This isn't about averages. It's about meeting demand, which is especially important during the winter heating season.
Germany is a great example that these renewable policies can't sustain an industrial lifestyle. Germany is something of a cautionary tale; adopting Germany's policies will make people worse off.
How much energy they produce is much more important when assessing how their renewable transition is going. They have barely managed to tread water by doing less per capita and matching their old supply. This is a far cry from the optimistic touting that solar/wind was a viable market competitor to fossil fuels - the evidence here is that these forms of energy are worse.
Only if you're assuming some kind of linear relationship between energy consumption and happiness, which seems extremely dubious.
Ignore my comment though if you would normally heat by electricity but you use an umlaut so i assume you are a german as well.
Just a few days/weeks ago we had an extreme price hike due to high demand. High demand should only come from consuming energy in a usefull way. Mining your shitcoins for nothing is not helping at all.
You still consume energy which wouldn't need to be consumed as we do have other and much more energy friendlih systems for transaction security.
You are basically an american who drives the biggest pickup truck available and using oekofuel and state its now okay to do this.
Heat pumps require a significant capital investment which would have to be recovered on only their efficiency improvement, since they don't otherwise generate revenue.
The math is different for new construction. There heat pumps make a lot more sense because the capital cost is relative to some other heating system you don't already have. Then the higher efficiency will generally cover the relative capital cost even if it wouldn't cover the total capital cost. This might still be less profitable than mining cryptocurrency (depending on a variety of factors) but better than any other traditional heating system.
No it isn't. I know because I looked into it.
Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop.
So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.
What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)
Tom's Hardware did a list for GPUs:
https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-mining-gpus-ben...
"Which cryptocurrency" will also vary over time since the prices are all over the place, but that's the other advantage of not-ASICs. You can switch to whichever one pays better this month.
Sure, but they are so rare at present thay in my entire life I have not even seen one.
That's why you install them in the basement. If you can.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06...
Doesn't Germany have a lot of wind power? Denmark sure does.
Let's see, 27.2% wind in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
And apparently there's a fair bit of North Sea area that can be used for new offshore wind.
No it’s usage need to be constant, or you'll get black-outs in regions where the grids 50hz frequency cannot be kept - which a lot of communals in Sweden are dangerously close to.
And if you don't keep the network balanced, you'll get complete blackouts instead of regional blackouts.
That's not what I'm saying. On a windy day, then doubling your number of wind turbines will (roughly) double your power output. But if there's no wind, your output drops to zero. Contrast that with nuclear power, where doubling capacity doubles output always.
So with nuclear power you could say that based on what current output we have, if we build X more capacity we could retire all polluting energy sources.
With wind (say) you can't say that.
I'd agree with that. Have you considered adopting a good policy instead?
Really? 10 to 20x? That's 1,000 to 2,000% Here in the UK we've had suppliers collapse due to some "issues" involving not buying with fixed prices and end users like you and me get bills that are about 150% last year but not 1,000%.
We have (had) quite a lot of innovative suppliers that offered "green" tariffs that were backed by variable suppliers. Unfortunately the shit hit the fan and the price charged back in the day wasn't enough to cover the current rate plus enough profit to cover admin.
https://www.vattenfall.se/elavtal/elpriser/timpris-pa-elbors...
and another:
https://elen.nu/dagens-spotpris/se3-stockholm/
Timpris på elbörsen (on the first site, "vattenfall") means "hourly rate on the electricity exchange". Have a look at the rates for area 3 - Södra Mellansverige (south of the middle of Sweden) and compare with the same day last year ("jämför med - Samma dag föregående år"). You'll see that the rates average some 500 öre (5 sek, about $0.55) per kWh excluding taxes, levies, surcharges and value added tax. At the same day last year the rate averaged about 20 öre, i.e. a difference of 2500%. The rates fluctuate hourly and the last few weeks they've broken all records. The increase for the last month was +245%, averaged over the whole year rates have doubled.
