122km/h. [0] The recent storm reached these levels at times, but didn't sustain them for longer periods over larger areas.
[0] https://www.enercon.de/en/technology/wec-features/ I'm sure other producers have similar technology.
[0] https://energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2...
> German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market.
> There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity.
> (...)
> This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one prefers, but I think the goal should be decreasing emissions.
That is the stated end-goal. The subsidies are (overly) high so that lots of renewable energy production/infrastructure is built instead of whatever might be more profitable otherwise. While this is related to eletricity production (payout per MWh etc.), the actual building part is what is ecouraged.
You can of course argue whether that it is a good goal to pick, but to me this sounds not like an unintended "problem" but rather as the subsidies achieving exactly what they intended to.
The "stated end-goal" and what is actually done is very divergent in modern day Germany.
Just saying that right now you pay on average 0,25€/kWh here. Although the market price is almost naught.
Germany has/had extensive coal production (complete exit by 2038 IIRC) with lots of employment tied to it; of course that has subsidies.
> They even stopped wind subsidies, because windenergy was too flexible and pushed coal out of the market, since coal is not flexible enough
That sounds more like a conspiracy theory. You don't stop stuff for being "too flexible" but because of other problem, e.g. offshore vs. onshore, transmission to the south, environmental concerns, wanting a different mix of renewables etc. .
> The "stated end-goal" and what is actually done is very divergent in modern day Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
There are more and more people employed in these industries. Production capacities went up etc. . Seems to be doing what it says on the tin.
> Just saying that right now you pay on average 0,25€/kWh here. Although the market price is almost naught.
Yeah, so? Consumer electricity prices were never even mentioned in the "end-goal"?
I get that and I am glad it happened, it's just way too late for my liking. At least it's done, I can agree on that.
>That sounds more like a conspiracy theory. You don't stop stuff for being "too flexible" but because of other problem, e.g. offshore vs. onshore, transmission to the south, environmental concerns, wanting a different mix of renewables etc. .
You can't have energy produced disappear. So if you overproduce, it has to go somewhere and you need to stop production to not fry your energy grid. If you overproduce, and your coal energy can't shut down, so your network becomes more green/clean, the obvious choice is to shut down the flexible generator, i.e. wind energy.
>Yeah, so? Consumer electricity prices were never even mentioned in the "end-goal"?
That is true, but the EEG is making renewable energies more expensive for end-consumers. And I think that is the main point of this article.
In the first half of last year a total of 35 new wind turbines were added across Germany[0], the lowest rate for 19 years.
If German government policies are supposed to encourage the creation of new renewable energy production then they don't appear to be working particularly well.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/windenergie-die-g...
- Switching to an auction model in 2017 to drive prices down, which was implemented very poorly.
- Strongly incentivizing small "citizen" project to increase acceptance in the population. Which messed up larger scale deployments and lead to awful bureaucracy.
Doesn't Germany have restrictive distance regulations between wind turbines and residential areas?
Due to distance regulations between residential areas, existing turbines etc etc (and basically each viable spot already taken / in use, besides offshore) the numbers built are shrinking - unless some kind of change regarding the laws are done...
Source: gf is a landscape architect
The government is slowing down adding wind turbines for basically two reasons:
* market price
* infrastructure catching up. We need more power lines to the south to distribute the electricity and building them takes a few years. It makes not too much sense to build wind electricity capacity in the North and not being able to transport it.
The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.
This means that the supply of electricity is greater than demand for it, and prices go below zero.
This has two knock-on effects:
1. Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand. The only source of revenue is government redistribution of energy taxes, and that can change quickly depending on government policy. This is not sustainable, there is no incentive here to produce efficient, long-lasting energy production infrastructure. There is only an incentive to maximise government subsidy payouts in the short term.
2. Germany is producing more energy than it needs, and producing energy (from any source) has a negative environmental impact. These policies that were intended to preserve the environment and reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.
Of course, this only considers domestic consumption, and specifically heating. It may be that the policies do better in other areas.
Yeah, I'd love for them to fix the bad power-vs-gas incentives. But I would not expect this to happen any time soon in the current political climate were no one will be willing to take the hit for something consumer will feel that directly.
It does.
> The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.
No, it doesn't. Renewable energy has a systematic preference and its share in electricity production has risen from 6% (in 2000) to 42% (in 2019).
> Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand
That's always the case. Energy policy is a government task. No nuclear would be build without MASSIVE government support and government demand.
Germany actually created an energy market, which before did not exist, since electricity production and distribution was in the hand of 4 big companies, each having a full monopoly in a large region.
> Germany is producing more energy than it needs
It doesn't. Far from. Also Germany is importing energy. Lots.
> reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.
This is not what is happening. The goal is to have more than 85% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050.
I believe the point was that, because of the subsidies that are included in the price for electricity, that electricity isn't used for what it could be because it's more expensive than fossil-fuel options.
Even if there was 100% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050, that wouldn't help with emissions that stem from heating unless you'd also make people heat with electricity. And to do that, you'd need to lower the prices (or raise the prices of alternatives).
> Even if there was 100% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050, that wouldn't help with emissions that stem from heating unless you'd also make people heat with electricity. And to do that, you'd need to lower the prices (or raise the prices of alternatives).
That's right. In a future with large electricity surplus it makes sense to switch to electricity for heating. To make that attractive new price models are needed.
Currently another goal is to increase heating efficiency and cheap heating prices would go against it. When we switch to electricity we want to make sure that the heating is max efficient. Different from France, where electricity for heating is cheap and is used very inefficiently.
>That's right. In a future with large electricity surplus it makes sense to switch to electricity for heating. To make that attractive new price models are needed.
Again, maybe read the article before commenting. Because the article explains how the pricing structure is incentivising people to continue using fossil fuels, even with a large electricity surplus.
For example: the renewable produced electricity is delivered onto the grid and the distribution takes it. As much as is possible. This is mixed with non-renewable electricity. The consumer then gets delivered the mix. The normal consumer has no choice - he always gets the mix. He/she can't prefer fossil fuels or renewable. If there is more coal generated electricity, the renewable energy electricity has a preference. By law:
https://www.buzer.de/s1.htm?g=eeg_2009&a=8
'Netzbetreiber sind vorbehaltlich des § 11 verpflichtet, den gesamten angebotenen Strom aus Erneuerbaren Energien und aus Grubengas unverzüglich vorrangig abzunehmen'
translates: 'Grid companies ... are required to take all provided electricity generated from renewable energies ... immediately and with preference.'
That's the German law, the EEG, the renewable energy law.
Thus there is simply no choice: ALL AVAILABLE RENEWABLE ENERGY IS PUSHED INTO THE GRID IMMEDIATELY WITH PREFERENCE.
The provider of renewable energy gets a guaranteed price, based on some calculations. The goal is that this price goes down over the years.
Additionally coal gets further price burdens, which last year had an effect that a lot of coal was driven out of the market, because coal generated electricity was suddenly much less competitive.
Currently there is no time in Germany when renewable energy electricity drives the country 100% or more. There are weekends with lots of wind where we reach 60%. These days are still relatively rare.
On these days the consumer can not choose to get more wind electricity, since he AUTOMATICALLY gets as much as possible via the mix provided by the grid.
The producer gets his price. Now there might be additional capacity available and there might not be a buyer for it. Thus the price on the spot market gets zero for some short period of time or even negative.
But for me as an end consumer I can't choose what kind of electricity I get delivered. What I can influence is where I buy the electricity from and where the profits from that are invested. For example I buy my electricity from a local provider, which invests in renewable energy. The company not only buys renewable energy on the market, but also has its own renewable energy production. The provider invests their profits into more renewable energy production.
For coal its currently tough to make any profits and they are slowly driven out of the market:
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/hunderte-millionen-ve...
