Author Topic: "Gas Armageddon": Energy/electricity prices in EU/UK (and how to deal with them)  (Read 79310 times)

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Online Marco

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A recent study (monitoring modern heat pumps across the country) shows an average COP of 2.6 for Germany.

How many of those are with high temp radiators? The industry is infamous for cocking it up.
 

Offline Miyuki

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A recent study (monitoring modern heat pumps across the country) shows an average COP of 2.6 for Germany.

How many of those are with high temp radiators? The industry is infamous for cocking it up.
People think they are maintenance free when they cost so much
Yet you will see this and people complaining about how bad it works
 
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Offline nctnico

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Hydrogen is going to be the new oil & gas.

I do see a strong future for hydrogen (or syngas, but probably both will be used.)

Whilst I'm not convinced it makes sense for vehicles, the use of hydrogen as a storage mechanism for renewable energy is just a no brainer.  There is no other technology that can possibly compete for seasonal energy storage.  Not batteries, not molten salt, not pumped hydro.
If you Google around a bit, you can find reports that say exactly the same. Batteries are good for storage for single digit hours. Beyond that, hydrogen is more cost effective.
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline tom66Topic starter

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The same pipes that now carry Natural gas around cities used to carry Town/Coal gas in the past and it is about 50% H2 and it worked without any issues.
You can switch to pure H2 distribution without major issues
There is no reason to not do so. It worked fine hundred years back.
It makes sense they want it. With Abundant renewables, there will be windows with electricity at zero or "negative" price. And they can with reasonably big storage make a fortune on using it and storing hydrogen.
It is pretty safe to store it and when it leaks it just safely rises to the sky.

The other thing to realise is that most of the old pipes under roads etc made of iron which are vulnerable to embrittlement, are reaching end of life anyway due to corrosion and temperature cycles. And so they are due for replacement in the next 10 years anyway.

When I lived in Leeds the gas authority there was conducting an extensive replacement process.  All pipes were being replaced with plastic or polymer which can support H2.  They are currently only carrying CH4, but there is clearly the aim in the future to carry H2.

Also, almost every boiler made in the last 10yrs is capable of burning a part H2 mix without modification.  And with some simple modifications it should be possible to get up to 90-100%.

Long term I think heat pumps make the most sense for new homes, and for old homes on a case-by-case basis perhaps.  But H2 as a heating gas also makes a huge amount of sense.  It combusts cleanly producing only water vapour, has similar energy density to CH4 (a little less but not drastically so) and can use as much existing infrastructure as possible.  It may even be possible to fractionate the gas at local distribution, so you can switch an area to 100% H2 once all the boilers in that area have been tested/upgraded.

IMO even bigger than climate change is energy security, if a country can produce its own gas, no more Russia/Saudi/etc. controlling the gas market.
 

Offline nctnico

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I do see a strong future for hydrogen (or syngas, but probably both will be used.)

Whilst I'm not convinced it makes sense for vehicles, the use of hydrogen as a storage mechanism for renewable energy is just a no brainer.  There is no other technology that can possibly compete for seasonal energy storage.  Not batteries, not molten salt, not pumped hydro.
The low efficiency of creating it by electrolysis is unfortunate, but not necessarily a show stopper depending on the source of the energy input. What I can't see is why we would ever use hydrogen as H2 (an inconvenient gas that's hard to liquify, low energy density, explosive in pretty much all concentrations, leaks through almost everything, embrittles metals, etc.) rather than stick it to some carbon atoms and make synthetic methane or synthetic LPG.
If you dig a bit deeper into hydrogen you'll find that it is widely used in many industrial processes. People that make such claims seem to reason from a POV where the large scale use of hydrogen is something completely new. It simply isn't. The technology and infrastructure are there, it just needs to be scaled up from large to extra-extra-large.

IMO even bigger than climate change is energy security, if a country can produce its own gas, no more Russia/Saudi/etc. controlling the gas market.
For Europe that is not going to change. There simply isn't enough land to support the required amount of renewable sources like solar and wind. Where it comes to solar, it makes sense to put the solar panels in the north part of Africa anyway because there is about twice as much energy coming from the sun in those areas compared to a large part of Europe. Marocco, Tunesia and Algeria are already gearing up to become hydrogen producers / exporters.
« Last Edit: August 25, 2022, 04:21:01 pm by nctnico »
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline james_s

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I have a chimney, and an open fireplace, and maybe I'll consider buying a chainsaw, there is plenty of trees around. Though you are also already too late to cut down trees, it needs months to dry out. Apparently deforestation is an issue back in the old country.

