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Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

kaikenhuippu.com

271–280 of 397 posts

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#271

I've not sure if has changed in the last few years, but one issue Denmark has run into is that our tariffs on CO2 actually harms the use of surplus green energy. Most of Denmark (at least in the cities) are heats using hot water from remote heating plants, either surplus heat from power generation or garbage incineration, with auxiliary gas and coal plants. 15 years ago many of the smaller gas powered heating plants…

I don't get it. Why would they pay CO2 tariff for heating with wind powered electricity?

Like what is the point of the regulation?

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#272

Interestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas. So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (…

I don't know about the countryside, but Helsinki is heated by district heating using cogeneration from the coal power plants within the city.

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#273

> On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical happened. For the first time, the market price of electricity fell below zero in Finland.(...) While this single day was a very windy one... I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, bt…

I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.

Some probably has to do as blades/axis could break due to stress, which there are videos of turbines with malfunctioning brakes spinning out of control and breaking.

Mostly wind turbines have issues with frequency as you don't want to change/adjust frequency too much (adds to cost) to that of the main grid they only generate when within acceptable frequency ranges and internal equipment is able to compensate.

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#274

> On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical happened. For the first time, the market price of electricity fell below zero in Finland.(...) While this single day was a very windy one... I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, bt…

I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.

Modern wind turbines can angle their wings in a way that they can produce in conditions that would have required a shutdown 15 years ago.

With this storm control the turbines lineally increase the resistance and are only shut down when the wind speed reaches more than 34 m/s as a 10 minute average. That's 122km/h. [0] The recent storm reached these levels at times, but didn't sustain them for longer periods over larger areas.

[0] https://www.enercon.de/en/technology/wec-features/ I'm sure other producers have similar technology.

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#275

Do I understand correctly from the article, that these negative prices are so that the suppliers can still claim their subsidy for supplying you. They are effectively giving you a cut of the subsidy?

I believe it's rather about making sure the power gets drawn and it's more about the power from the slow plants, like coal. Basically: strong wind -> a lot of wind power -> coal plant can't lower its output -> excess energy -> pay somebody for allowing you to dump your power in their system But whether you see this as a problem of coal not being able to power down quick enough or wind not being a steady power source…

I love the slightly dishonest comments like this one.

Wind power caused the instability but you fault the coal for not being able to compensate for it. What happens when you have 100 wind/solar and too much energy... Who do you fault then?

Coal is bad, obviously. But don't use that fact to scapegoat it so you can ignore the glaring problem with renewables that all electro engineers in Europe are screaming about: critically increasing instability of the grid due to improper rollout of renewables.

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#276

Interestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas. So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (…

Phasing out gas heating is going to be a very, very big job in the Netherlands. Replacing an energy source is easy, just place a nuclear power plant / solar field down and phase out the coal power station. Done.

However, almost all homes in the Netherlands are heated by gas directly from the source. The gas is used to heat up water in the home and pump it through radiators on the wall or in the floor. A highly efficient system. But we can't import the gas from other countries because of the calorific properties so we need to pump our own gas. Switching to electric systems in the home will double the cost for most home owners because it's not very efficient and electricity is expensive (though the government can lower taxes on it). It also means that home owners will have to convert their current system in the home and pay the price for this. But it should be a plug and play option.

An ever bigger project is switching to government provided hot water heating. That means that you have to dig up every single street in the country, get rid of all existing infrastructure (fiber, coax, power, gas, water, sewer), lay down a big water pipe in the middle, put the existing infrastructure back and repave the street. Have the hot water enter every home, redo the plumbing of the home and change the water systems. The downside to this is that instead of heating the home with 70 degrees water like we do now, it will only be around 50 degrees. You can't heat a home in the winter like that so you also need to isolate every home. And you are tied to a single provider for your heating, unlike the current system where you can occasionally switch energy provider to get a better price. People I know with this system pay more than I do with gas.

The second system is a gigantic job but somewhat cheaper overall and highly efficient. The only problem is heating the water in a central location. Near an industrial zone you can use waste water from cooling systems but if nothing is around you need a lot of electricity. Or geothermal. They are still trying to find a good way to do this.

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#277
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.

Modern wind turbines can angle their wings in a way that they can produce in conditions that would have required a shutdown 15 years ago. With this storm control the turbines lineally increase the resistance and are only shut down when the wind speed reaches more than 34 m/s as a 10 minute average. That's 122km/h. [0] The recent storm reached these levels at times, but didn't sustain them for longer periods over larg…

Do you know a rough percentage for how many wind-turbines in use are modern turbines like these?

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#278

> On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical happened. For the first time, the market price of electricity fell below zero in Finland.(...) While this single day was a very windy one... I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, bt…

I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.

We don't really have to speculate, since energy production data is available [0]. There certainly was a lot of energy produced by wind turbines. About the same as last week (also quite windy). But the "entire countries are working at half capacity" doesn't seem to be valid, at last I don't see a dip in power consumption.

[0] https://energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2...

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#279

Interestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas. So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (…

The best way to heat homes IMHO is geothermal energy. It is clean and renewable. There is an element of electricity consumption, but far less than with direct electric heating. There is a shift in Finland to geothermal, chosen for most new builds now, and district heating systems are exploring deep geothermal for heating whole towns and cities.

By geothermal, do you mean digging 30 meters into the ground for heat/cold? I've read that it doesn't work in densily populated areas where every system is very close to each other. Unless you have one installation per street.

We also have heat exchangers for warming your home but then you have a noisy box outside your house or on your balcony.

Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

#280
post #222
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the total population of And why should anyone outside that area care if the equipment they use will or won’t work in weather that they won’t experience?

It's not relevant what the total population is. Even if it's 1, you can't tell that person to use a heat-pump.

If the total population is low then you can tell them to _not_ use a heat pump.
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