If every German apartment dweller bought one 1500W, plug in heater, gas use would plummet.
It would make a massive difference for this winter.
It would make a massive difference for this winter.
Hopefully people are stocking up on coats!
There are roughly 40 million households in Germany based on some random numbers I found googling. If every one of them had a 1500 Watt space heater (woefully undersized for some, fine for others I imagine), and used them during the expected coldest day, you’d be throwing an extra 60 billion watt hours (aka gigawatts) of extra load on the grid right when renewables are least capable (typically).
That would also almost exactly double current German peak electrical energy consumption.
The grid would collapse.
As you might guess, in my current mood I’m not great at parties.
Every one possible should be installed, it just won't make a dent.
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eur...
Together with significantly reduced electricity cost at night like in the past, this is probably the way to go if we wanted to go back to nuclear power.
This is already an issue in the UK with electric tea kettles during certain times [0], but those are only in use for a very short time, those German electric heaters would need to run a lot to get trough winter.
Saying “if everyone would do X” isn’t very useful if the incentives aren’t in place that would compel everyone to do X.
Yes.. it's a component. Yes I'm sure it will be employed. Yes it will stress the electric grid (but there is much more flexibility available). But it's not the solution to the majority of gas heating, because there simply isn't the capacity to get the required amount of hardware in the available time.