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You clearly have no understanding of German energy consumption. Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used fo
by this_user 4y ago
You clearly have no understanding of German energy consumption. Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used for electricity generation. Even if we had 100% in spare nuclear capacity above baseline consumption, we would still be building these LNG terminals. Absolutely nothing would have changed regarding the current gas and oil situation.
- _visgean 4y agogas plants are used for short term electricity generation. If there is more demand than production can sustain the transmission operator will buy the extremely expensive electricity from gas sources. This price will be shared by everyone.. https://clouglobal.com/european-merit-order-energy-trading-obsolete/ https://clouglobal.com/european-merit-order-energy-trading-o...
- foepys 4y agoFrance (which built out nuclear power like no other country) is a big importer of this electricity because their nuclear power plants are largely shut down due to urgent maintenance work. Paris is in the process of doing exercises to prepare for blackouts in the coming months.
- lazide 4y agoEnergy use in the form of Natural gas for heating and industrial use dwarfs all electrical energy consumption in Germany - something like 8-10x at least if you measure it in joules. It’s not an uncommon situation in northern climates. Natural gas has a LOT of thermal energy, is pretty cheap per BTU/joule, and thermal energy is very useful.
- jacquesm 4y ago> is pretty cheap per BTU/joule Was pretty cheap.
- bionade24 4y agoFor the heating BHKWs (Blockheizkrafwerke) of many cities in Germany it's still cheaper to run on gas than switch to burning oil. Since the communal industry are legally structured as companies, the mayors aren't allowed by law to switch to oil if it is more expensive, even though it could ease the shortage. In Poland, coal prices absolutely skyrocketed because Russian coal isn't available anymore & consumers directly interfer with the market. Relatively, Gas is still cheap. If people all would switch to electric heating quickly, electrity prices would go up proportionally because we would need to buy more form neighbouring countries in close-border regions to keep the network stable.
- jacquesm 4y agoIn the EU the electricity price is pegged to the price of natural gas. This results in a lot of weirdness, such as the price of solar and wind power energy being the result of what natural gas costs, even though they have nothing to do with each other.
- bionade24 4y agoNo (at least in Germany, can't speak for whole Europe) the price is settled by the most expensive electricity producer currently serving. Gas power plants are used regularly to stabilize the network, but they didn't drive the electrity price that high because Germany has way more gas power plants than usually necessary. Only the modern ones were used. This year though, since France struggles so hard with their nuclear power plants, gas power plants are running 24/7, even older, less efficient ones. This led to the price of electricity determined by gas power plant operation costs all day.
- jacquesm 4y ago> the price is settled by the most expensive electricity producer currently serving That seems even more broken. The annoying thing is that the case for renewables is polluted by these kind of price fixing measures.
- jeltz 4y agoHmm, not sure I agree with northern climates. Russia uses gas for heating but Finland, Sweden and Norway do not.
- lazide 4y agoInteresting - at least for Finland, biomass (aka wood), and oil are common for folks out in the sticks, and district heating and electric resistive or heat pumps are more common in settlements or cities. My guess is the difference is due to infrastructure? Finland is widely dispersed, and it’s expensive to run pipelines for natural gas in frozen ground. So something naturally present (wood), tankable/drivable (oil), or centralized in a settlement (district heat) wins? Similar with Norway and Sweden? Russia is a bit different because it has a lot of oil and natural gas, but even then outside of a major city, probably wood wins? Germany has a much milder climate, and is much denser, but not all centralized, and especially after the wars, centralized heating probably seems like a dangerous idea.
- baybal2 4y ago
- sorenjan 4y agoWhy are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. Seems like fossil gas has been too cheap for too long, which have incentivized dependency on it despite the CO2 external cost. Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?
- oarfish 4y agoThat does exist; In my street they are doing construction work for exactly that purpose, but this is one of the largest cities, no idea how widespread that is.
- kuschku 4y agoAll of your suggestions have already been applied. They're already part of the Energiewende.
- landemva 4y agoI don't know if downsizing sq ft is part of the energy transition, though I was in a few multi-bedroom houses in Germany which relied on firewood for heating. Also, the book Cooking Without Electricity was published a year ago. https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Strom/kochen-ohne-strom_node.html https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Stro...
- NikolaNovak 4y agoFwiw - I moved to Canada and people basically don't understand there's any other way to heat a house than a basement gas furnace. I guess a combination of harsh winters and cheap gas?
- mh8h 4y agoThings are changing in Canada too. Heat pumps are much more common in the past few years.
- 4y ago
- lionkor 4y agoRunning an electrical space heater would maybe not cost more than a flight to a warm country if we had any kind of (long term) cheap electricity generation like nuclear. I'm German and I visited Russia recently, and their energy is dirt cheap due to it all being nuclear—it's crazy how you can just run a space heater and now worry about being bankrupted by it.
