There's a culture war about each item on that list, oddly enough.
Heat pumps are also good, but (as far as I can tell) burdened with a high sticker price. Great option when you replace an existing heating system at the end of life or a new build (we've got one in our new build), but I wouldn't say they are a "quickly" making a difference.
You're right about them being a culture war item though. I've seen political posters around here by people upset by them.
Batteries are cheap these days, but I think we're still a way off from manufacturing at the scale needed for "quickly". The factories are going up pretty quickly, just not fast enough given the context of "can we stop giving any money to oil and gas producing countries we no longer like?"
I think the hard part of batteries isn't culture war at the moment, it's that people are still pattern matching the term to AA's and drawing false conclusions about what's possible.
I know that the taxation on renewables is always touchy because the technology and how electricity gets routed and used changed faster than tax law.
https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-f...
According to the article the controversy is a law making it mandatory to buy something that costs €17,000 which is close enough to double the price of a reasonable alternative. The thing being heat pumps doesn't really an issue.
It is the same as the "anti-solar" push back in the day. It was pointed out at the time that Germany's initial Energiewende push was going to be a disaster and they ended up with some of the most expensive electricity in Europe for a while there. Again, that isn't an anti-solar or anti-wind observation. That is an observation that the people running the electricity grid are incompetent and verging on enemies to German prosperity. It makes a lot of sense that people like the AfD if they can consistently pitch "we're not going to just slug you for thousands of euros" but that isn't an anti-heat-pump stance.
There isn't resistance to any particular technology, if it made sense to use I'd expect general support for the idea. The controversy is the people who are insisting on driving the costs up for no reason are quite controversial, because they are morons and shouldn't be in charge of anything.
My theory is post-WWII the British did something to permanently screw up the ability of the German elite circles to function, it is quite stunning to watch them struggle to understand why people might not like expensive, scarce energy and ongoing visible money wasting projects.
a) opposition to regulations that aim to transition to them,
b) simplistic arguments against them based on upfront cost?
And c) then you flatly state they don't make sense.
And then finally, just as a massive and unnecessary cherry on top, you come up with a wild stabbed-in-the-back/mind-control conspiracy theory to explain why your opinion differs from the experts in Germany (and the rest of the world).
Transition to solar/wind is temporarily costly to the individual in itself because energy prices are no longer fixed 24/7. So maintaining your energy budget means adjusting your usage to different time periods.
When the individual citizen's energy expense is further increased because they themselves have to buy equipment, then that becomes an issue of funding rather than the technology. They would not be equally opposed to large tax-funded energy systems, so it's not a criticism of the technology itself.
Their own general stance:
> The AfD rejects any policy and tax that claims to be for alleged climate protection because humans cannot protect the climate. We also want to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. ... The alleged scientific consensus on "man-made climate change" has always been politically constructed...The predictions of the IPCC are based on inadequate models. The warnings of the so-called "climate science" have completely shifted from the predicted ice age of the 1970s to the currently claimed "global warming". ... On the contrary, CO2 has proven to be a driver of enhanced global plant growth, thereby benefiting global food security. ... The AfD vehemently rejects this goal and the associated societal restructuring. This also includes the EU's Green Deal, which is destroying the European economy and thus our prosperity.
Which directly supports their specific heat pump policy:
> Lifting the ban on gas and oil heating systems. In a technology-neutral heating sector, inexpensive gas, preferably from pipelines or heating oil will be available again. None of the so-called renewable energies or the proposed new applications, such as heat pumps or electric mobility, can survive in the market without subsidies, while conventional energies are artificially made more expensive or banned
Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/germany-election-2025-what-the-m...
Why are you trying to pass this off as reasonable differences on approach?
No one is saying that it is something that should interest private sector investors. Obviously on a spreadsheet it has no chance of comparing favorably against slapping up windmills.
It needs to be looked at in terms of national security.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-proposes-stat...
https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/docs/hydrogenprogramlibrarie...
Anti-nuclear folks I've heard about (and argued myself against) in both Spain and Sweden, but anti-solar people? Never heard anyone being against solar, what are the arguments for not having solar granted you have enough sun and besides any temporary economic arguments?
On the face of it it sounds somewhat sensible point by point, but the more you did in, the more it just boils down to finding excuses, any excuse at all, for NIMBYism, often from rich urbanites who moved to the country and want it to be an episode of Downton Abbey, and fret about their house price more then anything else in the world.
This one tries a particularly hamfisted and tendentious "but Ukraine", neglecting that the fucked domestic energy situation is heavily impacted by Ukraine right now.
- the energy they produce is too unreliable
- their production creates more pollution than they save
- the lifespan is too short to be worth it
- they require too much land that should be used differently
Nuclear, otoh, provides constant output (barring maintenance windows) and has the full cost of the plant, from construction to decommissioning, built into it.
We've got nuclear submarines that run just fine- the prototypal tiny reactor. Had we built more and smaller nuclear power plants decades ago, we could have averted a lot of emissions and so on and so forth.
Both wind farms and nuclear power plants end up with a "strike price", which is effectively a collar option around the spot price so that revenue is guaranteed. It can in some cases result in wind farms having to pay money back if the spot price goes up too much.
Separately there is the capacity auction https://www.emrsettlement.co.uk/schemes/capacity-market/ and a fast frequency response market (which batteries are starting to appear in).
> Had we built more and smaller nuclear power plants decades ago
The "learning rate" for reactors appears to be negative: over time, they get harder to build. Possibly as people discover more ways in which things could go wrong. Hinckley Point C is over time and budget.
Small nuclear plants are (maybe) cheaper per "plant" but not cheaper per watt and likely never will be.
Of course, if we're building enough renewable capacity that electricity is basically free when it's sunny or windy, that changes the eceonomics and maybe we should all be making hydrogen in that sort of [bumpily]-abundant future.
However, storing hydrogen is also a pain - the density is crap even as a liquid and very technically challenging, and the density is mind-bogglingly crap as a gas - you'd want to find some vast geological underground reservoir in which to store it economically.
None of these are insurmountable, it's just not an especially attractive option as things stand.
Storing hydrogen is trivially done in salt caverns. We already do it that way today.