> Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used for electricity generation.
Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
Replacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants. Domestic heating is a completely decentralized problem. If you wanted to change everyone over to electrical heat, yes it could be done. But not rapidly. And swapping out gas radiator boilers for electric options can be very difficult and costly.
There is no law that says that you must use gas for heat. But once you have that installed base, you can’t just switch from gas to electric heat overnight. It will take decades to make that change. Even if all of the equipment was available (and it’s not), it would take a team of 3-5 workers 2-3 days to convert each home. And that’s assuming a simpler gas -> electric boiler swap without needing to upgrade electrical service panels/etc. This type of change can get complicated quickly for just a single house. Multi unit homes would be more complex. Now factor that over all other homes/buildings and you can see that the number of workers required to do this rapidly don’t exist.
Even in the US, there is a push to phase out gas heat in many locations. But it’s a phased rollout with a plan decades long.
Could this be a longer term plan? Definitely. But with a quick turnaround? Not really.
I don't know what you are talking about. It's literally as easy as buying a $15 electric space heater from the next store and plugging it into an existing wall outlet. The rest is just aesthetics. Electric water heaters are also affordable, small and easy to install yourself.
Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious.
There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
These $15 space heaters have thermostats, you set a temperature and they heat the room until that temperature is reached. I'm sure you can get a $50 version that speaks smart home protocols of your choice so you can program schedules if that's what you want. Not sure how turning valves on several water radiators per room is more convenient.
These cheap (seriously a $15 heater can’t produce enough heat to cover a room larger than a small bedroom) heaters also can’t be controlled with a central thermostat. Water radiators (or electric heat pumps, etc) can be controlled for the whole home, or by individual locations (without needing to manually turn valves).
In fact, at least in the US, space heaters aren’t allowed to be automatically turned on by any means. They require a person to start it manually each time you want heat. Because they aren’t permanently installed, it is a potential fire hazard. A pet/kid/etc could run past it and knock it over. If that happened near a blanket or pillow, the fabric could catch fire.
I can’t imagine being able to buy something less safe in Switzerland.
I really don't know what else to tell you. This is $20 on Amazon, has tip over protection and a thermostat. Of course there are inexpensive wall mounted options available that you also plug into a wall outlet. These are super popular in Scandinavia.
Portable Electric Space Heater with Thermostat, 1500W/750W Safe and Quiet Ceramic Heater Fan, Heat Up 200 Square Feet for Office Room Desk Indoor Use https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu
I’ve been waiting a couple weeks for my gas furnace to be repaired (everything’s slow in Canada these days) and ended up buying a couple similar little electric heaters since winter’s pretty much here.
I’ve got no dog in the Euro energy debates, but I can say that anecdotally it’s been fine staying warm with electric heat in the interim. Obviously having a single centrally controlled thermostat is preferable, but it is really a vanishingly negligible task to flip heater a switch on or off.
I said a central thermostat. This is the context I was referring to. As in a remotely controlled heater where the thermostat is on the wall as opposed to on the device. This is what you’d need to use to keep a home heated while you aren’t there. I happen to have a space heater on right now next to me. It has a very nice remote app on my phone. And it is very clear that the heat function only works from the device itself (due to a legal requirement to support UL 1278). If your cheap heater has a built in thermostat that turns itself on, that’s great… while you’re there watching it. But I can’t say that’s something that I’d ever feel comfortable leaving always plugged in. They are only ever supposed to be used while attended - for a reason. The updated version of the product you linked to (2022 digital version) even has an automatic shutdown timer. You have to manually start it again after that shutdown.
I also have a permanently installed electric heater installed in the wall in a different room. It does have a permanent thermostat that can start/stop automatically. It’s quite a different beast from a $20 space heater with its own circuit back to my breaker box. It works pretty well, but portable, it is not. It was also much more than $20.
