171–180 of 197 posts
Completely unrelated, but I'm truly impressed that CNN offers a light version of their articles without any layout. This is really refreshing and a pleasure to read. I would like to see more websites do this and focus on the content.
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Producing that amount of heat with gas would still be better than using electricity.
You might think it's impossible to beat a modern 98% efficient gas furnace, but electric heat pumps can have effective efficiencies greater than 100%. (sometimes 200% or 300%!) They can do this because they "steal" heat energy from outside (yes, even in the cold winter air)
Also, gas furnaces get those 99+% efficiencies only at input=output (ie no heating) temperature. Most radiators require a water temperature well north of 50C to emit the power required, and for decades gas furnaces were thus set to default output temperatures of 70-80C. At that point, the maximum thermodynamic efficiency (which is a curve as function of temperature differential, with the optimum at Tdiff=0, ie no technical improvements are going to improve this) is more like 70-80%. Actually, a cheap way to get a ~10% gas bill reduction is to change the output temp to 50C (if yours runs at 70+) and see if your radiators still can emit enough heat to reach your desired room temperature.
Long term, heat pumps are the only sane choice. Burning gas in a plant and running a heat pump off its electricity is more efficient that burning it yourself. In fact, as of next year (or was is 2024?) any gas furnace must be replace with at minimum a hybrid heat pump here in the Netherlands.
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Okay, that makes sense. Do people in these situations try to come up with on-demand storage at all, or is that not reasonable given the difficulty of storing natural gas? Like, could you try and load up your idle fleet of containers (truck, ship) on the cheap or are we past that now, hence the negative price?
Any reasonably-sized storage has already been contracted out in advance, and improvising additional storage capacity isn't really viable given the amounts of gas we're talking about and the environmental laws storage has to comply with. However, what has happened in the past for oil is tanker ships anchoring with a full load just offshore until they can sell the load for a good price. I don't know whether that's also…
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Not to nitpick and assuming you're living in the northern hemisphere, winter has not officially arrived; we're still in the fall/autumn season.
It's a little too nitpicky IMO to point this out (not to say you were trying to be though, all good), because what people are shorthanding here is that it's "unseasonably warm" still, and that's a good thing. "Winter so far has been mild" is not a confusion on their part that it won't get any colder, just a misstatement. Autumn has been unseasonably warm, and the difference in parts of Europe between the two isn't as…
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From context, it seems that the "you" in question is "a company that runs a natural gas storage space." As a company with fiduciary responsibilities, they likely can't concern themselves too much with the problem you mention.
European utilities are often public utilities that are nationalized in some way, not strictly corporate businesses.
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> In addition, winter so far has been fairly warm. It's Autumn. Winter starts on the 21st Dec. October in most of the Europe is not that much of a heating season, November will make us start digging into the gas we prepared. It's way too early for early to judge how easy it'll be.
> Winter starts on the 21st Dec. 21 December is Midwinter Solstice... By orbital mechanics, winter starts around 10 November.
This year, astronomical winter begins on 21 December 2022 and ends on 20 March 2023.
Meteorological winter begins on 1 December.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/sea...
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European utilities are often public utilities that are nationalized in some way, not strictly corporate businesses.
Not sure what you're talking about, practically every major EU energy org is a corporation (traded on an exchange or even an Ltd-like private company), only sometimes there's a bit of it owned by a state... Can you give some examples of major energy organizations that are wholly-owned by a state (or at least majority-owned) or actual organizational units of a state?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vattenfall
Fortum, 50.x% owned by the finish state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortum
Equinor, 67% Norwegian government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinor
Ørsted, 50.x%. Danish state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98rsted_(company)
EDF, 87% French state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...
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It's a little too nitpicky IMO to point this out (not to say you were trying to be though, all good), because what people are shorthanding here is that it's "unseasonably warm" still, and that's a good thing. "Winter so far has been mild" is not a confusion on their part that it won't get any colder, just a misstatement. Autumn has been unseasonably warm, and the difference in parts of Europe between the two isn't as…
I like how you're effectively nitpicking my seemingly nitpicking comment in defense of anti-nitpicking :)
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Not sure what you're talking about, practically every major EU energy org is a corporation (traded on an exchange or even an Ltd-like private company), only sometimes there's a bit of it owned by a state... Can you give some examples of major energy organizations that are wholly-owned by a state (or at least majority-owned) or actual organizational units of a state?
Vattenfall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vattenfall Fortum, 50.x% owned by the finish state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortum Equinor, 67% Norwegian government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinor Ørsted, 50.x%. Danish state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98rsted_(company) EDF, 87% French state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...
And what about EU rules against unfair competition? They basically force these companies to behave like any other market participant and forbid the state from giving them much/any help. This had real consequences in Poland and Czechia where the states wanted to help nuclear projects (in case of Czechia it was CEZ - the partially state-owned energy company) but the EU stopped it.