> better insulation
better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
This makes insulating this house an absurdly bad financial decision, since once you have moisture damage in any part of this material, you can basically demolish most of the walls since it soaks like a sponge.
Mind you, I have not started going into the pitfalls of the legality of even touching a house this old in Germany, where you have to deal with "Denkmalschutz".
Insulating new construction and retrofitting insulation are two absolutely different things and barely have anything to do with each other from the cost-benefit ratio.
My house in Sweden is from the 1950's and I still had to be _very_ mindful when adding insulation. The best thing I've found is cellulose-based insulation, basically shredded newspapers lined with salts and pressed to sheets. The can buffer a lot of moisture without developing mold.
In old buildings with solid walls you can get condensation on the walls that will evaporate because the living space is heated and we'll ventilated. If you clad that wall in insulation you can prevent the evaporation which leads to damp problems.
Newer building codes have started to mandate more external insulation:
* https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...
Depending on the climate zone, up to half the insulation may be mandated to be on the outside (behind some kind of cladding (brick, stucco, siding) to protect it from UV and bulk water).
Per the above article, by having the outside be insulation, your interior structure is kept warmer, and so condensation is less likely to occur.
Do a search for "Joseph Lstiburek" and "Matt Risinger", who have lots of articles and videos on building science.
As the article notes this price decline was predictable decades ago, but you can't really blame people for being dubious about predictions. Maybe the people who got it right were just lucky.
But since real actual installed wind and solar became cheaper a while ago, the people still openly arguing against renewables slide ever close to cartoon supervillain status.
The alternate explanation is that nuclear is a sick technology, and the Green movement is not responsible for its failure. Nuclear was so weak even a group as feckless as the Greens could have success against it.
Do you think lobby from fossil fuel companies just sat on their hands all this time?
If there's many billions of dollars in value to be created, that will trump anything a NGO can whine about. That's why we're still burning so much fossil fuel. Nuclear was vulnerable because it wasn't creating value.
I'm not convinced enough people know that renewables are cheaper to make the latter claim you're making. For example, in some places as soon as renewables come online they get priority access to demand, and other fuel sources get the leftovers. That's still a subsidy, just by another name. So I don't know if they are cheaper.
Finally, the point about renewables isn't only cost, it's also reliability. The subsidy I just mentioned falsely obviates the need for renewables to be reliable from a cost perspective, but that doesn't mean that needing a high base load (and higher the more we move to electric vehicles) isn't the most important thing to supply.
And none of that is about people "not wanting renewables".
yeah, but fossil fuels get subsidies of all sorts, not just polluting for free, but even things like leaving the british taxpayer to pickup the bill for cleaning up old infrastructure they no longer need
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/25/british-tax...
Also, maybe if there is any risk of damage to surroundings like with hydro batteries there would be need to deposit amount of money that covers them fully.
But as with any problem, let's first start with the stuff causing the damage.
Let's get oil and gas and coal to pay for EVERY negative externality.
This is positive ridiculous. Are you serious in 2022? Your electricity is surely mostly sourced from hydrocarbons. Are you paying "true cost"? Surely not. If electricity was suddenly twice the cost due to carbon costs (which is probably the true environmental cost), you would be shouting from your windows to build more solar panels and wind turbines.
What? Why would you think that?
Plus, people usually oppose nuclear which is an expensive but stable renewable option.