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Re:The five-year engineering feat Germany pulled off in months by fragmede on Monday December 12, 2022 @03:24AM (#33952262)
Replacing a whole country's infrastructure to go from electric heat to depend on community steam boilers or gas heating instead is infeasible due to the logistics involved as those are major infrastructure projects. The reverse does not seem true. Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made. If you don't think shitty electric space heaters is not luxurious winter living I'd largely agree, but the thing is poor Americans are able to survive through harsher winters than, say, Berlin gets with these terrible heaters.

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.

Re:The five-year engineering feat Germany pulled off in months by trashtester on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @06:47AM (#33967597)
> Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made.

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!