Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
There is no law that says that you must use gas for heat. But once you have that installed base, you can’t just switch from gas to electric heat overnight. It will take decades to make that change. Even if all of the equipment was available (and it’s not), it would take a team of 3-5 workers 2-3 days to convert each home. And that’s assuming a simpler gas -> electric boiler swap without needing to upgrade electrical service panels/etc. This type of change can get complicated quickly for just a single house. Multi unit homes would be more complex. Now factor that over all other homes/buildings and you can see that the number of workers required to do this rapidly don’t exist.
Even in the US, there is a push to phase out gas heat in many locations. But it’s a phased rollout with a plan decades long.
Could this be a longer term plan? Definitely. But with a quick turnaround? Not really.
There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
In fact, at least in the US, space heaters aren’t allowed to be automatically turned on by any means. They require a person to start it manually each time you want heat. Because they aren’t permanently installed, it is a potential fire hazard. A pet/kid/etc could run past it and knock it over. If that happened near a blanket or pillow, the fabric could catch fire.
I can’t imagine being able to buy something less safe in Switzerland.
Portable Electric Space Heater with Thermostat, 1500W/750W Safe and Quiet Ceramic Heater Fan, Heat Up 200 Square Feet for Office Room Desk Indoor Use https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu
I’ve got no dog in the Euro energy debates, but I can say that anecdotally it’s been fine staying warm with electric heat in the interim. Obviously having a single centrally controlled thermostat is preferable, but it is really a vanishingly negligible task to flip heater a switch on or off.
I also have a permanently installed electric heater installed in the wall in a different room. It does have a permanent thermostat that can start/stop automatically. It’s quite a different beast from a $20 space heater with its own circuit back to my breaker box. It works pretty well, but portable, it is not. It was also much more than $20.
But, back to your original point — are you really suggesting replacing the entire German heating infrastructure with $20 ceramic heaters from Amazon? How is that a remotely viable solution? These are devices meant for heating a small office. If you want to heat an apartment or house or city, you need different options. And changing those over takes time and more consideration than buying a bunch of $20 space heaters.
Your point that you can't have central temperature controls with electric heating is just absurd, I learned how to build this in first semester of electrical engineering.
We (specific subsets of humanity) just completed a massive government led undertaking to distribute a brand new vaccine to huge swaths of population, which involved an insane amount of logistics. And then also RAT kits. On the heels of that, you're telling me that distributing a small box that doesn't need to be stored at -20C or else it goes bad, to every household in a country is simply too hard and we shouldn't even bother, and just let people freeze to death? I mean, yeah it seems a bit late to start. The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022. The second best time though is now.
This would be pointless in Germany, though, since there isn't enough electricity in the European grid to make a short term switch for this many people. (Also the price for electricity is already still much higher than for NG).
For this year, it's already getting too late to act, apart from trying to make as much LNG as possible available to the public.
For the future, electrification of Eueope will need large investments in stable&affordable power production with incentives for homeowners to make the switch as it comes online. Typically such an incentive would be to gradually introduce a tax on NG that will eventually be high enough to squeeze it out of the market.
> The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022.
The best time to start this would have been 20-50 years ago.
> The second best time though is now.
True!
I've heard a few people say this, but it's not true - the efficiency of electric heaters is 100%. They're only detrimental when they run off of fossil-fuel based power plants. Instead of making silly laws banning symptoms, our focus should be on removing the pollution at its source.
b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months.
c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have
d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough.
At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump.
TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.
Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.
Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up.
> Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil.
> I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).
For Germany you can double that. At least.
This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.
So, even if the average home could be switched over easily (which, I still think is wrong), that’s still would leave a lot of people without many good, financially feasible, options.
Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.
IMHO, what people demand is that Germany should recognize that the current crisis is the fruit of multiple decades of bad energy policy. If we don't, twenty years later, we'll still be saying "Yes, sadly, Germany is still burning gas, but you can't convert it overnight! What do you want?"
Something like €5000 plus labour in Lithuania, around half days work. Gov subsidises good portion of it.
There is no shortage of electricity in Germany, so there was no economic interest to build more nuclear power plants? Germny even exports electricity to France, which has a lot of nuclear power plants (many of which currently don't work).