Last year in the first half brown coal power plants were 650 Million Euros in the red.
Thus the consumer doesn't give the coal power plants any advantage.
The added capacity of renewable produced electricity is each year planned (but not completely determined) and the government has instruments to influence that.
It doesn't address any of the non-heating areas that you're talking about, and doesn't make any claims around any of the electricity supply market that doesn't affect heating.
So it doesn't matter if the first 90% of the electricity people consume is green, because they're not choosing to use electricity for this. Thus the renewable power is not replacing the fossil fuel power in this market.
Because the article has no clue what the discussion is in Germany.
There is right now no cheap surplus clean electricity for heating. The so-called 'free electricity' simply does not exist.
What is free is SOMETIMES electricity traded on the spot market, which is not necessary available when the consumer needs it for heating and not necessarily in the amount that it would be useful.
That heating is not done via electricity is because it's simply not currently a part of the energy policy in Germany to promote electrical heating on a large scale. It's also not seen as a useful consumption of surplus energy in the next decade. The topics which are discussed are heat pumps, combined-cycle power plants, better insulation, zero-energy houses (which don't need much heating, but need electricity for air distribution), centralized district-level heating, electrical heating from local PV installations, adding gas generated from electricity to the gas distribution, pellet heating, solar, ...
The cost for a complete electrification of the heating market is estimated to be 2 trillion Euro. That's far away. There is a plan to disallow new oil heating from 2026 onwards, but there is no plan to support direct electrical heating with incentives. There will be incentives for heat pumps, but the achievable market share is not large in the next years.
> Thus the renewable power is not replacing the fossil fuel power in this market.
Because it was/is not wanted. This may change, but there are many experts saying that it is currently not useful to promote direct electrical heating and heat pumps are currently not a large scale solution. Also: Currently the price (different from what is claimed in the article) for electrical heating is too high in Germany.
The next main usage for electricity probably will be for electric vehicles and the infrastructure for that will be expensive to build. Thus investments will be needed for the electricity used to decarbonize energy in traffic.
The main reasons why Germany isn't currently using electrical heating (besides heat pumps, etc), is that on a large scale electricity usage in other areas has a preference, electricity for heating currently is expensive (the 'free electricity' is a myth) and building the infrastructure would be very expensive.
Sure, sure, the issue is that you can use electricity or fossil fuels for heating. If the prices are massively different, people cannot afford to go green.
Having super high prices for consumers while essentially subsidizing industry seems like a problematic approach, and one that primarily hits the lower classes, as a higher electricity bill will very much directly affect their bottom line. Combining this with a subsidy policy framework for renewables that also primarily the upper middle & upper class profit from, this looks more like redistribution via market.
You can't. Fossil fuels are still used for electricity, too and there is not enough cheap electricity for heating. If you want to bring people from relatively cheap gas to expensive electricity (the free electricity claim is just nonsense) that would be massive investments, while the consumer already pays for the move into renewable energy for electricity production, which without heating still needs to scale to replace more fossil and nuclear. If we want to have the consumer to pay for new heating systems and electricity distribution for heating on a larger scale, then this will be difficult...
It's simply not the case that one lowers the price for electricity (who pays for that?) and consumers will switch on their electrical heating systems. There is simply no large scale infrastructure for that.
It might even be better to create gas from electricity and deliver that to the customer... Then one can use the large storage and distribution systems for gas in Germany and the gas heating which is widely available. There is a move to get rid of oil heating and to provide incentives to install different heating from 2026 onwards...
> It does.
Not really. Maybe in the future but now, it mostly replaced nuclear.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Electric...
EDIT: My data is a bit outdated, they did significantly reduce they reliance on hard coal. Lignite use (the worst kind of fossil fuel...) stayed about the same and they use more gas. But still, renewable mostly replaced nuclear.
Fossil fuel usage is significantly going down and adding gas power plants for very agile backup for renewable makes sense, too.
Keep in mind that the Energiewende is a long term project for rebuilding the whole energy landscape in an industrialized country of more than 80 Million people and one of the larger economies in the world. The time scale is 50 years from 2000 upto 2050. Even the current point where we are at 42% of renewable energy (up from 6% in 2000) for electricity was unbelievable 20 years ago - for example given that Germany does not have much hydro-electric capacity. From 'the grid would collapse' to 'Germany will be losing all industry' everything was claimed.
I wonder how they managed to tackle the duck curve[1]. Imports?
Whenever renewable is available, it pushes a lot of other sources out of the market. In the current months there were a lot of days where wind was the major source of electricity for the whole of Germany. For example in the windy days from Tuesday 28th Jan until Saturday 1st Feb the wind electricity share climbed from 47% on Tuesday to 61% on Saturday. Other sources either leave the market or more gets exported.
>It does.
Maybe read the article before commenting? There's a whole section in there explaining why this isn't happening (for heating)
The renewable energy expansion is used to replace current non-renewable electricity usage. Then we will see more renewable energy electricity used to decarbonize traffic (trains, cars, trucks, busses, ...).
I think most Germans wouldn't even get the idea to heat electrically.
Most of Denmark (at least in the cities) are heats using hot water from remote heating plants, either surplus heat from power generation or garbage incineration, with auxiliary gas and coal plants. 15 years ago many of the smaller gas powered heating plants offered to install the equipment needed to convert excess electrical power to heat. The idea being that they would save money, compared to buying gas, the only caveat: They didn't want to pay the CO2 tariffs, which made sense, given that the power would mostly be from wind anyway. Paying the tariff would completely negate any cost savings, compared to buying the gas.
This solution was refused by politicians for years, so instead the heating plants would burn gas, generation CO2, and the excess wind power would be sold to Germany for almost nothing, and in many cases for free. That this point Germany wasn't closing down its nuclear power plants, so the electricity the Danish windfarms replaced was also CO2 free.
The tariff was/is calculated per kW and not actually based on CO2 emissions. It's basically just an extra tax placed on the consumers to help subsidize green energy. It just kinda backfired the cases of the heating plants, because they weren't never thought of a consumer of electricity.
So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (in exchange for becoming part of Russia). Finland is in any case not great for wind power.
The article is correct that bureaucratic inertia and taxing practices in Germany don't make much sense and are very counter productive (and not just for the energy market). I live there. German ineptness and inefficiency is cringe-worthy. It's a political problem; the current government seems paralyzed waiting for their term to run out and not getting much done at all.
That does not mean clean energy is a no go but it does mean that pressure on politicians to fix things will increase over time. Also, the rest of Europe gets a sweet deal on energy. E.g. the Netherlands where I'm from is far ahead in EV deployments and despite being a gas producer is already implementing a policy of decommissioning gas usage by households over the next decades (this is a big deal in NL). Germany has no such plans in place. Heating oil disappeared a long time ago from my country as well and apparently is still a thing in Germany. Even coal heating was still a thing when I moved to Berlin 11 years ago (you could smell it in the winter). That's a lot more rare now.
Fundamentally, selling excess clean energy at negative rates is a sign of desperation. It should be a very valuable commodity. The problem is that we subsidize production but tax/penalize consumption. It should be the other way around. That would drive demand up and the cheapest way to meet that demand would be clean energy. With plenty of EVs hitting the market at tens of thousands per month across the EU, there should be no shortage of new demand.
That's why Texas pumps and refines oil using lots of solar and wind power. It's an economic no-brainer for them. Most of the clean energy capacity in that state (and it is world leading on that front) is actually consumed by their industry.
There is a shift in Finland to geothermal, chosen for most new builds now, and district heating systems are exploring deep geothermal for heating whole towns and cities.
We also have heat exchangers for warming your home but then you have a noisy box outside your house or on your balcony.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
Right now the energy for district heating in Helsinki is a mix of fossil fuels and using waste sources of heat like data centre heat.
