Your points do not dispute doomberg's argument. The reality is that EU wood pellet consumption has been increasing. Germany and France are leading the growth. It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas. We have cleaner alternatives. Corruption and poor decision making is hurting progress.

Interesting report from the USDA. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/european-union-eu-wood-pellet-...

> It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas.

It's not that simple. Coal (/oil/gas) burning releases CO2 that was previously safely stored in the ground and didn't affect the Earth atmosphere. Burning wood only (granted, prematurely) releases CO2 that is already in circulation.

The main ecological problem with burning wood is deforestation and impact of harvesting on the animals and plants. If wood comes from renewable forests (there are lots of countries that properly manage their forests) then the environmental impact is much lower than with coal/oil/gas.

That said, importing the wood from half the world away sucks.

This point needs to be emphasized. Wood burning is renewable compared to coal.

Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

> Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.

I don't believe that is correct. Unless you are counting all of Russia. https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area

Ah, you are correct and I was wrong. I had looked it up, but didn't realize that the multiple different sources I looked at all seemed to count the entirety of Russia.

In hindsight, it should've been obvious that Europe (~10 million sqkm) couldn't have 1 billion hectares of forest coverage.

That source does show that Europe has the highest forest coverage, although the weird remark about Russia does imply that Asian Russia is counted. Moreover, North America, which I believe is quite forested, is totally absent from the chart.

Biofuel is the most striking example of why "renewable" is not always equivalent to "desirable". While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change), and also releases a equilibrium level of particulate matter, which causes large numbers of deaths from lung and heart diseases.

> While you can indeed re-grow wood, combusting it at scale maintains an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which causes climate change.

True but meaningless.

Sitting in my deck chair also maintains an equilibrium level of CO2, but it doesn't provide any heat or benefit to anyone.

We can't look unfavorably on energy approaches just because they fail to actually reduce CO2. That's some kind of unrealistic purity test.

It's not meaningless. CO₂ in the atmosphere causes the greehouse effect, which allows the sun to heat the earth more. To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere. You need non-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, etc.

> To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.

But we don’t want to fully avoid the greenhouse effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect:

“Earth's natural greenhouse effect keeps the planet from having the below freezing temperature that it would have if there were no greenhouse gases”

He's talking about the excess unnatural greenhouse effect.

I don’t see how one can read that from “To avoid greenhouse effect you can't have things that require CO₂ to constantly remain in the atmosphere.”

The natural greenhouse effect has CO₂ constantly (I think at least since there’s any carbohydrate burning on earth) remaining in the atmosphere.

It's all implied. Maybe he doesn't know about some of those things, but it is incredibly common to talk about it in those terms without spelling out that you mean excess / problem-causing amounts of the effect, etc. When he says can't have things he's talking about human energy use. He says right after you need to use wind, solar, etc.

You're right about the particulates, but I believe that burning wood can't really cause climate change.

Wood is already in the biosphere. Even if we don't burn it, it will decompose and release all its CO2 that way, or burn in a forest fire. The CO2 of that wood is already circulating.

It doesn't actually increase CO2 levels the way that digging up long-buried fossil fuels does.

If you cut down and burn trees that take 50 years to grow in 3 seconds, you've increased the amount of CO₂ in the air. Sure it will eventually go away, but the thing that causes climate change is the CO₂ being in air at elevated levels, even if it's in a cycle.

Biofuel is almost as bad as fossil at 230 gCO₂-eq/kWh. [1]. Compare to solar pv at 40 and nuclear at 12.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

The footnote on those numbers says:

> Direct emissions from biomass combustion at the power plant are positive and significant, but should be seen in connection with the CO2 absorbed by growing plants. They can be derived from the chemical carbon content of biomass and the power plant efficiency. For a comprehensive discussion see Chapter 11, Section 11.13

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

> have led to strong forest Carbon sinks in many OECD regions (Pan et al., 2011; Loudermilk et al., 2013; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Erb et al., 2013). However, the capacity of these sinks is being reduced as forests approach saturation (Smith, 2005; Körner, 2006; Guldea et al., 2008; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Sections 11.2.3, 11.3.2). Active forest management, including management for bioenergy, is therefore important for sustaining the strength of the forest carbon sink well into the future (Nabuurs et al., 2007, 2013; Canadell and Raupach, 2008; Ciais et al., 2008), although countries should realize that for some old forest areas, conserving carbon stocks may be preferential, and that the actively managed forests may for some time (decades) act as sources.

But burning fossil fuel does _not_ maintain an equilibrium level of CO₂ in the atmosphere (which is the main reason why we have climate change in the first place)

But as doomberg is pointing out the actual alternative we should be comparing to isn't coal but uranium.