[edit]
Nord Pool have their own reporting on prices:
I'm quite surprised that Scandinavia is having even more problems than say the UK because you have rather a lot of useful topological features (really big hills and mountains and lakes at elevation - ie potential energy). You are also closer to the Ukraine than us for gas so that should be cheaper too.
Our consumer energy market is a bit strange. We have a national grid for eleccy and then have multiple "suppliers" who supposedly compete. The ones who went balls out have gone bust. They generally offered fixed and flexible rates based on the wholesale cost plus their margin. Then the wholesale cost went up rather a lot and they lost their margin and without money in the bank, they went bust. The govt agency for energy then enforced other suppliers to take us on. So I was a customer of "Green" and now I'm a customer of "Shell Energy". You can be sure that Shell are not losing out in any way 8)
I've just noticed that you use the term Nordic countries - is that a better/preferred term to use than Scandinavia?
Scandanavia includes Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The common factor there is having closely related languages and cultures. However, speaking from experience as an American, we often use "Scandanavian" as a synonym of "Nordic".
Nord Pool covers all the Nordic countries plus a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool
Little know fact kept out of the media when we had all the flooding over winter a few years back, one nuclear power station had to be shutdown to avoid a meltdown caused by flooding.
Electricity consumption has gone up with the increase in consumer gadgets, ie computers, tablets, mobiles, big massive flat screens, sound systems ie personal cinema setups, its only natural to see electricity demands go up.
And there is not enough of some of the rare earth materials and other metals used to make or maintain electric cars on the planet unless some miners have been keeping deposits secret, so I expect some miners share prices to go up considerably in the future.
Oh, I give up.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2015.0004...
[2] https://gml.noaa.gov/icdc7/proceedings/abstracts/bhattHI49.p...
Here's some more choice words on the failures of the current Swedish energy policy:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/02/28/irrationa...
Presumably people would switch if the cost of electricity was low enough for it to be more economical. Decisions that result in the price of electricity staying high provide political leverage to gas producers.
Though, eyeballing the numbers, it really should be very attractive to install heat pumps in the EU despite the high electricity cost. The cost of natural gas is quite high.
They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.
> They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.
Heat pumps are used way farther north in the US since I was a kid, including (now) in places that don't need cooling.
There are still people in the UK installing heat pumps. Either they have a very rose tinted view of the future direction of electricity prices Vs gas, a rose tinted view of future government taxes/incentives, a rose tinted view of the environmental benefits (eg. By looking at aggregate CO2 emissions instead of marginal CO2 emissions), or they have been misled by installers/builders who make substantially more money if they install a heat pump.
Either that or I got my maths wrong. But I don't think I did.
- ground source was roughly parity with gas (with something like an 8x higher install cost)
- air source heat pumps were more expensive to operate but similar on install costs
However comparing on cost only misses the point, a heat pump is generally capable of cooling as well, which is becoming more of a necessity in the summer.
P.S. You can do silly things with ground loops like use excess solar power to cool during the summer or daytime storing that heat in the ground, then removing some of it in the winter/nighttime.
* I'm tired of tenants installing window air conditioners.
* I pay for steam heat myself whereas tenants will pay for electricity used by their heat pump.
1. Altruism
2. Already committed
3. They have a pessimistic view of future gas prices.
4. They have solar.
5. They're in a long tail/corner case/different use case from the one you computed.
I'd put my money on 5, depending on how big a % difference. Eg. I've noticed more and more people switching to solar as prices come down and hit an inflection point for them in their use case. Wouldn't be surprised if heat pumps are the same.
I’m looking into installing a ground heat pump in a new house (coupled with solar panels) mostly for environmental reasons and all the critics I’ve read so far were about the costs.
It's the CO2 production of that extra generation, known as marginal generation, you should care about, not the nationwide average.
Most of the time, in most of the world, that extra generation is combined cycle gas turbines at ~50% efficiency.
