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Germany shutting down last nuclear power plants on April 15th
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Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: madires on April 17, 2023, 10:36:58 am ---heat pumps for heating we'll need about three times the electric power we're generating at the moment

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This is an excellent point. I once calculated it, and the bog standard air source heat pump is better bang-for-buck harvester of renewable energy than a home PV system. What's even better, it harvests renewable energy during calm wind and darkness.

It basically acts as a multiplier: you feed it with X amount of electrical energy of any origin, and it produces 2..3*X amount of renewable energy originating from solar, seasonally stored by our atmosphere and the Earth itself. Therefore, it's also a partial solution to the storage problem.

While running a heatpump from a renewable energy source means harvesting even more renewable energy (obviously great!), running it from nuclear or even coal source still means harvesting renewable energy - this is not obvious to everyone.

Therefore, keeping the nukes running for a while more while allowing the gas price to skyrocket due to the political difficulties, would have allowed electricity price to go down and gas price up, driving people to finally install those heatpumps, which should have happened ages ago; and has happened in Asia no problem, and even in Nordic countries where they are worse, no problem. But Central Europe - nope.

(Exact same logic is true for EVs.)
Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: tom66 on April 17, 2023, 12:09:10 pm ---Yes, there will likely still be fossil fuel usage (or synfuel) in 2050, because some applications are challenging for batteries or hydrogen. So we will need to be pulling CO2 out of the air for those applications, as well as to undo the CO2 emitted so far.

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Or just keep using fossils the way* we do now, and have done for the last century.  I don't see it as a big problem as climate negatives scale linearly down and political problems probably more than linearly. The point here is that those niches are truly niches.

*) referring to everything else except quantity

And we need oil and natural gas anyway for chemical processes, manufacturing plastic etc. And some natural gas comes "for free" when drilling oil. As these processes are in place, better keep using them for niche "energy purposes" as well.

But I'm a closet optimist. I really have quite positive outlook of how these energy things are going. We don't really need any silver bullets, and also won't need to change everything. The massive energy reform is now happening and can't be prevented, and fossil fuels will have a supportive small role in the energy systems of the future.

For example, while I'm all for playing with hydrogen and believe we will be seeing probably even significant H2 solutions in the future, it's not the necessary element we need. What's important, giving too much weight for H2 will be a problem, because while we can do without H2, we can't do anything with H2 alone, or with primary bias in H2 solutions.
Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: Neutrion on April 17, 2023, 11:31:26 am ---some extreme rare Dunkelflaute events, which could be countered by just keeping the gas plants in readiness and not building anything.

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These near-zero-wind-near-zero-PV "Dunkelflaute" events are by the way of similar rarity (at least in the same order of magnitude) compared to unplanned SCRAM events (following small checkups and fixes) of nuclear reactors - they happen not every year at all, but sometimes at the worst possible moment during the coldest week of the year. This is what makes large reactors like OL3 problematic, too. You lose a lot at once.

This is why nuclear has always been dimensioned with backup fossil fuel production and no one is saying this is any sort of problem. Only with wind power, the critics found this idea of making the need for such backup a big deal. This is what one gets when driven by agenda instead of mental honesty.
Neutrion:

--- Quote from: Siwastaja on April 17, 2023, 12:35:03 pm ---
Therefore, keeping the nukes running for a while more while allowing the gas price to skyrocket due to the political difficulties, would have allowed electricity price to go down and gas price up, driving people to finally install those heatpumps, which should have happened ages ago; and has happened in Asia no problem, and even in Nordic countries where they are worse, no problem. But Central Europe - nope.

(Exact same logic is true for EVs.)

--- End quote ---

In central Europe you get up to 4-5X efficiency because of the mild winters. You have to calculate with that! By the way in Sweden heat pumps are already broadly aviable, probably they are in clear majority already. But they are mostly geo-sourced.
And now the new german legislation expect every new heating systems to be at least 65% renewable based from next year on. That would also mean mostly heat pumps.
Sometimes I wonder whether Putin is a top secret Greenpeace agent meant to cut short the fossil fuels based buisness modell of Russia, which could do a lot of harm if unchanged. :)
Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: Neutrion on April 17, 2023, 01:02:46 pm ---In central Europe you get up to 4-5X efficiency because of the mild winters.

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Note that my notation of "1X input power = 3X renewable harvesting" is equal to COP of 4. That would be typical realistic for central Europe mild weather.

I always want to be a little bit conservative when promising savings, but COP exceeding 4 is indeed possible if the conditions are just right and the devices used in the correct way.
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