We'd need a time machine to start building reactors a few decades ago. And why, just to build more of the most expensive energy source ever conceived with the potential to make large portions of Europe uninhabitable?

Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe, there's the proliferation risk, and only very few countries figured out how to store spent fuel. Promises of safe and cheap tech to solve these problems are common but still unfulfilled.

Solar and wind energy on the other hand is so cheap to build up and don't need decade long mega projects. We can have a better, cheaper energy source right now. Nuclear has nothing to offer.

Because people want heat and electricity when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing enough (or at all) which happens pretty regularly

If you haven't won the geographic lottery then...

You can burn coal like there is no tomorrow (see Poland)

Or gas (see Germany, and most of Europe for heating), and enable Russia and other undesirables

Or nuclear and have energy security without directly and indirectly causing death and suffering for millions

Except - I guess - CO2 free energy when it's dark and windless. Like in a typical November night <hen you like having your home heated to acceptable levels.

Doesn't need to be November

Germany is dark and windless plenty of the time during summer: ~8 hours a day

I frequently saw our solar and wind usage below even 5% of their respective capacities

>Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe

Both are true because "spent" fuel isn't reprocessed because mumble mumble nonproliferation, yes?

In the mean time, obscene amounts are being spent on fusion, which will never even compete with fission on any metric.

Solar and wind have been the future for my whole life. Now we have an energy crisis. An artificial one for sure - we could open the pipes to Russia and they'd sell probably sell gas again - but a crisis nonetheless. The claim renewables are better was never true and the price of not stopping that deception is that now we face darkness.

As for nuclear, step one is certainly to stop listening to arguments like "it's too late, it would take too long to build":

https://twitter.com/mlanetrain/status/1556381583585804291

"This is some grim real life dramatic irony: Nick Clegg opposing nuclear power in 2010 because it would only come on-stream by 2021 or 2022."

anything that means people living near a thousand open or semi-open fires is vastly more unsafe.

wood in particular is the worst offender.

plus logging and transportation both are very unsafe industries.

spent fuel storage is a complete non-issue. even bringing it up shows the ridiculousness of the anti-nuclear lobby.

the only real risk is proliferation. which fortunately is again a non-issue in Europe, because the counties in question already have nuclear capabilities.

Distributing uranium pellets for domestic heating might prove problematic, likewise trying to burn uranium pellets in existing coal power plants to facilitate the transition to other sources would be problematic.

Europe isn't really a continent though.

More like a subcontinent of Asia, like India.

It is called eurasia.

It's not even that simple. Burning wood is only carbon-neutral on a multi-decade timescale. Trouble is, the next couple decades are critical. We're at risk of pushing the climate over tipping points, after which warming will go further even if we take our own emissions to zero.

So it's important that we reduce emissions in the short term. Burning wood increases short-term emissions. By the time it all balances out, it'll be too late for it to matter.

And even that assumes that the forests grow back enough to balance out. Those tipping points include drought and forest fires, so that's not a given.

>Coal (/oil/gas) burning releases CO2 that was previously safely stored in the ground and didn't affect the Earth atmosphere

This sounds crazy to me. The whole issue with climate change and CO2 is there is too much on a global scale. So it's all fungible. Yet people continually talk as though the CO2 molecules have labels on them to determine if they're sinful or not.

I don't know how the infrastructure works for biomass, but open pit coal mines in the US are extraordinarily efficient when management isn't fucking them up. We're talking electric conveyor systems that span from pit to plant, diesel-electric haul trucks, and a rail loop that drives right under the plant for loading onto a train that will net about 15-17k tons and ship "directly" to the generator. A coal seam can last a real long time depending on demand. And the infrastructure is already there and has been for ~50 years with various optimizations added along the way - at least in my locale.

I'm under the impression that logging is far less efficient due to the nature and complications of the work, but that is, I admit, simple conjecture: You're constantly moving, maybe with some gravity assist, to transport and load the raw material, I imagine for packing efficiency they're chipping straight into a 53' trailer, which will then port a relatively small sum, about 21-22.5 tons, compared with a haul truck, which range from 153-410 tons for back-and-forth movement. If we consider this holistically, BTU/man, BTU/manhour should both be accounted for as well, since those are real inputs which at scale (I imagine) represent a pretty substantial expense in terms of CO2.

Coal is also "processed" on site, with pretty minimal input: being crushing, drying, and sometimes spraying. There aren't secondary and tertiary processes.

