191–200 of 457 posts
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You cannot power a country with wind power alone. Even if you want to build wind turbines, you need nuclear, gas, or coal to back them up.
Wind, solar and pumped storage gets you a long way, to be fair. We definitely need some nuclear, but it's far too expensive to rely on.
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You can do hydrogen, but ammonia production is like 16% efficient?
Efficiency is less important than cost. Maybe ammonia is so much easier to transport and store that it's worth the efficiency penalty.
I am not sure how to compare with hydrogen, as you say costs for it are in storage and transportation
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If they are so inefficient then where does the wasted energy go?
Where it always goes, waste heat. In the case of LEDs, about 50% to 60% of the power draw escapes as heat. Of course, incandescents are much worse.
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>1300 kwh/year this is extremely, extremely low. No heating, no cooling, no hot water, no car charging. A fridge alone tends to be over 400KW/h. Edit: polycaster listed close to 5kWh/year for 3+ household. 1person being 2k. So, extremely low estimate.
We are using 1000 kWh per year as a couple including hot water. With that we are very low in Germany, but even that is really without much optimization (though we lack some energy-intensive devices like a clothes dryer). Newer devices sold in the EU are relatively energy efficient. A typical fridge-freezer combo uses 150kWh.
That would be a small Fridge efficiency has not increased much in the last decades (LG infamously had an efficient but horrendously unreliable 'linear compressor') - the only part that can increase efficiency is the time(s) it gets opened and how good seals the fridge has, and ambient temperature. Also smaller compressor by design cannot be super efficient.
The newer devices part doesn't affect fridges all that much - vacuum cleaners have been limited, lightning requires LEDs (effectively) - which comes w/ its own issue of retrofitting, TVs (also relying on LEDs for backlight or OLED directly), power factor correction (for 75+W) and what not. Direct drive (brushless DC) and low temp washing for washing machines. Yet, there is no recent groundbreaking technology, it's just that the EU changed the efficiency labeling to prevent massive A+++ stuff.
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> That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion... There is a widespread belief that Advertising serves no purpose to humanity. Advertising is like anything in life: In high doses it is harmful. In lower doses it is useful. If there are regulators in your country that prevent advertisers from making false claims, even better. Advertising has helped me hone onto products and services in my whole life…
> There is a widespread belief that advertising serves no purpose to humanity. This is highly political and that 'belief' is indeed often ideological. Free flow of information and awareness of products and services on offer is an important aspect of an open society and free market economics.
And the latter is fully achievable still without everything that is "advertising" today.
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Average power usage for a 1 person household in Germany is 1300 kwh/year (roughly, numbers vary, but not to a degree that it matters). That's about 150W sustained. So 1500W for a large sign, that's like 150 high power LED light bulbs, I guess that checks out. Anything that reduces ads in the public sphere is fine by me.
Not sure where this number comes from. Statistisches Bundesamt says it's 1,958 kwh. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro... Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.
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>1300 kwh/year this is extremely, extremely low. No heating, no cooling, no hot water, no car charging. A fridge alone tends to be over 400KW/h. Edit: polycaster listed close to 5kWh/year for 3+ household. 1person being 2k. So, extremely low estimate.
As household made of 4 persons, with me permanently in Home-Office, have a consumption of roughly ~2300kWh/year, including heating, in Germany. Waschmaschine and Dryer are almost on a daily basis used (the dryer is used less during hot season) If you tend to buy energetic-efficient devices, your power bill is lower, in front of higher costs for the equipment.
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So much to be said about that trope... Are there seriously people who still believe in TINA? What a bleak way to see the world.
I'm curious about what alternative you have in mind if you think that living in an open and free society is bleak.
I don't like political arguments on hn but if you're truly interested I can try to summarise them when I get home later.
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> I'm sorry, but this is hearfelt: the German greens are climate criminals. And they were fully warned of exactly this situation decades ago, so no, they have zero "circumstances forced our hand" defence. The Greens have not been in government for the last sixteen years . It was the conservative governments under Merkel and particularly the environment and later economy minister Altmaier who openly celebrated reducin…
> The Greens have not been in government for the last sixteen years. While this is true, they have always been in favour of shutting down nuclear power plants and now they would have the opportunity to reverse this course, but they don't. The Greens have been founded as an anti-nuclear party. In the 80s, they even demanded to replace nuclear power with coal ( https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/1435297744487338…
Because nuclear does not make sense. The financial risk of accidents at a Fukushima or Chernobyl scale is too high (as no insurer will take on that risk, the taxpayers will have to pay for it, and as the Ukraine invasion and the fighting around Chernobyl shows, disaster plants are a danger for decades!), a lot of the uranium comes from questionable sources (Russia and Khazakhstan [1]), and Europe does not have permanent storage solutions for the nuclear waste [2].
Renewable energies already make up 41% of our electricity generation, it could be 100%.
> What's so catastrophic about France? Despite all the troubles they currently have, their CO2 emissions per kW are still a fraction of Germany's.
For the sake of not spamming around the same text, I consolidated the list of issues here in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605337
As for the CO2 emissions: yeah because the CO2 everyone else in Europe generates to compensate their nuclear issues is not counted in their CO2 budget but ours.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...
[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/atommuell-die-suche-nac...
Colour signage sell more products than Black and White? Probably.