Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity? • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by turbinerneiter » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 10:56 AM UTC

sputr wrote: post #275

turbinerneiter wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: crit…

Where have I been dishonest?

I literally pointed out that the "who is at 'fault'" questions depends on how you frame the problem.

> 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 is dependent on whether you think CO2 emissions are bad or not.

What exactly is improper about the current rollout of renewables? The missing storage (batteris, gas)? True! But this would not be a problem if we had gas plants instead of coal, which can turn on and off much quicker. So again, you could frame this as improper rollout of renewables or as coal not being able to handle the new realities of the energy market.

I actually agree with you about the issues we are facing and I see your comment as a very valuable addition to my comment, which simplified the issue too much, losing important detail. I was not trying to be dishonest.

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

#282

Post by raverbashing » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

dharma1 wrote: post #237

jillesvangurp wrote: post #186

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.

Geothermal is very geography dependent.

If you have it available, great! Otherwise, it is not viable.

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

#283

Post by imtringued » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #220

Jean Marc Jancovici is a french energy expert, and he often talks about Germany. An important story to remember about Germany, is how Fukushima led the country to stop using nuclear power. Merkel has a PhD in physics, so naturally she understands that nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal. But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants, because as Jancovici argued, she is an "asse…

Oh, so nuclear power plants amortize themselves in less than 10 years? I didn't know that!

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

#284

Post by Faark » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

logifail wrote: post #263

diffeomorphism wrote: post #204

I feel this article is missing the forest for the trees: > German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market. > There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity. > (...) > This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one…

> The subsidies are (overly) high so that lots of renewable energy production/infrastructure is built In the first half of last year a total of 35 new wind turbines were added across Germany[0], the lowest rate for 19 years . If German government policies are supposed to encourage the creation of new renewable energy production then they don't appear to be working particularly well. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtsch…

Keep in mind there is a difference between subsidies we have to pay now for existing installations but were promised years or decades ago when those were built (this seems to be what the article is mostly about) and those guaranteed payments to turbine owners and rules around adding capacity now (and consumers will have to pay for in the decades to come). Yes, the political "enthusiasm" for renewable energy has faded quite a bit...

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

#285

Post by jevgeni » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

martin_a wrote: post #216

onetimemanytime wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

get up get up...lets wash our clothes right now, free, and then some, electricity. I always wondered what happened if there was 100units of energy in the system and only 90 were used in that minute/hour. I imagined a place where they offloaded it to the ground, much like lightning.

See... If politics hadn't fucked up for the last decades, and bowed down to the four large energy companies in Germany, we could have a wide variety of storage options to do something useful with all that excess energy...

A bit of off-topic, but I love the elegance of gravitational energy storage, like what the Swiss are doing:

https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...

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

#286

Post by Sharparam » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 11:08 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #172

actuator wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most washing machines have the spin cycle which removes almost all water that could drip out. So I haven't noticed any water that drips out as such. Also, you have a specific place in some apartments for this with different type of floor.

Yeah, okay, to be fair, I was hand washing clothes, not machine washing. And I do recall living in Germany and there were places to hang wet things that we don't have in American apartments. But I've seen some hang-to-dry things that could be used over a bathtub. Thank you! I at least have a place to start doing research.

>But I've seen some hang-to-dry things that could be used over a bathtub.

I have this in my apartment (Sweden). After I've done laundry I hang my clothes to dry over the bathtub, then move them onto a separate drying rack in the morning (so I have space to shower), and by that time the clothes have dried enough so there's no risk of dripping on the floor.

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

#287

Post by Faark » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #270

diffeomorphism wrote: post #204

I feel this article is missing the forest for the trees: > German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market. > There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity. > (...) > This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one…

Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels. Having more energy than we need is useless, and there's an environmental footprint to even the greenest wind farm. The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use…

I'm more familiar with the solar aspect of Energiewende, but a goal was to kick-start an industry to make renewable energy viable in the first place. This couldn't happen without significant amounts of installation caused by political commitment.

Yeah, I'd love for them to fix the bad power-vs-gas incentives. But I would not expect this to happen any time soon in the current political climate were no one will be willing to take the hit for something consumer will feel that directly.

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

#288

Post by imtringued » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

jakub_g wrote: post #32

I'm rather a noob in the topic, but I've been reading in recent months about energy market and it seems like a collective insanity in the light of the climate crisis. - In most(whole?) Europe, electricity used by trains is taxed higher than jet fuel used by planes (legacy measure from decades ago which was meant to boost air market; of course now it's hugely difficult to change it) - Germany went strongly into renewa…

>- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions

Phasing out nuclear delays the phase out of coal. It doesn't add any new coal. The problem is stagnation instead of an increase in emissions.

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

#289

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

trenchgun wrote: post #231

mrweasel wrote: post #206

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?

Because the regulation, at the time, mandated CO2 tariff on ALL electricity, regardless of origin. That was the broken part of the regulation.

The tariff was/is calculated per kW and not actually based on CO2 emissions. It's basically just an extra tax placed on the consumers to help subsidize green energy. It just kinda backfired the cases of the heating plants, because they weren't never thought of a consumer of electricity.

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

#290

Post by imtringued » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 11:26 AM UTC

hurricanetc wrote: post #132

diegocg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not delusion, but simple economics what makes it impossible to build new nuclear plants. The Obama administration granted permissions to build new plants, but few people were interested because fracking made gas cheaper - but even the ones that were built required loan guarantees from the government. The private sector wasn't able to find a solution by itself. A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front…

It wouldn’t cost so much or take so long if there hadn’t been decades of misguided propaganda and whining about nuclear. The fact that nuclear is expensive is not an engineering or construction problem. China is building nuclear fast and cheap, right now.

If that's true then why isn't every country replacing their old nuclear plants with new designs? Why keep around legacy plants like Fukushima that had obvious design mistakes (emergency generator was flooded)?