Energy from PRB coal, at the minimum of my data is about 7,420 BTU/lb. Some dry wood can "compete" at this level, apparently, when dry in fact one data point indicates 9033 BTU/lb (Colorado Pinyon). Maximum mean BTU for coal in the PRB is 11k (compared to 8.2 kBTU/lb pellet). I say compete because from what I've heard, generator designs aren't indiscriminate and require certain energy densities to hit efficiency - which may be a benefit of biomass because there's a lot more control, I'd imagine, in pelletizing wood vs. coal, which is a simple mix-batch. At scale it might actually be a pretty considerable boon for biomass.

To me this reads that biomass is going to require more input to extract the same amount of energy. The processing to get biomass to similar energy density is going to require more energy input. But even the primary input, knocking trees over, chipping them, porting them, is going to be less efficient and less centralized, and even once it does culminate in some logistical knot... You said it yourself, it sucks. But also, deforestation sucks. So does human sprawl.

My point here is that I do think the idea that burning wood is "carbon neutral" is spurious, because there are a lot of points which fossil fuels are used, and used less efficiently, and that the process at least by my imagination is ultimately less efficient, and those losses will also inevitably contribute to increases in the CO2 chain which I think is largely ignored. Maybe it's more like slightly-less carbon - cause the whole "if it's wood and we burn it now and let it grow back later while we keep cutting more and more down to satisfy the constantly increasing energy demands..." reads like we're displacing consequences into the future.

But! This is with the caveat that I'm not particularly familiar with the processes of biomass fuel production chain, and that my calculations are based on US information and doesn't necessarily pertain to industries in the EU.

Trees also store CO2. Actually, burning trees means less CO2 will be extracted from the air. More CO2 in the world means plants and trees can grow quicker.

If one believe CO2 is an issue (personally I don’t buy it), then burning trees is not a great way to fix the issue.

Once trees die they will release all that CO2 back into the atmosphere anyway. And trees will naturally die. Then another tree will grow in its place over time.

It's not a permanent storage of CO2 unless we cut it down and bury it or build something long-lasting with it.

I don't think that's true, how does "all the CO2" get released back into the atmosphere? During the decomposition of wood there are a lot of bacteria, fungi, worms, etc. that feed on the carcass of a dead tree. It doesn't just "evaporate" into the atmosphere...

The bacteria, fungi etc. emit CO2 as part of their metabolic process, just like you and I do.

There's also carbon sequestered in the soil. Decomposition doesn't end up with the entire tree evaporating.

It's great that 95%+ of the people we consider experts in these fields don't matter because CO2 is something plants breathe? Famously you can never have too much of a good thing. Impossible to overdose on water as we all know.

> Your points do not dispute doomberg's argument.[...] It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas.

How about this number? Coal consumption in the EU in the last 30 years: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/de/web/products-eurostat-news/...

Still more than 10x the number of burnt wood. Should we replace all coal by wood? Heck no, that'd be insane, but Doomberg framed this whole thing in a sensationalist way. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what the whole thread is about:

- UK burned wood a hundred years ago, which was totally inefficient.

- Then they discovered coal, which is more energy efficient.

- Now the EU is back to burning wood, even though it is less efficient than coal and they call this green, which is dumb. (Ignoring many aspects of the whole thing)

- The EU is stupid and they should go full nuclear instead.

I'm simply pointing out that Doomberg's chain of arguments lack actual numbers and neglect a few things (stove efficiency, different goals, etc.), even though the gist of it at least somewhat true.

> The EU is stupid and they should go full nuclear instead.

Policies differ between EU countries. Finland just brought a reactor online. France is planning to build 14 reactors in the next decade. On the other hand Germany is going to shut down 3 reactors.

The last reactors France built all (including the one in Finland) have had more than 10 years delay compared to what was planned, so I doubt we are going to build 14 in the next decade :)

The last reactors France has built were also the first of their kind built in the country. The reactors built during the Messmer plan were mostly of 4 distinct types built repeatedly. The main to away from analysis of nuclear plant cost history is that plants become cheaper when the knowledge from previous builds is taken to subsequent builds. Problems that are encountered in earlier builds are avoided, lowering cost.

Plants built during the nuclear boom in the 1960s and early 70s often had inflation -adjusted costs of 1-2 billion USD per GW of capacity. And that's with no intermittency and a capacity factor of over 90%.

They could well do, if they’re working out how to optimise it, and the workers get the hang of it.

As I understand it a large problem has been with poor quality welds being caught too late in the process.

Quality isn’t an easy thing to change, but I trust they can remedy for future builds.

Also Poland [0].

[0] https://pl.usembassy.gov/civil_nuclear_cooperation/

>It is generally accepted that wood burning produces more co2 than coal and natural gas

That doesn't seem possible unless we are discounting the carbon captured while the tree grew.

