Heating is largely natural gas based, so it's not substitutive. I don't think Germany should be shutting down its nuclear reactors, but that has nothing to do with Russian gas. (Unless perhaps they started making synthetic methane using the heat of a nuclear reactor, which is not a terrible idea but not something they are currently doing AFAIK.)
In Sweden natural gas is hardly used yet electricity prices have gone up astronomically compared to last year - daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time. Heating in Sweden is a combination of electric (resistive elements and heat pumps), wood in some form (firewood, pellets, wood chips), some oil and process heat from industry where available. The Swedish equivalent of the German Greens is proudly proclaiming they're the ones who have closed nuclear power plants long before their calculated lifetime was out, leading to an increased need for electricity imports from e.g. Poland (mostly coal-fired plants). Their "green" policy has led to oil-fired power plants which normally only come online in the deep of winter to be fired up in summer to prevent brown-outs.
"daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time"
Really? 10 to 20x? That's 1,000 to 2,000% Here in the UK we've had suppliers collapse due to some "issues" involving not buying with fixed prices and end users like you and me get bills that are about 150% last year but not 1,000%.
We have (had) quite a lot of innovative suppliers that offered "green" tariffs that were backed by variable suppliers. Unfortunately the shit hit the fan and the price charged back in the day wasn't enough to cover the current rate plus enough profit to cover admin.
Yes, really. The price of electricity is set through a controlled market mechanism at "Nord Pool", the electricity producers exchange for the Nordic countries. Nearly all producers and sellers have pages showing these prices, here's an example:
Timpris på elbörsen (on the first site, "vattenfall") means "hourly rate on the electricity exchange". Have a look at the rates for area 3 - Södra Mellansverige (south of the middle of Sweden) and compare with the same day last year ("jämför med - Samma dag föregående år"). You'll see that the rates average some 500 öre (5 sek, about $0.55) per kWh excluding taxes, levies, surcharges and value added tax. At the same day last year the rate averaged about 20 öre, i.e. a difference of 2500%. The rates fluctuate hourly and the last few weeks they've broken all records. The increase for the last month was +245%, averaged over the whole year rates have doubled.
I'm quite surprised that Scandinavia is having even more problems than say the UK because you have rather a lot of useful topological features (really big hills and mountains and lakes at elevation - ie potential energy). You are also closer to the Ukraine than us for gas so that should be cheaper too.
Our consumer energy market is a bit strange. We have a national grid for eleccy and then have multiple "suppliers" who supposedly compete. The ones who went balls out have gone bust. They generally offered fixed and flexible rates based on the wholesale cost plus their margin. Then the wholesale cost went up rather a lot and they lost their margin and without money in the bank, they went bust. The govt agency for energy then enforced other suppliers to take us on. So I was a customer of "Green" and now I'm a customer of "Shell Energy". You can be sure that Shell are not losing out in any way 8)
I've just noticed that you use the term Nordic countries - is that a better/preferred term to use than Scandinavia?
The Nordic countries include Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland
Scandanavia includes Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The common factor there is having closely related languages and cultures. However, speaking from experience as an American, we often use "Scandanavian" as a synonym of "Nordic".
We're not surprised by these problems because we saw them coming, it's just really disheartening to see the expected negative downfall of the policies enacted by the "green" party and its followers. Add to this the fact that this party hardly has any support - they are currently underneath the 4% limit and will most likely disappear from Riksdagen (the Swedish parliament) and it becomes even more incongruous that they have been allowed to have such an extraordinary negative effect on the future energy supply in this country. To add insult to injury they recently stepped out of the coalition (between the "green" "miljöpartiet" (which means "environmental party")) and the social democrats, less than a year before the coming elections. They're now in supposed opposition, acting as if the negative effects are all someone else's fault. May they never reach the threshold again so that those who care for the environment stop believing this party is the one to vote for.
10-12 years ago the UK govt signed deals with some companies that would be building the new nuclear power plants ie EDF that they would be getting a minimum price for generation which was double what it was back then. I often think we dont have a free market but a clever fixed pricing market. UK is also windiest country in the world hence all our wind turbines. Dont know if more Electric Mountains will be built to buffer the surplus wind power as more turbines come online, but the bigger the turbine the more that is generated which is the natural progression we are seeing.
Little know fact kept out of the media when we had all the flooding over winter a few years back, one nuclear power station had to be shutdown to avoid a meltdown caused by flooding.
Electricity consumption has gone up with the increase in consumer gadgets, ie computers, tablets, mobiles, big massive flat screens, sound systems ie personal cinema setups, its only natural to see electricity demands go up.
And there is not enough of some of the rare earth materials and other metals used to make or maintain electric cars on the planet unless some miners have been keeping deposits secret, so I expect some miners share prices to go up considerably in the future.
If that were true here in the USA my bill would go from $200 in the winter to $2000. I could afford that but poor people would just have to turn off the heat and suffer and some of them die, so this seems..... like there's more to the story.
