Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> German putting some nuclear shutdowns on hold

This is precisely what I had been jumping up and down about for years, especially at the beginning of this year. The irony that Germany doesn't want nuclear power internally, yet buys their direct neighbour's nuclear power instead.

> France is looking like they might get their fleet back on track by beginning 2023 after they sorted out their corrosion issues

Apparently. I doubt it. Too little too late for this winter.

> UK just fasttracked fracking (sigh) and sizewell C nuclear plant seems to have gotten the go ahead.

I'll take fracking over freezing to death. The alternative is people will burn whatever is not nailed down, and you can bet that would be worse. Sizewell C is too little too late. None of this will make a difference this winter.

> Quite unfortunate that the writeup is on twitter though.

Something as important as this should be on a news outlet's website. People most definitely need to see it and read it.

Actually Germany usually exports power to France. In fact many of the nuclear plants in France don‘t work, especially this year.

"usually" just means when their renewable power happens to be running.

French have been using the last few years to do maintenance on their nuclear plants.

Going into this winter, Germany will suffer far far more than France.

Let‘s see. France heats with incredibly inefficient wall heaters.

In any case, this winter is very special. It‘s not a good example to make an argument for one technology or another. Long-term I think Germany is better prepared. A lot of work has been going into heat pumps, properly isolating houses, renewables and so on.

WINTER is a special case? Is this a serious comment?

If renewables cannot handle WINTER then that's pretty telling of what quality of a solution it is.

Current existing renewables infrastructure, not renewable energy theoretically. If you had no natural gas infrastructure it would be useless.

We're talking about a winter with out-of-equilibrium energy markets here, not generic winter.

If you already have a system where everybody uses electricity in house warming its far, far, far (and lots more fars) easier to switch to heat pumps while in Germany lots of houses have gas/oil heating. Going from that to heat pumps is 100x more difficult and costly.

France is in a much better situation. Better isolation, heat pumps are technology independent, you just need reliable electricity.

Actually it is the other way around. The houses designed for electric heating usually don't have any heating pipes but just resistive heaters as part of the floor. You cannot convert that to heat pumps, you have to build a new heating system into the house including laying pipes, new floors.

On the other side, if you have a central heating system, you can replace the burner with a heat pump and leave the rest mostly unchanged. I say mostly, as you want to optimize the whole system towards lower water temperatures to get higher efficiencies of the heat pumps. But this can be done, and if you have in-the-floor heating already, this can be skipped as that works with low water temperatures anyway.

You can have airair pumps, but ye airwater or waterwater (ground heat) is better. Especially if the house is not small.

Switching from electric heaters to heat pumps is very easy for the grid, but not at all easy in existing homes. Central heating needs water pipes, which traditional electric heating doesn't have. Adding the pipes is going to be a major hassle.

I'm not sure if there is a major difference in insulation. Old houses are in Germany are not great, new houses usually are, and it's probably the same in France.

You can watch live on https://app.electricitymaps.com/map how cross-border exports look like across the countries. There is also a historical view.

Amazing that people shit on France when the have been providing and exporting nuclear energy for 40 years. Saying that nuclear plants don't work is just idiotic when at any point you can look at CO2 intensity and France is always among the very best, and the best for a country so industrialized. And not just in the last 5 years, but the last 30 years.

And the only reason nuclear plants in France have been down this year, is because as always in the last 30 years, the French Left attempted to kill nuclear and starting in 2015 started de-prioritizing it.

And those plans will soon be online when the maintenance is done and then continue to provide green energy for decades.

The failure in France was to try to get away from nuclear and stop building new plants. Instead starting to use more and more gas.

France had amazingly advanced nuclear plants ready for to be built in large numbers to secure the future. But guess what happen, the French Left (with Greens) killed these programs.

French nuclear works fine, and has been for 40 years. Had other countries acted like France we would be in a much better situation now.

And I for one would prefer some temporarily offline plants rather then breathing lots and lots of coal dust.

Yeah it's political. Greens have to get their money from somewhere, plus...plus sometimes people fuck up 200%. Not only not be in favor of something, and be neutral, that would be 100%. 200%, being doggedly against the only solution.

I consider evangelical Christians to have fucked up 200% with their response to gay marriage, instead of fighting it they should have made it mandatory, much better for the current spread of untold sexual diseases, not only the ones you've heard of, but thousands of new ones. All because they couldn't form the only bubble (group of sex partners) that actually works, a bubble of two. Marriage.

> Actually Germany usually exports power to France.

When was this last true? Is this net export, or is this just some of France using German electricity?

Germany has been actively shutting down nuclear power stations without replacing their capacity for quite a few years.

If Germany is self sufficient for this winter, why are they beginning to impose energy restrictions on government buildings? Why are they having so much issue sourcing cheap energy? To me it sounds like a net import situation.

> In fact many of the nuclear plants in France don‘t work, especially this year.

As the thread suggested, this is because they are addressing a corrosion issue. These will at best not be ready till early 2023.

Net exporter of electricity, but importer of gas. I think now Germany imports electricity only on 8 days of a year on average.

https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.h...

> If Germany is self sufficient for this winter, why are they beginning to impose energy restrictions on government buildings? Why are they having so much issue sourcing cheap energy? To me it sounds like a net import situation.

It is more complicated than that. If Germany runs out of gas this winter, then the lights in Italy will go out, because Germany, despite of all the issues, is a net exporter of electricity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com