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In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

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Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#601

Post by Maakuth »

zdragnar wrote: post #520
jacquesm wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere you use resistive heating you're better off with a heatpump which is far more efficient than that.

Unless you live somewhere that (air, e.g. in an EV) heat pumps can't function at high efficiency. Tonight and tomorrow night will be -20F/-28C. Always good to have a backup plan, no matter what your primary heat source is.

Modern air-to-air heatpumps heat at over 100% efficiency even at those temperatures, they are very widely deplyoed in the Nordics for heating. And even where it is sometimes that cold, most of the year it is warmer than that. Still yes, you should have another source of heat just in case.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#602

Post by 8fingerlouie »

zdragnar wrote: post #520
jacquesm wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere you use resistive heating you're better off with a heatpump which is far more efficient than that.

Unless you live somewhere that (air, e.g. in an EV) heat pumps can't function at high efficiency. Tonight and tomorrow night will be -20F/-28C. Always good to have a backup plan, no matter what your primary heat source is.

My Vaillant air to water heat pump is "effective" down to -28C, and has a resistive heater element as a backup in case the COP value flatlines (as in if COP is 1, it doesn't matter).

My cheap air to air heat pump in the summerhouse (Panasonic HZ25ZKE) is effective down to -25C and has a COP of 2.22 there. Even at -25C it still delivers twice as much heat energy as the electricity consumed.

https://www.aircon.panasonic.eu/DK_da/product/panasonic-hz25...

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#603

Post by a_paddy »

black_puppydog wrote: post #591
owenversteeg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe. For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc. Y…

Nice link, thanks! Still, the renewables (I'm not counting nuclear and biofuels, but counting hydro and "other renewables") make up 21.1% of the total energy consumption as well, up from 13.3% in 2015. That's still quite marked. Also after clicking the "settings" button to show absolute values, I was surprised to see that total energy consumption peaked in 2006 (hey, that's 20 years ago!) at ~18,900TWh, and is now at…

Do not underestimate the impact of transitioning from incandescent to LED lighting. An average home could be consuming 1Kw for lighting alone at busy times.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#604

Post by holowoodman »

eigenspace wrote: post #265
owenversteeg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe. For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc. Y…

It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage. Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards…

> Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).

Yes, but there are also future inefficient uses of renewables. E.g. when making iron, you heat the ore (iron oxides) with coke (refined sulfurless coal). The coke will provide extra heat and act as a reduction agent, separating the oxygen atoms from the iron oxides. Now you can do the same thing with hydrogen as the reduction agent to avoid producing CO2 and to avoid using fossil fuels. However, creating renewable hydrogen is atm only 30% efficient, storing and transporting it has losses. Even with possible improvements, that hydrogen will be a very inefficient and costly use of electricity, and at least half of it will always be wasted.

So in terms of total energy usage, making those kinds of industrial processes use hydrogen, we will have to at least double our electricity output. And a lot of that doubling will be wasted because of the inefficiency of electrolysis, as opposed to directly using coal or natural gas.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#605

Post by lambdaone »

tsimionescu wrote: post #571
jopsen wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Falling back on gas 10-20 times per year sounds very reasonable. It's not net zero, but nearly zero will probably do fine? Politicians like to say net zero, but when we are 90% there will we maybe not stop caring and find other more pressing problems?

Net zero is barely enough to help with climate goals, given how late we are. It's not a huge goal, it is the absolute bare minimum to avoid >2 degrees of warming.

Achievable near-future net-nearly-zero in the near future is a lot better than waiting longer until we can achieve full net zero. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The real issue is the cost of keeping gas peaker stations around that are mostly idle and fire up only a few days a year, but that's an economic issue, not an engineering one.

In the longer term, you could even run them off net-zero renewable syngas that you make the rest of the year using low-cost electrical power at peak solar generation times; you only need to store a relatively small amount of it, and old fossil fuel reservoirs are ideal for this.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#606

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Moldoteck wrote: post #590
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Ontario they now want to double the electricity price to 15 cents kWh to finance refurbs and ”SMR” new builds. https://reneweconomy.com.au/ontario-utility-wants-to-double-... New built nuclear power simply does not make any sense anymore given the costs and timelines involved.

You need to read precisely what's happening. Ontario wants to front finance all refurbs and SMRs instead of spreading the financing over years like it's usually done. BWRX is expensive for sure. It'll cost more per GW than the failed french FLA3 or Vogtle. To me this seems a mistake considering Canada had Candus, an own authentic design that doesn't rely on enriched fuel and they did some very serious refurbs recentl…

> The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt

I assumed it was, like the UK, because it let them avoid committing to a specific price like all the other competing technologies so they could raise the price later once the project was too far along to cancel.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#607

Post by kolektiv »

clarionbell wrote: post #600

Meanwhile European chemical manufacturing is collapsing under weight of record energy costs.[1][2] Most of other manufacturing is somehow tied to chemicals, you can't build things without material after all. So this will feed ongoing industrial collapse, which now affects even Germany.[3] Meanwhile, low income households are running into financial issues if they want to turn up the heat.[4] The whole process has been…

There's absolutely mismanagement, and politicians could do an awful lot to change this. Ironically, in the UK at least, most of the reasons why they don't are due to historic regulations designed to protect either the fossil fuel industry or an initially weak green energy industry, which no longer serves any purpose except to push both households and businesses into decline.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#608

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

epolanski wrote: post #391
dataviz1000 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians. It would be worth including control of the people who vote for the politicians by direct investment such as when the oil producing Saudis bought the second largest stake in NewCorps which controls FoxNews controlling the content that influences voters. And, less than ethical control using bots on social media by Russia. A lo…

I'm kinda tired of the argument where we only focus on some bad actors when it comes to online influencing. Our countries absolutely do the same if not more to influence voters both here and in these other countries, especially online.

What could western nations possibly do to propagandise voters in Russia and Saudi Arabia?

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#609

Post by lambdaone »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #537
kieranmaine wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding long term storage keep an eye on the UK's Cap and Floor scheme which offers guaranteed revenues to long term storage technologies [1]. Page 7 of https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/LDES%20... lists the technology types of the project applications. The majority are Li-Ion BESS, but there are also other battery chemistries and Liquid/Compress Air Storage 1. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/press-rele…

> offers guaranteed revenues Government picking winners? When did that ever work out well?

Airbus.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#610

Post by jillesvangurp »

nandomrumber wrote: post #522
jacquesm wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere you use resistive heating you're better off with a heatpump which is far more efficient than that.

This is not true in all circumstances. Where you need process heat for industrial applications, you’re almost always better off with resistive heat or fossil fuels, typically gas.

Depends, industrial heat is a rather large category. The vast majority of industrial heat in e.g. food production or textiles needs modest temperatures that can easily be handled with heat pumps.

For the rest, there are many ways to heat electrically. Including resistive, plasma, arc, induction, etc. Mostly, gas based heating is convenient because it is rather simple technology that is easy to use and we know how to do it at scale. But there is a lot of wasted heat in industry. Mostly that just blows out the chimneys or is radiated to the universe.

Cooling is as big of a problem as heating is in industry. Cooling is the process of expending more energy in order to get rid of the already wasted energy you can't use. Very little of that energy is recovered. Though some places run e.g. district heating on this type of energy.

There are examples of steel producers that are using electric heat now. Still a bit niche. But it works. A lot of this stuff is inertia. Building and designing new factories from scratch is expensive and disruptive. Gas isn't expensive/wasteful enough to consider that for a lot of existing industries. However, new companies would be well advised to see if they can undercut the competition by going electric. Especially in places where gas now has to be imported in LNG form at great cost.

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