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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?

#371

Post by eisa01 »

usrusr wrote: post #50
Zenst wrote: post #21

I'm somewhat shocked that they do they not load those subsidies onto the electricity charge on consumers as a tax and mean those that use more, pay more. That's what they do in the UK, though alas they loaded it onto the standing charge that is a flat rate per day for having a supply. Idealy it should be like personal TAX, you have a certain amount you get without being taxed, then after that you pay X amount until y…

> alas they loaded it onto the standing charge that is a flat rate per day for having a supply. Not true, source: my electricity bill. A standing charge exists, but the vast majority of what we pay is per kWh. The part that you misunderstood, I think, is that the EEG is fixed per kWh and not per euro paid (just like most of our fuel taxes, even if crude doubles or halves in price our price at the pump only shifts a l…

You can switch to Tibber to enjoy spot based pricing

We have had that in the Nordics for ages, they are just about to launch in Germany

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

#372

Post by lispm »

luckylion wrote: post #359
lispm wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not really a separate price for fossil fuel electricity. And renewable energy has preference: if renewable energy is available, it will be used with preference. > 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 p…

> There is not really a separate price for fossil fuel electricity. And renewable energy has preference: if renewable energy is available, it will be used with preference. Sure, sure, the issue is that you can use electricity or fossil fuels for heating. If the prices are massively different, people cannot afford to go green. Having super high prices for consumers while essentially subsidizing industry seems like a p…

> Sure, sure, the issue is that you can use electricity or fossil fuels for heating.

You can't. Fossil fuels are still used for electricity, too and there is not enough cheap electricity for heating. If you want to bring people from relatively cheap gas to expensive electricity (the free electricity claim is just nonsense) that would be massive investments, while the consumer already pays for the move into renewable energy for electricity production, which without heating still needs to scale to replace more fossil and nuclear. If we want to have the consumer to pay for new heating systems and electricity distribution for heating on a larger scale, then this will be difficult...

It's simply not the case that one lowers the price for electricity (who pays for that?) and consumers will switch on their electrical heating systems. There is simply no large scale infrastructure for that.

It might even be better to create gas from electricity and deliver that to the customer... Then one can use the large storage and distribution systems for gas in Germany and the gas heating which is widely available. There is a move to get rid of oil heating and to provide incentives to install different heating from 2026 onwards...

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

#373

Post by lispm »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #350
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. Maybe read the article before commenting? There's a whole section in there explaining why this isn't happening (for heating)

It's not happening because it is no goal in the energy policy to promote large scale electrical heating and there is no cheap surplus energy (different from what the article claims). There will be some expansion in the area of heat pumps, but it will be slow.

The renewable energy expansion is used to replace current non-renewable electricity usage. Then we will see more renewable energy electricity used to decarbonize traffic (trains, cars, trucks, busses, ...).

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

#374

Post by ZeroGravitas »

I've not checked this particular occurrence yet, so it's possible there's good news, but I've never found one of these "renewables cause negative prices" stories yet where the system was actually running on 100% renewable.

Usually there's some coal or gas supply that decides for whatever reason to not turn itself off. Often because ramp downs and then up again will cost them more than the negative price.

So it's all geeky accounting, but basically non renewables are being fined so they make slightly less money overall if they aren't flexible to demand.

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

#375

Post by LordHeini »

archgoon wrote: post #51
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…

> But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. What? Why?

Because there are serious problems with the disposal of highly radioactive waste.

As of now there is no proper solution in Europe for the disposal of that stuff. There are a few, work in progress, storage facilities like Asse in Germany which are blocked by local politics.

Lots of the stuff just circles around on the European rail network on its way from temporary storage to temporary storage.

On top these French and especially the Belgian nuclear reactors are in a horrible state. Just have a look at Thiange and you would never want to be near that thing.

And did I say the Belgians have no idea what to do whith the waste too.

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

#376

Post by dharma1 »

wokkel wrote: post #348
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.

