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Comment by mono442 | Hacker News Reader

You can't provide heating in winter using renewables.

You can, and should, over the entirety of europe apart from the northern parts of the nordic countries electric heat pumps are now simply more efficient than gas powered furnaces. This is true even if powered by gas based electricity - but obviously makes it possible to power them via renewables as well.

People in Quebec (Canada), which is colder than just about all of Europe, have been providing heating in winter using renewables for decades (thanks to an excess of renewables).

most of the countries don't have enough hydro to make it feasible

Yeah, but now wind and solar have made it feasible just about everywhere.

And geothermal, biogas and tidal.

There's little sunshine in winter. Wind is better but it's still intermittent.

Panels are cheap enough that you can overprovision for winter sun.

There are a gazillion battery techs being developed right now (regular lithium ion - with variations like NMC, LFP, ...), solid state lithion ion, sodium ion.

You can over provision solar as someone said.

There's geothermal, tidal, etc.

Long distance high voltage electricity transmission at scale.

Electricity is a marvel and we're just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with it. Betting against it is like betting against electronics, a risky proposition.

Wot?

Solar makes a fair bit where I am. Hydro works fine. Geothermal works fine. Wind works fine. Aircon is very efficient.

This is harder in plenty of regions but a blanket ‘can’t be done’ is way off the mark.

My wood pellet stove begs to differ.

...you can? Electric heaters exist?

Always worth mentioning we should be using heat pumps, not straight resistive heating.

For sure. Heat pumps aren't the best option everywhere (though modern heat pumps probably function acceptably at lower temperatures than most people realize), but if you need to do electric heating, they are the best option most places.

For "human" temperatures don't they just degrade back to the efficiency of resistive heating? Or are some places actually cold enough to push the factor below 1?

> Or are some places actually cold enough to push the factor below 1?

Probably some far north, but not that many. My Kaiteki 6600 has[1] a SCOP of 5.1 and a factory guaranteed COP at -25C (-13F) of 3.1.

[1]: https://mee.no/privat/produktkategori/luft-luft-varmepumper/...

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