That is not a law of Physics. Electric heating is perfectly fine. It’s true that we cannot do it quick enough to matter in this case, but that is not a good reason to just shrug and not learn anything from this. We will need a long-term strategy, because even if we manage to come up with a temporary solution, it’s clear that these things will happen again in the future. It’s just too good as a way of applying pressure on European countries. Long term, it will have to be electric if we want to improve our energy supply and have a remote chance of not staying too far from our climate goals.
We should have seen this coming for quite a while. It was in fact predicted, but mostly ignored by politicians who seemed to thing that oil crises from the 1970s were fun and that energy independence was irrelevant.
Different types of power have different characteristics. Nuclear power plants runs at constant load and changes in power are slow. They take on the order of days to start and stop, and can not on their own follow load changes on a country wide network.
This isn't good or bad, it just is. They can manage the same base load day every day until they need servicing. But that also means you need other power sources to take the top load. That's usually natural gas turbines, even if it could be other things. Hydro is optimal, but most countries have a limited capacity for that. Which is, somewhat ironically, a similar situation as wind and solar have, but for completely different reasons.
Keep that in mind when people talk about replacing natural gas with nuclear. They do different things.
This mostly isn't physics, but rather a reflection of nuclear power's high capital costs. Nuclear plants have demonstrated that they can ramp up and down pretty quickly compared to e.g. most combined cycle natural gas plants.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
"For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr , with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute. " - it goes on to discuss how most modern light water plants significantly outperform this requirement.
"Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute. Some designs are capable of extremely fast power modulations in the frequency regulation mode with ramps of several percent of the rated power per second, but in a narrow band around the rated power level. "
> Keep that in mind when people talk about replacing natural gas with nuclear. They do different things.
Having some nuclear base load certainly helps, though, if natural gas is disrupted. Instead of having both the dispatchable power and variable power impacted from reduced natural gas supply, you instead only have a portion impacted.
One strategy is to build a bunch of renewable for during the day. Add some nuclear base load. And then with the surplus power you get sometimes, do power-to-gas with electrolyzer cells. Finally, use natural gas peaker plants and burn natural gas where justified in industry. This is a nice diverse mix with storage.
Yes, last winter France imported a lot, because more than 4 reactors were shut down for maintenance due to corrosions problems that has been found. These problem should had been found earlier, and would allowed to make the maintenance before the winter, but due to covid, inspections have been postponed.
If you look at previous years winter: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/synthese-des-donnees?type...
For example, 01/11/20 to 26/12/20 (their website allow only 8 weeks period graph) you can see that overall France exported a lot of electricity to other EU countries in the middle of the winter.
Are you able to expound on why this is the case? Are you specifically talking about furnaces that use some kind of oil being very common in Europe?
Also, in an emergency situation, can't nuclear be used for heating, albeit through powering things like space heaters rather than the normal furnaces?
So no, nuclear power cannot be used for heating and Europe definitely doesn't have an electricity problem.
Europe is still going to have access to gas if Russia cuts its whole supply come winter -- in fact, 60% of the European gas supply will still be present. Probably a bit more, since lots of crisis efforts have been made to provide gas from other sources. Only part of the heating needs have to be replaced.
Let's say Germany still had the, what, 8000 gigawatts of nuclear power online that it has shut down during the last decade? Wild-ass guess, but it's a lot. That's base load, of course. Electric power.
Resistive heating is dirt cheap to deploy in terms of capital costs. You can buy a 2000W heater for $20, perfect for domestic use. So the operating costs dominate. Using a heat pump is 3-4 times better in terms of operating costs; that's not as easy to deploy but many places will already have A/C installed and that's usually the same thing.
So then it becomes a question of economics; many industrial processes cannot be replaced with electricity. But as we've seen, heating of living spaces can easily be done with electricity.
So in the kind of crisis we're discussing here, those thousands of gigawatts of nuclear electricity would be pretty damn useful for emergency heating of German homes and businesses, during months where the gas would be more profitably used for the industrial processes that require it.
It sure as hell wouldn't have been cheap, but it would be cheaper than shutting down half the economy, which is what we're preparing for right now.