It's clean but renewable not so much in two ways: they are planning one here at a depth of 2.5 to 3km. They expect it to last 30 years before the underground has cooled to much to be of use. Regenerating that heat (i.e. spreading the other heat to this area) will take a few hundred years they expect. And secondly: there is a limited amount of heat available in the earth. It's a lot of heat, but there is no meaningful…

Interesting - do you have a source for that?

Makes sense though, and I think it depends on how much heat you extract - you could locally deplete the heat faster than it "regenerates" back to that area through natural radioactive decay and primordial heat loss

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

#377

Post by systemtest »

Throwaway984332 wrote: post #341
systemtest wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is correct, but a heat pump requires a big unit placed outside the home that makes noise. Given our lack of space, closely grouped homes and apartment buildings, that is a challenge. Also a heat pump is not able to heat the water to 70 degrees, which is why you need to isolate your home even more for it to work. Electric resistance heat is inefficient but it's a plug-and-play replacement solution for gas heaters…

"but a heat pump requires a big unit placed outside the home that makes noise." Old ones maybe. We've installed a Mitsubishi mini-split that can heat a 1900 sq ft. mediocrely insulated home in Appalachia (this morning was -6C). Never mind, the indoor spits ( As to footprint, the compressor is tall and wide (about 1m). But it's only 25 cm thick, so it doesn't take much room at all along the wall. Really, Europe has no…

A heat pump at -6C? Are you sure it was operating as a heat pump or did it fall back on resistance heating?

Also split units are rather ugly and with older homes you ruin the look. Government hot water heating with city water is much better as it doesn't affect how the street or homes look like.

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

#378

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Faark wrote: post #278
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.

We don't really have to speculate, since energy production data is available [0]. There certainly was a lot of energy produced by wind turbines. About the same as last week (also quite windy). But the "entire countries are working at half capacity" doesn't seem to be valid, at last I don't see a dip in power consumption. [0] https://energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2...

Notably these graphs show that Germany was exporting quite a lot of power on the 10th, but was still burning gas, brown coal and hard coal in large quantities at the same time. Also nuclear, which I don't mind as much of the others, but still Germany has decided to phase it out so it seems Germany still needs more renewables.

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

#379

Post by endorphone »

Retric wrote: post #125
endorphone wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The issue with heat pumps is you may need far less heat at 15c when their very efficient than at -15c when their not." My home is heated with a heat pump. I live in Canada, and just went through a period of -20C. It works great and is a fraction of the cost of heating with natural gas. It also operates as a fantastic AC in the summer. It uses a closed loop of water to pipes in the ground, with the ground as the "sin…

The ground ends up close to the average temperature of the local environment which in your case is a long way from -15c. Excluding of course hot springs etc, but that’s a separate and very localized solution. Further, if you’re that far south a solar hot water heater system is still cheaper to build + operate and in terms of energy costs. People dealing with permafrost both directly are stuck with lower temperatures…

I'm not quite getting your point, and honestly it seems like you're digging deep to stick with what you originally stated.

The climate I live in is colder than the majority of humans. Maybe the vast majority. I have a very efficient heat pump (I've been using it for 8 years now -- it's well proven to me by now). Ergo, any notion that heat pumps only work in balmy conditions has no bearing on reality -- yes, those super cheap air exchange units you grab from Home Depot to take the chill off in Atlanta during January might have such limits, but that has no bearing on the market as a whole.

The article linked talks about how Germans don't heat with electricity -- even with very efficient heat pumps -- because a regressive tax on such use makes it uneconomical. I don't see what solar heaters (which seldom even pay for themselves in great conditions -- e.g. California -- as an aside) have to do with this conversation.

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

#380

Post by dekhn »

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.

I do the laundry for the house; it's about 4 loads a week for 4 people, which I mainly batch up because if I'm not paying attention to the wet laundry, it can sit in the washer and get stale. It would take more like 5 minutes to hang a load- do I hang it inside, or out of my crowded home (it's in the 4-10C range outside now), so you're talking about 20 minutes, spread throughout a day. Alternatively, I can just dump the washer load into the dryer, and come back when the dryer finishes. For a busy professional, this is huge.
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