We don't even know where to safely put the waste for the next million years. Germany doesn't have the huge inhabited areas like the US - and even they have not solve that problem yet.
You can’t currently build a reliable electric grid with wind and solar alone so you need either nuclear or fossil fuels.
So what did Germany do for heat before the wall fell and they got cheap fuels from Russia?
Germany used to be heated by gas created from coal and coal directly till about the 1960ies. Starting with the 1970ies already, the Soviet Union began delivery of natural gas.
This podcast has lots of details if you're interested. https://omegataupodcast.net/368-nuclear-waste-disposal-and-s...
No but there are laws of chemistry.
The point the previous poster was trying to make is, that the industry needs natural gas as a precursor product, mainly for the chemical industry. Obviously, you cannot replace that with electricity easily. Over 12% of Germany's natural gas use is purely for the chemical reactions it provides within the chemical industry. A further 10% is for use in the metal industry where gas also has been notoriously hard to replace as it's not used for its energy value alone but for providing reduction reactions.
What you say basically is, not only Germany should have kept on building nuclear, it should also have developed new hydrogen based industrial flows for all these sectors alone, things that exist nowhere on this world on actual scale.
So LNG terminals would have been necessary in any case. Germany had none due to the over-reliance on Russian gas.
Otherwise I will not comment on the difficulty of replacing domestic heating, which IS a huge block of gas usage, on the scale of a whole country, as others have already done this.
Hydro makes this simple. Nuclear makes it possible. No other approaches have been demonstrated that allows this without fossil fuels at scale.
The issue is if they don't have gas, transitioning other things to electricity becomes difficult, because you need copper.
Or I have used the oil boiler in the basement, if Norway didn't ban that in 2020. That would have freed up enough electricity for several homes in the UK or Germany.
Electrical heating is fine if all electricity produced is from hydro, nuclear or wind/solar, but it makes less sense if the grid relies too much on fossil fuels.
But you do have to transport the gas or electricity to the heating site, and I don't know how that adds up.
Also, if conditions are right, you can use electricity to run a heat pump and move heat from the outside air to the inside air; depending on the details, you can move a lot more watts of heat then you spend operating the heat pump. This can be more economical than direct heating.
Heat pumps are great and super cool but if you include the efficiency of generation it's unlikely to be more energetically efficient, yes.
It's close though, natural gas combined cycle plants are very efficient for what they are. And if the heater is electric, substitution for other electricity sources is possible... unlike now.
Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?
I'm hoping to get a heat pump next Summer.
But in 2025 it will be a completely different story which will likely require yet another investment. I'm kind of wondering how people that can't just do that kind of thing are going to cope, it is a worrying development. Of course it doesn't help that the measures to control the prices of energy here effectively benefit the large producers at the expense of the people that decided to go for heatpumps early on.
But as long as the countermeasures still split by gas and electricity usage it is to our advantage to get as close to the cap as possible on natural gas. Ridiculous, but the difference is too large to ignore.
If they weren't so impractical, everyone should have been buying gas turbines to make their electricity - that's the level of market failure we are talking about.
The incentives and the rhetoric are poorly aligned.
I guess a combination of harsh winters and cheap gas?
Crappy foundations without insulation, roofs and walls with poor insulation, front door directly opening into the house instead of a separate space, almost all of them freestanding (especially rural ones) and relatively large for the number of people living there. Heating in Canada is an interesting problem. -40 Celsius on the other side of a 4" barrier is nothing to take lightly. One elderly couple that I'm aware of had begun to dismantle their house on the inside and they were burning it all up bit-by-bit to stay warm, the two of them sitting around a shitty old pot bellied stove that moved the bulk of the heat generated straight out the chimney. Stuff like that breaks your heart.
My post was a little too quick… one of my good friends was an energy efficiency expert and when I asked him for advice on replacing a boiler in our “new to me” home and he goes “don’t!”.
We did an audit and spent about $4000 on efficiency retrofit - it cut our heating bill about 25%. That was 10 years ago, and we’ll probably start looking at replacement boilers when incentives ramp up for new tech.
A few years later I got another report and fixed a few more things. House cold spots mostly went away, bills went down, less outside noise, and have the same windows and furnace.
