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

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

#361

Post by undersuit »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #209
undersuit wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryto-mining with excess energy is only effective when you have excess computing power too. Maybe a gamer with a GPU could get the opportunity to use all the excess resources for a little bit of profit, but the payoff rate for buying a GPU needs 24/7 mining to even make a profit over a year.

That's the case even when electricity is free?

It's not always free. What's the prices when it's not free? Do you just take a bath on profitability every time you have to pay higher prices when there is demand? Do you not mine when it's not free?

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

#362

Post by turbinerneiter »

sputr wrote: post #331
turbinerneiter wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Sorry, I was a bit too combatitive. Anyway, my critique is of the 'if we had gas plants'. But we don't. I see building a wind farm without storage as a similar thing to building a coal plant without a high chimney and filters. Sure, your making energy but your just making everyone deal with your shit while making everything worse. Renewables are, currently, incompatible with the current grid past a certain percentage…

It's cool, and I generally agree.

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

#363

Post by nelgaard »

goodcanadian wrote: post #219
krzyk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't air pumps less power efficient then ground ones? Also, is it possible for air pump to heat a liquid in pipes? I mean can I have air pump that provides heating to the floor? If the floor is warm then body thinks it is warm. I know air pumps only as air conditioners and they just blew warm air around, which is not that comfortable if you are just where the warm wind blows :)

Aren't air pumps less power efficient then ground ones? Only when the air temperature is less than the ground temperature. On average, yes, air source is slightly less efficient than ground source, but the initial cost of ground source is so much higher that you will not make up the difference in the lifetime of the pump. Air source is fine. Also, is it possible for air pump to heat a liquid in pipes? Yes. I mean can…

Yes, and that was Canadian houses, I assume, with dozens of vents in the floor on every level of the house.

In Europe we mostly see air-to-air heat pumps in cottages, and there is then only one vent for the entire house. Which if fine and efficient for a small cottage in the fall and spring and maybe a few weekends in the winter.

But it would be hopeless in a Canadian winter.

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

#365

Post by Dumblydorr »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #57
Dumblydorr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot that can be done with renewables without nuclear or fossils, you can use demand response, batteries, hydro storage, and compressed air storage to store very cheap electricity.

This is just the typical diversion rhetoric. According to all IPCC reports I've seen, you can't accomplish with renewables without nuclear what you can accomplish with renewables and nuclear, yet all political bodies promote renewables and fossil fuels while pretending it's just renewables.

How is it diversionary to state examples of how renewables can be stored? That is literally the crux of the issue, we need storage for renewables. Nuclear sounds great on paper but look at new capacity additions. No one except China is adding nuclear. So to bring it up over and over here, Many HN commenters simply can't get over the fact that nuclear is way way way more expensive than renewables. Storage is the clear answer, unless you can point me to recently built nuclear and how cheap it is?

How about South Carolina? Oh that was a massive fiasco that cost the ratepayers billions for literally nothing. If they spent those billions on solar, efficiency, and demand response, they'd have far cheaper and cleaner electricity. Instead they wasted billions on a nuclear facility that will never be finished.

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

#366

Post by marcus_holmes »

lispm wrote: post #358
marcus_holmes wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Even if there was 100% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050, that wouldn't help with emissions that stem from heating unless you'd also make people heat with electricity. And to do that, you'd need to lower the prices (or raise the prices of alternatives). >That's right. In a future with large electricity surplus it makes sense to switch to electricity for heating. To make that attractive new price…

Again, the article is misleading and fails to understand the German electricity markets (!), how the EEG works, how the electricity production/distribution/sales works in Germany, the pricing and how consumers buy electricity. For example: the renewable produced electricity is delivered onto the grid and the distribution takes it. As much as is possible. This is mixed with non-renewable electricity. The consumer then…

The article makes the point that for heating, consumers are choosing to stay with fossil fuel-driven heating rather than install electrical heating, because the tax-driven pricing for electricity makes electricity so expensive that where there is a choice to not use it, people do.

It doesn't address any of the non-heating areas that you're talking about, and doesn't make any claims around any of the electricity supply market that doesn't affect heating.

