Domestic heating is done, mostly, by gas. Hard to replace all of Germany's (or Europes) domestic heating infrastructure with electric heating in couple of years. Not to speak about monts.

So no, nuclear power cannot be used for heating and Europe definitely doesn't have an electricity problem.

This whole comment tree seems to be full of people who deliberately misunderstand physics and economics.

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.

Umm... I'm looking at https://www.ercot.com/ and for all of Texas (if memory serves we're twice the landmass of Germany and probably on par by population) on one of the hottest days of the year, we've got about 84,000 megawatts of capacity. I think you're off by a couple orders of magnitude when talking about thousands of gigawatts.

According to Reuters, I was off by a factor of two, if the number they quoted counts all the plants they decided to shut down. ~4000 GW shut down. That’s a decent wild-ass guess, IMHO.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...

Yeah, I don't think Reuters is correct here. Everything I'm seeing is that a nuclear plant produces around 1 gigawatt, so we'd be talking about thousands of nuclear plants.

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.

Ah, that's a very fair napkin calculation, the 4000GW number is obviously wrong.

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 Texas: 29 million

Population Germany: 80+ million

In an emergency situation (a matter of life and death for the vulnerable) can't space heaters be powered by electricity then?

In "emergency situations", there is this crazy modern technology called "blankets" and "jackets" and "coats".

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.

> "But are people going to die? Not likely"

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.

Maybe if you want to heat a subset of rooms for the cost of heating the whole house.

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).

I never understoood why nobody makes a windowshaker heater, but I guess you could just install an existing unit in reverse and protect it from rain.

Same with portable air conditioners.

Windows here in Europe don't usually slide. And in Europe we like looking out of them :)

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).

I believe there are models of window units with heaters available though they may just be doing resistive heating. I've seen plenty of mini-splits running as heaters obviously using heat pumps and they seem to work quite well.

Short answer no. Unless someone comes up woth a scalable domestic heating version, using electricity, of AWS.

And stop spreading FUD about people freezing to death in there houses in winter, please.

Don't you literally just buy a wall heater and plug it in? What am I missing here?

You don't seeem to uave an idea how domestic heating works in most oarts of Europe, do you? And that simple plug in heater will consume so much electricity that your gas heating would still be cheaper. Also, that wall heater doesn't heat your water supply...

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?

Sorry, let's start over.

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?

No idea why the concept of energy, in the scope of a national ecobomy, is so hard to understand. 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.

Also, nobody will freeze to death in his house over this.

> No idea why the concept of energy, in the scope of a national ecobomy, is so hard to understand.

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?