For most people, the only time a new use of electricity is eco-friendly is when all the energy in a country is already supplied by wind/solar/hydro, and therefore a newly switched on thing also gets supplied by wind/solar/hydro.
Obviously the decision to installation a heat pump depends on the marginal generation in 15 years when you are still using that heat pump. That's very hard to predict.
I think it doesn't really matter much what is meant throughout - point was about shifting gas demand on to the electricity supply, and whether the grid could cope with it if everyone did that to a meaningful degree.
Heat pumps use 1kw of electricity to get >1kw heat.
Similarly a gas boiler uses 1kW electricity (for the pump) to get potentially >1kW heat out of radiators (and pipes). Because that heat is energy conserved from the gas, not the electricity.
Anyway I didn't mention heat pumps or compare them to resistive heating so I'm not sure what I'm defending.
Edit: hyperbole ^
(Which should be done. But it'll take time.)
There are electric boilers...
Radiators are heated by boilers...
No heat pump necessary...
Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating, which is a huge part of their total CO2, and pollution output.
You could say that pretty much about any country in the European synchronous grid. Everyone needs everyone else.
> and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants
The gas plants are actually quite cheap. It's the gas that's expensive.
> Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating
That statement makes no sense to me. Rising power prices are definitely connected to rising gas prices, which don't prevent people from moving away from using gas for stoves and heating but rather motivate them to do just that.
But if they produced nuclear at the price they used to be able to in Germany, before regulations and investment insecurity drove up the price, buying gas just could not compete.
Sweden, notably getting half its power from nuclear, does not need anyone else. Same thing for france.
Compare building and installing 5 million heatpumps with building 2GW new nuclear power production ? The latter could include at least one city heated entirely by cooling water, but even ignoring that, using Finnish numbers for nuclear, and ballparking optimistically the heaters? They cost about the same, take about the same time to build and install... its unclear to me which would lower individual costs more, which would be better for the economy, or climate. I guess heatpumps win on individual costs, nuclear on the economy, and both being roughly equal on climate. The nuclear plant certainly wins on total maintenance resources/work, but the heatpumps on versatility of maintenance, i.e. you can just say fuck it with heat pump maintenance in a way you cant with nuclear. Nuclear wins on flexibility, while heatpumps win on rollout, giving its highest benefits very quickly, but taking as, if not far longer, to complete. There is often a benefit to mass production over individual small scale stuff though. If we could build at 1970ties + inflation prices though, the nuclear plant power would cost less than a tenth, and output more power than the total heating the corresponding 500k heat pumps provide.
Compare to how people buying and installing large supplemental home solar+lithium ion battery packs looks great, until you consider the cost and time to deploy a million such, and compare that to the cost and speed by which we could produce a large hydropower dam as energy storage. The latter wins by a landslide, or occasionally flood^^. Heatpumps are much better and cheaper, though, so its harder to tell.
Except NOT having to heat is even more effective than burning fuel for heating locally. So the move away from gas heating to low-energy buildings is definitely stimulated by higher gas prices.
> Same thing for france.
I doubt that, since France seem to be actually using their interconnects. Can't comment on Sweden, though.
France is self sufficient, but imports when prices are low in order to keep levels high in reservoirs, which further decreases prices over the year.
Actually, not currently. A combination of regulator-mandated nuclear plant stops, scheduled nuclear plant maintenance and fossil plant closures means that France currently relies on importing a lot currently.
Your statement is true generally, but France's situation currently contributes to high energy prices.
Gas stoves still come out on top price-wise, but part of that are asinine taxes, where gas is taxed less than electricity.
Those are huge though (at least "natural draft" ones are) and usually made of concrete, and making the concrete currently requires lots of carbon emissions.
But the real problem is the cost of changing the infrastructure, remember its not just getting power instead of gas, its also switching out every heater from fluid based to power based. Switching stoves from gas to power, etc. Its not only a big investment, but a time consuming and inconvenient one.