Don't. Keep on pointing out this lie, not so much to smear electric vehicles - given good battery technology these are a good idea - but to make clear that the powertrain is as clean as its dirtiest link. Whether this is a browncoal-fired powerplant, a polluting Cobalt mine employing child labour or fields full of not recyclable wind turbine blades, these things need to be taken out of the chain for the technology to deserve the "green" label. Given that an increase in CO₂ will lead to an increase in biomass [1,2] you may as well apply a "green" label to fossile fuels, it would be just as disingenuous.
Not that many. Power from Poland or Germany is not that common in Sweden, Sweden exports most of the time. It can happen during periods of low winds, but it's not that frequent.
It has become far more frequent than it used to after the closure of Ringhals 1 and Barsebäck, two nuclear power plants in the south of Sweden. The power grid in Sweden is designed to take electricity produced mostly by hydroelectric plants in the north and middle and nuclear in the south. The closure of those nuclear plants in the south has led to an imbalance, especially given the increase in power use in the south. To make matters worse the "government" - between quotes here because they hardly deserve that term - allowed the establishment of several data centres by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google, each of which consumes enough electricity to make it impossible for other industry to be established in the same area given the limits of the distribution network. To make things even worse those data centres got a really sweet deal on electricity, they're not paying all the taxes and surcharges which other consumers and industry have to. In return they provide a couple of dozen jobs, each of which was subsidised by the Swedish state (in addition to the mentioned deal on electricity) to the tune of 2.5 million SEK (around $275.000,-).
Here's some more choice words on the failures of the current Swedish energy policy:
To be fair, residential/commercial heating could be entirely electric, and heat pumps have additional benefits over natural gas heating (like being reversible in the summer).
Presumably people would switch if the cost of electricity was low enough for it to be more economical. Decisions that result in the price of electricity staying high provide political leverage to gas producers.
Though, eyeballing the numbers, it really should be very attractive to install heat pumps in the EU despite the high electricity cost. The cost of natural gas is quite high.
In northern countries where the primary need is heating (and there is very little need for cooling), heat pumps at current electricity and gas prices are 2x more expensive per kWh of heat put into the property. They are also about 3x more expensive to install.
They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.
Numbers from 1 hour ago... From the UK, and assuming UK climate for COP figures. ~True with both retail capped prices, and wholesale market prices.
There are still people in the UK installing heat pumps. Either they have a very rose tinted view of the future direction of electricity prices Vs gas, a rose tinted view of future government taxes/incentives, a rose tinted view of the environmental benefits (eg. By looking at aggregate CO2 emissions instead of marginal CO2 emissions), or they have been misled by installers/builders who make substantially more money if they install a heat pump.
Either that or I got my maths wrong. But I don't think I did.
from the UK - groundsource vs air-source heat pumps makes a huge difference. Last i checked:
- ground source was roughly parity with gas (with something like an 8x higher install cost)
- air source heat pumps were more expensive to operate but similar on install costs
However comparing on cost only misses the point, a heat pump is generally capable of cooling as well, which is becoming more of a necessity in the summer.
P.S. You can do silly things with ground loops like use excess solar power to cool during the summer or daytime storing that heat in the ground, then removing some of it in the winter/nighttime.
Thank you!
And I can venture a few more hypotheses (from least to most likely):
1. Altruism
2. Already committed
3. They have a pessimistic view of future gas prices.
4. They have solar.
5. They're in a long tail/corner case/different use case from the one you computed.
I'd put my money on 5, depending on how big a % difference. Eg. I've noticed more and more people switching to solar as prices come down and hit an inflection point for them in their use case. Wouldn't be surprised if heat pumps are the same.
Can you expand on the aggregate CO2 vs marginal CO2 part ?
I’m looking into installing a ground heat pump in a new house (coupled with solar panels) mostly for environmental reasons and all the critics I’ve read so far were about the costs.
If you turn on a light and use some extra electricity, some power station somewhere will need to increase power output to provide for you.
It's the CO2 production of that extra generation, known as marginal generation, you should care about, not the nationwide average.
Most of the time, in most of the world, that extra generation is combined cycle gas turbines at ~50% efficiency.
For most people, the only time a new use of electricity is eco-friendly is when all the energy in a country is already supplied by wind/solar/hydro, and therefore a newly switched on thing also gets supplied by wind/solar/hydro.
Obviously the decision to installation a heat pump depends on the marginal generation in 15 years when you are still using that heat pump. That's very hard to predict.
And when you say resistive, do you mean element within (an electric) boiler, radiators to work as normal, or something more direct, electric radiators/underfloor/etc.?
I think it doesn't really matter much what is meant throughout - point was about shifting gas demand on to the electricity supply, and whether the grid could cope with it if everyone did that to a meaningful degree.
Not necessarily, it's just uncorrelated since it's not what's doing the actual heating.
Similarly a gas boiler uses 1kW electricity (for the pump) to get potentially >1kW heat out of radiators (and pipes). Because that heat is energy conserved from the gas, not the electricity.
Anyway I didn't mention heat pumps or compare them to resistive heating so I'm not sure what I'm defending.
It should be done, but that's almost impossible. Retro fitting to a heat pump is very expensive, you have to replace all radiators with underfloor heating and the insulation has to be redone. While this is done, you can't live in your home.
