Germany cannot be trusted
Yes, doing something big would require many things. Building a bunch of them at the same time would allow you to save many of the pitfalls of nuclear construction: having to redesign each one from scratch.
You’d build power plant factories, fifty of the same plant around the country/continent.
Stuttgart 21 is still in construction and the Berlin airport took way longer than expected. And these projects don't have the same severe consequences if the construction is botched.
Not to mention attacks.
When you build a reactor, you probably don't want "first-timers" working on the project for you.
Given Germany's track record in screwing Europe (on top of shutting down nuclear power plants, have a look at the damage Gerhard Schroeder did) this country is dangerous to other EU members.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-buil...
Wind and solar are the cheapest sources of power. A decades long propaganda campaign has tried, but failed, to cover that up.
Yet this zombie opinion persists in certain political bubbles that get their information from fossil fuel interests.
And now, when one of those fossil fuel interests invades another nation, the prime culprit is... renewable energy? And it's used as an excuse to talk about how utterly indespendible natural gas is, even though experts want us to dump it as fast as possible? Isn't that oddly convenient for Putin, who seems really well liked by all the same people who tell obvious lies about climate change.
The reason why Germany and indirectly most of Europe hasn’t stopped buying gas from Russia is because, despite being a massive (the most massive?) solar and renewable economy, those don’t work very well during the winter.
I’m literally pointing out the emperor has no clothes which is why they’re freezing?
If they were in a climate with better insolation and more predictable renewable sources, then they’d probably be fine. But they aren’t.
If they had adequate storage to deal with peak energy demand during minimum insolation, or had another adequate source, then they would have cut Russia off years ago. But they don’t.
They used to, but they have been shutting them down and not building replacement capacity.
Instead they’re paying out the nose and scrambling because they don’t have viable options, and resisting the political motions they would otherwise do because Russia has them over a barrel.
The reason why Germany hasn't stopped buying gas is because there are 12 million gas heaters spread across the country, heating 20 million homes (nearly 50% of housing).
We currently bring up 150k heat pumps a year (mostly in new developments). At that rate it takes some 60-80 years to convert all existing gas guzzling real estate over to electric heating.
> because, despite being a massive (the most massive?) solar and renewable economy, those don’t work very well during the winter.
Last I checked it's winter and we just broke wind power records, multiple times in a row. Wind power has approximately the same installed capacity as solar (60GW each). But it still doesn't help those gas heaters keep people warm.
What then?
As mentioned by another comment: even if we were to send all that gas used for heating into gas turbines instead and use the generated electricity to operate the heat pumps, we'd use less gas (because it's using environmental heat energy in addition to the intrinsic energy of the gas).
That brings the bonus that we could look into alternative power sources (of whatever kind: I'm sure France would be more than happy to assist bringing up nuclear reactors again, although that's unlikely to happen in Germany for a whole bunch of reasons) when gas is difficult to obtain because electricity is electricity.
But apparently we don't have a sufficient number of people who could do the installation, plus it'd be expensive, and even discounting that, I'm not sure if "We need 12 million heat pump systems. Next quarter?" is something that could _possibly_ work even under normal circumstances (nevermind the supply chain issues we're currently dealing with globally).
That's why I brought up the 150k installed units per year: There's probably room for improvement (I've been thinking that there must be a very profitable career in heating installations), but even if we can install 600k a year, we're still looking at 20 years before we get all the old cruft converted.
you’re still looking at about 4 trillion kWh of energy/yr (possibly a month - hard to get good data) that would be needed to do that switch.
most of it during winter.
Germany currently produces a little over 500 billion kWh of electrical energy a year.
So to replace natural gas for heating in this scenario, Germany would need to produce 9x the electrical power it currently produces. Most of it during the winter.
And not having enough production would kill people.
It isn’t a matter of not having enough heat pumps or people to install them, that’s just the immediate road block if you individually wanted to switch.
It’s a fundamental economic issue that would require investment on a scale heretofore not considered outside of world wars. And maybe not even then.
Right now, we don’t even know of a storage technology that could even work at that scale, let alone what it would cost to do it.
And depending on which way climate changes go, the size of storage needs to be potentially arbitrarily large. The more uncertainty you have, the larger it needs to be.
Unlike a fossil fuel, we don’t have (essentially) arbitrarily large reserves we can pull from, it all has to be made and stored in advance by the same infrastructure that produces your normal production.
The "gas boiler in every second home" scheme locks us into gas to a degree that even "a natural gas burning turbine in every city" wouldn't. But locked in we are.
The push for renewables or the rejection of nuclear power plants is orthogonal to why Germany is stuck with Russian gas.
By now, even the power plant operators aren't very interested in keeping them running for longer because they already planned to turn them off and dismantle them. Keeping them on for longer means a significant investment to them, for unknown benefit as the societal rift will inevitably break open again. They might invest (so they can continue to operate things safely), delay the dismantling (probably also costs money because they likely started hiring companies already), only to be told a year later to shut things down again (all that money for nothing).
