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...