The gotcha is that the efficient units require more maintenance so in some situation it’s cheaper to be less efficient.
With the amount of flak raised about infrastructure not being able to handle electric vehicles I can't even imagine the chaos if the prairies went electric heat.
I'd really like to see strong baseline energy efficiency standards put in provincially for new builds and a lot of investment in retrofit, but with the current political climate in the prairies that's impossible. Promoting anything that doesn't burn both oil and money is anathema.
Advocates usually don’t mention that the solution for the millions of houses with hydronic systems are usually mini-splits, which are both ugly and noisy.
Lots of people who don’t have heat pumps are rabid advocates of them. In some cases trying to ban gas heat.
They seem to work okay in many parts of Alaska (down to about -20C):
* https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2021/even-in-frigid-tempe...
Also, the book Cooking Without Electricity was published a year ago. https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Stro...
But this is not the case for a heat pump.
This will definitely change in the next few years, as heat pumps will replace "fioul" (petrol ?) boilers, which are being slowly banned.
Which will make our direct co2 emissions slightly better, and our electricity generation problems MUCH bigger...
(Full disclosure : I bought a house with a 5-year old gas boiler that I haven't had the heart to trash yet, instead investing in insulation, and a good wood furnace. My goal for 2022-2023 winter is to use it half as little as last winter.)
My question isn't "why aren't you switching now", it's "why haven't you switched during the previous 20 years, when we've all known about climate change"? And on top of that there's the strategic issue with relying on Russia.
You do realize that in many countries - including the US - a very large portion of electricity is still generated from fossil fuels? Until there is enough electricity generated from wind/solar/nuclear, switching to an electric heat pump just switches where those fossil fuels get burned, i.e. it pollutes someone else's neighborhood instead of your own.
They decommissioned ~20GW of clean nuclear power over the past 20 years. Whatever way you cut it that’s a huge mistake for the climate (not to mention economy). That replaces most of the coal in that picture. Or replaces all of the gas and then some in that picture.
Is it a clusterfuck: yes. Is it ambitious to leave nuclear and fossils behind us: yes. As a wealthy society should we try: yes.
We Germans are a bit idealistic and maybe illusional but at least we try.
CO2 emissions equivalent to wind and solar (actually slightly better). Safety (deaths per kWh) also equivalent to wind and solar. And land use much much better. Waste is tiny for the energy produced and easily contained unlike other industries, which is why no one has died from waste.
So basically you're rejecting the safest power source with the least environmental impact, and the only source along with hydro that has actually empirically (in the real world) accomplished deep decarbonization of an electricity grid (e.g. Ontario, France, Sweden).
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Nuclear energy is climate change wise, surely a good deal but environment wise and human population wise, the thing is not that easy.
And nuclear waste is only easy contained if you are the US, Russia, Canada or Australia. Because otherwise you do not have a significant sized land area where you can burry that waste without creating massive problems.
There is nowhere to leak when we're talking multi-cm copper casks, metres of bentonite, and half a kilometre of bedrock.
It is raising the water some few degrees. But that is unfortunately enough.
It was cynical politicians and industrialists who sold the population on a clean energy revolution, all while banking on cheap Russian gas to actually deliver the energy required.
It was the string of conservative governments that followed it that neglected (and, at times, actively sabotaged) the build out of renewable power sources.
German politics are also very collaborative/compromise driven, so it's a mistake to think the outcome would have been drastically different, had we had a SPD/Green coalition rather than a CDU/SPD coalition the last 16 years.
This is especially the case, given that parts of the SPD were and continue to be on Russian payroll.
Ultimately, renewables are very challenging from a technical perspective for a densely populated country with energy intensive industries and limited offshore wind options.
If you ignore the long term waste. There is no way to place a cost on storing that waste. So people hand wave it away. Hoping a way to deal with it is found.
You like breathing radioactive coal waste?
Why? At that point resistive heating could be cheaper than gas, and remove at least some of the demand.
It’s not an uncommon situation in northern climates. Natural gas has a LOT of thermal energy, is pretty cheap per BTU/joule, and thermal energy is very useful.
My guess is the difference is due to infrastructure? Finland is widely dispersed, and it’s expensive to run pipelines for natural gas in frozen ground.