> That doesn't seem possible unless we are discounting the carbon captured while the tree grew.

Half of it

The other half lies still safely under the surface. When a tree is chomped we take only half of the tree. This amount should be taken in mind in the model.

I think they mean on a per unit basis, not total from all burnt wood vs. all burnt coal/lng

The factoid that gets thrown about is carbon emitted per energy released. Coal does better than wood on this super specific stat, but it's fossil CO2 we just dug out the ground, whereas wood from a managed forest used for other purposes is carbon negative if the alterantive is leaving it to rot to methane, because it's extracting CO2 from the air and then the managed forest is growing more trees that do the same, because we use wood for things.

There's complications and details, but overall if everyone is doing what they should its okay and most of the hype is fossil fuel propaganda. Windmills upset the worms etc.

Unfortunately the irony of European countries asking India to stop burning coal for power is lost on the leaders of the same countries which are now burning wood...

> I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons

... Well yes, the entire point is that it's incredibly polluting, even more so than all the other fuels we're trying to supplant.

Especially silly when countries simultaneously are trying to shut down nuclear, going from as green as we can practically do (fewest deaths and fewest resources per TWh) to as bad as it can realistically get (by same metrics). The only worse source of energy I can think of would be people burning their own trash as-is.

Pellets in Switzerland are all from local Forrest that are specifically used for this. The manufacturing of pellets requires no additives and if 4 or more homes are sharing a burner (recommended) the burner has to meet very strict emissions and needs to be inspected regularly. Because the resources are local and the burning only produces CO2 which is planted again, it is considered quite sustainable.

If course a geo thermal heat pump and solar would be better but not every one has 100k extra to get that installed.

I honestly doubt that 100% of Swiss pellets came from Swiss... It would be FAR more expensive and if in Swiss pellets are common like in France or Italy... Swiss pellets production will erase forests in a decade.

Beside that pellets in general is not sustainable due to the usage scale: wood is renewable BUT at a certain rate. If we all heat with pellets the usage rate is simply too high. Solar + heat pumps is nice IF you do not need much heat AND you have enough sunlight AND a veeery big hot water storage: I'm actually evaluating this for my home, witch is new "Minergie/A class" kind, with a small p.v. plant, with potentially enough room for insulated storage in sufficient quantity and well... I need at least 3000l of water, 10kWp solar to pass a single SUNNY winter day 100% on local energy for heating (witch means not counting water circulatory pumps etc). It's potentially feasible on scale, but IF and only IF we re-build all homes, annihilating condominiums, limiting the change to Europe south/center. Oh and heat pumps compressors does not last more than 10 years in general... It's not just a matter of costs, it's also a matter of scale.

How quickly is each consumed tree replaced, how quickly is the CO2 from the entire supply chain recaptured, and how quickly does the other pollutants degrade?

If it takes years to recreate the resources or recapture the CO2 from what is burnt in the course of days, then it is pretty grotesque to call it sustainable, but maybe the numbers show otherwise?

If everybody shares burners for highly processed pelletized wood that lives up to power-plant like smoke processing requirements (how many would you say do? 90%? 20%?), then indeed you might be able to just being as bad as coal... Which is horrible.

Air-to-water heatpumps are also an option, no need to compare to the heating solution with the highest installation cost.

Depends on the surface area of the forest. A single tree takes tens of years to grow but a certain area of forest contains enough growing trees that by the time you cut down the last the one you planted first has grown to full.

Do note that a tree that dies in forest also produces CO2. Exactly the amount it does if it’s burned (unless it’s a peat bog or whatnot). So not burning it doesn’t really change things.

> Do note that a tree that dies in forest also produces CO2. Exactly the amount it does if it’s burned (unless it’s a peat bog or whatnot). So not burning it doesn’t really change things.

Growing trees require more than just CO2, and I imagine there are limits to how much this process can be accelerated without environmental impact. Depending on the tree sort and location they may naturally live for long enough to be considered immortal for all practical purposes, so felling the tree after only 10 years presents a very significant increase in tree turnover, and as the tree is taken away it does not fertilize the soil again, so there's a significant increase in soil nutrient and water requirements in the area.

Plus, the felling operation, timber processing and pellet production require large amounts of energy. There is a significant environmental load even if the pellets are never burnt to release the stored CO2.

So yes, it changes things a whole lot.

Here in the US I don't think I've ever heard of a shared burner between multiple homes. It seems like an interesting idea. How common are these? How does it typically work? Does one home owner sell heat to the neighbors, or is it jointly owned? Or is there no "typical", and it's always a custom arrangement?

