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Comment by zhte415 | Hacker News Reader

Like a lot of articles about power or energy as related to 'green' or renewables, this article is about electricity and not total power. Only a fraction of energy consumption is from electricity.

From [1], total energy consumption in Germany in 2021 was 3364 TWh. Total electricity consumption was 581 TWh. That's quite a difference. Electricity at around 20-30% of total energy consumption is in the ball park for developed/industrial economies.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany

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I've just assumed Germany is working towards electrification for heating. From a cursory search, this appears to be both de-facto the case[0] and an official policy goal[1].

I agree this should be explicitly mentioned when talking about renewable electricity generation targets, but the good news is that it is being addressed. (I mostly looked at heating, but I'm sure industry is also a huge portion. Presumably that's also being worked on.)

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/heat-make-german-buildi...

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-launch-emergenc...

I dunno about de-facto, my anecdata is my heating is in the process switching from L-Gas to H-Gas, have not heard any mention of replacing gas in the near future for existing properties

Wonder what the stats are for new builds being with gas heating vs without

Am not optimistic about German electricity handling the switching of heating and transport (cars) on top of existing usage+growth as long as we're antinuke (:

Yeah, its pretty unrealistic to imagine any zero-Carbon approach which excludes nuclear. But the greens would rather cover their eye/hears about that, and imagine that it can all be done with wind and solar (in northern europe of all places).

It’s certainly possible, just very very expensive due to capacity factors and storage. Like ‘multiples of GDP’ expensive depending on the napkin math used.

Is the carbon footprint being taken into account regarding batteries, windmill blades, and solar panels? These are all very expensive consumables, with no good way to reuse or recycle. Specifically the windmill blades and solar panels.

How does nuclear help with heating homes? The last time I checked we put nuclear plants far away from people, not use them for district heating.

Ever hear of electric heating? How on earth would you expect solar or wind to be used for heating. It's far from the cheapest option currently, but you're not getting rid of fossil fuels without electric heat.

Northern Europe has a lot of offshore wind capacity.

Electric heating and transport both help introduce renewables faster as they are both effectively storage. EVs are literally batteries that can charge off peak and electric heat pumps can work near continously to store heat in the building fabric and pause when demand is high.

Good insulation is another super boring technology that really helps too.

Additional anecdata, my landlord will replace the old oil-based boiler with a gas-powered one in ~ two months. Gas is sadly not dead, even in "new" installs. :D

(And jacks the rent up 30 euros per month because of it, while the "official" estimated monthly savings on the heating bill are 0.1 cent (yes, cent, not euros) per month per m², probably negative now, amazing ^^')

Ask for a heat pump

Are we neighbors? My landlord has the same plan.

The year Germany reaches ~100% renewable energy for electricity, will also be the year they install the most renewable capacity in history. It is very unlikely that the year after will see 0 renewable capacity installed. Instead, prices will start to fall steadily, dramatically accelerating the electrification of remaining sectors.

Remember that both wind and solar follow very predictably cost-reduction curves. Starting a few years before 2030, electricity consumers will start to see reduced energy bills because of this.

turbines and solar panels will need to be replaced after 20 years of use..

That's why Germany is planning to do Sektorenkopplung. Don't know the english word.

Basically everything is switched over to electric. Transportation, Heating, …

I could be wrong, but I thought the point of the GP comment was that there are many industrial processes like smelting that don't have good electric replacements. For example, it's nigh-impossible to maintain the temperatures required to run a steel plant with no combustion and only resistive heating elements.

There are steelmaking processes using hydrogen for reducing the ore and arc furnaces for heat. They are currently a bit more expensive than using coke.

For those, one would use H2 or methane created with the use of electricity.

Arc blast furnaces are a thing - just more expensive. The electrode (typically graphite) is consumed, so technically not zero carbon, but the gas could be captured.

One major category of such processes is calcination, both for cement (CaCO3 >> CaO) and alumina (Al(OH)3 >> Al2O3). This can be done with concentrated solar heating:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/gc/c7gc0058...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X1...

But building enough plants to actually do this at scale could take a while. Supposedly there was an anode developed for electrolytic iron reduction:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134

but there have been problems with scaling it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349905

Between calcination, smelting and heating, you've addressed a pretty big chunk of fuel-burning processes. The question is whether we can get these kinds of technologies online in time without Manhattan-Project levels of government support, since that does not seem to be forthcoming.

Calcination can also use low-duty-cycle electric kilns that soak up spare solar panel electricity (from overprovisioning), at least once you have 2-3 days of storage to level solar fluctuations and day/night (big, cheap ovens take a while to heat up).

In general, they are quite amenable to using electrically heated air in place of methane/air combustion exhaust.

They all have good replacements, but if their competitor is allowed to pollute without paying for externalities, they'll struggle in the market.

The EU had, as pointless as it was, anti dumping tariffs on solar modules. Such tariffs can be used to protect domestic non-poluters against their foreign competition.

They've been talking about exactly that for a while but recent events seen to have nudged it along:

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/3/15/eu-countries-ba...

Looks like the translation is "sector coupling" or "integrated energy", but I think the real key in translating this is that we typically use a different framing in English.

German "Sektorenkopplung": We're explicitly unifying all sectors to a single source of energy, and it's implicit that this source is electricity.

English "electrification": We're explicitly switching sectors to electricity, and it's implicit that this will ultimately tie every sector to a single source of energy.

Disclaimer: I don't speak German.

The English-language podcasts I listen to have dubbed it the "electrify everything" movement.

To be honest, English most often sounds way cooler than German.

How much of that 3364 TWh is lost fighting Carnot's theorem and similarly futile endeavors?

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