So something naturally present (wood), tankable/drivable (oil), or centralized in a settlement (district heat) wins? Similar with Norway and Sweden?
Russia is a bit different because it has a lot of oil and natural gas, but even then outside of a major city, probably wood wins?
Germany has a much milder climate, and is much denser, but not all centralized, and especially after the wars, centralized heating probably seems like a dangerous idea.
Was pretty cheap.
If doing resistive heat, it’s more like 30x.
Even if everyone somehow had enough heat pumps, installers, and capital to switch the entire country to heat pumps, the electrical transmission grid would collapse long before it could work, even if generation (historically an issue) wasn’t a problem during these coldest days. Which it tends to be, and has gotten worse with the switch to renewables.
This was a known issue that could have been addressed with several decades of prior notice, but at great expense.
So wasn’t.
Big European cities have pretty crummy infrastructure and upgrading that is both costly and time consuming. The next years will give a massive boost to energy independence though, which in many ways is a good thing, it's just that we are no longer in control of the timetable and given the fact that until not all that long ago at least my country was selling their gas for wholesale prices that were pretty much a giveaway I really wonder why nobody seems to be doing much in terms of long term planning. Frustrating.
In Poland, coal prices absolutely skyrocketed because Russian coal isn't available anymore & consumers directly interfer with the market.
Relatively, Gas is still cheap. If people all would switch to electric heating quickly, electrity prices would go up proportionally because we would need to buy more form neighbouring countries in close-border regions to keep the network stable.
This year though, since France struggles so hard with their nuclear power plants, gas power plants are running 24/7, even older, less efficient ones.
This led to the price of electricity determined by gas power plant operation costs all day.
That seems even more broken. The annoying thing is that the case for renewables is polluted by these kind of price fixing measures.
I do agree that the EU isn’t likely to be hands off enough to ever let it get to that point though. It was a particularly dumb set of regulatory decisions that let/encouraged Enron to do what they did.
But market forces are powerful motivators.
Even so, not using any LNG for electricity and replacing coal is just if not more valuable.
And of course the reluctance to electrify heating for houses is linked to the bad overall energy policy.
That it wasn't done doesn't make it less needed?
Schröder wasn't around in 1969 when the first contracts for russian gas have been closed.
> Heating could have been switched to heat pumps
We have 12 million gas boilers. Last year, we had an install capacity of 165k heat pumps. The government is trying to up that to 500k per year. Even in this (somewhat optimistic) scenario, that would be 24 years of work.
So yes, we need to start doing that. But until last year, we had 16 years of governments that did fuck-all for renewables.
Sure, it didn't help shutting down nuclear reactors prematurely but building new ones certainly is not the cheapest strategy.
[1] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-hr.pdf (Page 280, Figure 52)
>The running of aging nuclear power plants generally leads to higher operating and maintenance costs. Only in the U.S., the nuclear industry has claimed a cost reduction of 35 percent since 2012 to US$29.4/MWh in 2020—the lowest since the collection of industry-wide data in 2002—in particular due to a 57 percent drop in capital expenditures over the period.
Here's the source they use - it explains this much better: https://www.nei.org/resources/reports-briefs/nuclear-costs-i...
So, what's the difference? Nuclear is different because it costs the same to run per hour no matter how much power is generated. So, when demand is down, costs remain the same - while coal and gas can just use less fuel, which is their major cost. The risk that nuclear won't be able to run at higher loads increases costs overall. If market forces could guarantee usage, then costs would lower.
There's definitely a lot to explore here... power pricing is complicated!
As it turns out, the industry is willing to build new nuclear if and only if 1) the government guarantees 100% usage of the offered capacity 2) the government is willing to pay for the difference between the market price of electricity and a (higher) fixed fee.
The fixed pricing of nuclear is often way higher than the market price - even with 100% capacity usage. It is simply not able to compete with dirt-cheap solar and wind energy. The free market is aware of this, so they are unwilling to take the risk without guaranteed government subsidies.
Not sure where you got this - nuclear gives only about 20% of electricity in Russia. 60% of electricity is produced from natural gas, and the rest 20% is from hydro stations.
(I don't know how much of the tax went to subsidising earlier wind power construction.)