An open fireplace is virtually useless for heating, I have heard in some cases it is a net negative since most of the heat goes up the flue and then it continues to draw heat out of the house after the fire dies down before you can close the damper. A sealed wood stove is lovely though, I installed an insert in one of my fireplaces years ago and I love it.
 
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Offline james_s

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Is the issue caused by speculation? Really?

Speculators make profit between the buy-sell spread; they attempt to profit from small changes in price.  They do not generally profit from the price of the commodity itself, not for gas at least.  This is because they don't usually store gas (that's expensive) and they don't produce it.  So if the hypothesis that this high gas price is caused by speculation, then where is all of this storage, holding gas back from the market?

The "Don't Pay" campaign is silly.  I understand that people are struggling and they may simply be unable to pay.  However, the energy retailers, the companies who buy energy for their customers on the wholesale market, don't make a huge amount of money in any typical year.  In a good year they'd make £25 per customer for a gas and electric contract, for a whole year.  They're already making a loss at the current SVR tariff because the wholesale price has jumped even further ahead of the capped price, at least for the UK.  The anger is directed at the wrong people and risks further collapse of the energy retail market and higher costs for all.

That's typical unfortunately. About 10 years or so ago when gasoline first topped $2/gallon there was a rash of incidents where bricks were thrown through windows of gas stations and other crimes of that sort. The gas stations of course weren't the issue, they don't make much profit at all on the gas.
 

Offline james_s

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Right, but you also can't allow Russia to invade a sovereign democratic country.  So the sanctions are justified there, it is just that the EU cannot survive long without Russian gas, so it creates a dilemma.  You can support Ukraine and have cold homes and shut down industry,  or allow Ukraine to fall to the Russians and admit that Russia has too much control over European energy to make any retaliatory action practical in the long term. 

Why can't you? I think it's pretty crappy what Russia is doing, but that doesn't make it yours or my duty to get involved and dictate what one sovereign nation does to another. It's pretty hard to tell Russia what to do, and there isn't much the rest of the world is going to be able to do to persuade them short of starting WWIII. I suspect the sanctions will have a negligible effect on Russia, all they are really doing is causing suffering in the countries imposing them.
 

Offline james_s

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Problem is unless you’re near a plate boundary or volcano land isn’t growing on trees so rightfully what we have need be used wisely. From what we see the UK has mainly hamlets throughout the countryside in the effort to protect the productive farmland from senseless subdivision whereas here close to cities housing is expanding horizontally instead of vertically in some effort to protect the productive countryside.

This is a big problem in my region. Over the past decades we have paved/built over millions of acres of prime agricultural land. People love to crap on the rural regions, but forget that's where the bulk of our food comes from.
 

Online Marco

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In the lead up to the war, Putin never really cared about NATO buffers or even an impending invasion of Donbas (or biolabs). The closest Putin came to a Casus Belli was ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“. Now consider that Russia already said, "Baltic states’ treatment of Russians reminiscent of true apartheid". They consider all Russified/Russian empire nations theirs to bully and unfortunately, we already made some of them NATO and EU members.

Coming out on the side of Ukraine had a Real Politik purpose. If you want to be really callous you could say Ukraine has served its purpose, but there was a purpose.
 

Offline vad

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It's pretty hard to tell Russia what to do, and there isn't much the rest of the world is going to be able to do to persuade them short of starting WWIII. I suspect the sanctions will have a negligible effect on Russia, all they are really doing is causing suffering in the countries imposing them.
What makes you believe that nuclear deterrence no longer works?

Sanctions do have negligible effect, because there are no real sanctions. Russian energy exports are stronger than ever. EU’s oil embargo will only start in January 2023, and EU has no plans to cut natural gas imports any time soon.
 

Offline madires

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A recent study (monitoring modern heat pumps across the country) shows an average COP of 2.6 for Germany.

How many of those are with high temp radiators? The industry is infamous for cocking it up.

No idea! The COP value is for air-water types.
 

Offline themadhippy

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Quote
1st January 2023 (Latest predictions) £4,650 a year (31% rise)
Leaving someone on the highest rate disability benefits around  £155 A YEAR for everything else

Quote
some very serious unsettlement is coming to the streets very soon.
Right after ive watched the  new series of gladiators baking on ice, o but theirs a cory special on after so can we wait till that's finished
 
