Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy reform in decades”

Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by dangerlibrary on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @10:54AM (#30932673)

I could be wrong, but I thought the point of the GP comment was that there are many industrial processes like smelting that don't have good electric replacements. For example, it's nigh-impossible to maintain the temperatures required to run a steel plant with no combustion and only resistive heating elements.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by ZeroGravitas on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @12:04PM (#30933801)

They all have good replacements, but if their competitor is allowed to pollute without paying for externalities, they'll struggle in the market.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by hef19898 on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @12:51PM (#30934568)

The EU had, as pointless as it was, anti dumping tariffs on solar modules. Such tariffs can be used to protect domestic non-poluters against their foreign competition.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by ZeroGravitas on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @02:11PM (#30935528)

They've been talking about exactly that for a while but recent events seen to have nudged it along:

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/3/15/eu-countries-ba...

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by scythe on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @11:28AM (#30933193)

One major category of such processes is calcination, both for cement (CaCO3 >> CaO) and alumina (Al(OH)3 >> Al2O3). This can be done with concentrated solar heating:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/gc/c7gc0058...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X1...

But building enough plants to actually do this at scale could take a while. Supposedly there was an anode developed for electrolytic iron reduction:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134

but there have been problems with scaling it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349905

Between calcination, smelting and heating, you've addressed a pretty big chunk of fuel-burning processes. The question is whether we can get these kinds of technologies online in time without Manhattan-Project levels of government support, since that does not seem to be forthcoming.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by namibj on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @09:00PM (#30939413)

Calcination can also use low-duty-cycle electric kilns that soak up spare solar panel electricity (from overprovisioning), at least once you have 2-3 days of storage to level solar fluctuations and day/night (big, cheap ovens take a while to heat up).

In general, they are quite amenable to using electrically heated air in place of methane/air combustion exhaust.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by lazide on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @11:19AM (#30933042)

Arc blast furnaces are a thing - just more expensive. The electrode (typically graphite) is consumed, so technically not zero carbon, but the gas could be captured.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by adrianN on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @10:57AM (#30932712)

There are steelmaking processes using hydrogen for reducing the ore and arc furnaces for heat. They are currently a bit more expensive than using coke.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by _ph_ on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @10:58AM (#30932733)

For those, one would use H2 or methane created with the use of electricity.

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