Renewable energy sources are currently being evaluated for this, with deep geothermal (up to several kilometres deep) being one source.
https://www.hel.fi/uutiset/en/helsinki/helen-investigates-po...
If you have it available, great! Otherwise, it is not viable.
Article in Finnish- but the W/m geothermal potential illustration is in English
https://www.gtk.fi/geoenergian-ja-geotermisen-energian-poten...
Makes sense though, and I think it depends on how much heat you extract - you could locally deplete the heat faster than it "regenerates" back to that area through natural radioactive decay and primordial heat loss
However, almost all homes in the Netherlands are heated by gas directly from the source. The gas is used to heat up water in the home and pump it through radiators on the wall or in the floor. A highly efficient system. But we can't import the gas from other countries because of the calorific properties so we need to pump our own gas. Switching to electric systems in the home will double the cost for most home owners because it's not very efficient and electricity is expensive (though the government can lower taxes on it). It also means that home owners will have to convert their current system in the home and pay the price for this. But it should be a plug and play option.
An ever bigger project is switching to government provided hot water heating. That means that you have to dig up every single street in the country, get rid of all existing infrastructure (fiber, coax, power, gas, water, sewer), lay down a big water pipe in the middle, put the existing infrastructure back and repave the street. Have the hot water enter every home, redo the plumbing of the home and change the water systems. The downside to this is that instead of heating the home with 70 degrees water like we do now, it will only be around 50 degrees. You can't heat a home in the winter like that so you also need to isolate every home. And you are tied to a single provider for your heating, unlike the current system where you can occasionally switch energy provider to get a better price. People I know with this system pay more than I do with gas.
The second system is a gigantic job but somewhat cheaper overall and highly efficient. The only problem is heating the water in a central location. Near an industrial zone you can use waste water from cooling systems but if nothing is around you need a lot of electricity. Or geothermal. They are still trying to find a good way to do this.
Electric resistance heat is inefficient but it's a plug-and-play replacement solution for gas heaters. You can directly replace it without any changes to the home other than needing an extra circuit breaker and wire pulled.
Old ones maybe. We've installed a Mitsubishi mini-split that can heat a 1900 sq ft. mediocrely insulated home in Appalachia (this morning was -6C). Never mind, the indoor spits (<30dB?), the compressor outside is so quiet you can't hear it if you're next to it. My, brand new, radon pump is far noisier.
As to footprint, the compressor is tall and wide (about 1m). But it's only 25 cm thick, so it doesn't take much room at all along the wall.
Really, Europe has no reason at all not to go all in with splits.
Even the "quiet" new ones cause a problem when placed in the confined area between buildings[1]. It projects low frequency noise into the neighboring structure. Very hard to deal with. You still need to be careful with placement[2].
[1] http://www.quiet.org/readings/a-c_sound%20advice.htm
[2] https://www.eugene-or.gov/DocumentCenter/View/17196/Neighbor... (PDF)
Also split units are rather ugly and with older homes you ruin the look. Government hot water heating with city water is much better as it doesn't affect how the street or homes look like.
Yes you do or just pay for inefficiency.
I've spent 2 years in Netherlands moving from Ukraine. I was shocked how (some) Dutch people ignorant to save warmth of their houses and schools in winter. Only way to change that make it expensive. As it should be.
It's apparent to me as Ukraine has turned away from Russia subsidised (cheap) gas at 2014. So most of Ukrainians now know that there are no such thing as free energy. Someone has to pay in one way or another.
I could improve by having better insulation in the walls or better windows. But with our high labour cost that would be thousands of euro's() to bring the bill down to at most €45, if I could cut my energy bill in half, which is unlikely. It's not worth the investment.
() I had to replace drywall due to water damage, it was around €2000 for a section of five square meter. This was replacing the insulation, wall, redoing the stucco, repainting and reapplying the fixtures and wall trim. Luckily this was covered by insurance. I don't want to know what replacing the 180 square meters of drywall would cost.
I guess if you replace the boiler on the other end with a fuel cell based system that was still 'wet' so the radiators and water heating in the house stayed the same the there may be less change needed?
Well you can, you just need bigger radiator surface area. Modern gas heating also runs no hotter than ~50°C because condensing boilers are more efficient.
Given the climate of NL is relatively mild, averaging between 0 to 25C,[1] would something like a heat pump be ideal for the area? There are units that can operating down to -20C.
There seems to be a desire to move off of gas:
* https://energypost.eu/a-revolution-the-netherlands-kisses-ga...
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the idea:
* https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/03/heat-pump-installation...
Finland itself is heavily dependent on energy imports from Russia. So Finnish heating is not exactly carbon neutral.
I have no idea about wholesale spot prices, but I don't see any incentive to switch to electricity as the price isn't going below 4 cents so often.
Comparing kWh for natural gas (some loss up flue) with a heat pump in your case it seems they cost roughly the same marginally (although you might have grossly different installation costs, risks of outages, and CO2 impact depending on your individual circumstances).
It isn’t just efficiency but size. A heat pump that can work on the occasional very cold day is impractical.
And why should anyone outside that area care if the equipment they use will or won’t work in weather that they won’t experience?
Man, please look up methane freezing point
Also, is it possible for air pump to heat a liquid in pipes?
I mean can I have air pump that provides heating to the floor?
If the floor is warm then body thinks it is warm.
I know air pumps only as air conditioners and they just blew warm air around, which is not that comfortable if you are just where the warm wind blows :)
- air/air
- air/water (i.e. an "air pump that heats a liquid in pipes")
- ground/water
https://www.nibe.eu/en-eu/products/heat-pumps
The efficiency depends on the pump, the house and the weather. At +10 (Celsius) ambient temperature, the air source pumps will generally come out ahead, at -20 the ground-source pump is going to win.
Only when the air temperature is less than the ground temperature. On average, yes, air source is slightly less efficient than ground source, but the initial cost of ground source is so much higher that you will not make up the difference in the lifetime of the pump. Air source is fine.
Also, is it possible for air pump to heat a liquid in pipes?
Yes.
I mean can I have air pump that provides heating to the floor?
Yes. This is generally considered the best way to do it as the water does not need to be as hot as with conventional radiators, so it is somewhat more efficient. However, conventional low temperature radiators work fine, too.
I know air pumps only as air conditioners and they just blew warm air around, which is not that comfortable if you are just where the warm wind blows :)
To each their own. I grew up with forced air heating and prefer it to radiated heat.
In Europe we mostly see air-to-air heat pumps in cottages, and there is then only one vent for the entire house. Which if fine and efficient for a small cottage in the fall and spring and maybe a few weekends in the winter.
But it would be hopeless in a Canadian winter.
Not modern ones. When outside temperature is above 5C, they're actually more efficient.
> Also, is it possible for air pump to heat a liquid in pipes? I mean can I have air pump that provides heating to the floor?
Yes, via a heat exchanger. This isn't new techonology, I have a 10 year old version of this warmning my house as I type: https://www.nibe.eu/sv-se/produkter/varmepumpar/luft-vattenv...
>I know air pumps only as air conditioners and they just blew warm air around, which is not that comfortable if you are just where the warm wind blows :)
The pump linked above connect to the water based heating system in my house. Works like a charm and I heat ~260 m2 (badly isolated) with 1500 kWh per month (wintertime)
Most of these — these days – seem to be for both cooling and heating, but I know Mitsubishi Ecodan have models for just heating. If you live in a building with pipes installed, the pipes need to be specially insulated to carry cold water, if not the moisture in the air will seek the cold pipes and form condensation thus causing humidity problems.
