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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Those percentages are just shares of electricity.

Their share of energy is more dire.

Natural gas is just 15% of German electricity production, but nearly half of residential heating. Then there’s gas-obligatory fertilizer production, on-premise electricity generation (campuses), cooking fuel, etc.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-much-does-germany-n...

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Storing heat is actually much easier than storing electricity. In relatively dense areas with district heating, you can even establish storage that retains heat from the summer.

Yes, it requires investments and scaling up of the production of these solutions - the reason these investments haven't been made yet, is plainly that it wasn't deemed necessary yet. Continuing burning fossil fuels was cheaper.

Why would gas be obligatory for fertilizer production? I've dug into some industrial uses in my country (bakeries for instance), and in all the cases I looked into, gas was not actually required, just a bit cheaper or more convenient. If you put a tax on gas, all of them would switch within a few years. It looks like you need hydrogen for fertilizer, so I guess switching to (more expensive) hydrolysis would be the solution there.

Gas is needed for fertilizer production because it's one of the input resources - Haber-Bosch capture of ammonia (nitrogen) requires a source of hydrogen and that's usually natural gas since it's rich in hydrogen.

As such, lumping in the gas that's used for fertilizer production in with gas used for energy production makes limited sense - it's not fungible and can't just replaced with nuclear (or any other) energy. In the future, it would be possible to use hydrogen generated via hydrolysis, but we're pretty far off doing that on industrial scale.

Relatedly, Russia is a top exporter of fertilizers: https://thehill.com/policy/3513855-why-the-fertilizer-market...

Interestingly, while over the past 10-15 years the U.S. condemned Germany for importing natural gas from Russia, the U.S. was methodically displacing some of its domestic fertilizer production with imports, a substantial fraction coming from Russia and Belarus--in particular, 12% of U.S. potash consumption comes from Russia, and 93% imported overall. See https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/03/war-in-ukraine-and.... It seems small but it turned out to be a significant direct short-term lever, and presumably a much bigger lever with many other countries; and that's not even considering indirect leverage from Russia's ability to manipulate global market prices and thus U.S. domestic prices.

Perhaps the only thing that hits harder than an increase in energy prices is an increase in food prices.

(OTOH, for all I know the USDA, etc, may have actually been diligently working to minimize foreign dependence without being too disruptive--politically or economically--and the current percentages and source country distributions were the best they could accomplish.)

> 12% of U.S. potash consumption comes from Russia, and 93% imported overall

Sounds like the Canadians wanted to charge too much and US finally gave in and sourced an intercontinental supply. I don't think USA is at risk of losing a secure potash supply. Rail transport from Saskatchewan is too cheap into agri America.

There are hydrogen and methane generation processes that also do some small carbon capture, to manufacture ammonia ultimately.

The problem is that they require too much heat and electricity and currently are not yet viable. They would be viable in a slightly oversized grid with at least 75% renewables.

More likely your domestic fertilizer production will shutdown and you’ll import it from places that don’t tax natural gas as highly, unless you have ultra-cheap electricity.

This isn’t a horrid idea if you don’t have access to piped gas (LNG = hard to ship, nitrogen salts = easy).

Having said that, I am all for replacing income taxes with carbon taxes.

Taxing people’s work, skill and effort should be avoided at all costs.

We should be so lucky to live in a world where most nations had achieved even a third of electricity generation from renewables. We'd be vastly better off than we are now! So I am happy to give credit in those few cases where credit is due.

I think carbon-intensity (gCO2eq/kWh) is a much more important metric than the use of specific generating technologies. Looking at the data [1], Germany has one of the dirtiest electrical grids in western Europe.

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

We all know that electricity can be utilized for purposes currently monopolized by fossil fuels, including heating and automobiles. Which means that the end game necessarily includes a rapid transition towards electricity generation from renewables. Germany has gone much father down that road than most nations, even if they have an unfortunately massive amount of electricity still being produced from coal.

You can also be more efficient with heat pump than with direct gas heating, including when producing electricity from gas, eg:

https://twitter.com/DrSimEvans/status/1560556804051968000

"Thought experiment:

1 UK replaces 24m gas boilers with electric heat pumps

2 UK builds new gas plants to supply the electricity

=> Overall UK gas demand falls by 120TWh (15%)"

Will be interesting to see things like stove sales for this year, because I'm quite sure there's a massive shift going on right now. My parents wanted to replace their old oil heating with gas, but now moved to a heat pump instead. My girlfriend and I wanted to buy a new gas stove but are now looking in more efficient induction stoves instead.

The stove migration to electric will be longer term. I think tabletop « toaster ovens » and tabletop pressure cookers (like an instant pot) will be really hard to come by come winter.

Maybe a run on electric kettles if the culture is to use stovetop kettles.

Using gas for residential heating is saner compared to using electricity (what the French are using, for example). Afaik it also makes it easier to use centralised heating systems, which are more efficient than "outsourcing" the heating to each building or even to each apartment.

That's not true, even if you produce electricity from gas, using a heat pump to heat your home rather than a gas-powered central heating is more efficient.

Generally correct, except they now have people running air conditioning in summer now that they have it.

Which will hopefully be running from solar then, when the sun's out. ;-)

The electrical network as it is right now won't be able to resist each and every apartment, or each and every building, using a heat-pump during the winter at -5 or -10 degrees celsius. The network in my city is on the brink of going down even during the summer, when AC is turned on (and not everyone has AC, but everyone will have to have heat-pumps in the heat-pump scenario, because you literally risk dying in your home when there are -10 degrees outside and if you don't have heating inside).

More generally speaking, I never quite could understood this obsession for heat-pumps. Again, the Soviets (yes, the Soviets) have managed to do it right when it comes to central heating during the winter, they even had lower costs compared to the West, not sure why and how we have to use more inefficient solutions.

To say nothing of the fact that under the central heating scenario you can more easily subsidise people that cannot afford to pay for heating, after all, if you're providing heating to an entire micro-district might as well heat the old lady pensioner's apartment who cannot afford to pay for the whole heating bills, but under the heat-pump scenario your electrical utility sees that you're behind with your payments and doesn't care that you're an old pensioner lady, it will just cut off your electricity (and hence your heating), while leaving the electricity on for the rest of said pensioner lady's neighbours.

Heat pumps have gotten much better over the last decade. They don’t work as well in sub 10 degree Fahrenheit weather, but in the 20-40 range are more efficient than furnaces from what I understand.

I measure sanity on a simple scale of "this produces carbon emissions that will accelerate climate change and its catastrophic consequences" to "it doesn't do that".

This. The situation here seems like the inverse of investment rounds for startups, where "the pie gets larger, and the value of your share gets larger, despite you share of the pie itself becoming smaller." Their share of renewables got larger, but the overall energy pie itself got smaller, and that's a problem.

It's worth noting in such discussions that nuclear is also capable of displacing gas in many of these use-cases. Surplus heat from nuclear reactors can be used for district heating, and dedicated reactors can be used to provide heat for industrial processes.

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