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I'm puzzled by how many people confuse gas and electricity, enough to wonder whether I am the one who's wrong. The country where I live historically used about
by Arnt 4y ago
I'm puzzled by how many people confuse gas and electricity, enough to wonder whether I am the one who's wrong.
The country where I live historically used about 15% of its gas to produce electricity. (Most of the 85% were burned for heat at end-user sites, some were used as molecules in chemical plants.) I'd like to know two things. I can't find these on the web, but perhaps someone on HN knows.
1. Do any of the European countries that imported gas from Russia burn most of to produce electricity? I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed that most of it was burned in furnaces and other heating devices, like here.
2. Are there any countries with a sizable set of heating devices (furnaces, ovens, whatever) can can use either gas or electricity, depending on what's available at any given moment?
- _ph_ 4y agoNo, you are not wrong. Gas is only a small part of German electricity production. It is a larger part in the US, but the US has a lot of gas available from fracking. Yes, if there were plentiful of cheap gas, it is much better to use that instead of coal and oil, but electricity production isn't the bottle neck. Switching home heating to heat pumps alone could reduce the gas consumption considerably.
- doikor 4y agoThe % of actual gas used does not matter much as the price is set by the most expensive form of production at that moment. Most of the time this is a peaker gas (or oil) plants if it is required to run one. So if you normally need to run the last 1% of your production with peaker plants that used to cost X but now due to external reasons their costs are 10X then your electricity price for the moment they are on is 10 times more.
- _ph_ 4y agoGas wouldn't cost 10x more, if it were not scarce.
- doikor 4y agoAnd? Europe consumes more gas then it produces and thus it has no real control over the price of it.
- _ph_ 4y agoSure, but the current gas price on the international markets comes from demand exceeding available production. If Europe would half its gas usage, the price would plummet. It is already going down as gas supply is stabilizing despite Russia no longer providing gas to Europe.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThe small amount of gas burned for electricity has an outsized impact on electricity prices. The pricing mechanism was designed to reward efficient power plants and prevent price gouging and it mostly does that. If just one gas plant tripled their prices, then the market would simply not call on them to deliver unless everything else was already in use. That doesn't work when the gas itself has gone up in price as all the gas plants prices rise (though it's good that it'll still reward the efficient ones and prevent intentional price gouging by non gas suppliers trying to take advantage of the short supply of gas). Since the European grid is interconnected, this impact is spread around to a degree so that Russia can't just bully Germany or Finland into doing stuff and to reduce overall costs. Similarly the gas can be transported so that price equalises across borders too.
- Arnt 4y agoSo maybe one can say: Europe will indeed lack energy this winter, mostly gas. The article writer may not realise that the energy lacking is mostly gas, not so much electricity, but that doesn't prevent the article's conclusion from being right. Because the price of electricity is one of "Finland's power problems". Cluelessly happening to be right.