If you are looking into installing an air to water heat pump for heating your home, you can either use it for floor heating and/or different types of radiators (many solutions also offer sanitary water heating as well, for showers etc.) Sometimes you can use the radiators that are already installed in your home and just install the water pump system, but that requires that the water warmed up by the heat pumps is sufficiently warm (and that depends on the company/model chosen). If the water is not sufficiently warm, you either need to install a bigger radiator or newer types of radiators that are called low temperature radiators. The latter radiators are "smarter" and gives more heat at a lower temperature, but typically are also more expensive.
Here are a couple of links for more info. The video is more for illustration purposes, as models changes all the time. It is also important to point out that – in general – there are lots of different solutions on how these machines are assembled. Sometimes the outdoor unit contains technology that in other models are stored in the indoor unit. Sometimes the water container is stored together with the indoor unit itself, sometimes these are separate. It all depends on available space, or if you like things compact or not.
I have nothing to do with Daikin or Mitsubishi, I have just been looking into installing this in our own home. I am looking into an air to water air pump, and only for heat as our pipes are not properly insulated.
https://www.ecodan.de/en/heat-pumps/hydroboxes/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-XHJmEtZU&t=171s
For example, despite last year was on average warmest on record, my tomatoes still suffered from sudden frost in May and then again in October.
What you can do is make a hole in the ground, put pipes on it and recirculate fluids. But this is way more expensive.
It seems you can make a nice deal when you are an electricity intermediary in Germany?
I'm guessing it really can't mean 0.02 cents.
See also: Verizon Math :-)
$0.02 - two cents
2c - two cents
0.02c - 1/50th of a cent
$0.02c - does not compute
You claim (2) is a misunderstanding of the title. The title is intended to be interpreted as "Why Germans won't heat their homes with electricity, even if it's free". That is how I immediately interpreted it so I don't think the claim that the title is inaccurate can be maintained on this basis.
The intersection of the two claims is a further point of the article. Since free electricity in Germany is too expensive to heat houses with, and since Germans are going to heat their houses (unlike, say, Australians—where a normal winter is comparable to this year's winter in Berlin—who will merely become uncomfortable and/or stay in bed when the cost of heating gets too high), we therefore have the unfortunate situation that Germans are not selecting the most abundant nor the most socially responsible forms of heating. The taxes do not act like a carbon tax when a person is encouraged to use natural gas to heat their house instead of superabundant wind power.
What a terrible system.
The average market price may affect the retail prices in the long run if it goes up or down.
We're seeing prices for electricity as low as 0€ (or lower) because there isn't enough storage capacity.
But another part of that is that retail prices don't correspond close enough to market prices, so people aren't incentivised to use the best source of energy available at a time. An electric heater isn't that expensive. An app that broadcasts the current energy price is probably a little more expensive, especially since the company that produces it will want to add as many expensive lock in features as they can.
The German marketplace is remarkably inefficient. It's extremely difficult to cancel contracts here for instance — you most commonly have to do it several months in advance, or else they will automatically extend themself without the actual, legitimate consent of the client.
There's many problems but most of them are caused by bugs in the German marketplace which could be fixed by regulation intended to improve efficiency. For some reason, all the regulation here is intended to reduce efficiency.
No, it's not difficult. Changing your energy provider is usually quite easy and there are a lot to choose from. I did it a few years ago and the new provider did all the paper work for me.
It's just that many end consumers are not prepared to do it. And no one does it on a daily base on the spot market.
The general market price is not 0€/MWh. That's nonsense. The price is on the short-term spot-market, which is only a small part of the larger electricity market.
Consumers who need to heat homes / buildings / etc. are not buying on the spot market, but have long term contracts.
Instead, perhaps:
'Why won't Germans heat their homes with free electricity?'
...or maybe all of it be rephrased a little:
'Why won't Germans heat their homes with electricity, even when it is free?'
(I think the second version best captures the two questions dealt with within the article - the German propensity to heat their homes with natural gas, and the odd taxation system meaning that 'free' electricity isn't really free.)
Does Octopus provide the price of electricity at the current moment?
I had a quick look at their website but couldn't see anything obvious.
This website does some analysis on the pricing: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile/
The useful part is that, if a user of the tariff is sufficiently engaged, not only do they save money, but by shifting their demand to follow supply it helps with the increasing adoption of renewable sources.
Looks like this:
But if you want, you can also export all of the data as an excel spreadsheet.
Some car chargers(OHME for example) can read this data in real time and only start charging when the price per kWh falls below a pre-set level.
IMO: this doesn’t make sense. Transmission and distribution costs are largely the amortization of the cost of building the system peak carrying capacity.
There’s no shame in charging higher D&T rates during peak times and near-zero rates at 3AM.
Could also make electricity taxes a percentage instead of a fixed $ per kWh.
Germany could encourage domestic consumption of its overproduction, which would further encourage demand smoothing, but instead exports it.
But do remember, Germany recently went thru an anti nuclear phase and that forced many coal reactors to carry on longer, so they did need to compensate and a push on solar and wind power was a logical move. How that was subsidies and paid for was and is perhaps an avenue they need to address.
All that said, much respect to the people of Germany for responsibly using energy. That has probably done way more than anything to help.
Not true, source: my electricity bill. A standing charge exists, but the vast majority of what we pay is per kWh.
The part that you misunderstood, I think, is that the EEG is fixed per kWh and not per euro paid (just like most of our fuel taxes, even if crude doubles or halves in price our price at the pump only shifts a little). The article was quite misunderstable, bordering on wrong even, in that part because it reads as if market rate had any influence on German electricity bills and only the EEG charge was fixed. In reality, it's impossible for a households to get a contract that follows market rate, you always pay the same per kWh no matter if it's Sunday or Monday, windy or calm. The electricity spot market price is only relevant for utilities and for a few heavy industrial users with special contracts (the kind of heavy use where you'd be mandated to give the utility a heads up before increasing or dropping the load).
This will have to change eventually, because load shift is so much mow efficient than storage, but it's difficult to implement because you can't really have both constant rate and variable rate in parallel due to an abundance of bad actors who would have both and ruin the pricing models by opportunistically switching between them.
I will say, the shift in electric cars and more so the iminante arrival of solid state lithium batteries, distributed and more so, local home storage will start to become and more open avenue. This would be great for flats that can not avail the installation of solar panels and also those that rent (more an aspect in Germany) which are limited. A battery tech that you don't have to worry about exploding and you can literally drive nails into and be safe, will be game changing (not advocating that people drive nails into batteries, more a way to explain how much safer they are). That level of safety will open up the home storage market more as well.
In the UK you can use the Agile tariff from Octopus Energy (https://octopus.energy/agile/) which has half hourly dynamic pricing per electricity kWh. The next 24hrs worth of prices are released each day around 4pm and follow market cost. There’s a 12p/kWh surcharge between 4pm and 7pm during peak demand. Used in conjunction with a smart meter it bills per half hour usage and can go negative.
Twice in the last two week’s it has gone below zero due to recent storms. It’s a great tariff if you have an electric car to charge in the early hours when prices are cheapest and can reduce usage during the peak three hours. A home battery would also help out as it could be charged during cheap periods and discharged when prices are too high.
We have had that in the Nordics for ages, they are just about to launch in Germany
German consumers pay 6.756 cents per kwh EEG tariff.
Thank you for putting me on the right track.
They do both. The fixed amount is (officially) for infrastructure improvements, but there is an additional tax for consumption per kWh.
> Of course you can allocate people a higher initial rate they can use without paying tax upon the charge for things like disabilities, health needs etc
Probably too burocratic and inefficient in practice. Energy just has to be affordable for any household.
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/17/797322305/episode-965-das-gre...
Everyone is buddies with someone in politics, otherwise screw your career.