It’s just a heat exchanger glycol loop that uses burning wood to generate the heat, very similar to a gas-fired boiler. With a large enough burner you can have multiple heat exchangers or multiple glycol loops with a large heat exchanger for multiple buildings, similar to how commercial buildings use a single boiler or chiller to heat/cool large buildings or multiple buildings that need multiple heating or cooling glycol loops.

Most of the houses that burn wood for heat in the US are in sparsely populated rural areas where sharing a burner wouldn’t make sense due to the loop length and pumps needed to circulate the glycol. Densely populated areas in the US that need lots of winter heating generally have natural gas distribution networks.

I don't know about typical, but I know a couple of people (here in Switzerland) using pellets and they jointly (that is, together with their neighbours) own the burner. They made the investment together and pay for all expenses together. I also heared that it makes most sense for a densly populated area like an old town (talking about european old towns) or big buildings like a school. Doesn't make too much sense if every one-family home has their own.

Pre pandemic, London air quality was returned to worse than before the Clean Air Act by wood burning for vanity hearths.

Related earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32765950

and earlier NYT article with more information about European protected forest cutting, legal and illegal:

https://archive.ph/7se1H

> I personally think burning wood in housing areas > should be banned entirely for health reasons

Contemporary pellet burners and inserts are incredibly cost-effective and clean.

Gosh, even heating with peat is ecologically sound if it is extracted nearby.

Peat is only arguably renewable though - it grows at something like half a mm a year in thickness. Vegetation takes a long time to come back in those environments, and there's also so many more high-value things the peat could be used for instead. We must leave our grandchildren a world with Laphroaig..

Grid solar has both fewer deaths than Nuclear and uses fewer resources like water, thus the lower costs.

Rooftop solar is dangerous because people are putting stuff on roofs and can fall off in the process, so rooftop solar probably shouldn’t be subsidized IMO.

A nuclear power plan doesn’t “use” water. It takes fresh water in and reject it later a bit warmer. That’s pretty much it.

Water usage must be one of the silliest metric used in ecology by the way. Water doesn’t magically disappear when it’s “used”. What’s important is the share of the potable water available in an area used by an activity and how much other pollutants are released in the water.

Don’t be silly, “Use“ does not imply destruction it just implies an opportunity cost. Land you use for a nuclear power plant isn’t destroyed, but you can’t put a shopping mall there until you decommission it.

Water evaporated into the atmosphere before it can be use to irrigate crops is one such cost. Nuclear therefore uses ~600 - 800 gallons per MWH not a huge amount but much larger than solar. On the other hand much larger quantities of water are discharged in such a way they an be reused down stream, that’s not what I am talking about.

> A nuclear power plan doesn’t “use” water.

Some nuclear power plants have cooling towers that evaporate large quantities of water.

So it will flow away into universe...

Water use doesn't mean destroying water. It means using some of the limited quantity of water that's available at a given time in a given place, using it for a given purpose and not some other purpose.

Water that evaporates isn't available for drinking and showers and farming.

It is - it will rain down not too far away.

So it will be available again in the future, but it's not available right now anymore.

I guess everyone here lives someplace with abundant water. When water supplies are actually limited, using water for one purpose means water isn't available for something else.

Edit:

I know nothing about European water supplies, but with a quick search I found news suggesting that is an issue even in Europe:

https://www.euronews.com/2022/08/08/nothing-left-in-the-pipe...

Where exactly in Europe are water supplies limited?

Edit for your edit: Europe definitely could do better in terms of making use of the available water - but there's no shortage of water in nature around us.

For example, the communists have damaged many rivers (made the river basins concrete etc), leading to drying of the surrounding areas. We're slowly correcting the damage. But generally speaking we have enough water. And you choose the place to build a nuclear power plant based on water availability.

Perhaps it's more of a problem in the southern states, I don't know about that. But we have an interconnected grid - we can sell electricity from one state to another (it's being done today).

Unfortunately there's water scarcity in Europe and it's only going to get worse. I'll just leave this here: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/water-stress...

If I understand that map right... We are going to be moving from medium/severe water stress to low water stress in many central/northern areas - isn't that an improvement in water availability? Why couldn't we build the nuclear power plants primarily in the light-yellow places and transfer the electricity via the grid to the places where it's worse?

I don't understand why should we reject it altogether on the whole continent just because it's bad in Spain and Italy - OK, agreed, let's not build nuclear there maybe. The rest of the EU seems like a good place.

Most especially, Germany should stop ignoring science and make the water-rich land they got available for as much nuclear as possible. The Union needs it now more than ever, and it's not like they haven't got a hand in creating the situation.

