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> 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
by 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.
- dbrgn 4y agoAre you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious. There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoAs a quick, temporary emergency measure? Yes.
- j0057 4y agoI don't think there are warehouses full of electric heaters waiting on the off chance half a continent switches from central heating to this.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoa) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere. b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months. c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
- yongjik 4y agoWell, I don't think anyone's suggesting it can be done overnight. So, of course, we will need a stopgap measure (of LNG terminals). For now. IMHO, what people demand is that Germany should recognize that the current crisis is the fruit of multiple decades of bad energy policy. If we don't, twenty years later, we'll still be saying "Yes, sadly, Germany is still burning gas, but you can't convert it overnight! What do you want?"
- cycomanic 4y agoFrance is using the same percentage of gas, why is nobody calling out France for decades of bad energy policy? Even more their nuclear reactors despite massive subsidies are in such a state of disrepair that they had >60% off during the summer, and Germany had to take up the slack.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago> swapping out gas radiator boilers for electric options can be very difficult and costly Something like €5000 plus labour in Lithuania, around half days work. Gov subsidises good portion of it.
- slowhand09 4y agoNow, replace the word "heat" with "cars".
- aktenlage 4y agoIt's the result of cheap fossil fuels, provided by Russia. There is no shortage of electricity in Germany, so there was no economic interest to build more nuclear power plants? Germny even exports electricity to France, which has a lot of nuclear power plants (many of which currently don't work). We don't even know where to safely put the waste for the next million years. Germany doesn't have the huge inhabited areas like the US - and even they have not solve that problem yet.
- Scea91 4y agoGermany export to France is an uninteresting information without context. Due to the energy mix the energy is exported in production peaks when it is cheap (sometimes prices are negative) and imported back when there is shortage for higher prices. Also the whole flow network needs to be taken into account and germany imports also from other countries. You can’t currently build a reliable electric grid with wind and solar alone so you need either nuclear or fossil fuels.
- midoridensha 4y ago>It's the result of cheap fossil fuels, provided by Russia. So what did Germany do for heat before the wall fell and they got cheap fuels from Russia?
- brodock 4y agoCoal
- warpspin 4y ago> So what did Germany do for heat before the wall fell and they got cheap fuels from Russia? Germany used to be heated by gas created from coal and coal directly till about the 1960ies. Starting with the 1970ies already, the Soviet Union began delivery of natural gas.
- lambdadmitry 4y agoWe do though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... is going operational next year, and the amount of research that went into it guarantees that it's safe. This podcast has lots of details if you're interested. https://omegataupodcast.net/368-nuclear-waste-disposal-and-storage/ https://omegataupodcast.net/368-nuclear-waste-disposal-and-s...
- rch 4y agoWhat of the installed base of water heaters, stoves, and home furnaces? These can all be converted to e.g. induction ranges and heat pumps, but the time and expense of doing so needs to be factored in.
- jhoechtl 4y agoIsn't burning gas for heat more efficient than first produce the power to heat sthg?
- neltnerb 4y agoIn a sense, but if the worry is carbon and energy security then domestic renewables and nuclear look a lot more attractive. Heat pumps are great and super cool but if you include the efficiency of generation it's unlikely to be more energetically efficient, yes. It's close though, natural gas combined cycle plants are very efficient for what they are. And if the heater is electric, substitution for other electricity sources is possible... unlike now.
- toast0 4y agoDepends. Better to burn gas for direct heat than burn gas to produce electricity and then use resistive heating. But you do have to transport the gas or electricity to the heating site, and I don't know how that adds up. Also, if conditions are right, you can use electricity to run a heat pump and move heat from the outside air to the inside air; depending on the details, you can move a lot more watts of heat then you spend operating the heat pump. This can be more economical than direct heating.
- gruturo 4y agoNot if you use a heat pump, no. Modern ones have very high efficiency (above 300% as they're not actually using energy to make heat, just to "move it around") and work even in very, very cold temperatures. But you don't install tens of millions all over a country in a matter of months - you quickly run into bottlenecks like production, distribution, certified installers, etc.
- trashtester 4y agoYou're not likely to get 300% efficiency when it really matters, in colder climates. The temperature outside my house is around -10C now, and closer to -20C at night this week. Keeping my house warm requires around 6-10KW constantly atm, which I could perhaps reduce to 5-8KW with a heat pump (some heating will come from other appliances, like computers, fridges, etc). Or I have used the oil boiler in the basement, if Norway didn't ban that in 2020. That would have freed up enough electricity for several homes in the UK or Germany. Electrical heating is fine if all electricity produced is from hydro, nuclear or wind/solar, but it makes less sense if the grid relies too much on fossil fuels.
- cycomanic 4y agoThere is a lot of industry that has absolutely no other way than to use gas. There was an article about a copper wires manufacturer in a German magazine a while ago. They need a lot of heat to melt the copper, and currently the only economically feasible way is natural gas. Electricity just can't get you the temperatures and alternatives like hydrogen just don't work yet (they actually have been running tests for years on this). The issue is if they don't have gas, transitioning other things to electricity becomes difficult, because you need copper.
- warpspin 4y ago> 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. No but there are laws of chemistry. The point the previous poster was trying to make is, that the industry needs natural gas as a precursor product, mainly for the chemical industry. Obviously, you cannot replace that with electricity easily. Over 12% of Germany's natural gas use is purely for the chemical reactions it provides within the chemical industry. A further 10% is for use in the metal industry where gas also has been notoriously hard to replace as it's not used for its energy value alone but for providing reduction reactions. What you say basically is, not only Germany should have kept on building nuclear, it should also have developed new hydrogen based industrial flows for all these sectors alone, things that exist nowhere on this world on actual scale. So LNG terminals would have been necessary in any case. Germany had none due to the over-reliance on Russian gas. Otherwise I will not comment on the difficulty of replacing domestic heating, which IS a huge block of gas usage, on the scale of a whole country, as others have already done this.
- merry_flame 4y agoNo law of economics… are you that sure? France is the poster boy of nuclear energy and has been pushing very hard for electric domestic heating over the years and yet it simply has almost never made any sense for homeowners to opt for electric heating rather than natural gas. Indeed, though French electricity prices have always been probably the lowest in Western Europe, it still always comes up some 50% more expensive than natural gas. The only major reason property owners switch to electric is that it's cheaper to install, so using in it in rentals shifts higher energy prices onto tenants while property owners benefit from lower investment costs. Clearly, not building more power plants isn't really what went wrong here.
- trashtester 4y agoNorway banned fossil fuels for domestic heating in 2020. Which it could do due to having built out electricity generation 4-5x the GW/capita compared to most of Europe, 100% which is renewable (+some 10-20% extra available for exports). Hydro makes this simple. Nuclear makes it possible. No other approaches have been demonstrated that allows this without fossil fuels at scale.