Even if power prices dropped to half I would not expect this to be particularly fast, and worse still, historically Germany has subsidized directly(with rebates, taxbreaks, etc) and indirectly(nordstrom2... LNG harbors, etc) the gas prices whenever people complain, or just to prevent complaints.
I guess replacing gas in German households will require both electricity prices dropping to around one third or less, and substantial government support. Or a multi decade power price drop to say one tenth or less.
Temperature in sweden averages about 2 degrees C, and the temperature in germany about 3 degrees C, which can look like a 50% increase, but everything in thermodynamics works in Kelvin, not C. So the difference is between 275 and 276 degrees K, which is about 0.3% or almost nothing.
Its not enough to prove anything, just make it reasonably likely, which is then combined with the qualifier.
- are nuclear power plants cheap? Isn't Hinkley Point C guranteed 10 ct/kwh + inflation. Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros? What do gas power plants cost, 20 billion?
> 'which have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves ...'
I would like a source for that. According to [1], 91% of german house holds are using electric kitchen stoves and 7% gas. For heating, they have a larger market share but gas kitchen stoves are not really widespread.
Olkiluoto unit 3 is a pretty extreme outlier in construction costs. The same amount of power generation capacity from CPR1000 plants (widely used in China today) would cost closer to 2.5 billion Euros, and construction times are about 5 years.
The climate, really.
Right this second, Germany is EXPORTING to most of their neighbors. Are they charging the other batteries now or how am I supposed to follow your logic?
Because this debate is more about ideology, than anything else.
2. Sun and wind only produce a fraction of the time (40% [1] and 25% [2] respectively, and 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of installed capacity this very second [3])
3. Production capacity without sun and wind < peak demand
Germany's mix only work because of neighbouring countries. And their humongous amounts of still existing coal and gas.
[1] https://assets.greentechmedia.com/assets/content/cache/made/...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-...
The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear, that's understandable for a country that can't just print money.
There will eventually be some limit to that strategy (i.e. how do you meet supply at night) and we'll have to see how the next-gen energy storage and nuclear pan out.
People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. After that new fuel rods were introduced into the reactor. A few month later as consequence of the Fukushima disaster it got "shut down"[1], because it was now "not safe". Which is obviously bullshit, cause the rules on reactor safety for German nuclear reactor didn't change due to Fukushima, opinions did and politicians needed to show that they do something.
[1] It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat. Only after the fuel rods were burned down it really got shut down.
Wow. Idiocracy vibes.
That's completely idiotic, correct?
Not completely, but you can make electricity almost free at certain times of day to encourage shifting usage.
Although there is a natural limit to this, since people have to be home to do laundry!
(Also electric driers are the real culprit, they use an obscene amount of electricity! I am not sure if Germany is big on electric dryers or not though, that is something which is very culture dependent)
Holy crap, doing the math a US style dryer would cost ~1.50 in electricity in Germany to dry one load of clothing.
Sources: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price... https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-el...
So, like, you know, yeah. My dryer has a delay start function on it, if late night prices are 1/2 peak, then I'd save 75 cents a load. Let's say 3 days a week of laundry, $9 a month in savings.
Again, my dryer already does this, it isn't new tech, it is just nudging me to make use of the existing button that is already there!
US electricity prices are so low, eh, not really worth it for the state I live in.
Also, electricity prices are not the same everywhere. My parents for example pay only 20 ct/kwh (I have no idea how they got that contract, especially since they moved only last year. They have low overall usage though (2,000 kWh/a, with fixed cost being like 30% of the total bill)
It's not just a syllogism, it's a really weak one. You actually can decide when people "turn on their washing machine". It's called controlled supply, it's existed since the 1950s. Mainly for water heating but in principle any function.
Looking at maps for power prices with large hydropower dams you can easily see how most countries grids dont transfer more than around 1000km, and often quite a bit shorter. In practice this is the point where it becomes more cost effective to build new powerplants, than bigger infrastructure for transfer.