No, in the heatwave of this summer, some French nuclear plants had to be turned off because the rivers in which the cooling water had to be released had become too warm. (Further French nuclear plants had to be turned off due to technical problems.) So France had to import much energy to meet its demand. It was mainly Germany that helped out. The same problem affected – besides Belgium, Switzerland – Germany, too, though to a lesser degree (no pun intended) because Germany is less dependent on nuclear.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bloomberg/news/2022-08-03-fra...

https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-power-production-curtailed-...

https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/08/07/failing-french-nucle...

https://www.grs.de/en/news/built-close-water-do-increasing-d...

https://www.thelocal.de/20090630/20301/ [Rhine, too, heated up by nuclear plants]

That is a question of design and not a necessity.

> Rooftop solar is dangerous because people are putting stuff on roofs and can fall off in the process

This is very misleading. Roofing is dangerous and deaths when installing panels are blamed on solar energy.

Yet, people need to build and rebuild roofs anyways. If solar panels or shingles are installed when a house is built or refurbished accidents should not be blamed on solar energy.

Additionally, some countries (especially US) have poorly enforced work safety regulations and that can be improved. Plus, houses can be built with safe roofs i.e. flat roofs.

It’s not just installing panels homeowners will climb up to remove snow, do maintenance, etc.

On a house by house basis it’s not a significant risk, but when you start comparing it to the ~1/2 billion homes it would take to equal the worlds nuclear power plants low risks do add up.

> when you start comparing it to the ~1/2 billion homes it would take to equal the worlds nuclear power plants

...while also completely ignoring the systemic risks involving the latter.

Over grid solar?

There are some edge case advantages to rooftop solar for individual homeowners, but when everyone is connecting to the grid anyway I don’t think it’s a good idea to subsidize the more expensive option. It’s simply a waste of public funds when we can hit a larger bank for the buck both economically and environmentally.

GAF Energy in the last year came out with nailable solar shingles so the installation process is similar to a normal roof. I think that's the future because it only adds a relatively small cost to the cost of replacing a roof or new one, doesn't require any structural changes to framing (sometimes needed), and the risk of "stuff falling" is the same.

https://www.gaf.energy/timberline-solar/

Are these available to DIYers? I'm building a shed and would just as soon use these if I could. As it stands, I'm just going to overbuild the roof structure a bit and then add racked solar when I get around to it.

I don't know, but I recommend reaching out. Sounds like a cool project!

It’s better, but I still expect some fool to climb up onto their roof in the winter to remove snow etc. When you start talking 100’s of millions of homes your end up dealing with vast numbers of really dumb people.

Bold, wild claims require evidence for the rest of us to believe you. Got any?

Bold? Here’s a video of someone actually falling off their roof, but you can find plenty of videos where people are walking around their roof looking at their panels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA4HrMy9djk

Here’s an article actually recommending it for flat roofs.

Using a Shovel Method

Shoveling is the riskiest of the snow removal procedures from your roof. The reason for this is that it requires you to climb to the roof to remove the snow.

There’s risk in climbing the ladder, the shoveling itself, and the risk of damaging the roof if you step in a weak spot or hit the shovel on a delicate part of the roof.

However, it is the best especially on a flat surface/roof https://roofscour.com/how-to-remove-snow-off-roof/

There's not enough sunlight per day in the coming months in most of Europe. How's solar going to help?

To replace just a single nuclear reactor you need so many solar panels that the deaths caused by the transportation will be significant - accidents, pollution + you have to count the damaged roads that need to be replaced - again pollution and accidents. And high-voltage electricity is not exactly safe - you would need so much electrical work that there simply must be a lot of death from accidents too, on this scale we're getting into the area where it's statistics and not really something to simply prevent.

Solar panels need to be replaced after 30 years max, but most probably will be replaced much earlier because the operators want to pocket the improved efficiency of newer panels. Reactors will need maintenance but it is normal to keep them running much longer. Also, what about the human labor? To maintain such large solar array you'd need hundreds of people. A modern nuclear powerplant with 5+ reactors is maintained by few dozens of people.

I'm a huge proponent of solar energy - but on rooftops, not as a replacement of nature or nuclear power. It will never be possible to phase out fossil fuels in transport and industrial uses without nuclear power - solar just doesn't scale this much, it's perfect for individual houses but you just can't power thousands of large container ships with it, nor blast furnaces etc - and definitely not the uncountable amount of trucks and cars on roads.

How many transportation deaths are associated with ~1,000 works showing up every week to a nuclear power plant for 50+ years?