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...
https://countryeconomy.com/energy-and-environment/electricit...
The issue with gas in Germany is not generating electricity but using it for heating and industry. Nuclear cannot really help with that. There were a only a few GW of nuclear left at the beginning of the year. I believe some of that is being kept online a bit longer. Or they are considering to. But it's just a few GW. All little bits help of course but accelerating the tens of GW of wind coming online in the next few years is much more productive to obsess about keeping the few GW of nuclear power. Not actually against that but it's just not enough to matter much at all.
As far as I can tell, in 2020 over 50% of German electricity came from renewable sources. The market share of fossil fuel has also been rapidly dropping over the last few years.
Let alone simply building more of it and solving the problem.
Because its of course easy to say that 50% is coming from X but this is bought with under capacity in the rest. If you have a long time period where you have low wind and solar utilization you need backup that you can ramp up.
Nuclear is very bad at ramping up. It's very expensive to shut down and restart nuclear plants. One of the headaches with the remaining plants is that they would have been due (over due actually) for a lengthy shutdown for maintenance and inspection reasons. The two remaining plants will be kept online until April 2023 now; a few months past their original closing date. By then, most of the French plants that have been offline for maintenance should be back online. As others have noted, France has been leaning on German energy exports a bit more than usual for this reason.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-nuclear-produ...
I will grant you that Trump did get this right... but it was by no means a policy that he was an architect of, and the degree to which he was invested in this policy was questionable (US sanctions were driven largely by Congress, not the president).
And do not forget, Germany is historically twice in the situation to keep the balance between east and west. Once after WWII and once in 1990 after the reunification. pumping money into Russia was also part of a global appeasement politics. That geopolitical game is well understood.
As a German, that is what I remember of that screaming. And now, some months in, we still have no clear statement who blew up the pipelines.
This whole pipeline game is far more complex than just "bad reliance of Germany from Russia"
You're right that this was a pretty easy call made by tons of people for a very long time before & after Trump. Also, GP is a little off, they didn't actually call him an 'idiot', they just smirked and said that they knew better:
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/09/25/trump-accuse...
> German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas could be seen smirking alongside his colleagues.
...
> Trump’s attacks haven’t changed that calculus. After his July remarks, Merkel responded that she may be in a better position to judge her country’s dependence than the current U.S. president.
> “I’ve experienced myself a part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, and I’m very happy today that we are united in freedom,” she said at the time.
(and check the videos: they only started laughing once he got past that sentence)
I can provide citation if needed.
Applies to many other entities, too.
The reasoning is dead-simple obvious - becoming reliant on a nation-state which does not share your values and shared-future is a foolish idea.
Further even, “the haters” for lack of a better term - spent his term calling him a Putin-Puppet so why would he be suggesting folks decouple from Russia? The only thing coming to mind on that note would be a they-do-the-opposite level 33rd Dimension Chess move a la the Obama-Republican skit from Key & Peele.
Uncharitably, this just reads like cope. A grade school inability to admit your rival has the ability to be intelligent and correct with their own legitimate belief system. Again, like the K&P skit.
[0] For example see a policy brief from the european parliament in 2014: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2014/5364...
This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades. The nuclear energy industry collapsing is a secular trend globally with share of energy production steadily falling. The one country somewhat buckling that trend is China, but only due to heavy state intervention and even in China the industry is in slow decline. The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
""Nuclear energy's share of global gross electricity generation continues its slow but steady decline from a peak of 17.5% in 1996 with a share of 10.1% in 2020," states the report.
The comparatively cheap cost of renewables is at the heart of the problem. The WNISR confirms that new renewable electricity investment was above $300 billion (€256 billion) in 2020, which is 17 times higher than the reported global investment commitments to nuclear power."
https://www.dw.com/en/world-nuclear-industry-status-report-c...
Believe me, I know. Having lived in Berlin the amount of anti-nuclear propaganda there is just mind blowing.
> but only due to heavy state intervention
And no state intervention was used in any of the other sectors of energy. Solar for example was just this totally market driving thing where no state intervention was needed.
To talk about the energy market in Europe and Asia as 'heavy state intervention' is ridiculous, its simply totally driven by states. Its states that decide what they want to build, its states that lay out their long term strategy.
