Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
There is no law that says that you must use gas for heat. But once you have that installed base, you can’t just switch from gas to electric heat overnight. It will take decades to make that change. Even if all of the equipment was available (and it’s not), it would take a team of 3-5 workers 2-3 days to convert each home. And that’s assuming a simpler gas -> electric boiler swap without needing to upgrade electrical service panels/etc. This type of change can get complicated quickly for just a single house. Multi unit homes would be more complex. Now factor that over all other homes/buildings and you can see that the number of workers required to do this rapidly don’t exist.
Even in the US, there is a push to phase out gas heat in many locations. But it’s a phased rollout with a plan decades long.
Could this be a longer term plan? Definitely. But with a quick turnaround? Not really.
There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months.
c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have
d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
In fact, at least in the US, space heaters aren’t allowed to be automatically turned on by any means. They require a person to start it manually each time you want heat. Because they aren’t permanently installed, it is a potential fire hazard. A pet/kid/etc could run past it and knock it over. If that happened near a blanket or pillow, the fabric could catch fire.
I can’t imagine being able to buy something less safe in Switzerland.
Portable Electric Space Heater with Thermostat, 1500W/750W Safe and Quiet Ceramic Heater Fan, Heat Up 200 Square Feet for Office Room Desk Indoor Use https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu
I also have a permanently installed electric heater installed in the wall in a different room. It does have a permanent thermostat that can start/stop automatically. It’s quite a different beast from a $20 space heater with its own circuit back to my breaker box. It works pretty well, but portable, it is not. It was also much more than $20.
But, back to your original point — are you really suggesting replacing the entire German heating infrastructure with $20 ceramic heaters from Amazon? How is that a remotely viable solution? These are devices meant for heating a small office. If you want to heat an apartment or house or city, you need different options. And changing those over takes time and more consideration than buying a bunch of $20 space heaters.
Your point that you can't have central temperature controls with electric heating is just absurd, I learned how to build this in first semester of electrical engineering.
We (specific subsets of humanity) just completed a massive government led undertaking to distribute a brand new vaccine to huge swaths of population, which involved an insane amount of logistics. And then also RAT kits. On the heels of that, you're telling me that distributing a small box that doesn't need to be stored at -20C or else it goes bad, to every household in a country is simply too hard and we shouldn't even bother, and just let people freeze to death? I mean, yeah it seems a bit late to start. The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022. The second best time though is now.
This would be pointless in Germany, though, since there isn't enough electricity in the European grid to make a short term switch for this many people. (Also the price for electricity is already still much higher than for NG).
For this year, it's already getting too late to act, apart from trying to make as much LNG as possible available to the public.
For the future, electrification of Eueope will need large investments in stable&affordable power production with incentives for homeowners to make the switch as it comes online. Typically such an incentive would be to gradually introduce a tax on NG that will eventually be high enough to squeeze it out of the market.
> The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022.
The best time to start this would have been 20-50 years ago.
> The second best time though is now.
True!
I’ve got no dog in the Euro energy debates, but I can say that anecdotally it’s been fine staying warm with electric heat in the interim. Obviously having a single centrally controlled thermostat is preferable, but it is really a vanishingly negligible task to flip heater a switch on or off.
I've heard a few people say this, but it's not true - the efficiency of electric heaters is 100%. They're only detrimental when they run off of fossil-fuel based power plants. Instead of making silly laws banning symptoms, our focus should be on removing the pollution at its source.
This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.
So, even if the average home could be switched over easily (which, I still think is wrong), that’s still would leave a lot of people without many good, financially feasible, options.
Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.
Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up.
> Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil.
> I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).
For Germany you can double that. At least.
Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.
In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough.
At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump.
TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.
IMHO, what people demand is that Germany should recognize that the current crisis is the fruit of multiple decades of bad energy policy. If we don't, twenty years later, we'll still be saying "Yes, sadly, Germany is still burning gas, but you can't convert it overnight! What do you want?"
Something like €5000 plus labour in Lithuania, around half days work. Gov subsidises good portion of it.
There is no shortage of electricity in Germany, so there was no economic interest to build more nuclear power plants? Germny even exports electricity to France, which has a lot of nuclear power plants (many of which currently don't work).
We don't even know where to safely put the waste for the next million years. Germany doesn't have the huge inhabited areas like the US - and even they have not solve that problem yet.
You can’t currently build a reliable electric grid with wind and solar alone so you need either nuclear or fossil fuels.
So what did Germany do for heat before the wall fell and they got cheap fuels from Russia?
Germany used to be heated by gas created from coal and coal directly till about the 1960ies. Starting with the 1970ies already, the Soviet Union began delivery of natural gas.
This podcast has lots of details if you're interested. https://omegataupodcast.net/368-nuclear-waste-disposal-and-s...
No but there are laws of chemistry.
The point the previous poster was trying to make is, that the industry needs natural gas as a precursor product, mainly for the chemical industry. Obviously, you cannot replace that with electricity easily. Over 12% of Germany's natural gas use is purely for the chemical reactions it provides within the chemical industry. A further 10% is for use in the metal industry where gas also has been notoriously hard to replace as it's not used for its energy value alone but for providing reduction reactions.
What you say basically is, not only Germany should have kept on building nuclear, it should also have developed new hydrogen based industrial flows for all these sectors alone, things that exist nowhere on this world on actual scale.
So LNG terminals would have been necessary in any case. Germany had none due to the over-reliance on Russian gas.
Otherwise I will not comment on the difficulty of replacing domestic heating, which IS a huge block of gas usage, on the scale of a whole country, as others have already done this.
Hydro makes this simple. Nuclear makes it possible. No other approaches have been demonstrated that allows this without fossil fuels at scale.
The issue is if they don't have gas, transitioning other things to electricity becomes difficult, because you need copper.
Heat pumps are great and super cool but if you include the efficiency of generation it's unlikely to be more energetically efficient, yes.
It's close though, natural gas combined cycle plants are very efficient for what they are. And if the heater is electric, substitution for other electricity sources is possible... unlike now.
But you do have to transport the gas or electricity to the heating site, and I don't know how that adds up.
Also, if conditions are right, you can use electricity to run a heat pump and move heat from the outside air to the inside air; depending on the details, you can move a lot more watts of heat then you spend operating the heat pump. This can be more economical than direct heating.
Or I have used the oil boiler in the basement, if Norway didn't ban that in 2020. That would have freed up enough electricity for several homes in the UK or Germany.
Electrical heating is fine if all electricity produced is from hydro, nuclear or wind/solar, but it makes less sense if the grid relies too much on fossil fuels.