Re:The five-year engineering feat Germany pulled off in months
by jacquesm on Sunday December 11, 2022 @04:51PM
(#33947937)
Agreed, this was entirely preventable. The grid is under significant stress already due to the electrification of transport (and likely to become much more stressed on account of that in the near future) so all this is beginning to add up to a perfect storm.
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.
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.