> The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
Nuclear declined because governments decided they didn't want nuclear, solar and wind were successful because governments bet all out on solar and wind even before they made financial sense. They had good arguments like, yes its more expensive now but prices will come down once we produce more and it will make our grid green. And this was correct, but its just as correct for nuclear. Its not difficult to understand.
Had Europe spend the last 20 years collectively embracing nuclear and deployed a few 100GW hours of nuclear building 100s of plants, investing 300 billion $ in it, with a well trained workforce for and the same few models over and over again it would also very also be very cheap.
To act like this has anything to do with markets is silly.
And this is without even mentioning all the 100s of nuclear research projects that were killed up, all the nuclear plants that were scheduled to build that were prevented by protestors. In France an insane Swiss politician from the Green party literally crossed the border to shot the nuclear reactor with an RPG. All the nuclear research and education that was removed from universities as well.
There is no reason, non what so ever that we could be deploying 10 new GenIV nuclear reactors every year in Europe, had this been our policy for the last 20 years.
I am genuinely baffled when I read such histrionic statements.
Can you explain what has been destroyed?
Nuclear was never a big part of power generation and the shutdown has been compensated by renewable. LNG is compensating for the shutdown of Russian pipelines.
Prices for energy have gone up in Germany, but they are going up everywhere. There have been no power blackouts or bankruptcy of major industries. And I don't believe for minute that Russia somehow would not have invaded if Germany had more nuclear.
The Nordstream projects were conceived to allow Russia to exert force on Eastern European countries without endangering supply of gas to Germany.
Our energy policy has been incredibly short-sighted, focused on maximizing certain sector's economic interests at the expense of national security and EU security.
Literally Germany made the choice to replace nuclear rather then coal. That was literally their choice.
Do you know about all the bad effects of burning coal at large scale?
> And I don't believe for minute that Russia somehow would not have invaded if Germany had more nuclear.
That is not an argument I made.
So people over and over bring up this one year where France has some maintenance problem but somehow 40 years of brown coal in Germany is just considers unimportant, not to mention the still extensive use of coal now in Germany.
So how about instead of constantly shitting on France and Nuclear we look at the basic facts of what was actually good for humanity and what was a disaster.
Also, most nuclear plants should be back by then, some already, they are 'bracing' themselves in case of emergency and because anti-nuclear people have hyped this issue to a frenzy on social media.
And the French problems with nuclear now are 95% related to the last 20 years of anti-nuclear politics and specially the outright attack on nuclear by the Holland government where critical maintenance was ignored because they lived in a fantasy world where renwables were just gone do everything. This has been well documented.
Even before that France just stopped building new plants and started to use more and more LNG because of the opposition to nuclear and now they are eating the fruits of that.
Not to mention canceling amazing projects like the Superphénix reactor.
France is still living of the glory days of nuclear from the 70/80s. Its ridiculous, 20 years of sensible energy policy with 1960s tech is all that is required and yet most governments can't figure it out.
Just check how good France, the nuclear power country in Europe, is doing and how much they have to import energy from e.g., Germany and also nuclear fissile material from Russia (rosatom). Nuclear power needs a massive amount of water and constant maintenance, iow., not really climate-change proof and once neglected - and most HN users will know that infrastructure might sooner or later get neglected if its running anyway ("why should I pay for you if everything works" mentality isn't only a thing in IT), and getting those plants then up and repaired again is a huge work and may reduce power production on some sites close to zero for months to years.
So, no, it's not worth pointing something out that isn't as black as white as a lot of armchair energy experts would like it to make, especially done in such a gloating manner it rather seems just for fishing for upvotes or confirmation, but really adds nothing to the discussion.
So nuclear in France is a failure in the sense that it's made us the greenest country in Europe (along with hydro-rich Sweden) for the past 40 years, one of the largest exporters of energy, and that despite calls to bring it down we're basically in the same state as Germany right now except we don't produce 50% of our energy from coal and gas.
Also, more importantly: if we can agree that nuclear shutdown was a bad decision, then we can work backwards from that and conclude that the people responsible for it shouldn't be trusted with anything more complex than digging ditches.