Laws are mainly pre written by the industry which is afraid of the risks associated with tackling the challenges involved in climate change. But also afraid of doing nothing, since this would make them clear targets for disruption through voters. So when they do change something it is always in extremely small steps, limited in scope, without changes to the wider system.
While politics give a clear sense of direction regarding renewable energy, the whole thing seems to be to complex for politicians to fully grasp.
Sometimes this makes sense, and sometimes to inane protection of incumbent interests like happened with digital content (it's illegal to copy the DVD you've purchased etc).
In some cases this might mean you plan your laundry better. Eg. you start laundry when you have at least 1 set of clothes to wear for the next day, instead of when you have 0 clean clothes to wear.
(Joking aside yes this is completely correct.)
(My towels are a very distinct shade of red, a color I never wear. The lint is the exact same color.)
For shirts I run through the dryer, they don't seem to have suffered much by it. But I don't run printed designs through the dryer, because they take serious damage that way.
Considering how popular synthetics are these days, I suspect it's because they use small combo washer/dryers in Europe. Certainly my British washer/dryer combo did a good job.
I wash my clothes in the washing machine, then hang them to dry, that's all there is to it. It takes time (about a day) and some space for the clothes hanger in a rather small apartment, but that doesn't bother me.
But how do you hang wet clothes and not ruin your floors?
Sorry if I sound stupid. American apartments aren't set up for this and I would rather handle it this way and I've had challenges.
But I've seen some hang-to-dry things that could be used over a bathtub.
Thank you!
I at least have a place to start doing research.
I have this in my apartment (Sweden). After I've done laundry I hang my clothes to dry over the bathtub, then move them onto a separate drying rack in the morning (so I have space to shower), and by that time the clothes have dried enough so there's no risk of dripping on the floor.
Most US apartments have wall-to-wall carpeting, not wood or tile floors. God, how I hate it.
Dry and very wrinkled
But it is true that you need space and a fitting room as the drying can create damp rooms that need a good ventilation.
I think many people actually have driers but don't use them if they can dry them otherwise. A disadvantage of drying by air is that the clothes can get pretty hard. Some use fabric softener for that.
Also it helps if you live somewhere with reasonable humidity.
Only really cold & rainy days is this a problem
Yes, most people I know don't want to waste electricity on driers even when it's cheap.
[edit] though frankly it’s probably even easier for Germans to just pay their domestic coal producers not to produce.
But I still think that we (as a world) should start capture carbon actively during this decade. Last summer in Europe was hottest yet and with such hot winter we are for even hotter summer this year. Keeping energy prices up would be just added benefit.
The author makes it seem like that the negative prices are constant, which is not the case. Germany also does not have 100% renewable energy. Once you have an electric heater at your home, you will be using electric energy generated by burning coal to heat your home.
It also does not solve the problem of the German electricity market, which is mostly that renewable energy is not steady. Power is not distributed evenly across space and time. So you need to store the energy and move it from North to South. But storage and transmission lines are lacking to say the least.
One intermediate strategy you could take, would be to convert abundant electric energy to hydrogen, which you can feed into the already existing natural gas pipes and burn inside the already existing gas heaters, the author is criticizing. This way you would solve both problems (missing network and missing storage) at the same time.
Electric heating via heat pump is ridiculously efficient and has a much bigger bang for your carbon-reducing buck than anything else a homeowner can do.
Yes, heating with a big electric radiator is wasteful. Heating with a heat pump, on the other hand, is fantastically efficient.
https://www.internationale-bauausstellung-hamburg.de/en/proj...
Strictly speaking that's "electrically assisted" heating. What most people refer to as electric heating is the conversion of electricity directly into heat, eg. by a resistive element.
When people say that their home is heated by natural gas, they mean that they have a supply of natural gas, and that is the consumable they use / pay for, not the specific chemical process when it is oxidized. Similarly, when people say they heat their home with electricity, whether it's a heat pump or electric radiators is just a secondary possibility. I heat my home with electricity and it's a ground-source heat pump. If someone has some weird hangup or ignorance about that, that's on them.
If someone said that they cooled their home in the winter with "electricity assistance" I think everyone would rightly laugh.
No, just pointing out the usual definition of electric heating. A heat pump doesn't necessarily even use electricity. The mechanical power for the compressor (assuming a refrigerant based heat pump) could come from anywhere.
So, it really does depend on how cold it gets where you are if it’s better to burn fuel at home or at a powerplant.
PS: Solar hot water heaters are generally the best overall option any place heat pumps are actually efficient.
As to warranty, they generally last well past that point. You may be replacing a part or to at ~10 years, but a 20+ year lifespan is common depending on the model and your water hardness.
It probably would not be as efficient as a commercial solution, but it would be very cheap.
Don't forget about water safety, backflow valves, or local plumbing and building codes. Or winter - would want a bypass valve for flushing and draining it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc78nueDQ64
More pipe = more heat of course, so you can size it up according to your needs. If I had a pool, I would definitely do this.
My home is heated with a heat pump. I live in Canada, and just went through a period of -20C. It works great and is a fraction of the cost of heating with natural gas. It also operates as a fantastic AC in the summer.
It uses a closed loop of water to pipes in the ground, with the ground as the "sink". It is very efficient, and the ground is always 8-10C.
This conversation seems to be dominated, and moderated, by a lot of people who are in the dark, or misunderstand the fundamental physics behind how a heat pump works, or who gatekeep what "electric" means with heating (which is particularly bizarre).
People dealing with permafrost both directly are stuck with lower temperatures and would need to dig much further as your dependent on water exchanging heat with a large thermal mass. That’s the tipping point I am talking about, not your balmy 8-10c average temperatures.
My point is solar hot water heaters are generally the better solution, even if they don’t work in the very far north. But, if you’re that far north heat pumps also fail.
The climate I live in is colder than the majority of humans. Maybe the vast majority. I have a very efficient heat pump (I've been using it for 8 years now -- it's well proven to me by now). Ergo, any notion that heat pumps only work in balmy conditions has no bearing on reality -- yes, those super cheap air exchange units you grab from Home Depot to take the chill off in Atlanta during January might have such limits, but that has no bearing on the market as a whole.
The article linked talks about how Germans don't heat with electricity -- even with very efficient heat pumps -- because a regressive tax on such use makes it uneconomical. I don't see what solar heaters (which seldom even pay for themselves in great conditions -- e.g. California -- as an aside) have to do with this conversation.
In the tropics at high altitude you can use cheap systems for domestic hot water and minimal heating needs. Colder local temperatures require larger and more complex systems but also increase demand for heat. Meanwhile, heat pumps get steadily worse until ground source heating becomes viable though at significantly higher upfront costs and more limited locations. Salt water for example dramatically increases heat pump costs costs vs fresh water.
Large cities often shift things to heat pumps. Though neither system is that great for dense NYC skyscrapers or other large northern cities. And most cites skyscrapers have significant unused exposures where solar collectors are at least somewhat viable. Many short apartment buildings in China for example have solar collectors for the top few floors.
PS: That said, it’s generally not exactly a dramatic difference. However, unlike many things it’s both generally if not always cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
When the efficiency of a heat pump decreases it’s producing less heat for the same energy (when running) rather than the same heat using more energy. As you need more meat output as the temperature drops that quickly becomes a problem. This means you quickly need either a larger heat pump or a backup resistive heating element in the worst conditions. That’s rarely an issue for ground source heating, but is a huge issue than means a heat pump may theoretically be much more effect looking at a chart than what actually happens in practice.
I always wondered what happened if there was 100units of energy in the system and only 90 were used in that minute/hour. I imagined a place where they offloaded it to the ground, much like lightning.
https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
Basically:
strong wind -> a lot of wind power -> coal plant can't lower its output -> excess energy -> pay somebody for allowing you to dump your power in their system
But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not.