- mqus 4y agonuclear energy generation is "cheap"? Are you sure? According to e.g. [1], it's the most expensive power source and getting more expensive each year. It's probably "cheap" due to all the subsidies and the conditions on the subsidies setting certain prices. Sure, it didn't help shutting down nuclear reactors prematurely but building new ones certainly is not the cheapest strategy. [1] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-hr.pdf https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-hr.pdf (Page 280, Figure 52)
- morcheeba 4y agoThat's a great graph, thanks. But there is a whole lot factored in to those numbers. Check out this paragraph in the next page: >The running of aging nuclear power plants generally leads to higher operating and maintenance costs. Only in the U.S., the nuclear industry has claimed a cost reduction of 35 percent since 2012 to US$29.4/MWh in 2020—the lowest since the collection of industry-wide data in 2002—in particular due to a 57 percent drop in capital expenditures over the period. Here's the source they use - it explains this much better: https://www.nei.org/resources/reports-briefs/nuclear-costs-in-context https://www.nei.org/resources/reports-briefs/nuclear-costs-i... So, what's the difference? Nuclear is different because it costs the same to run per hour no matter how much power is generated. So, when demand is down, costs remain the same - while coal and gas can just use less fuel, which is their major cost. The risk that nuclear won't be able to run at higher loads increases costs overall. If market forces could guarantee usage, then costs would lower. There's definitely a lot to explore here... power pricing is complicated!
- crote 4y ago
- steeve 4y agoHeating could have been switched to heat pumps (and will need to anyway at some point), had they not bathed in natgas for tens of years (thanks Schröder!). That it wasn't done doesn't make it less needed?
- pgeorgi 4y ago> had they not bathed in natgas for tens of years (thanks Schröder!). Schröder wasn't around in 1969 when the first contracts for russian gas have been closed. > Heating could have been switched to heat pumps We have 12 million gas boilers. Last year, we had an install capacity of 165k heat pumps. The government is trying to up that to 500k per year. Even in this (somewhat optimistic) scenario, that would be 24 years of work. So yes, we need to start doing that. But until last year, we had 16 years of governments that did fuck-all for renewables.
- steeve 4y agoImagine if that was started on 2002 when Energiewende was voted, it'd be 4 years to go. That it takes a long time is never a good excuse not to do something, rather the opposite.
- erentz 4y agoLooking at electricity maps: Currently burning 28GW of very dirty coal, 46% of demand, 72% of emissions. 12GW of gas, 19% of demand, 17% of emissions. Wind+Solar combined is only supplying 7% of demand. They decommissioned ~20GW of clean nuclear power over the past 20 years. Whatever way you cut it that’s a huge mistake for the climate (not to mention economy). That replaces most of the coal in that picture. Or replaces all of the gas and then some in that picture.
- oaiey 4y agoNuclear is as clean as clean diesel. Is it a clusterfuck: yes. Is it ambitious to leave nuclear and fossils behind us: yes. As a wealthy society should we try: yes. We Germans are a bit idealistic and maybe illusional but at least we try.
- worik 4y ago> Nuclear is as clean as clean diesel If you ignore the long term waste. There is no way to place a cost on storing that waste. So people hand wave it away. Hoping a way to deal with it is found.
- oaiey 4y agoThat was sarcasm. There is no clean diesel. Germany's Volkswagen had a major lawsuit in the US because it branded diesel green . Obviously it was not.
- midoridensha 4y agoThe alternative is pumping radioactive, polluting waste into the atmosphere, which is exactly what Germany is doing right now with its coal-burning plants. You like breathing radioactive coal waste?
- erentz 4y agoWhy do you say nuclear is as clean as diesel? That is clearly not true. CO2 emissions equivalent to wind and solar (actually slightly better). Safety (deaths per kWh) also equivalent to wind and solar. And land use much much better. Waste is tiny for the energy produced and easily contained unlike other industries, which is why no one has died from waste. So basically you're rejecting the safest power source with the least environmental impact, and the only source along with hydro that has actually empirically (in the real world) accomplished deep decarbonization of an electricity grid (e.g. Ontario, France, Sweden). https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
- yongjik 4y ago> Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used for electricity generation. Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mbreese 4y agoReplacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants. Domestic heating is a completely decentralized problem. If you wanted to change everyone over to electrical heat, yes it could be done. But not rapidly. And swapping out gas radiator boilers for electric options can be very difficult and costly. There is no law that says that you must use gas for heat. But once you have that installed base, you can’t just switch from gas to electric heat overnight. It will take decades to make that change. Even if all of the equipment was available (and it’s not), it would take a team of 3-5 workers 2-3 days to convert each home. And that’s assuming a simpler gas -> electric boiler swap without needing to upgrade electrical service panels/etc. This type of change can get complicated quickly for just a single house. Multi unit homes would be more complex. Now factor that over all other homes/buildings and you can see that the number of workers required to do this rapidly don’t exist. Even in the US, there is a push to phase out gas heat in many locations. But it’s a phased rollout with a plan decades long. Could this be a longer term plan? Definitely. But with a quick turnaround? Not really.
- golemiprague 4y ago
- jupp0r 4y agoI don't know what you are talking about. It's literally as easy as buying a $15 electric space heater from the next store and plugging it into an existing wall outlet. The rest is just aesthetics. Electric water heaters are also affordable, small and easy to install yourself.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jupp0r 4y agoYou clearly have no understanding of electric space heaters.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago> if we had 100% in spare nuclear capacity above baseline consumption, we would still be building these LNG terminals Why? At that point resistive heating could be cheaper than gas, and remove at least some of the demand.
- Raydovsky 4y agoIf you had tons of nuclear, you would have people switching to electric heating.
- panick21_ 4y agoIts also used for electricity at least on the graphs I have seen. Maybe I mixed up total electricity production or energy consumption. Even so, not using any LNG for electricity and replacing coal is just if not more valuable. And of course the reluctance to electrify heating for houses is linked to the bad overall energy policy.