Whatever the merits, the most salient point on the issue is that nuclear power, by and large, doesn't matter. It's below 5 % of total now and was at about 15 % at its highest.
Also capacity is a dumb thing to look at. There can be week long streches where solar has like 5% utilization.
Of course Germany could have done what France did, there the graph looks quite different if you go back to the 1960 to now.
Simple put with the right policy, the German 'Grünewende' could be mostly done by now and very little LNG would be required.
Except that is simply a lie that anti-nuclear people spread.
Nuclear plants can reach 80 or 100 years and we honestly don't even know the max lifespan. Almost the German plants could have continued to run. 30 year is nothing for a nuclear plant.
Yes, it requires maintenance and partial replacement of subsystems, but that's just the reality. We are talking about replacing fucking coal, I just don't understand why people don't care about that.
You can use them for 50-70 years
It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives, sure Germany did a mistake here with relying on russian gas and so did most of europe. Problem is, you have to rely on someone, is russia better than saudi-arabia? Irak? You have to rely on something and europe sees now the consequences
France had clean energy for 40 years so how are they doing, fantastic compared to all the coal the Germans have been breathing.
They had a few maintenance issue because in the last 10 years anti-nuclear energy ministers deferred maintenance. Most of these issues however should be fixed before winter.
We are seriously comparing one year of a few maintenance issue with 50 years of clean energy production. How can anybody be critical of that?
> It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives
I think 40 years of breathing incredibly dirty coal smoke is kind of big deal.
> Problem is, you have to rely on someone
You can source uranium from Australia or a number of other countries. Or mine it in Europe if you want to. You can actually have a number of suppliers, so there really isn't a problem.
In fact, a really clever policy for Europe would have been to invest in nuclear for electricity. Then go a step further and invest in high-temperature reactors for the next generation and also use them to produce methanol and mix that into fuel supply and eventually mostly replacing it.
This is likely no longer necessary because we are switching to electric cars now, but still, would have been a good policy back then.
That was the logical next step for the DeGaul policy in France but they gave up on it and sadly by the time the EU happened France had largely turned its back on nuclear.
If this is really a long term issue more air cooling could be installed.
> We didn't even start talking about nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste is basically a non issue anti-nuclear people bring up when they don't have any serious arguments.
Anybody that seriously looks into it understand that this isn't really that big of a problem.
> Germany tried to find a good place for that for decades without luck and most containers start to leak after a couple of years already.
This is another one of these basically fake issue that anti-nuclear people use to spread panic. But of course the reality is zero people have died or been hurt because of this. Even under worst case condition, like delusional fantasy of anti-nuclear people the idea that in the next 1000 years anybody gets hurt because of this is very low.
Germany were idiots in the 70s and instead of just storing low-level waste in a easy to manage placed they threw it in a unstable mine. Not very smart but also not really that big a deal or that dangerous.
So yeah if that the worst thing you can bring up against nuclear I'm not impressed. And again this is an issue because people did dumb shit in the 70s with all kinds of waste from the 50/60s. It has nothing to do with modern nuclear power.
> nuclear waste is basically a non issue anti-nuclear people bring up when they don't have any serious arguments.
so what about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation leakage, Chernobyl, Fukushima. In fukushima they just put their waste water back into the ocean, it will just diluted right?
> This is another one of these basically fake issue that anti-nuclear people use to spread panic. how is it spreading panic when there're actual concerns and evidence about the problems caused by nuclear. We can use nuclear power plants but everyone should be aware of the issues that come with it and not argue based on ideaology. Calling it a none-issue and delusional fantasies of anti-nuclear people without giving arguments doesn't give much confidence in the claims you make.
And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...) Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
But, what I will agree with you is that exit plan for nuclear by Merkel and her CDU/CSU was shitty done. They did not have a strategy and, in parallel, they destroyed the German solar industry (which could have been a powerhouse now but was basically sold do China by the CDU). And yes, it would have made more sense to first bring down coal and then nuclear. Or that the grid needed to be meshed more to support distributed energy generation. But nuclear was never a (good) option in a country so densely populated.
You mean the nation that in 15 years decaronized most of the grid? Yeah how horrible to have 40 years of clean power.
The reason France has problems and has to import, is because since the early 1990s France has stopped building new nuclear reactors.