Wind power caused the instability but you fault the coal for not being able to compensate for it. What happens when you have 100 wind/solar and too much energy... Who do you fault then?
Coal is bad, obviously. But don't use that fact to scapegoat it so you can ignore the glaring problem with renewables that all electro engineers in Europe are screaming about: critically increasing instability of the grid due to improper rollout of renewables.
I literally pointed out that the "who is at 'fault'" questions depends on how you frame the problem.
> But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not.
What exactly is improper about the current rollout of renewables? The missing storage (batteris, gas)? True! But this would not be a problem if we had gas plants instead of coal, which can turn on and off much quicker. So again, you could frame this as improper rollout of renewables or as coal not being able to handle the new realities of the energy market.
I actually agree with you about the issues we are facing and I see your comment as a very valuable addition to my comment, which simplified the issue too much, losing important detail. I was not trying to be dishonest.
Anyway, my critique is of the 'if we had gas plants'. But we don't. I see building a wind farm without storage as a similar thing to building a coal plant without a high chimney and filters. Sure, your making energy but your just making everyone deal with your shit while making everything worse.
Renewables are, currently, incompatible with the current grid past a certain percentage of total production. Anything past that point requires a much more responsible approach. Aka storage is to wind what a damn is to hydro.
Now gas can help. But gas isn't storage, it can only help smooth out the bigger disturbances.
But since we're already having issues with storage and we're still just at the 'smooth out instabilities' part... I have no idea how we're going to deal with baseload since no one wants to touch nuclear and we can't build them anyway even if we wanted to.
- In most(whole?) Europe, electricity used by trains is taxed higher than jet fuel used by planes (legacy measure from decades ago which was meant to boost air market; of course now it's hugely difficult to change it)
- Germany went strongly into renewables which is laudable, but CO2 footprint barely changed, because...
- Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants.
- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions, and this is the last thing that we want at this time. But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2.
Am I missing something or this is total madness?
Any sources on this? In Australia in the past few weeks Germany is given as an ideal example of a country decommissioning all of its coal mines and power plants.
Basically, in order to set a deadline, politicians decided to compensate power plant owners for their losses. Problem is: suddenly, all power plant owners came up with very optimistic plans on how long they would’ve kept each plant running.
This would’ve been acceptable to a certain degree if the plan to shut down plants was aggressive to begin with. However, the phase-out plan is largely in line with the plant’s lifespans anyway, so we’re not actually shutting anything off very early.
Reactions have been very mixed, to say the least.
On the bright side, it does close the discussion around coal energy once and for all, but for an unnecessarily high price.
You're not hearing about it because it's very embarrassing to Germans, as it should be in my honest opinion. I get that Germans have a very unique and real perspective on the use of nuclear power. I get that nuclear power has very real and serious risks. It's still done less harm to the planet and the things that live on it than the use of coal. Furthermore, the forced dependence on fossil fuels as a result of shunning nuclear power has all kinds of add on effects. There's no Germany without Russian gas, and Putin knows it.
Maybe I am wrong, but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel because they are unwilling or unable to confront the cultural stance on use of nuclear power. That's the norm for cultures so I don't blame them for it, but I do think it's leading to the wrong choice here.
but we don't. Fossil fuel consumption for electricity production is going down.
There are lots of factors which are working against it. For example Germany has heavy coal resources (unlike France for example) and it's the largest domestic source of energy. Thus the country has used it for many many decades and this brought wealth and employment to people. Now to tell them that their coal-related jobs will be replaced is creating massive resistance in certain federal states against changing that.
Compressed air is very inefficient.
But the general argument is: we need to consider what is happening now, not what could be possible under some idealised hypothetical scenario. And right now more renewables, without more, or maintaining existing, nuclear means more base-load coal and more load-following gas.
The problems aren't really technical, they're political. Politics appears to be ill-equipped to deal with these problems.
How about South Carolina? Oh that was a massive fiasco that cost the ratepayers billions for literally nothing. If they spent those billions on solar, efficiency, and demand response, they'd have far cheaper and cleaner electricity. Instead they wasted billions on a nuclear facility that will never be finished.
What? Why?
The real idiocy in Germany was retiring the nuclear plants before EOL. If you’re trying to work out whether to replace old nuclear with new it’s much less easy to come to a clear answer. Britain has had the same issue, most people are quite enthusiastic about new nuclear but it’s just really expensive.
It’s the issue with most of these small-n construction projects. Perhaps modular nuclear can be a solution.
As of now there is no proper solution in Europe for the disposal of that stuff. There are a few, work in progress, storage facilities like Asse in Germany which are blocked by local politics.
Lots of the stuff just circles around on the European rail network on its way from temporary storage to temporary storage.
On top these French and especially the Belgian nuclear reactors are in a horrible state. Just have a look at Thiange and you would never want to be near that thing.
And did I say the Belgians have no idea what to do whith the waste too.
Germany has been reducing CO2 emissions. Last year German CO2 emissions were shrinking by 7%.
> Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2.
When they increase renewables instead?
You're not missing anything. This is madness.
Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm.
Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.
How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actually familiar with.
It's a simple question no renewable proponent wants to talk about because it makes their whole case indefensible.
So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 to make a mass extinction inevitable by 2100.
Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?
This is very emotive language, which is fine, but there is no currently projected scenario where mass extinction is inevitable or even likely.
Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently.
We are well on the way. In many parts of the world this is the majority energy mix already.
So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2
This is untrue. It's roughly the same cost as replacing coal stations with new coal stations, which is roughly ten times cheaper than replacing them with nuclear. And it cuts energy production C02 production by about 70% which is easily enough to meet most targets to stabilise the climate.
It seems very fair - even overly cautious! - to push the inevitability of that out to 2100 when many would say it is already in progress.
However the OP said (in their original post): In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.
I took it in that context. I'd also note the there are multiple causes of mass extinction of which climate change is one.
Where are all the modular reactor factories that the nuclear industry needs? Why is everyone focusing on one shot construction of nuclear infrastructure instead of keeping it alive by periodically replacing existing reactors?
Let me describe the way nuclear power plants have been built. Company E wants to build a power plant. It cannot take advantage of an old design because those have been declared unsafe. They only want to build a single one but they are forced to make a custom design. The custom design costs hundreds of millions in R&D before it can be approved by the government. Afterwards the company has to ask for government support because a 10-30 billion dollar project is very difficult to finance and insure by a single company. Now the construction phase begins. Making parts for nuclear power plants requires specialized factories which are often already running at capacity because they are busy with other projects. You can now wait a year or more for the parts to be delivered. Alternatively you can also construct factories dedicated to the construction of nuclear power plants. Once you have all the parts and finished the construction process you can run the nuclear plant for 50 years or more. 30 years later a design defect has been discovered. It can be fixed but it requires a partial redesign. 2 billion have to be spent on upgrades. Now 50 years have passed and the plant is reaching the end of its life. The design is now considered obsolete and should be replaced immediately. The government is now on the hook for the decommissioning process. Costs? Unknown but definitively not less than 10 billion dollars. Because decommissioning is so expensive the government keeps the plant online for another 15 years. Your country has several dozens of these plants and once someone makes a critical mistake or a natural disaster strikes you get a Chernobyl or Fukushima type event again. These power plants are responsible for the bad reputation of the nuclear industry but at the same time the industry willingly took the risk. They have nobody to blame but themselves.
Ok, what if we just get rid of those plants and replace them with new ones? The cycle repeats. New design. No economies of scale. New custom factories because the old ones didn't have any customers for 65 whole years. Mistakes can't be fixed. Again, this is not something that green activists forced these companies to do.
