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Germany would have problems if not for French nuclear, and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants. For exactly how much, just look at what has happene
by midjji 5y ago
Germany would have problems if not for French nuclear, and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants. For exactly how much, just look at what has happened to the UK as they left the EU wide powersharing agreements.
Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating, which is a huge part of their total CO2, and pollution output.
- jhgb 5y ago> Germany would have problems if not for French nuclear You could say that pretty much about any country in the European synchronous grid. Everyone needs everyone else. > and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants The gas plants are actually quite cheap. It's the gas that's expensive. > Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating That statement makes no sense to me. Rising power prices are definitely connected to rising gas prices, which don't prevent people from moving away from using gas for stoves and heating but rather motivate them to do just that.
- midjji 5y agoNo not quite, burning fuel for heat locally will always be at least twice as effective as ideal conversion to power, followed by ideal conversion to heat, in practice its closer to three times. Therefore power prices need to fall substantially gas prices before the switch is worth it. That will never happen while producing power from gas or more expensive alternatives. In particular since the gas distribution infrastructure is in place and effectively subsidized/on a different budget. But if they produced nuclear at the price they used to be able to in Germany, before regulations and investment insecurity drove up the price, buying gas just could not compete. Sweden, notably getting half its power from nuclear, does not need anyone else. Same thing for france.
- jhgb 5y ago> No not quite, burning fuel for heat locally will always be at least twice as effective as ideal conversion to power Except NOT having to heat is even more effective than burning fuel for heating locally. So the move away from gas heating to low-energy buildings is definitely stimulated by higher gas prices. > Same thing for france. I doubt that, since France seem to be actually using their interconnects. Can't comment on Sweden, though.
- midjji 5y agoInsulation is exactly as beneficial to gas and power heated homes. It does jack shit or worse for cooking though. France is self sufficient, but imports when prices are low in order to keep levels high in reservoirs, which further decreases prices over the year.
- danhor 5y agoFor cooking induction plates are much more efficient, transferring 90% of the energy as opposed to ~50% with gas stoves. Together with a gas plant efficiency of ~50%, they comes close in efficiency. Gas stoves still come out on top price-wise, but part of that are asinine taxes, where gas is taxed less than electricity.
- monopoledance 5y agoOr when their nuclear power plants boil their rivers...
- nitrogen 5y agoAre there closed loop reactor designs that don't need to dump heat into a body of water?
- hollerith 5y agoThermodynamics says that it needs to dump heat somewhere, but maybe they can dump it into the atmosphere instead using hyperboloid cooling towers. Those are huge though (at least "natural draft" ones are) and usually made of concrete, and making the concrete currently requires lots of carbon emissions.
- wumpus 5y agoDoes your number include electric heat pumps? Germany is warm enough for very modern heat pumps to do well.
- midjji 5y agoHeat pumps change this a bit, doubling the efficiency (assuming its similar to Sweden), but it varies. So in the ideal case, its roughly the same, in practice slightly less, and with costs it gets complicated and dominated by subsidies and existing infrastructure. Heat pumps require nearby reservoirs however, land essentially, which is available in suburbs, but can be quite a challenge in dense cities. But the real problem is the cost of changing the infrastructure, remember its not just getting power instead of gas, its also switching out every heater from fluid based to power based. Switching stoves from gas to power, etc. Its not only a big investment, but a time consuming and inconvenient one. Even if power prices dropped to half I would not expect this to be particularly fast, and worse still, historically Germany has subsidized directly(with rebates, taxbreaks, etc) and indirectly(nordstrom2... LNG harbors, etc) the gas prices whenever people complain, or just to prevent complaints. I guess replacing gas in German households will require both electricity prices dropping to around one third or less, and substantial government support. Or a multi decade power price drop to say one tenth or less.
- wumpus 5y agoHow is it similar to Sweden, when Sweden is colder?
