Now of course not all of that is from burning coal for electricity (Poland had a lot of manufacturing and heavy industry), but if you were to decarbonise in general it would make a big difference to us :-)
From next year, all new homes here are required to generate most of their electricity from renewable sources, so we should start to see a big uptake in solar. I think this comes from EU regulations to decarbonise housing, so maybe there is something similar in Poland?
Unfortunately this pollution comes mostly from heating and trust me - I wish it was coal these people were burning.
To put this into perspective: last year I was celebrating new year's eve in eastern Poland and met a shopkeeper who was complaining that he can't take wood from a local national reserve.
So yeah - sorry about that. A large part of our society is focused mostly on their own convenience.
It’s still nowhere as clean as even natural gas, but even without switching fuel sources you can do a lot to make wood burn cleaner.
I wish they were. Wood was probably just a part of that gentleman's own "energy mix", consisting mostly of culm(coal dust), trash, coal and wood.
Recently coal dust for heating purposes was outlawed, along with stoves not meeting a certain standard of emissions, but that didn't stop retailers from offering products which were not up to those standards.
Anyway the main issue still appears to be awareness, as many people who could easily afford to use gas for heating still choose to pollute, because it's cheap and convenient.
Wholesale prices in Germany are anything but stable. We have often times where the price is negative and on the other hand sometimes exceeds hundreds of Euros per MWh.
Germany has allegedly 50% renewables in their electricity mix, yet they have one of the highest specific CO2 emissions per kWh in Europe, plus the highest prices.
If you want a positive example, you have to use France.
For comparison:
- France: 17 Cents per kWh, 50 grams CO2 per kWh on average
- Germany: 31 Cents per kWh, 401 grams per kWh on average
Also, the wholesale electricity price is irrelevant to the customer, especially in Germany where renewables receive a guaranteed price per kWh, _independent_ of the current wholesale price which is why our electricity bills are so high.
Germany is currently planning and building 16 gas plants and even two coal plants, so you shouldn’t take Germany as a positive example for decarbonizing the electricity sector. We aren’t.
I’m very glad Poland and the Netherlands are actually planning to build nuclear power plants.
And wholesale prices matter to investors - recently we had a large coal project shut down because with the added cost of CO2 credits the LCoE was simply too high, so nobody was willing to finance it.
you shouldn’t take Germany as a positive example for decarbonizing the electricity sector. We aren’t.
I'm not, because the UK with its shift from coal to gas+wind and increases in energy efficiency is a much better one. And also a great example how nowadays nuclear means mostly cost and time overruns.
Meanwhile France is operating on a aging fleet of nuclear reactors(35 years old on average), which hasn't increased in capacity for 20 years now. I'm not sure what's their plan when they will be forced to phase out some of the older units.
I’m very glad Poland and the Netherlands are actually planning to build nuclear power plants.
Well it's not going to happen here because these plans were a vessel for corruption from the get go.
On the other hand solar is growing because it's cheap and with two-way metering coupled with incentives homeowners have all the incentive they need to set up their own installations.
Recently various cronies came out of the woodwork, so there's a chance we will have some weirdly expensive (even for this source) offshore farms.
But it's likely that some of our national parks will be turned into biomass for coal plants sooner - that's something currently in the works at least.
Their "Agile Octopus" tariff has 30-minute pricing windows, estimated the previous day. Electricity is cheap in the early hours where there's a surplus, and expensive at dinner time. Idea being you can charge your EV and do your tumble-drying at the cheapest possible time. There has been negative unit pricing in the past, when generation has far exceeded demand (i.e. early hours of the morning on a windy day).
More info here: https://octopus.energy/agile/
Real time pricing sounds great, but all the supply and demand effects economists love go away when you delay pricing effects by a day... Why do that?
- We import electricity at an average rate of 1.2GW - mostly from Germany and Sweden - and this number keeps growing.
- Not 95% of our electricity comes from coal(as it's often assumed here), but 75% at most.
- Wholesale electricity prices in Poland are actually higher than in e.g. Germany.
- Solar reached a point where it registers in the mix - single digit percentages so far, but capacity is growing sharply.