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...
This isn't about averages. It's about meeting demand, which is especially important during the winter heating season.