But, back to your original point — are you really suggesting replacing the entire German heating infrastructure with $20 ceramic heaters from Amazon? How is that a remotely viable solution? These are devices meant for heating a small office. If you want to heat an apartment or house or city, you need different options. And changing those over takes time and more consideration than buying a bunch of $20 space heaters.
My point was that replacing an existing central gas posered water circulation heater with electric heating is easy, cheap and fast (operating it might be more expensive, or cheaper depending on electricity prices). It's not "Replacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants.". I have done so myself on a relative's house in a weekend including installing an electrical water heater (solar panels in roof make this very inexpensive to operate). Of course you wouldn't use cheap chinese portable heaters as a permanent solution, but it would totally work, they are 100% efficient in converting electrical to thermal energy.
Your point that you can't have central temperature controls with electric heating is just absurd, I learned how to build this in first semester of electrical engineering.
Replacing a whole country's infrastructure to go from electric heat to depend on community steam boilers or gas heating instead is infeasible due to the logistics involved as those are major infrastructure projects. The reverse does not seem true. Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made. If you don't think shitty electric space heaters is not luxurious winter living I'd largely agree, but the thing is poor Americans are able to survive through harsher winters than, say, Berlin gets with these terrible heaters.
We (specific subsets of humanity) just completed a massive government led undertaking to distribute a brand new vaccine to huge swaths of population, which involved an insane amount of logistics. And then also RAT kits. On the heels of that, you're telling me that distributing a small box that doesn't need to be stored at -20C or else it goes bad, to every household in a country is simply too hard and we shouldn't even bother, and just let people freeze to death? I mean, yeah it seems a bit late to start. The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022. The second best time though is now.
> Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made.
This would be pointless in Germany, though, since there isn't enough electricity in the European grid to make a short term switch for this many people. (Also the price for electricity is already still much higher than for NG).
For this year, it's already getting too late to act, apart from trying to make as much LNG as possible available to the public.
For the future, electrification of Eueope will need large investments in stable&affordable power production with incentives for homeowners to make the switch as it comes online. Typically such an incentive would be to gradually introduce a tax on NG that will eventually be high enough to squeeze it out of the market.
> The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022.
The best time to start this would have been 20-50 years ago.
I've heard a few people say this, but it's not true - the efficiency of electric heaters is 100%. They're only detrimental when they run off of fossil-fuel based power plants. Instead of making silly laws banning symptoms, our focus should be on removing the pollution at its source.
a) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere.
b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months.
c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have
d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
I don't believe your apartment in Switzerland only has one 16A circuit it can draw from, that wouldn't be up to electrical code in most European countries that require one 16A circuit per room. No expert in Switzerland electric code specifically though. The last apartment in Germany I lived in (1 bedroom 1 bathroom) had 4x16A circuits and separate 3x16A for the electric kitchen stove.
What's the efficiency of a 2kW electric heater? It's 100%, which is not terrible. If the electricity production of your country sucks, that should be fixed for other reasons than heating.
No, that isn't a realistic option. My grandparent's place over in Germany is a huge 3 story place heated by a hot water boiler system and plenty of rooms. There's absolutely no way that you can heat that place with electric heaters in every room without blowing fuses constantly, and if you switch over to an electric boiler, there's a good chance the connection to the electrical grid is inadequate as it was installed 70+ years ago when life was very different. Europe is not like north American as older housing stock is not easily retrofitted without significant costs being incurred. Plus there are plenty of high density buildings as land is precious and expensive, so we're not talking about 1 story bungalows being the norm. This is what happens when towns have already existed in place for centuries.
My house is similar to that of your grandparents. The house was built 70 years ago, and originally it had a coal fueld boiler, which was switched to a heating oil boiler (twice, I think) with the one in place when I bought it also having a 6KW electrical backup coil.
In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough.
At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump.
TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.
As long as you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity using electric space heaters is counterproductive because you actually produce significantly more CO2 than just burning the gas directly (this applies to France as well btw). The space heater comment also let's me to believe that you never lived in a country that requires proper heating.
Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.
The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric.
Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
> The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric.
Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up.
> Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil.
> I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).
For people who think electric heating is the solution, now replace it with 0.98 euro/kWh, which my current rate in the Netherlands since November. Though heating with gas is equally bad at 3.3 euro per me. I'm paying roughly 600 euro a month just to heat our home to 17 deg C
That's because your country chose to make themselves completely reliant on a crazy mass murderer 3 countries over for its electricity production. But hey, it was cheaper (but not that much) than building solar and wind for a few decades!
Ugh. I wish it were that simple. The wiring in my home won’t take more than a single space heater before blowing a fuse (every plug in the house is on the same circuit) and I wouldn’t trust a $15 space heater with my life.
Most electrical codes only require updates (to bring the system into compliance) when there is work being done. So if you don’t need to add a circuit, your home may still be wired as if it were the 1950s (or earlier!).
This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
The average home can use a water kettle and a gaming PC at the same time, you are making some super rare edge cases seem like the norm. I've seen lots of old buildings and none was wired so inadequately that you couldn't heat it electrically.
Yes, my home is wired from ancient times. Last year we had monthly blackouts in our home. It took multiple electricians to figure out that our home wasn’t wired to code, and finally to learn that two wires had melted together and were a fire hazard. It was easy to replace them but, impossible to rewire the house to bring it up to code. All the walls would have to be ripped out, which just isn’t feasible on a realistic budget.
The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.
Anytime you’re talking about a large population, outliers are going to be found pretty often. Even if only 5% or the homes in Germany are like the parent/sibling post, that’s still 2.1M homes (Google said Germany has 42.5M homes, so that’s what I used).
So, even if the average home could be switched over easily (which, I still think is wrong), that’s still would leave a lot of people without many good, financially feasible, options.
Of course that's more efficient but won't matter (from an environmental perspective, might still make economic sense) in a few years when all electricity comes from carbon free sources. If this won't be the case then heating will be the least of our problems.
I think you're optimistic if you think we'll have zero carbon electricity production in a few years, at a scale that will allow us to replace all NG and oil heating with electrical, especially without heat pumps.
Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.
Well, I don't think anyone's suggesting it can be done overnight. So, of course, we will need a stopgap measure (of LNG terminals). For now.
IMHO, what people demand is that Germany should recognize that the current crisis is the fruit of multiple decades of bad energy policy. If we don't, twenty years later, we'll still be saying "Yes, sadly, Germany is still burning gas, but you can't convert it overnight! What do you want?"
France is using the same percentage of gas, why is nobody calling out France for decades of bad energy policy? Even more their nuclear reactors despite massive subsidies are in such a state of disrepair that they had >60% off during the summer, and Germany had to take up the slack.
It's the result of cheap fossil fuels, provided by Russia.
There is no shortage of electricity in Germany, so there was no economic interest to build more nuclear power plants? Germny even exports electricity to France, which has a lot of nuclear power plants (many of which currently don't work).
We don't even know where to safely put the waste for the next million years.
Germany doesn't have the huge inhabited areas like the US - and even they have not solve that problem yet.
Germany export to France is an uninteresting information without context. Due to the energy mix the energy is exported in production peaks when it is cheap (sometimes prices are negative) and imported back when there is shortage for higher prices. Also the whole flow network needs to be taken into account and germany imports also from other countries.
You can’t currently build a reliable electric grid with wind and solar alone so you need either nuclear or fossil fuels.
> So what did Germany do for heat before the wall fell and they got cheap fuels from Russia?
Germany used to be heated by gas created from coal and coal directly till about the 1960ies. Starting with the 1970ies already, the Soviet Union began delivery of natural gas.
> Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
No but there are laws of chemistry.