We could build grids designed for this, but never across oceans, and we are talking about an absolutely gargantuan investment, and its generally not considered as a solution for the unreliability of solar and wind. Its also why no one ever suggests to use the big empty oceans for truly large scale wind or solar etc, its always places very close to land.
Its also worth pointing out that superconductors cannot solve this, even if price and the gargantuan cooling energy requirements are ignored. This is because while superconductors transfer power without loss, they can only do so up to a limited effect, as the power interferes with the superconducting ability after that, essentially breaking it.
That's an incredibly low amount. Taking Berlin as an example, even 5000km lets you reach plenty of hot, sunny desert areas where any losses will be easily offset by vastly increased solar efficiency. Or you could spread out your wind energy sources to get more consistent coverage.
In fact that's pretty much what Singapore is doing: building a solar farm 5000km away in Australia.
1000km of ocean reduce transmission to about 0.1%^^
That sounds bloody swell. I'd pay for that in a heart beat.
Atmospheric depressions are bigger than than, and the distance for solar are much bigger as well (other than cloudy, there's day and night).
Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... puts the cost of wind/solar at roughly 1/3rd the cost of nuclear, so it's more (cost) efficient to spend as much on transmission as you do on generation and build a really well connected massive grid than to use nuclear.
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Also there is wind energy which doesn't care about whether the sun shines or not (actually it generates more energy when the sun isn't shining: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbin...).
Transmitting power also consumes energy - you cannot have a electric wire across pacific to transmit power from US to EU without transformers - electric power line is not a fiber optic that transmit just signal.
I also doubt we have enough rare earth minerals to make all those magnets for wind turbine and and electric car enough for whole planet. Remember also you have to decomission those windturbine after some years which is expensive
Regarding rare earths, we will need them regardless of using nuclear or renewables for electric cars, so that seems partly tangential. For wind turbines their reliance on rare earths seems troublesome. It's geopolitically ironic that we (Western Europeans) get our gas from Russia and our rare earths from China.
You are right that you can't have an electric wire across the Pacific to get power from the US to the EU, but more because the EU doesn't border the Pacific. On a more serious note, Novia Scotia to Ireland is about 2600 miles, so it's on the edge of doable with HVDC, but it would be a massive project and slightly hard to justify.
I'm interested to know what rare earth metals make up so much of a wind turbine. According to https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/66861.pdf (page 65), around 99% of a turbine is accounted for by steel, fiberglass, iron, copper, and aluminum.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2021/05/24/usd-30-billion-north...
Whats funny about this is, that the wind farm will not even be connected to Iceland itself! I guess they have such great geothermal resources that they don't really need more power.
Still an unacceptable CO2 emission in my book. Natural gas is at 55,82 [kg CO2 / GJ], when coal is at 94,6 [kg CO2 / GJ]. [1]
So that's only 40% less pollution, and there are still huge quantities of coal that has yet to be replaced in Germany.
What's missing from your view is how you provide for baseload. Right now, what is baseload in Germany? It is coal: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
[1] https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index_e.ph...
What you mean to say is "we need to provide power all the time".
Coal exit is not related to nuclear exit in Germany. Germany would have the exact same amount of coal plants if they'd kept nuclear.
Coal is about jobs (and votes) in regions which are already troubled by unemployment. This is why the name of the commission which decided how the phase out will work was: "Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
1. Germany is a net exporter
2. Germany has reduced the production from fossil fuels from about 70% to about 37% within 30 years.
3. At the same time it cut nuclear power from around 28% to about 10.
4. It looks like without reducing nuclear power it could have replaced the equivalent amount of fossil fuels (achieving less than 20% fossil fuels by 2020). However, energy consumption has also gone up since 1990, so it would have required building more reactors.
5. Renewables have replaced about 25% of energy production in the last 10 years.