You know what the answer to these problems is? Making lots of small nuclear power plants. Companies can afford them. They can be cheaply mass produced. They can be cheaply replaced. Custom factories are maintained over time instead of closed down. Yet strangely no nuclear activist proposes these types of reactors because they do not acknowledge the inherent problems nuclear faces. Instead, the focus lies on new designs that don't even exist but promise to do everything better without addressing any of the actually important flaws. Nuclear plant designs are like cryptographic hashing. You will always find a flaw given enough time.
> In some cases, clouds can actually result in better panel performance than standard sunny weather. A cloud can reflect or sometimes even magnify sunlight, which results in additional power output from your solar panels. [0]
In my country (Oz) we have two states that are into solar: SA has a tesla battery plant (built in <100 days) [1], but more as a 'surge saver', and WA which has recently mentioned it's about to reach serious trouble because solar is now getting in the way of it's existing non-renewable coal (meaning there's an over supply). WA doesn't have battery storage up and running, whereas in SA the tesla plant can ramp up demand almost instantaneously and is saving a bucket load of cash per year (because the coal plants don't need to spin up another turbine to meet demand: something which takes hours to achieve AND is costly)
> "We know that the 100 megawatt capacity of the existing Hornsdale battery has saved South Australian electricity consumers $40 million per year since its inception," he said. [1]
[0] https://news.energysage.com/solar-panels-work-night-cloudy-d...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/sa-big-battery-set-to...
In short, the good thing about solar is:
- easy to set up, low cost, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, easy to switch off if over supply ever happens. - good for moving away from coal provided you have storage.
As other's have mentioned, the nuclear option costs billions and takes years to set up whereas battery storage of renewables is very very quick indeed to set up, and instantly produces savings.
South Australia ran on 55% renewables, 65% gas, while powering the Portland aluminium smelter in Victoria for 55 days[1][2].
Also - outside solar - most Australian states gets significant power from renewables (wind and hydro). Right now as I write this roughly 30% of the power in Queensland is solar, 20% in NSW, about 10% is wind in Victoria with another 15% being solar. In South Australia about 20% is gas, with all the rest being wind and solar. Tasmania is 100% renewable (almost all hydro)[3].
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-batteries-saved-the-day...
[2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/murdoch-media-headline-shock-ren...
Maximizing value in a world with “power production weather” would be a valuable task from which rewards that aren’t necessarily obvious could be mined if the pursuit becomes incentivized on a larger scale.
The short answer is pretty much all of them. It's pretty much canonical that it is economically more productive to have a resource continually available than not. The right economic question to ask is: Where does the marginal cost of increasing uptime meet the marginal benefit of further increased uptime?
That's for a 100% renewable approach, which is great. Personally I think there is a role for gas fired stations - these produce about 50% of the emissions of coal stations, are cheap and quick to build (very roughly $1M for 1MW) and most importantly can ramp up and down power generation quickly and economically.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/grid-energy...
It looks like that's talking about 3% to 10% of the total monthly power output.
A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front costs, which take a long period of time to recover, a time which can not be calculated reliably because nobody can predict the future and nobody knows how technology may evolve during that time and how will it affect power prices, how future wars will affect supply, how much demand developing nations will bring to the markets, etc. Even if nuclear power is cheap, the margins are not static and betting billions without knowing when you will get them back is not something everyone wants to do.
Nuclear is going to need a lot of government subsidies if it wants to have a renaissance.
The fact that nuclear is expensive is not an engineering or construction problem. China is building nuclear fast and cheap, right now.
There are new, smaller, safer, and easy to build plants that have been waiting approval for years and years.
The US has never had a nuclear disaster but we’ve had countless coal disasters. Oh and we’re living in a climate disaster caused by coal.
This is simply wrong.
Firstly, renewables plus transmission reduce the intermittentcy problem enormously. China has multiple 2000km+ transmission lines already working, and preliminary work has started on a 3800km transmission line from Australia to Singapore[1].
Combine that with comparatively small amounts of short term storage (eg, batteries), as much long term storage (eg pump hydro) as possible and fill the rest with gas generation (around 30% of the CO2 output of coal or oil) and you have a generation mix that is very quick to build, competitive with coal on price and dramatically cheaper than nuclear.
[1] https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/singapore-power-retaile...
Europe is the only one with a true large scale interconnected grid[0] and even there the interconnects are expensive, small and marginal. With the majority of EU population being able to import or export only ~20% of the power generated locally.
The US and Australian grids are even less connected, with the project you're quoting being simply a pipe dream to steal money from idiots. I've worked in data analysis for an energy company and renewables are amazing because they make the energy markets volatile and unpredictable. They allow rent-seeking in power generation. Something that hadn't been possible for decades.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
I live in Australia so I know it pretty well. My state (South Australia) has multiple ~1000km interconnects with more being planned.
Australia remains badly underconnected compared to other markets. Wikipedia has good data[3], and your idea about "looking at the first world" is dramatically outdated.
Most new power generation is being done in Asia (and to some degree Africa) which is where these long distance power transmission lines are mostly being built. If you don't trust the Chinese ones (not sure why - you can go visit a lot of these installations because the hydro dams are tourist attractions, and you can see them on Google Maps) you can just look at the multiple 1000km+ installations in India[4].
[1] https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/category/stats/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia
You lose a lot more energy moving electricity through small wires then oil in tanks.
The new Ultra high voltage lines in China and elsewhere are even more efficient.
This explains why the Chinese are able to keep their power generation capacity so far away from their main population centres.
I wonder why they don't find a location on planet which is most stable, away from human settlement.
Then create a nuclear reactor large enough to meet all the world requirement for electricity and supply it to all the world.
China's cheap power sources (coal and hydro) are in the northwestern part of the country, and the big loads are in the southeastern part. So many HVDC links are going in.
The US's biggest HVDC link is Oregon to California, opened in 1970.
Some negatives I've found are UHV lines used for renewable transmission will see low utilization and the switching equipment is quite unreliable so overcapacity is needed.
I did find a book with some details in case anyone wants to dig deeper: Ultra-high Voltage AC/DC Power Transmission (2018) (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7AF7982201735A290D8...)
Huge huge tax payer subsidies are put into all stages of nuclear, which never show up on the energy company's balance sheets or the 'operating costs'.
I'm not against nuclear but saying renewables are not competitive with this is incredibly naive and blatantly wrong - the subsidies and funds directly or indirectly provided for nuclear are on an entirely different scale than for renewables, which have mainly some research funding, grid extension and development subsidies behind them.
there is a nice read on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...
Here is one for the base load myth: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374
Many reasons for the slow fall are based in politics (coal industry is a job machine especially in the troubled eastern parts) and nimbys (hindering wind development) and politicians helping them out (ridiculous policies governing the distance to "settlements").
Why isn't nuclear the backup? "90% renewable, 10% nuclear" sounds politically-viable; it's still "moving away from nuclear."
I wrote "in the long term" for a reason, by the way. I'd prefer to get rid of coal before nuclear despite the danger.
Bullshit. You need storage, obviously.
> Am I missing something
Yes.
I don't really get why the nuclear "base load" generation even helps. If nuclear generates 70% of our peak load, and our peak load happens on a windless, dark day - what then? We still need storage and likely CCGT as backup of last resort.
Which does not actually mean turning off the power grid for hours as a lot of people here claim but things like throttling down energy-intensive industry at peak times and running non-time-critical jobs when there's surplus energy.
I am not really opposed to nuclear. But on the renewable side, for the intermittency problem, you have overprovisioning, regional transmission, short range storage with batteries, and long term storage with hydro and hydrogen gas produced from renewables. And both batteries and hydrogen gas are steadily getting cheaper.
That means when a utility is deciding to spend 10 billion or so on a nuclear plant, and it is trying to figure out future rates for the next 30 years to pay that back, it needs to take into account all these future developments, instead of assuming they will stay the same.