Even worse, since then leftist governments, specially after 2014 when they basically wanted to copy Germany and get ride of all nuclear. They essentially stopped with vital maintenance.
Unfortunately, they built so many plants in the same period, and those are getting in to their mid years and need maintenance. Because they have largely stopped building new plants, some of the knowlage is now lacking.
Overall, the issue in France is not enough nuclear, not nuclear itself.
France even had really awesome advanced nuclear projects, that were all killed off often by Green/Left governments.
Don't you think its kind of funny to point at the only large industrial nation with a green grid and say 'look at the issues those people have'. If I was German I wish we had those kinds of problems.
> And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Actually new plants is the solution. Yes, they need time, that's why building shouldn't have been stopped.
Nuclear plants don't need that much room, and there are already train lines most places, adding a branch line isn't that hard.
Yes, training workers for those jobs is actually good.
Energy is mostly government driven anyway, and so it is in France.
> Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
Saying all of them need to shut down because of water is just wrong. Most nuclear reactors continued to operate in most places in Europe.
The hardest energy problems are in winter, all you need to make sure is that you build new plants in places where you can cool them even under worst case assumptions for future climate and it will be fine.
> In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
In the European context saying only because tax money is nonsense. The 'markets' are so strongly regulated and often lots of it is state owned. Wind and Solar were only made viable by tax money. Massive government projects to push these drove the economics of scale.
The same could have been done for nuclear for the same price. Had Europe built 100 new nuclear reactors in the last 30 years, the economics of nuclear would be way better. Had Europe not invested massively in wind and solar, the economics there wouldn't be as good.
Even going back to 1970, Jimmy Carter killed nuclear project and focused research on solar. And many of the same trends were happening in Europe. If you prioritize one group of technologies and demonize another you can't then act supersized decades later with the results you get.
And even those project just use the grid as balance, if base load and intermittency were correctly priced, a lot of those economics aren't as good. But governments didn't want to do that, because they wanted more solar/wind even at the cost of later dealing with intermittency.
> And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...) Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
The economics are not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.
If you build large nuclear project with many of the same reactors multiple times it look pretty good. It also requires far less investment in terms of updating the grid, because usually you can just locate reactors where coal plants were before.
Nuclear build cost are dominated by learning cost, if you build many then they get massively cheaper and you can built them far faster. Look at France in the 70/80s as a good example.
You also solve the intermittency issue because nuclear don't have that. So had we just invested in nuclear, rather then wind and solar, we wouldn't have to do all those investments into intermittency mitigation a problem that still remains unsolved.
Even worse, because intermittency was not price correctly, the base load had to suffer and that made their economics worse. Often nuclear also didn't receive the same subsidies as solar and wind. There are many examples of that.
And this is before we even talk about GenIV reactors. Because all research and development was stopped and often made borderline impossible, we have not progressed. Newer reactor designs have massive amount of potential to be cheaper. They can also solve problem such as heat production for industrial heat. But over the last 30 years there was comically little investment in that.
So what you see as 'economics' and 'market' I see as governments 30 years ago deciding that solar/wind were the future and simply going with it. Had the EU fixed on a single reactor design, even Gen3 design, and had said we will de-carbonize by nuclear it would have been far cheaper and we would be further along by now.
In fact, such a standard nuclear plant would have been an amazing thing to export to other nations as well.
And then have a GenIV reactor in the pipeline after that.
Nuclear isn't the future because 'we' didn't want it to be the future. But it could have been, and it would have been far better future then what we have now.
P.S: Let me give you an example. France had the GenIV Superphénix. They had finally worked out all the issues (including somebody shooting an RPG at it) and could have started to seriously think about building then in larger numbers but by that point they had little interest in building new reactors and the left/green govenrment wanted to kill as soon as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
Had France simply started building 5-10 of a next generation of these in the 2000s they would now be a net energy exporter with reactor that had super low fuel cost (because of breeder) and the per plant cost would likely be a fraction of the PWR designs they are currently planning.
You can see how small this reactor is compared to PWRs. So the overall cost when in production at scale would be amazing.
Even if you are gone say not to build anything new, just maintaining what they had would have resulted in significantly more energy then all energy they are getting from LNG now.