Re:Large-scale ‘sand battery’ goes online in Finland
by lazide on Thursday July 07, 2022 @10:29AM
(#32014565)
How can anyone function if their heat is down for days? Bucharest isn’t in a tropical climate!
Re:Large-scale ‘sand battery’ goes online in Finland
by oblio on Thursday July 07, 2022 @02:28PM
(#32017585)
They do try to fix it and in the vast majority of cases it's a bunch of hours. If it's longer than that, people have electric heaters, some use their gas stoves... you can kind of handle that for a short while.
And it's usually quite localized, some blocks don't have it, obviously if it affects large chunks of the population priority goes up.
Badly maintained infrastructure (as an American you're probably familiar with the idea). Keeps breaking down. Not enough money invested to bring it to modern standards. Pipes are not well insulated, they break down constantly, huge leakages and losses.
Cost of heating is so high that about 20% or more of the entire Bucharest city budget (I've just checked, budget: ~$1.8 billion, subsidies: ~$450 million; Bucharest has about 2.2 million people) is spent on subsidizing heat for poor families. Heating/hot water sometimes go down for hours or even days in random districts.
In many districts district heating is mandatory because everyone who can pull out does so and that makes the system even more inefficient, which would cause the collapse of the entire system, hurting poor families even more.