I have read a lot of comments from nuclear supporters, but I can't recall one that covers all that. They all seem to assume the situation for storage and interconnection will not improve in the future.
What, why?
France has the problem, that they are not able to build enough new reactors (cost, construction time) to replace the aging operating reactors. So ramping up renewables is the logical conclusion and besides having quite a lot of hydro power already installed, France has great potential of wind (very windy coasts at 3 sides of the country) and solar (sunny south).
> you can never reach 100% renewables
partly true, partly wrong, depending on your infrastructure and topology, but there are other options to satisfy a CO2 neutral base load than nuclear.
CO2 emission are actually dropping, although far too slow to call it healthy.
The per capita output is somewhere in the middle of industrial first world countries. Sometimes better than countries employing nuclear power, sometimes not. I think the effect is sometimes overestimated. It may be better than coal, but it should be noted that newer coal plants replace older ones that are more inefficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Phasing out nuclear delays the phase out of coal. It doesn't add any new coal. The problem is stagnation instead of an increase in emissions.
The atmosphere and its ability to contain a limited amount of carbon is a public good, and we should stop giving away the right to dump stuff in it for free.
The share of electricity for renewable energy is currently at 42%. There is not a large surplus of electricity from renewable energy for heating.
Usually there's some coal or gas supply that decides for whatever reason to not turn itself off. Often because ramp downs and then up again will cost them more than the negative price.
So it's all geeky accounting, but basically non renewables are being fined so they make slightly less money overall if they aren't flexible to demand.
An important story to remember about Germany, is how Fukushima led the country to stop using nuclear power. Merkel has a PhD in physics, so naturally she understands that nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal.
But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants, because as Jancovici argued, she is an "assermented executor": if all germans want to stop nuclear energy, then there's nothing to do.
How do you arrive at that conclusion? Better in what regard?
AFAIK nuclear power has all sorts of problems, the main one being that nobody knows what to do about the waste. Building nuclear power plants isn’t exactly carbon emission free either.
Once we've decommissioned all coal power plants, then it might be reasonable to assess whether or not continued investment in nuclear is worthwhile, but until then decommissioning nuclear is actively causing harm, including huge numbers of deaths, by keeping more coal plants operational.
Nuclear energy emits less co2 than renewables: it requires less metals (especially if you store electricity with batteries or other means), and renewables are not baseload energies, meaning you need to burn either coal or gas when there's no sun or wind.
Wind mills require a lot of metals, and installing them is complicated. Solar panels require mining elements, and solar panels degrade over time.
Nuclear energy is green. It's time to say it.
Also you worded it like you don’t need mining to produce nuclear energy, it’s not complicated to handle and reactors don’t fall apart over time.
You need less mining for uranium.
Reactors have a huge lifespan. They're cheap and clean when considering the energy they bring.
There has been many events where nuclear waste has been dumped in the ocean, misplaced, lost, improperly buried, leaked in rivers, caught fire and even deliberately used in projectiles and dispersed in the environment.
And this is nothing compared to the risk of exposing large amounts of waste during a war or terrorist attack.
please have actual figures about death and cancer, and compare them with car exhaust and air quality
it is illegal to dump nuclear waste
You're breathing the wastes of fossil fuel based energy sources every single second of your life and it will 100% reduce your life expectancy and quality of life.
The best case scenario of fossil fuel based energy production is worst than the worst case scenario of nuclear based energy production.
I live in Germany. Seems a different country from the one you describe.
investors only care about short term and medium term
Merkel was also the responsible minister for reactor safety. She understands the risks, too.
> But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants
No, the exit was long before decided. The conservative government was trying to exit from the exit. But that would had created mass protests. Then Fukushima happened and basically everyone went back to the already agreed exit.
That seems like a recipe for folks just building endlessly regardless of demand, pulling money from government... and an eventual mess when you fix it and nobody is making money suddenly...
2) Build a CCS Plant [1]
3) Run CCS plant using renewable energy. Charge your customers (people who need to offset their carbon footprint by buying carbon credits, such as big industry).
4) Profit
> That seems like a recipe for folks just building endlessly regardless of demand
In some ways, yes. If so, it definite could create a problem wherein there's more supply than demand.
> pulling money from government...
The ethics of government capture aside, this sounds to me like that's rather the _point_ of a government subsidy on something: to build more supply of that something.
> and an eventual mess when you fix it and nobody is making money suddenly...
Fix what? The idea that there's too much electricity and so nobody makes money? Then come up with another way to use the electricity. Charge money to use the excess electricity for something useful. For example: capturing carbon.
But that's not what happens. Germany has a tight control over how much is build every year. Actually there are lots of complaints that currently Germany builds not enough renewable energy capacity per year.
Edit: also why don’t they just mine some coins?
They can't turn off power plants, because the renewables are ephemeral.
Normally supply and demand need to be matched to obtain a balance. If the supply is not enough for demand then the frequency drops below 50Hz, if it drops too low bad things happen.
Imagine you have a greenhouse factory producing strawberries. The strawberries come out of the factory on a conveyor belt. Now, you can't just turn off this factory easily since it might take a week to get it up running again and you don't have any storage, so what happens when nobody wants your strawberries for a day?
You pay someone to take them.
And yes, it happens to physical products too, e.g. household electronics - you need to pay someone to scrap them.
Nobody is going to pay for mining rigs that are idle 99% of the time.
If it happened enough you'd have people set up cheap resistor banks to eat all the excess, so that provides a natural cap on how much negative pricing there can be.
Here in Massachusetts USA I pay USD0.24 per kWh delivered to my home (generation + transmission + distribution + taxes). Our energy markets are generally mired in 19th-century ways of measuring, so it's harder to tell what natural gas costs (what is a therm???) But I believe it's about USD0.08 per kWh.
I've just signed up for "community solar." A developer is building a PV farm (in the median strip of a large highway, I believe). It will save me on generation costs, but not transmission or distribution, so my rate will fall to about USD0.18 I believe.
Here we have high generation costs partly because Hydro Quebec drove a hard long-term bargain ("take-or-pay" they call it) with our electric company long ago. Towns with municipal power usually pay less because they're not stuck with Hydro Quebec, but sometimes pay more.
I could go on and on, but here's the thing. It's expensive for generators to participate in long-distance grids. Why? If their AC frequency drifts even a tiny amount, the grid must disconnect. How can companies maintain the AC frequency under heavy load?
1. expensive and filthy peak-load generators (diesel-powered often) spinning ready to take load.
2. big batteries. Telsa and some Australian government utilities have had great success with this.
3. excess renewable capacity. But at times of heavy demand there isn't any.
4. SMART DISTRIBUTION: the ability to quickly and selectively shed load temporarily. Space- and water- heating are perfect applications for this. So is battery charging for transportation.
We aren't nearly done with the disruption yet. Now it starts to get interesting. Electricity companies are in the information business; they just don't know it yet.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not...
Basically, just wear a sweater and long pants in the house in the winter so you don't have to heat it so much. And if you need to, put a heat source near you, but there's no need to heat the whole house.
Then could take it a step further increase number of people and take into account the body heat of each person (people produce alot of heat + water)
Unless you're living in an area that never goes below zero, which is not the case in most of Europe.
Cannot cut into the action of Putin and Gazprom Schroeder.
[We can bet that this entirely correct comment will be deleted by the censors.]
It seems no matter what Germany does, it only promotes fossil fuel usage. Quite opposite of what they wanted...
"We want green energy -- let's subsidize green energy by taxing electricity."
Seems fair enough... fast forward several years and:
1. People burn fossil fuels for heating because electricity is too expensive, increasing their carbon footprint.
2. Poorer people in apartments and cities pay out the nose to fund rebates to wealthier suburban homeowners with solar roofs.