- midjji 5y agoI'm guessing based on what I happened to know of heat pumps in practice in sweden, but I think it makes sense to assume this. The reason is that the temperature difference between sweden and Germany is probably less than 1%. Temperature in sweden averages about 2 degrees C, and the temperature in germany about 3 degrees C, which can look like a 50% increase, but everything in thermodynamics works in Kelvin, not C. So the difference is between 275 and 276 degrees K, which is about 0.3% or almost nothing. Its not enough to prove anything, just make it reasonably likely, which is then combined with the qualifier.
- Kirby64 5y agoHeat pumps generally have a coefficient of performance (i.e., number of watts consumed vs. number of 'heat watts' moved) of ~4 with modern systems. So, compared to resistive electric heat (COP=1) it's roughly 4x as efficient. It gets worse in colder climates, (such as parts of Sweden...), but you should be doing better most of the time, as you aren't at super super cold temperatures all the time.
- midjji 5y agoMuch like insulation they help, and I would wager its cost effective in most places most of the time, in particular for individuals. But I am not sure how well it scales. Compare building and installing 5 million heatpumps with building 2GW new nuclear power production ? The latter could include at least one city heated entirely by cooling water, but even ignoring that, using Finnish numbers for nuclear, and ballparking optimistically the heaters? They cost about the same, take about the same time to build and install... its unclear to me which would lower individual costs more, which would be better for the economy, or climate. I guess heatpumps win on individual costs, nuclear on the economy, and both being roughly equal on climate. The nuclear plant certainly wins on total maintenance resources/work, but the heatpumps on versatility of maintenance, i.e. you can just say fuck it with heat pump maintenance in a way you cant with nuclear. Nuclear wins on flexibility, while heatpumps win on rollout, giving its highest benefits very quickly, but taking as, if not far longer, to complete. There is often a benefit to mass production over individual small scale stuff though. If we could build at 1970ties + inflation prices though, the nuclear plant power would cost less than a tenth, and output more power than the total heating the corresponding 500k heat pumps provide. Compare to how people buying and installing large supplemental home solar+lithium ion battery packs looks great, until you consider the cost and time to deploy a million such, and compare that to the cost and speed by which we could produce a large hydropower dam as energy storage. The latter wins by a landslide, or occasionally flood^^. Heatpumps are much better and cheaper, though, so its harder to tell.
- sandos 5y agoSweden is shutting down its nuclear all since a vote in the 1980s, although new nuclear is suddenly being seriously considered here it seems. It only took a major electricity price shock!
- midjji 5y agoNot sure its called shutting down if you keep it online for 40 years, then decide not to shut it down after all ^^
- patall 5y ago- why then, if we go by jhgb's source, is France missing 52 min of electricity per year while Germany is missing 12 min? Are they stabelizing the german grid at their own disadvantage? - are nuclear power plants cheap? Isn't Hinkley Point C guranteed 10 ct/kwh + inflation. Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros? What do gas power plants cost, 20 billion? > 'which have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves ...' I would like a source for that. According to [1], 91% of german house holds are using electric kitchen stoves and 7% gas. For heating, they have a larger market share but gas kitchen stoves are not really widespread. [1] https://www.hea.de/fachwissen/kochfelder/marktdaten https://www.hea.de/fachwissen/kochfelder/marktdaten
- pyrale 5y ago> What do gas power plants cost? The climate, really.
- pjscott 5y ago> Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros? Olkiluoto unit 3 is a pretty extreme outlier in construction costs. The same amount of power generation capacity from CPR1000 plants (widely used in China today) would cost closer to 2.5 billion Euros, and construction times are about 5 years.
- locallost 5y agoIs Vogtle in Georgia also an outlier?
- pjscott 5y agoYes, and so is the new Flamanville reactor. It's funny: out of the fifty or so commercial nuclear reactors that came online in the past decade, for some reason those still-under-construction debacles are the only ones most people have heard about.