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This whole comment tree seems to be full of people who deliberately misunderstand physics and economics. Europe is still going to have access to gas if Russia
by marvin 4y ago
This whole comment tree seems to be full of people who deliberately misunderstand physics and economics.
Europe is still going to have access to gas if Russia cuts its whole supply come winter -- in fact, 60% of the European gas supply will still be present. Probably a bit more, since lots of crisis efforts have been made to provide gas from other sources. Only part of the heating needs have to be replaced.
Let's say Germany still had the, what, 8000 gigawatts of nuclear power online that it has shut down during the last decade? Wild-ass guess, but it's a lot. That's base load, of course. Electric power.
Resistive heating is dirt cheap to deploy in terms of capital costs. You can buy a 2000W heater for $20, perfect for domestic use. So the operating costs dominate. Using a heat pump is 3-4 times better in terms of operating costs; that's not as easy to deploy but many places will already have A/C installed and that's usually the same thing.
So then it becomes a question of economics; many industrial processes cannot be replaced with electricity. But as we've seen, heating of living spaces can easily be done with electricity.
So in the kind of crisis we're discussing here, those thousands of gigawatts of nuclear electricity would be pretty damn useful for emergency heating of German homes and businesses, during months where the gas would be more profitably used for the industrial processes that require it.
It sure as hell wouldn't have been cheap, but it would be cheaper than shutting down half the economy, which is what we're preparing for right now.
It's a moot point, of course, because those ~17 nuclear plants are already shut down. But it would very much have made the issue dramatically less painful.
- hotpotamus 4y agoUmm... I'm looking at https://www.ercot.com/ https://www.ercot.com/ and for all of Texas (if memory serves we're twice the landmass of Germany and probably on par by population) on one of the hottest days of the year, we've got about 84,000 megawatts of capacity. I think you're off by a couple orders of magnitude when talking about thousands of gigawatts.
- hef19898 4y agoPopulation Texas: 29 million Population Germany: 80+ million
- marvin 4y agoAccording to Reuters, I was off by a factor of two, if the number they quoted counts all the plants they decided to shut down. ~4000 GW shut down. That’s a decent wild-ass guess, IMHO. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-its-nuclear-plants-running-2022-02-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...
- hotpotamus 4y agoYeah, I don't think Reuters is correct here. Everything I'm seeing is that a nuclear plant produces around 1 gigawatt, so we'd be talking about thousands of nuclear plants. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3 Also probably helpful to think about it on a per person basis. Another comment corrected me that Germany has 80 million people, so let's use that. 8000 gigawatts (8 terawatts) divided by 80 million looks like 8,000,000,000,000 watts / 80,000,000 persons gives you 100,000 watts per person which does not seem realistic. With my air conditioner running at full blast, that's probably just a couple kilowatts, and that covers 3 people. Lights use a few watts. A beefy computer is around 100 watts. It's possible that Reuters got gigawatts and gigawatt hours confused.
- marvin 4y agoAh, that's a very fair napkin calculation, the 4000GW number is obviously wrong. But I don't think it ruins the core of my argument; it wasn't hinging on Germany having reduced their annual power production by 99%. If Germany in fact shut down 15GW of nuclear production (15 plants), that's still on the order of 200 watts for every person in Germany, or one new 1000W resistive heater running 24/7 for every fifth household. That's the kind of "on the margins" capacity that would indeed make a Russian gas embargo dramatically less painful.