So it doesn't matter if the first 90% of the electricity people consume is green, because they're not choosing to use electricity for this. Thus the renewable power is not replacing the fossil fuel power in this market.

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

#367

Post by smolder »

2wrist wrote: post #319
systemtest wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effici…

here in the UK there was the whisper of using the gas system to deliver hydrogen (or a variation). I heard last year that one of the big gas mains in Yorkshire was being converted to supply hydrogen. I guess if you replace the boiler on the other end with a fuel cell based system that was still 'wet' so the radiators and water heating in the house stayed the same the there may be less change needed?

If the goal is heating, hydrogen combustion would be much cheaper and just as clean. It might not be as efficient as a fuel cell + heat pump combination, but I think the production of fuel cells and heat pumps would have a worse environmental impact than generating the difference in hydrogen.

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

#368

Post by lispm »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #366
lispm wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the article is misleading and fails to understand the German electricity markets (!), how the EEG works, how the electricity production/distribution/sales works in Germany, the pricing and how consumers buy electricity. For example: the renewable produced electricity is delivered onto the grid and the distribution takes it. As much as is possible. This is mixed with non-renewable electricity. The consumer then…

The article makes the point that for heating, consumers are choosing to stay with fossil fuel-driven heating rather than install electrical heating, because the tax-driven pricing for electricity makes electricity so expensive that where there is a choice to not use it, people do. It doesn't address any of the non-heating areas that you're talking about, and doesn't make any claims around any of the electricity suppl…

> The article makes the point that for heating

Because the article has no clue what the discussion is in Germany.

There is right now no cheap surplus clean electricity for heating. The so-called 'free electricity' simply does not exist.

What is free is SOMETIMES electricity traded on the spot market, which is not necessary available when the consumer needs it for heating and not necessarily in the amount that it would be useful.

That heating is not done via electricity is because it's simply not currently a part of the energy policy in Germany to promote electrical heating on a large scale. It's also not seen as a useful consumption of surplus energy in the next decade. The topics which are discussed are heat pumps, combined-cycle power plants, better insulation, zero-energy houses (which don't need much heating, but need electricity for air distribution), centralized district-level heating, electrical heating from local PV installations, adding gas generated from electricity to the gas distribution, pellet heating, solar, ...

The cost for a complete electrification of the heating market is estimated to be 2 trillion Euro. That's far away. There is a plan to disallow new oil heating from 2026 onwards, but there is no plan to support direct electrical heating with incentives. There will be incentives for heat pumps, but the achievable market share is not large in the next years.

> Thus the renewable power is not replacing the fossil fuel power in this market.

Because it was/is not wanted. This may change, but there are many experts saying that it is currently not useful to promote direct electrical heating and heat pumps are currently not a large scale solution. Also: Currently the price (different from what is claimed in the article) for electrical heating is too high in Germany.

The next main usage for electricity probably will be for electric vehicles and the infrastructure for that will be expensive to build. Thus investments will be needed for the electricity used to decarbonize energy in traffic.

The main reasons why Germany isn't currently using electrical heating (besides heat pumps, etc), is that on a large scale electricity usage in other areas has a preference, electricity for heating currently is expensive (the 'free electricity' is a myth) and building the infrastructure would be very expensive.

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

#369

Post by asveikau »

lm28469 wrote: post #313
dekhn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd still pay the cost, because energy is cheaper than my free time.

It takes like 2 minutes to hang a full load of laundry.

If you are "synchronously" doing laundry, ie. waiting for the load to dry, then we must admit it's slower, though this may vary with the seasons and climate of your location. But if you set it aside in the morning or evening, then go out and start your day as you normally would, you're OK.

In some cases this might mean you plan your laundry better. Eg. you start laundry when you have at least 1 set of clothes to wear for the next day, instead of when you have 0 clean clothes to wear.

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

#370

Post by hokkos »

probably_wrong wrote: post #148

> 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…

This is not ridiculous at all to point that, those kind of event will be common as more intermittent renewable come into power, because they are all correlated in Europe.
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