It's a moot point, of course, because those ~17 nuclear plants are already shut down. But it would very much have made the issue dramatically less painful.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3
Also probably helpful to think about it on a per person basis. Another comment corrected me that Germany has 80 million people, so let's use that. 8000 gigawatts (8 terawatts) divided by 80 million looks like 8,000,000,000,000 watts / 80,000,000 persons gives you 100,000 watts per person which does not seem realistic. With my air conditioner running at full blast, that's probably just a couple kilowatts, and that covers 3 people. Lights use a few watts. A beefy computer is around 100 watts.
It's possible that Reuters got gigawatts and gigawatt hours confused.
But I don't think it ruins the core of my argument; it wasn't hinging on Germany having reduced their annual power production by 99%. If Germany in fact shut down 15GW of nuclear production (15 plants), that's still on the order of 200 watts for every person in Germany, or one new 1000W resistive heater running 24/7 for every fifth household.
That's the kind of "on the margins" capacity that would indeed make a Russian gas embargo dramatically less painful.
Population Germany: 80+ million
Home heating is primarily a luxury for comfort, not survival. Given sufficient insulation, we generate enough heat from food to muddle through.
Is it fun to shiver under blankets during an energy crisis? No, not at all. But are people going to die? Not likely, assuming access to space alien technology like blankets and coats.
Public Health England say:
> The most recent data on fuel poverty in England indicates that there were 2.28 million fuel-poor households in 2012. 5. Cold homes can affect or exacerbate a range of health problems including respiratory problems, circulatory problems and increased risk of poor mental health. Estimates suggest that some 10% of excess winter deaths are directly attributable to fuel poverty and a fifth of excess winter deaths are attributable to the coldest quarter of homes. 6. Cold homes can also affect wider determinants of health, such as educational performance among children and young people, as well as work absences
in the summary at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Excell winter deaths (excluding COVID19) were in the ~29,000 region in 2019, which makes for ~2,900 deaths even though blankets and coats exist.
Electric heaters are extremely expensive to run relative to gas or heat pumps.
Heat pumps are great and extremely efficient, but not they are as hard to install as air conditioners (because they are air conditioners that work in reverse).
Same with portable air conditioners.
But heat pumps are also available in single units now. They're getting quite popular because they can be self installed (no refrigerant engineer necessary).
And stop spreading FUD about people freezing to death in there houses in winter, please.
Edit: Assuming a plug in wall-heater does all of that, just how many of them would you need by November this year to change something?
1. Cool, nuclear power, cheap electricity, great.
2. Hmm, looks like sometimes they explode in a pretty rude, nukey way. Maybe we should stick with coal, oil, and gas.
3. Yikes, climate change. But if we pull all our coal/oil/gas plants down we won't have enough energy and prices will skyrocket. Not enough wind/solar/hydro yet.
4. So... maybe nuclear is a good idea again? Cheap electricity?
We're here. So your argument is we can't use nuclear because electricity is too expensive in Europe, when the whole idea is to increase the supply of electricity and thus bring down the price?
> Also, that wall heater doesn't heat your water supply
There are electric water heaters.
> how many of them would you need by November this year to change something
Maybe someone in this thread is arguing that we can both build a bunch of nuclear plants and distribute electrical heaters to people in ~4 months, but I'm not. This is all a long term thing isn't it? Don't we have to do this anyway for green energy?
Also, nobody will freeze to death in his house over this.
Please don't condescend! I agree this is a big job.
> Of course you can heat with electricity, in the case of heat pumps even sustainable. Thing is, there are millions of house holds, commercial and industrial users that have decades of infrastructure in place heating with gas. No way to replace that in mid, let alone short term.
Again we agree. My point is that we have to electrify for green energy anyway. May as well do it, right? Is your argument that we should only ever heat with gas, and electrification is a waste of time and money? Is there enough gas to do that?
> Also, nobody will freeze to death in his house over this.
The thing you're referring to is someone saying "In an emergency situation (a matter of life and death for the vulnerable)". Isn't it reasonable to consider this scenario? Why is it FUD?
Heat is the main challenge and heating alone is problematic all by itself.
Gas dependence was a huge mistake, nuclear is not the short term solution we are looking for and getting away from gas dependence in the past couldn’t have relied on nuclear.
Think heating when you hear gas, not electricity.