401–410 of 467 posts
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Using heat pumps also makes it almost on par with the cost of natural gas.
Heat pumps don't work below -10C, so this really depends on the local climate. You can use geothermal heat pumps, but now you're no longer near par.
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And how will you drive the discharged car in the morning? It's a non-starter proposition.
Non-starter? It's the actual grid battery storage solution a decade from now. EV owners will be able to pull and push electricity to the grid, incentivized by $. When the grid needs base load, $ paid to EV owners pushing electricity to the grid will keep rising until market equilibrium. Users can get notifications on a mobile app for certain $/kwh they'll be willing to receive to have their car go from 100% -> 60%, e…
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> Germany would have problems if not for French nuclear You could say that pretty much about any country in the European synchronous grid. Everyone needs everyone else. > and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants The gas plants are actually quite cheap. It's the gas that's expensive. > Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for…
No not quite, burning fuel for heat locally will always be at least twice as effective as ideal conversion to power, followed by ideal conversion to heat, in practice its closer to three times. Therefore power prices need to fall substantially gas prices before the switch is worth it. That will never happen while producing power from gas or more expensive alternatives. In particular since the gas distribution infrast…
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- why then, if we go by jhgb's source, is France missing 52 min of electricity per year while Germany is missing 12 min? Are they stabelizing the german grid at their own disadvantage? - are nuclear power plants cheap? Isn't Hinkley Point C guranteed 10 ct/kwh + inflation. Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros? What do gas power plants cost, 20 billion? > 'which have largely prevented ger…
> Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros? Olkiluoto unit 3 is a pretty extreme outlier in construction costs. The same amount of power generation capacity from CPR1000 plants (widely used in China today) would cost closer to 2.5 billion Euros, and construction times are about 5 years.
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Heat pumps don't work below -10C, so this really depends on the local climate. You can use geothermal heat pumps, but now you're no longer near par.
Depends. The ones sold in Poland (and I guess Germany as the climate is similar) are often rated to work from -25C up.
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In most of the Europe the biggest use of energy for family will be heating except summer. In the future probably also charging electric car. This kind of power demand you need mostly at night when sleeping - during the day you are probsbly in the office. Transmitting power also consumes energy - you cannot have a electric wire across pacific to transmit power from US to EU without transformers - electric power line i…
Electric cars are currently mostly charged at night (since that's when electricity is cheaper), but as solar becomes more prevalent, that will swap. Charging cars during the day is pretty easy, just require office parking lots to have chargers (and possibly subsidize). You are right that you can't have an electric wire across the Pacific to get power from the US to the EU, but more because the EU doesn't border the P…
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2021/05/24/usd-30-billion-north...
Whats funny about this is, that the wind farm will not even be connected to Iceland itself! I guess they have such great geothermal resources that they don't really need more power.
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Electricity absolutely, unarguably, is a substitute for gas.
Not when your building's central heating is done by a natural gas furnace. Not without expensive retrofitting. (Which should be done. But it'll take time.)
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6. Wholesale electricity rates have increased from 50 Euros/mwh to 250 Euros/mwh over the course of the last year. This isn't about averages. It's about meeting demand, which is especially important during the winter heating season.
Electric heating is extremely uncommon in Germany (like 1-2 % of households use it).
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There is no battery capacity required for the simple effect of substituting gas power plant operation. Any MWh generated by another source will simply remove the need to generate that MWh from gas, where the price of gas is the dominating component.
Not really. This is overly simplistic since it's not accounting for reliability/predictability of supply. Natural gas can be turned into MWh on demand, at night, when there's no wind, during consumption anomalies, etc. It's clearly not interchangeable with renewables MWh for MWh like you're suggesting.
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They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently. The lifestyle Germans enjoy is falling behind a hypothetical world where they implemented a cheap energy policy. How much energy they produce is much more important when assessing how their renewable transition is going. They have barely managed to tread water by doing less per capita and matching their old suppl…
> They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently. Only if you're assuming some kind of linear relationship between energy consumption and happiness, which seems extremely dubious.