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?

#331

Post by sputr » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

turbinerneiter wrote: post #281

sputr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 of total production. Anything past that point requires a much more responsible approach. Aka storage is to wind what a damn is to hydro.

Now gas can help. But gas isn't storage, it can only help smooth out the bigger disturbances.

But since we're already having issues with storage and we're still just at the 'smooth out instabilities' part... I have no idea how we're going to deal with baseload since no one wants to touch nuclear and we can't build them anyway even if we wanted to.

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

#332

Post by lispm » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #325

lispm wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels. It does. > 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 electricity. No, it doesn't. Renewable energy has a systematic preference and its share in electricity…

> > Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels. > It does. Not really. Maybe in the future but now, it mostly replaced nuclear. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Electric... EDIT: My data is a bit outdated, they did significantly reduce they reliance on hard coal. Lignite use (the worst kind of fossil fuel...) stayed about the same and they use mor…

Newer: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

Fossil fuel usage is significantly going down and adding gas power plants for very agile backup for renewable makes sense, too.

Keep in mind that the Energiewende is a long term project for rebuilding the whole energy landscape in an industrialized country of more than 80 Million people and one of the larger economies in the world. The time scale is 50 years from 2000 upto 2050. Even the current point where we are at 42% of renewable energy (up from 6% in 2000) for electricity was unbelievable 20 years ago - for example given that Germany does not have much hydro-electric capacity. From 'the grid would collapse' to 'Germany will be losing all industry' everything was claimed.

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

#333

Post by hurricanetc » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

number6 wrote: post #135

hurricanetc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And there will never be a nuclear disaster in china. Ah the wonders of progress and dictatorships

We’re living in a coal energy disaster right now. People fear the wrong things.

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

#334

Post by hurricanetc » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #290

hurricanetc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Because there is virtually infinite red tape and paper pushing to do it.

There are new, smaller, safer, and easy to build plants that have been waiting approval for years and years.

The US has never had a nuclear disaster but we’ve had countless coal disasters. Oh and we’re living in a climate disaster caused by coal.

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

#335

Post by rb808 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

Do German households even have smart meters? To me this is the most important thing in a renewable world. I'd imagine the wholesale market electricity was free but consumers pay a fixed charge that doesn't change even on windy days. The most important thing is changing people's behaviour on the peak cold windless cloudy days when the market price is high people shouldn't be washing clothes or ironing or using electric heating.

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

#336

Post by martin_a » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

jevgeni wrote: post #285

martin_a wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Anything is better than just wasting the energy or "selling" it for a negative price to somebody who dumps it somewhere.

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

#337

Post by GuB-42 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

lispm wrote: post #332

GuB-42 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels. > It does. Not really. Maybe in the future but now, it mostly replaced nuclear. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Electric... EDIT: My data is a bit outdated, they did significantly reduce they reliance on hard coal. Lignite use (the worst kind of fossil fuel...) stayed about the same and they use mor…

Newer: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g... Fossil fuel usage is significantly going down and adding gas power plants for very agile backup for renewable makes sense, too. Keep in mind that the Energiewende is a long term project for rebuilding the whole energy landscape in an industrialized country of more than 80 Million people and one of the larger economies in the world. The time scale…

Wow, 2019 is impressive.

I wonder how they managed to tackle the duck curve[1]. Imports?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

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

#338

Post by ryder9 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 2:00 PM 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…

[citation required] for a lot of these ridiculous claims

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

#339

Post by dharma1 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

systemtest wrote: post #279

dharma1 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Densely populated areas in Finland are typically heated with district heating, rather than each house individually.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

Right now the energy for district heating in Helsinki is a mix of fossil fuels and using waste sources of heat like data centre heat.

Renewable energy sources are currently being evaluated for this, with deep geothermal (up to several kilometres deep) being one source.

https://www.hel.fi/uutiset/en/helsinki/helen-investigates-po...

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

#340

Post by mtmail » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #335

Do German households even have smart meters? To me this is the most important thing in a renewable world. I'd imagine the wholesale market electricity was free but consumers pay a fixed charge that doesn't change even on windy days. The most important thing is changing people's behaviour on the peak cold windless cloudy days when the market price is high people shouldn't be washing clothes or ironing or using electri…

If I understand this article correctly: The 2016 law to install smart meters came into effect Feb/2020. Well for those households over 6000 kWh. It's expected that 10% of households will have those within 3 years. https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intelligente-Stromza...