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Comment by dimitar | Hacker News Reader

Oil and gas can be only a short term disruption to either Russia or Europe, because both are commodities AND have substitutes.

Natural gas is a little more problematic because the pipelines and LNG terminals are a big investment, but this matters less over the long term.

Disruptions in fossil fuel supplies - are another reason to switch to renewables and nuclear, the best substitutes in the long and medium term; so Russia is eroding the foundations of its economy. The Kremlin instead of researching hypersonic missiles should be investing in RnD to either find the commodity Russia can export or new alternative uses for oil.

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Germany keeps foot gunning themselves when it comes to nuclear and then ends up using it anyway, just imported from France. As for hypersonic missile research, Russia is as aware as any other country in the world of what happens when the United States has you at a great military disadvantage.

They are unlikely to proceed with their scheduled nuke shutdown for 2022 given Russia's actions. Perhaps they will consider reopening the nukes they've shut down recently as well.

Only 15% of gas in Germany are used for electricity production. 85% is used for heating and in the industry and this is completely unrelated to the shutdown of nuclear plants.

Germany needs to replace gas heatings with heat pumps and gas usage in industry with hydrogen to reduce the dependency on Russian gas.

The problem is not a lack of electric energy (this year also 12 coal plants will be shut down, while a lot of renewable energy is being installed). Reopening the nuclear plants will not help.

The thing is though that 40% of the German gas supply comes from Russia at the moment. That means that if you can eliminate the 15% used for electricity, you've reduced the demand for Russian gas by about 38%. Put that way, reopening the newly shut nuclear plants makes a lot of sense. Refuelling and starting an existing power plant should be far quicker than building a brand new power plant or wind farm. You'll still have a lot of demand for gas from heating, but the warm winter and arrival of spring should reduce that too in the next few months.

Longer term, you are right about the need for more heat pumps to replace gas heating, and I'd also add extra insulation to that to reduce the heating needed from any source. The heat pumps can be powered by nuclear, renewables or gas depending on cost and preference.

15% is still a non-trivial amount. I assume some newer housing also uses electric heating only -- either direct floor heating or electric boiler. Is that already included in those 15%?

Anyway, renewables alone can't completely replace coal or gas, since their output is relatively unstable and unpredictable. So far Germany has been ignoring that problem while shitting on neighboring countries which cover for their fluctuations and which obviously can't pull the same trick now.

You can see the usage for electricity ("Stromversorgung") in https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/entwicklung-d... . Actually in 2021 it was only 12.7% instead of 15%. This includes all electricity usage, there is no separate electricity production for heat-pumps or resistance heating. As you can see in https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/stromerzeugun... gas usage for electricity went down when the prices for gas went up in the second half of 2021. This share could probably be reduced further, but currently there is no need for this.

Europe has an integrated grid. The purpose of this grid is to balance fluctuations. NordLink (https://www.tennet.eu/our-grid/international-connections/nor... ) was explicitly build to access the more than 100 TWh of available pumped water storage in Norway to store wind energy. And I guess Norway is making some money from it. Denmark has an even higher share of wind energy than Germany (70% last week). The Netherlands got 30% of its energy from wind last week, Austria 26%, Poland 25%. France uses German electricity when it is cold in winter and resistance heating is using more energy than they can produce or if they have to shut down some nuclear plants because of security issues (https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1549986/macron-france... ). They are all pulling the same trick.

Again: Balancing is the purpose of the grid and not "shitting on neighboring countries".

The trick is replacing coal and nukes which have predictable output with renewables while depending on the same not being replaced in the neighboring country. Poland and Czechia to be precise.

I suppose given recent developments this whole discussion is moot though :)

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