Ballpark say 1,000 people * 30 total mile daily commute * 365 days a year * 50 years round to ~1 billion miles driven over the lifetime of a power plant in the US should represent around 13 traffic fatalities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Let’s call it somewhere between 5 a 25 transportation deaths per nuclear power plant, meanwhile large solar farms are often completely empty of people 90+% of the time.

>Solar panels need to be replaced after 30 years max, but most probably will be replaced much earlier because the operators want to pocket the improved efficiency of newer panels. Reactors will need maintenance but it is normal to keep them running much longer. Also, what about the human labor? To maintain such large solar array you'd need hundreds of people. A modern nuclear powerplant with 5+ reactors is maintained by few dozens of people.

To just pick at one of your "statistics": E.g. Flamanville, a reactor plant with 2 reactors (and 1 being built) employed 670 people (not a "few dozens")[1]. I would argue the solar panels are the ones needing much less people. The ones I know don't need any kind of big servicing. But in those sizes this is pure speculation from my side.

> To replace just a single nuclear reactor you need so many solar panels that the deaths caused by the transportation will be significant - accidents, pollution + you have to count the damaged roads that need to be replaced - again pollution and accidents. And high-voltage electricity is not exactly safe - you would need so much electrical work that there simply must be a lot of death from accidents too, on this scale we're getting into the area where it's statistics and not really something to simply prevent.

Electronics-wise I don't see why there is so much more (and more dangerous) work involved in wiring up solar panels compared to constructing a nuclear plant. But I don't have statistics on that. I also wanted to know if your "deaths caused by the transportation will be significant" makes any sense. For that I tried to estimate the kind of size a solar park would have be to replace a reactor plant, e.g. Flamanville. Flamanville produces 14TWh per year. I took [2] as a reference(2.14km², 117GWh) and it came out to 256km² of area to produce the same amount of energy per year with solar in the flat part of germany. Storage is missing there. This is a huge amount of space, but also nothing that will produce "significant accidents" on its own. Constructing reactors and transporting fuel rods and nuclear waste is also a huge act with tons of material involved.

> It will never be possible to phase out fossil fuels in transport and industrial uses without nuclear power - solar just doesn't scale this much, it's perfect for individual houses but you just can't power thousands of large container ships with it, nor blast furnaces etc - and definitely not the uncountable amount of trucks and cars on roads.

Maybe direct batteries are not a solution for transport and industrial uses. But green h2 would be. This then has the fortunate aspect that it can be produced anywhere and independent of the need, e.g. in the Sahara and only when the sun shines. In that way solar can replace fossil fuels and nuclear power. Regarding cars and regular power use (btw germany covers ~40% of its energy with renewables already, taking this times two or three is not an issue of "scale"), lets just take the solar example from above and try to do 150% of germany's current power needs in full solar and see where that gets us. Germany needed 624 TWh in its peak year (2007, [3]), lets be generous and say we need 1000TWh in the future. This comes down to 18300 km². Germany has an area of 358000km². So our (very generous) solar capacity would need about an area of 5%. How much is 5%? According to [4], citys and streets (etc.) sum up to 14.5%, Agriculture has about 50%, Forests 30%. Since we can "simply" put the panels on top of the first category and don't have to replace existing areas most of the time, this looks pretty feasible to me, even with exaggerated demands in napkin calculations. So maybe it does not scale well, but it does scale.

And all of this does not take into account that solar is not the only option. Power from wind is a great way to mix since wind is strong mostly when there is no/less sun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templin_Solar_Park (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpark_Templin_%E2%80%93_Gr... has the energy statistics regarding GWh in 2017)

[3] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/energie/stromverbrauch (german, but the graph should be readable)

[4] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/flaeche-boden-land-oeko... (also german)

> - I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons.

From what I understand, modern fireplaces and wood stoves can be 70% to 80% efficient. Rocket mass stove can be over 90% efficient. I don't know how efficient pellet stoves can be. Smoke is from the wood that isn't completely burned, so more efficiency means more combustion and less smoke. My guess is that this is also going to be a lot better for health than an older and less efficient wood heat source. I would be interested in knowing how accurate I am but a quick web search hasn't turned up a whole lot.

I had a rocket mass heater for a few years and it was awesome - no smoke out the chimney, just steam. I burned sticks raked up out of my yard, pinecones, construction scraps, etc.

There have been a lot of improvements in RMH design in recent years, led largely by the RMH enthusiasts at https://permies.com/f/260/rocket-mass-heaters

IMO traditional metal wood stoves really suck compared RMHs, but they can be made better by routing the exhaust through a stratification chamber (eg a large metal container like a barrel or a old water tank; hot flue gas enters the top, cooler flue gas exits the bottom). Pretty easy to set up next to an existing wood stove, and you get a lot more heat and a lot less smoke out of an otherwise crappy stove.