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Offline richard.cs

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The low efficiency of creating it by electrolysis is unfortunate, but not necessarily a show stopper depending on the source of the energy input. What I can't see is why we would ever use hydrogen as H2 (an inconvenient gas that's hard to liquify, low energy density, explosive in pretty much all concentrations, leaks through almost everything, embrittles metals, etc.) rather than stick it to some carbon atoms and make synthetic methane or synthetic LPG.
If you dig a bit deeper into hydrogen you'll find that it is widely used in many industrial processes. People that make such claims seem to reason from a POV where the large scale use of hydrogen is something completely new. It simply isn't. The technology and infrastructure are there, it just needs to be scaled up from large to extra-extra-large.
Sure, there's plenty of hydrogen used industrially, though I would be enormously surprised if industrial hydrogen use is within two orders of magnitude of methane use.  Almost none of that is made electrolytically, instead by reacting natural gas with steam. Nor does the fact that  it's widely used industrially have any bearing on whether it is a good idea to distribute it to the general public in a network of pipes not designed for it, through private pipes not designed for it, to large amounts of equipment also not designed for it.

The same pipes that now carry Natural gas around cities used to carry Town/Coal gas in the past and it is about 50% H2 and it worked without any issues.
I am not sure I agree with "without any issues". It's generally accepted that coal gas had an increased explosion risk in domestic use due to the very wide range of gas:air ratios over which it will ignite. Coal gas was also horribly toxic due to the carbon monoxide content, and is one of those things that probably would be considered very unsafe if it were invented today (like Aspirin, cars with single-skin petrol tanks 4 inches above the road, 3rd rail electric trains, etc).

I am not that against distributing hydrogen in place of methane, I just am yet to be convinced there are all that many benefits over distributing electricity or distributing synthetic methane (which gives complete backwards compatibility). For vehicles hydrogen is a bugger to store and synthetic-LPG made with electrolytic hydrogen would make more sense. For grid-scale storage, where are we proposing to store huge amounts of hydrogen? In old gas fields or as liquid? What's the round trip efficiency? (if we make it electrolytically at 70% efficiency and then burn it in CC gas turbines at 40% we're down to 28%)
 

Offline AndyBeez

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... I suspect the sanctions will have a negligible effect on Russia, all they are really doing is causing suffering in the countries imposing them.
Agreed. Russia declared war on the free world, and now the government's of the free world are cashing in. Not just through increased tax revenues but, their otherwise unstable political positions are being shored up. Meanwhile the price of grain and cude oil is good news in the mid west and southern USA, which is just in time for the primaries. Then there all of those defense contracts. Or defence if you are British.

As for our friends in Deutschland, such is the price to pay for making their economy addicted to Russia's give away gas/gaz. France is laughing. Was ist das Nord Stream?  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
 

Offline nctnico

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The low efficiency of creating it by electrolysis is unfortunate, but not necessarily a show stopper depending on the source of the energy input. What I can't see is why we would ever use hydrogen as H2 (an inconvenient gas that's hard to liquify, low energy density, explosive in pretty much all concentrations, leaks through almost everything, embrittles metals, etc.) rather than stick it to some carbon atoms and make synthetic methane or synthetic LPG.
If you dig a bit deeper into hydrogen you'll find that it is widely used in many industrial processes. People that make such claims seem to reason from a POV where the large scale use of hydrogen is something completely new. It simply isn't. The technology and infrastructure are there, it just needs to be scaled up from large to extra-extra-large.
Sure, there's plenty of hydrogen used industrially, though I would be enormously surprised if industrial hydrogen use is within two orders of magnitude of methane use.  Almost none of that is made electrolytically, instead by reacting natural gas with steam. Nor does the fact that  it's widely used industrially have any bearing on whether it is a good idea to distribute it to the general public in a network of pipes not designed for it, through private pipes not designed for it, to large amounts of equipment also not designed for it.
That is the kicker: the public gas distribution network in the NL (and appearantly in the UK as well) is already being modified to support hydrogen. In the NL there are several small suburbs which are using hydrogen instead of natural gas already.

And for sure most of the hydrogen is produced from natural gas nowadays but hydrogen electrolysis plants that use electricity from wind & solar are going to be built in the next couple of years. It is not something that happens overnight or has all the pieces in place at the same time.
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline Miyuki

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btw I know when I was small they switched from Coal/Town gas to Natural gas where I lived. It was not so long ago. In 1996.
I'm not sure if they used coal or reformed it from natural gas. But it might be coal fed as there were plenty of coal mines and some coal-fired power plants operating to this day.
But they just purged the lines and do something with gas appliances, but they stayed in place, grandma uses that same stove for 50 years.

I just wonder if it can be in the worst case swapped back coal gas. I know the generator equipment will be long gone. But Europe has coal and even if not, it can be transported way easier than Natural gas.
 

