The wording of the current title is unnecessarily insulting. The point of the article is that Germans don't use electricity to heat their homes because the weird economics plus possibly some sunk costs favor natural gas or oil. Germans aren't sitting around in the cold winters wearing parkas and shaking their thrifty fists at the powers that be.
Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
381–390 of 397 posts
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
mass extinction inevitable by 2100 This is very emotive language, which is fine, but there is no currently projected scenario where mass extinction is inevitable or even likely. Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. We are well on the way. In many parts of the world this is the majority energy mix already. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces en…
The poster said ‘a mass extinction’ which does not mean what you seem to think it does: “An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event It seems very fair - even overly cautious! - to push the inevitability of that out to 2100 when many would say it is already in progress.
You are right of course.
However the OP said (in their original post): In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.
I took it in that context. I'd also note the there are multiple causes of mass extinction of which climate change is one.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Chinese power grid isn't especially secret. Data is available here[1] or a good write-up on Wikipedia[2]. I live in Australia so I know it pretty well. My state (South Australia) has multiple ~1000km interconnects with more being planned. Australia remains badly underconnected compared to other markets. Wikipedia has good data[3], and your idea about "looking at the first world" is dramatically outdated. Most new…
It’s not about the distance of the transmission lines - it’s the capacity. You lose a lot more energy moving electricity through small wires then oil in tanks.
I thought that this was the case but I did some reading and I was very surprised at how little HVDC lines lose - roughly 3% per 1000km (a lot less than AC transmission).
The new Ultra high voltage lines in China and elsewhere are even more efficient.
This explains why the Chinese are able to keep their power generation capacity so far away from their main population centres.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sup…
My point is solar hot water heaters are generally the better option for home heating as I have been saying. You may assume I am referring to a specific case but this is very general advice. Including arctic through tropical climate, sea level or extreme altitude, detached single family homes through skyscrapers, building on bead rock vs oceanfront silt.
In the tropics at high altitude you can use cheap systems for domestic hot water and minimal heating needs. Colder local temperatures require larger and more complex systems but also increase demand for heat. Meanwhile, heat pumps get steadily worse until ground source heating becomes viable though at significantly higher upfront costs and more limited locations. Salt water for example dramatically increases heat pump costs costs vs fresh water.
Large cities often shift things to heat pumps. Though neither system is that great for dense NYC skyscrapers or other large northern cities. And most cites skyscrapers have significant unused exposures where solar collectors are at least somewhat viable. Many short apartment buildings in China for example have solar collectors for the top few floors.
PS: That said, it’s generally not exactly a dramatic difference. However, unlike many things it’s both generally if not always cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#385Earlier 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)
Electrical heating is seen as an emergency solution in Germany. There are nearly no homes with electrical heating systems in place, and if people heat electrical it is when their central heating system is broken.
I think most Germans wouldn't even get the idea to heat electrically.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, there are. But houses need to be insulated. Consumers need not waste energy by just using it -> for example don't open the window to cool down, instead of lowering the heating, etc. etc. Standards need to be defined for new houses. Also provide solutions for existing houses. Provide business models. To create that market and to make some impact means that we are talking about decades.
I keep forgetting how hopelessly after on the insulation central Europe is compared to us in the north. A friend of a friend built a house by Swedish standards in the UK a while ago and all her neighbors pitied her because the snow remained on her roof during winter.
UK is much much worse than Germany tho. And as an Austrian I have to say that most scandinavic houses I have been to (including iceland) were much worse insulated (both thermally and acoustically) than the houses in Austria.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#387I 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…
It also doesn’t state what is obvious to those of us who build infrastructure: Germany and Denmark have no way to store wind power so it has no choice but to pay others to take it. Norway is home to one of the worlds largest batteries.. its hydro power. Already cheap, but has the added benefit of being storable for sufficient duration to take german and danish wind power when it suits them (ie when they get paid). It…
I recently listened to a long podcast with a German that is working on hydro-gravitational storage with water lifting a huge (multiple hundred meters in diameter) rock cylinder to store energy. He recently finished a smaller scale prototype (if I recall right 20m diameter) that tests all the insulation, the cutting techniques and power generation
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, a power source as insanely dangerous as nuclear is fortunately not politically viable at all here in the long term.
Nuclear is safer than any other power source we have.
All other power sources, except maybe hydro, are almost perfectly safe. They're a lot more damaging to people's health and the environment, yes, but that is a different thing from danger.
I wrote "in the long term" for a reason, by the way. I'd prefer to get rid of coal before nuclear despite the danger.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can never reach 100% renewables Bullshit. You need storage, obviously. > Am I missing something Yes.
Or alternatively/in combination with dynamic demand, smart grids, wide area transmission and overprovisioning. I don't really get why the nuclear "base load" generation even helps. If nuclear generates 70% of our peak load, and our peak load happens on a windless, dark day - what then? We still need storage and likely CCGT as backup of last resort.
> dynamic demand
Which does not actually mean turning off the power grid for hours as a lot of people here claim but things like throttling down energy-intensive industry at peak times and running non-time-critical jobs when there's surplus energy.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article stresses since 2017 and for two reasons ( different from what is discussed in this thread): - Switching to an auction model in 2017 to drive prices down, which was implemented very poorly. - Strongly incentivizing small "citizen" project to increase acceptance in the population. Which messed up larger scale deployments and lead to awful bureaucracy.
> Strongly incentivizing small "citizen" project [...] Doesn't Germany have restrictive distance regulations between wind turbines and residential areas?
Yep, that exactly is the problem.
Due to distance regulations between residential areas, existing turbines etc etc (and basically each viable spot already taken / in use, besides offshore) the numbers built are shrinking - unless some kind of change regarding the laws are done...
Source: gf is a landscape architect