An issue in that has been that renewables build-up has been all but sabotaged politically in the last years, and that storage technology didn't develop as well as estimated, making gas necessary as a peak load compensation mechanism, "hopefully" temporarily. Gas turbine operators are whining for years that they're operating at a loss but they're forced to continue to operate (getting the loss just about compensated I think) to ensure the grid's safety.
Other than _that_, gas is mostly used for heating which is a distinct system. As such, any consideration of "nuclear vs. gas dependency in Germany" is something that seems to be mostly discussed outside Germany: No matter how many nuclear power plants we keep up, gas boilers just don't run on electricity (except for their controller module).
As for booking a contractor 20 years ago: There are funding programmes to encourage folks to go for heat pump systems and other modernizations. The last electricity heating system that was widely deployed in Germany _was_ horribly inefficient, which is no surprise with technology that was already old in the 70s, and the idea "electricity for heating is a waste" has stuck. The political sabotage that I mentioned extended to not really caring about correcting such misconceptions.
According to the analysis, the price of electricity in Germany, adjusted for purchasing power, is 45-dollar cents (39-euro cents) per kilowatt-hour. This not only puts German electricity costs as the 15th highest of all the countries included, but it also means Germany has the third-highest electricity prices in the EU... The data included in the study refers to the second quarter of 2021, and so does not take into account the surge in prices consumers in Germany are currently facing.
or look here:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
And then there's wind (as mentioned: we just broke records. In winter. At night.), and water (to some minor degree). And theoretically a comeback of nuclear (won't happen). Or hydrogen storage. Or fusion, or whatever. The good thing about electricity is that it doesn't care where it comes from, and there are many different kinds of sources.
On the other hand: Natural gas boilers require natural gas, and so far we don't have methods to synthesize it from electricity - or anything else - at scale. The main argument in their favor is that they're installed: a pretty important argument though.
When the consequence of not having enough production is people literally freezing to death, worse case production matters.
https://www.worldbiogasassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
But yeah, big picture, gas is a poor choice for home heating, and should be phased out for health, cost and carbon reasons.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/415034/cigarette-prices-...
I wonder what secret tech Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and other nations at the bottom of both lists have that makes both electrical power and cigarettes so cheap to produce? You'd think their neighbours would ask them to install it for them in order to access cheap electricity and cigarettes.
Even if Wind and Solar could supply 100% of demand tomorrow, we cannot convert all uses of oil and gas quickly. Renewables may be the future, but they are not today. The attempts of some misguided politicians to reduce Western extraction* of fossils merely subsidize Putin and dictators like him.
* As opposed for attempts to reduce demand and switch supply to clean fuels which are useful.
Natural Gas has a mind blowing amount of thermal energy, and per unit is essentially free compared to anything else. 42-45MJ/kg.
Near as I can tell, Germany imported 119 billion cubic meters of natural gas in Jan/Feb of last year. A cubic meter of natural gas has approximately 38MJ of energy in it, so that is around 4.5 x 10^18 joules of energy or 1.2 x 10^13 kWh. Something like 12 trillion kWh.
About 40% of that was from Russia (near as I can tell).
Natural gas and Electric heating probably have similar end efficiencies (taking into account electric transmission losses).
Have you heard of heat pumps? If you burn the gas in electricity plants you can get 3x the efficiency of burning gas for heat. So if the heating power of gas is that impressive to you, then renewable backed heat pumps must be about 10x as impressive.
You can even hook them up to the nuclear plants that you were supposedly advocating for before this turned into a love letter to natural gas, Russia's biggest export.
Have you run the numbers on capex to switch everyone to heat pumps, or looked at available grid capacity required if everyone switched?
I’m not saying it’s impossible period - I’m saying no one is being realistic about the cost or trade offs, and seems to be under the delusion that some (most of the time) fanciful faceplate capacity number and cheap price for one part of the story means everything is solved.
It’s time to do the math.
Let's say you can get $600/kwH for storage? If you need to cover let's say 18 hrs of energy needs (electricity and heat using electricity) that would give a sense of capital cost for the storage portion of the solar + wind package for germany as a whole? This excludes cost of conversion of course across the rest of things.
This push to dump nuclear and gas for wind / solar is going to come eventually, just not clear we are there yet in available supply / cost etc.
So I don't think its infinite, but extremely high and not overnight.
If you convert natural gas heating to electric (using efficient heat pumps), that adds roughly 9x the energy needs. So $5.4 trillion. And that is just to cover average ‘overnight’, with a little buffer. If there is a problematic couple days during winter? People would freeze to death.
Energy needs would likely be more ‘peaky’ during winter, so these would need to go up a bit to deal with the spikes, but it’s probably order of magnitudeish correct.
The current German population is about 83 million, so that would only be about $65,000 for every man woman and child in Germany for the minimal best case storage needs.
For realistic ‘no mass casualty events due to lack of available heat energy every other year’, it would probably need to be 3-4x higher at least.
To protect against a 100 year storm or the like, 7-10x is probably a better idea. But I doubt anyone would ever pay that.
However, the attempts to reduce fossil extraction don't help the climate (the West just imports from some dictatorship which doesn't care), and ironically have their own negative externality.