Offline james_s

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It's pretty hard to tell Russia what to do, and there isn't much the rest of the world is going to be able to do to persuade them short of starting WWIII. I suspect the sanctions will have a negligible effect on Russia, all they are really doing is causing suffering in the countries imposing them.
What makes you believe that nuclear deterrence no longer works?

Sanctions do have negligible effect, because there are no real sanctions. Russian energy exports are stronger than ever. EU’s oil embargo will only start in January 2023, and EU has no plans to cut natural gas imports any time soon.

I think that's covered by "short of starting WWIII". Nuclear deterrence may work to a point, but does anyone really think we are going to use them? If we did the result would be catastrophic.
 

Offline MT

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Lefti US citizen Jimmy Dore on UK energy companies outrageous profits by looting compliant brain washed UK citizens.

« Last Edit: August 25, 2022, 10:26:16 pm by MT »
 

Online NiHaoMike

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If you Google around a bit, you can find reports that say exactly the same. Batteries are good for storage for single digit hours. Beyond that, hydrogen is more cost effective.
There's thermal storage that's very cost effective for a few days. Some larger installations might be able to push it to a few weeks before insulation costs render it impractical.
Cryptocurrency has taught me to love math and at the same time be baffled by it.

Cryptocurrency lesson 0: Altcoins and Bitcoin are not the same thing.
 

Offline tautech

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In todays news is Japan doing a full 180 reversing its policy of moving away from nuclear generation......yes it seems they are governed by adults and not influenced by the whims of children.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/24/japan-signals-return-to-nuclear-power-to-stabilise-energy-supply
Avid Rabid Hobbyist.
Some stuff seen @ Siglent HQ cannot be shared.
 

Offline Someone

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A recent study (monitoring modern heat pumps across the country) shows an average COP of 2.6 for Germany.
How many of those are with high temp radiators? The industry is infamous for cocking it up.
Many variables to manipulate/consider if you want a particular "answer" there. You can see the wildly varying performance of whats available "new" in the market in:
"Study on Air-to-Water Heat Pumps Seasonal Performances for Heating in Greece" January 2022
That has air-water SCOP at several different supply temperatures, in some comparable climates (not just stereotypical sunny Greece). The best performers are above 3.0 and in more optimal situations >4.5. But the "average" of whats installed and in operation (even for new installs) could easily be far lower so 2.6 doesnt sound impossible or unreasonable. But that points back to people not understanding/caring about the details and bothering to find an installer who can deliver a well sized and tuned system. "bought heat pump, cashing subsidies saving planet" box ticked.

air-water is already putting in a synthetic constraint/requirement that is not essential, air-air can meet the essential human need for heat in almost all situations, still with a SCOP above 3.0.

3.0 is just a round number that happens to be close to the current relative price of the energy inputs in most countries. SCOP 2.0 can be worthwhile depending on the specific costs considered/exposed, such as replacing resistive heating where gas isn't available or more expensive. Or where the majority of the energy delivered would be from solar/wind. Marginal electricity generation is not going to be 100% produced from gas (across the seasons as the SCOP figure).
 

Offline JohanH

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There's thermal storage that's very cost effective for a few days. Some larger installations might be able to push it to a few weeks before insulation costs render it impractical.

There is a Finnish concept of storing heat in sand that keeps the heat for months. Currently the first product has been installed with 8 MWh capacity. It's cheap and seems to work.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520
 

Offline tszaboo

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There's thermal storage that's very cost effective for a few days. Some larger installations might be able to push it to a few weeks before insulation costs render it impractical.

There is a Finnish concept of storing heat in sand that keeps the heat for months. Currently the first product has been installed with 8 MWh capacity. It's cheap and seems to work.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520
Around 100 tons of sand costs 7000 EUR, it's in short supply in the world.
And I'm sure all these people living here with their ~40 sqm gardens would love to have half of it dedicated to a huge concrete silo.
As I said this before, it's a bad idea.
With P2G, the same energy can be stored in about 600 KG of LNG, or 70 times the energy in a single intermodal tank that you can transport and stack and store it anywhere, far away from the city.
 

Offline JohanH

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Around 100 tons of sand costs 7000 EUR, it's in short supply in the world.
And I'm sure all these people living here with their ~40 sqm gardens would love to have half of it dedicated to a huge concrete silo.
As I said this before, it's a bad idea.
With P2G, the same energy can be stored in about 600 KG of LNG, or 70 times the energy in a single intermodal tank that you can transport and stack and store it anywhere, far away from the city.

I've heard there are sand in Sahara... For this type of usage, you can use sand that doesn't qualify for construction.

There will not be a single solution that will work everywhere for now, today, so I applaud every project and idea. How the future evolves, we don't know. It's not always one solution, and not always the best solution that "wins".
 


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