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Comment by dsnr | Hacker News Reader

Actually, gas heating can _easily_ be replaced with heat pumps assuming cheap electricity is provided.

You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two.

Also, in the German climate and with its many 'old' buildings, merely switching the heat source won't do. One also needs additional isolation, and new radiators.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-millio...

> You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two.

Who's talking about a year or two? Germany has been pushing for russian gas since the 90's, against all logic.

> in fact you could argue that their denuclearization is the very reason Russia has so much leverage in the situation

If we had more nuclear power, this wouldn't change much, if anything

I think you replied to the wrong person.

The logic was "if we depend on each other, Russia isn't going to pull crazy stuff". Which works with rational people (and after Gorbachev and the German reunion, the perception was that Russia is rational), but not with Putin.

And you may have noticed that Russia is not cutting off delivery of Russian gas to Germany. Which they would if the damage was unilateral.

Also, electrical heating is one of most wasteful and damaging ways to do heating, and Germany has been moving away from electrical heating for this reason for decades now.

> Also, electrical heating is one of most wasteful and damaging ways to do heating, and Germany has been moving away from electrical heating for this reason for decades now.

Not disagreeing with the rest of the arguments, but electrical heat pumps are actually the most efficient way to heat your home (theoretically you can get about 5 W of heat for every 1W of electricity, for practical ones it's a bit more than 3W IIRC).

That said, it's not trivial to convert old houses to use heat pumps. Cost is one issue, but they typically require better insulation because they don't have the same power that you can get with a gas heater.

Not to mention that Ukraine earned some billions in transit fees, which helped upgrading their military.

What if the EU had not bought Russian gas? Then Russia would probably have sold more to others like China or India and Ukraine would not have earned money from transit fees, nor would there be any leverage against Russia at all.

Leverage would be more like buying Russian gas but having a backup. If you have no choice but to buy Russian gas then it is not leverage—in fact it is leverage against you.

Also If EU did not buy Russian gas and China and India were the only buyers then that lowers the price and profits Russia commands. In a liquid marketplace the number of buyers available contribute to profits.

The 2010 and 2012 energy efficiency directives guarantee (EU-wide, not just in Germany) that all buildings will eventually transition to low-energy buildings, but this is expected to take place by simply building new buildings to stricter code, not by upgrading all existing buildings in the EU in a few years. It's unlikely that there's industrial capacity for that.

It's against logic if your only consideration is geo politics. And even then, many have argued economic cooperation builds peace and security through mutual trust and dependency. In the light of current events, this way of thinking has been discredited, but it's far from self evidently irrational.

It was against any geopolitics or environmental logic either.

Europe being dependent on Russia led to Russia trusting that the EU would not intervene when Putin is off to a new adventure.

That's a trick the Germans will have to do about 50 million times to get rid of their gas dependence in all their households. That's going to be bottle necked on the availability of heat pumps and trained people to install those. It will be interesting to see how quickly that industry can scale.

Providing the electricity for those pumps is the easy part of the problem. That just requires doing a bit more of what they are already doing at scale, which would be installing wind and solar all over the place.

In Norway (of all places), the use of fossil fuels for heating was banned in 2020. Not all houses have heat pumps, there are ovens for sale that do not require those. Heat pumps do make sense when energy prices are above some threshold, though, but houses can be upgraded with that over time.

In any case, not all heat pumps are that expensive, and it is also possible to have hybrid heat pumps and air conditioners.

Had Germany decided to phase out natural gas for heating in 2014, and replace it by nuclear power, ovens and heat pumps would definitely be able to keep up with the reactor build rate.

But nuclear energy isn't cheap

That's half of all homes in Germany we're talking about.

You can't make precursors for CoViD vaccines from heat pumps, you can't make steel using heat pumps.

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