The point the previous poster was trying to make is, that the industry needs natural gas as a precursor product, mainly for the chemical industry. Obviously, you cannot replace that with electricity easily. Over 12% of Germany's natural gas use is purely for the chemical reactions it provides within the chemical industry. A further 10% is for use in the metal industry where gas also has been notoriously hard to replace as it's not used for its energy value alone but for providing reduction reactions.
What you say basically is, not only Germany should have kept on building nuclear, it should also have developed new hydrogen based industrial flows for all these sectors alone, things that exist nowhere on this world on actual scale.
So LNG terminals would have been necessary in any case. Germany had none due to the over-reliance on Russian gas.
Otherwise I will not comment on the difficulty of replacing domestic heating, which IS a huge block of gas usage, on the scale of a whole country, as others have already done this.
What of the installed base of water heaters, stoves, and home furnaces? These can all be converted to e.g. induction ranges and heat pumps, but the time and expense of doing so needs to be factored in.
No law of economics… are you that sure? France is the poster boy of nuclear energy and has been pushing very hard for electric domestic heating over the years and yet it simply has almost never made any sense for homeowners to opt for electric heating rather than natural gas. Indeed, though French electricity prices have always been probably the lowest in Western Europe, it still always comes up some 50% more expensive than natural gas. The only major reason property owners switch to electric is that it's cheaper to install, so using in it in rentals shifts higher energy prices onto tenants while property owners benefit from lower investment costs. Clearly, not building more power plants isn't really what went wrong here.
Norway banned fossil fuels for domestic heating in 2020. Which it could do due to having built out electricity generation 4-5x the GW/capita compared to most of Europe, 100% which is renewable (+some 10-20% extra available for exports).
Hydro makes this simple. Nuclear makes it possible. No other approaches have been demonstrated that allows this without fossil fuels at scale.
There is a lot of industry that has absolutely no other way than to use gas. There was an article about a copper wires manufacturer in a German magazine a while ago. They need a lot of heat to melt the copper, and currently the only economically feasible way is natural gas. Electricity just can't get you the temperatures and alternatives like hydrogen just don't work yet (they actually have been running tests for years on this).
The issue is if they don't have gas, transitioning other things to electricity becomes difficult, because you need copper.
Not if you use a heat pump, no. Modern ones have very high efficiency (above 300% as they're not actually using energy to make heat, just to "move it around") and work even in very, very cold temperatures. But you don't install tens of millions all over a country in a matter of months - you quickly run into bottlenecks like production, distribution, certified installers, etc.
You're not likely to get 300% efficiency when it really matters, in colder climates. The temperature outside my house is around -10C now, and closer to -20C at night this week. Keeping my house warm requires around 6-10KW constantly atm, which I could perhaps reduce to 5-8KW with a heat pump (some heating will come from other appliances, like computers, fridges, etc).
Or I have used the oil boiler in the basement, if Norway didn't ban that in 2020. That would have freed up enough electricity for several homes in the UK or Germany.
Electrical heating is fine if all electricity produced is from hydro, nuclear or wind/solar, but it makes less sense if the grid relies too much on fossil fuels.
Depends. Better to burn gas for direct heat than burn gas to produce electricity and then use resistive heating.
But you do have to transport the gas or electricity to the heating site, and I don't know how that adds up.
Also, if conditions are right, you can use electricity to run a heat pump and move heat from the outside air to the inside air; depending on the details, you can move a lot more watts of heat then you spend operating the heat pump. This can be more economical than direct heating.
In a sense, but if the worry is carbon and energy security then domestic renewables and nuclear look a lot more attractive.
Heat pumps are great and super cool but if you include the efficiency of generation it's unlikely to be more energetically efficient, yes.
It's close though, natural gas combined cycle plants are very efficient for what they are. And if the heater is electric, substitution for other electricity sources is possible... unlike now.
It is, but why would we want to burn gas and invest in gas infrastructure instead of carbon free technology? Electric heating works great for any future technology we end up using.
Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.