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6. Wholesale electricity rates have increased from 50 Euros/mwh to 250 Euros/mwh over the course of the last year. This isn't about averages. It's about meetin
by barney54 5y ago
6. Wholesale electricity rates have increased from 50 Euros/mwh to 250 Euros/mwh over the course of the last year.
This isn't about averages. It's about meeting demand, which is especially important during the winter heating season.
- formerly_proven 5y agoElectric heating is extremely uncommon in Germany (like 1-2 % of households use it).
- creato 5y agoIf gas is used for both heating and electricity production, or share any other fuel source, the prices of electricity and heating will still be related.
- pixelpoet 5y agoPaying 41c/kWh for ökostrom / 100% renewable energy here, and doing some mining with two 150W Radeon 6000 GPUs to keep this computer room warm goes a long way to making it cost effective.
- Gare 5y agoUsing heat pumps also makes it almost on par with the cost of natural gas.
- nomel 5y agoHeat pumps don't work below -10C, so this really depends on the local climate. You can use geothermal heat pumps, but now you're no longer near par.
- ajuc 5y agoDepends. The ones sold in Poland (and I guess Germany as the climate is similar) are often rated to work from -25C up.
- dispat0r 5y agoHeat pumps are also loud.
- jsilence 5y agoJust as fossil fuel boilers are. That's why you install them in the basement. If you can.
- duckmysick 5y agoThey really aren't. The outdoor units are comparable to air conditioners (60 db). I can't hear mine through the walls.
- leobg 5y agoExactly. All electric heating should be replaced by GPUs. If you need to heat up a room with electricity, at least do some proof of work along the way.
- formerly_proven 5y agoGPUs are just resistive heating with extra steps, COP 1. Heat pumps can do way better most of the time.
- AnthonyMouse 5y agoHardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free" since you're using it for heat anyway. Heat pumps require a significant capital investment which would have to be recovered on only their efficiency improvement, since they don't otherwise generate revenue. The math is different for new construction. There heat pumps make a lot more sense because the capital cost is relative to some other heating system you don't already have. Then the higher efficiency will generally cover the relative capital cost even if it wouldn't cover the total capital cost. This might still be less profitable than mining cryptocurrency (depending on a variety of factors) but better than any other traditional heating system.
- michaelt 5y ago> Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free" No it isn't. I know because I looked into it. Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop. So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.
- AnthonyMouse 5y agoThat's because you're using Bitcoin, for which custom ASICs are a thousand times more power efficient than commodity hardware and so commodity hardware is useless, but custom ASICs are stupid expensive. What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)
- Bergingen 5y agoYour 100% renewable energy mentioning sounds like you believe this and use it as an excuse to make it okay. Ignore my comment though if you would normally heat by electricity but you use an umlaut so i assume you are a german as well. Just a few days/weeks ago we had an extreme price hike due to high demand. High demand should only come from consuming energy in a usefull way. Mining your shitcoins for nothing is not helping at all. You still consume energy which wouldn't need to be consumed as we do have other and much more energy friendlih systems for transaction security. You are basically an american who drives the biggest pickup truck available and using oekofuel and state its now okay to do this.
- eleitl 5y agoDon't forget heat pumps. EV sales have also increased recently.
- jhgb 5y agoThat's a very good argument for the need to build much more renewable capacity in Germany, since that would substitute the burning of natural gas that caused this price increase.
- AstralStorm 5y agoSure, we'll see it when it happens. Renewables are like a trickle at best, all the low hanging fruit there is taken, and the required battery capacity is huge....
- jhgb 5y agoThere is no battery capacity required for the simple effect of substituting gas power plant operation. Any MWh generated by another source will simply remove the need to generate that MWh from gas, where the price of gas is the dominating component.
- kspacewalk2 5y agoNot really. This is overly simplistic since it's not accounting for reliability/predictability of supply. Natural gas can be turned into MWh on demand, at night, when there's no wind, during consumption anomalies, etc. It's clearly not interchangeable with renewables MWh for MWh like you're suggesting.
- dispat0r 5y agoYou also have to pay the gas. Gas backups for power are just stupid without any own supply. In winter, we also need the gas for heating, that will not change in the next 30-40 years.
- wumpus 5y ago> Renewables are like a trickle at best Doesn't Germany have a lot of wind power? Denmark sure does. Let's see, 27.2% wind in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany And apparently there's a fair bit of North Sea area that can be used for new offshore wind.
- estaseuropano 5y agoBut this is an issue of Russia putting the squeeze on gas prices, not an inherent issue of the German energy system.
- ihsw 5y ago
- cwp 5y agoBeing dependent on imported gas seems like an inherent issue of the German energy system.
- garmaine 5y agoHeating is largely natural gas based, so it's not substitutive. I don't think Germany should be shutting down its nuclear reactors, but that has nothing to do with Russian gas. (Unless perhaps they started making synthetic methane using the heat of a nuclear reactor, which is not a terrible idea but not something they are currently doing AFAIK.)
- chris_va 5y agoTo be fair, residential/commercial heating could be entirely electric, and heat pumps have additional benefits over natural gas heating (like being reversible in the summer). Presumably people would switch if the cost of electricity was low enough for it to be more economical. Decisions that result in the price of electricity staying high provide political leverage to gas producers. Though, eyeballing the numbers, it really should be very attractive to install heat pumps in the EU despite the high electricity cost. The cost of natural gas is quite high.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThis would be very difficult for the grid. Switching to electric heating is a big hurdle.
- roenxi 5y ago7. Energy per capita has dropped by something like 20% from its peak in the 90s. Germany is a great example that these renewable policies can't sustain an industrial lifestyle. Germany is something of a cautionary tale; adopting Germany's policies will make people worse off. https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany
- lmm 5y agoArguing that energy sustainability changes have made people worse off because they've reduced per-capita energy use is blatantly begging the question. Maybe energy is being used 3x as efficiently as it was in the 90s and so people are 2.4x better off.
- roenxi 5y agoThey'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently. The lifestyle Germans enjoy is falling behind a hypothetical world where they implemented a cheap energy policy. How much energy they produce is much more important when assessing how their renewable transition is going. They have barely managed to tread water by doing less per capita and matching their old supply. This is a far cry from the optimistic touting that solar/wind was a viable market competitor to fossil fuels - the evidence here is that these forms of energy are worse.
- lmm 5y ago> They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently. Only if you're assuming some kind of linear relationship between energy consumption and happiness, which seems extremely dubious.
- dispat0r 5y agoMaybe not happiness but definitely living standards. In the US air conditioning systems are common in Germany not so much.
- fho 5y ago7. Germany does not import a lot of energy ... but when it does it does so mostly from France [1]. I suggest that is because the french nuclear reactors provide an abundant amount of energy. [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06/PD21_275_43312.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06...