I've always found rocket mass heaters to be quite interesting. One day I'll get around to making one. I'm in an area where I might be able to use it a couple weeks out of the year so it's not much of a priority.

> I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons.

What about for cooking? Smoking meat requires the use of wood splits being used to build a wood fire in a smoker.

Depends. Do you burn tons of wood every day as my neighbor for a daily barbeque or 10 hours in a row in your smoker? Does the smoke go into my sleeping room in the summer? I'd rather prefer if you didn't. Once in a while? I have to accept it (and might to a barbeque once in a while, too).

this is the reality here - dozens of wood fires for small groups of people with zero filtering; so easy and common, difficult to see the cumulative effects. I believe open fires have been completely banned in my area due to simple excess by a small number of careless actors.

> sensationalist

unfortunately this is how you get 5~6 digit followers on fintwit. its no longer about nuanced analysis but how can I disguise my political narrative in the form of "DD" or "analytical take" but leave room for contingency in case somebody digs deeper and throws stone at my bridge made out of twigs?

"- I personally think burning wood in housing areas should be banned entirely for health reasons."

It would be a start, if coal for heating homes would be banned (you can buy it in the supermarket here).

But stopping people from burning wood they get from their garden/forests, like I do now, is never gonna get through and I do not see any reasons why it should.

The only time burning stoves bother people, is when people start their fires and more so if they do it non efficient. That smells bad and is bad.

But once it burns? Not a problem, unless everyone in a crowded area would do it.

And about CO2, well, it is a net zero, if the area where the wood comes from, is regrowing trees again.

The US DOE designed the most efficient wood stoves during Jimmy Carter's presidency (he was an engineer by training). Those are the same ones we use today. This isn't a recent thing. This includes cat converter wood stoves.

Strictly wood is NOT a carbon footprint because it's part of a short-term carbon cycle (in <100 years it's already back into trees).

Until recently I lived in the boonies and ONLY used wood for heating.

The biggest problem with wood: you have to constantly manage/regulate the fueling and heating - even the best stoves need to be refilled in 4-6 hours when the temperature is below 10C. Further, you only get this if you've aged (dried) the wood for 2 years first. Newly cut wood is 20-30% water and the heat of vaporization to steam radically reduces the heating value of the burned wood.

I downvoted this because I think you are wrong about some crucial details. Woodstoves have in fact improved considerably since the late 70's: higher efficiency, longer reload times, and lower emissions. Modern woodstoves do not need to be refilled every 4-6 hours.

I'm in a good position to assert this, since we live in Vermont (a place with cold winters) and heat almost exclusively with wood. We recently upgraded from what was a state-of-the-art 1980's stove to a start-of-the-art 2020's stove. Doing so reduced our fuel consumption by about 30%, and improved our reload time from the 4-6 hours you mention to 8-10 hours.

After upgrading, I no longer have to get up in the night to feed the fire. And this is in a 100 year old house with overnight outside temperatures frequently in the -20C to -10C range (-5F to 15F). I do agree with you though on the necessity of properly drying wood and on the carbon cycle.

> But the reality is more complex than this thread claims.

Disagree - I think it is very simple and you are over-complicating, which is what the EU bureaucrats do to obfuscate their bad decisions bc they do not want accountability for what they do.

Let me simplify:

- past and present decisions by EU bureaucrats = bad

- nuclear energy = good

There. Now the EU people know who to blame and what to do.

But the EU leadership is like - "Hubbuduh hubbuduh, blah blah..."

It's distraction. Don't fall for that politic shit.

Energy is not an EU competency. And to be clear, EU bureaucrats decide basically nothing, the council of ministers makes all EU decisions and they are the elected ministers of the member states.

> Energy is not an EU competency

You’re right about that.

> the council of ministers makes all EU decisions and they are the elected ministers of the member states.

Then whoever is electing those ministers better start electing other, smarter people.

That would be the people of Europe, and I agree. But blaming it on faceless bureaucrats is a distraction from that.

> Let me simplify:

You simply don't know of EU works or you're lying because you have an agenda.

My agenda is that is that I wish the best for the people of the EU. The people running the EU do not, which is proven by their illogical actions.

The issue is not that the people running the EU do not want what's best for the EU. It's that:

    1. "what's best" is subjective
    2. They sometimes lack the ability to understand and measure the consequences of their decisions

> The people running the EU do not

It's not clear why one should believe you do, given that your idea of EU inner working is based on false assumptions.

The fill me in - what do I not get about the inner workings of the EU?