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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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It's definitely going to be a tough winter, but in terms of total demand reduction, there's probably quite a lot of low-hanging fruit to be plucked, whether it's turning down the thermostat 1 degree, turning it off for longer periods, waiting till later in the year to turn it on. Much of that will happen organically as people see their gas bills. Of course, that won't directly help people who are already struggling to pay their bills, nor will it help industrial processes that are reliant on gas, so some state intervention will be required. However, I'm less worried than I was a month ago, and encouraged both by how quickly Europe has filled its storage and the trends in euro gas futures (now down to their lowest since July... still high, but the worm may have turned). As for next year, we'll hopefully have more infrastructure in place, like the floating LNG terminals in Germany, more renewables, more heat pumps, more insulation, etc..

I know almost nothing about energy forecasting, but naively could the lower futures prices reflect an expectation of rationing or price ceilings as well as they could reflect an expectation of abundance?

LNG is the most expensive way to move gas. That alone will massively increase prices for Germany. Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work and battery tech is still not close enough to compensate. Insulation helps residential homes keep warm, but that’s it, and how many are able to afford it? I don’t quite understand your optimism here. Time will tell

Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work and battery tech is still not close enough to compensate

While this sentiment is probably unpopular in the green space these days, over the past year or two I've realized that actually fielding scaled renewable systems anywhere roughly north of the Mason-Dixon line requires something like two orders of magnitude more battery capacity than even "battery-backed renewable" systems design for these days. Expected grid usage needs to go up. Way up.

To fully switch from fossil fuels, we presumably need to switch heating over from largely combustion furnaces to heat pumps: heating a home in northern Europe in winter takes far more energy than cooling one in a warmer climate. Electric transportation adds to grid usage. Including these, total demand is almost certainly highest when solar is least useful. A few net-zero days in summer is cute, but doesn't really provide a viable path to storing summer sunlight for winter, and without that investments in solar would be better placed in nuclear.

Question(I am a licensed HVAC tech and am well aware of the shortfalls of heat pumps)-

Are heat pumps enough for Northern Europe and Germany in the winter(heat pumps can’t keep up very well below 25 degrees F, and better insulation doesn’t extend that well) and can Europe afford to buy them(that is, install an AC unit in every house/apartment)?

Use of heat pumps in, say, Spain or France where it doesn’t stay frozen all winter probably makes sense. But my understanding is that Germany and Northern Europe are significantly colder.

But my understanding is that Germany and Northern Europe are significantly colder.

My understanding based largely on this video is that state of the art heat pumps manage to perform such that even in places like Chicago using them to heat with energy from a natural gas power plant uses less fuel even including transmission and generation losses than a domestic furnace when the temperature is above -15C (5F). I'm not quite sure how cold any given place in Northern Europe gets, but Chicago isn't exactly known for being warm in the winter.

I'd like to see what the cost premium for "state of the art". Skimming the web I see that there are heat pumps that start to struggle below 40F, some 25, some 15, and I'm sure nobody's deliberately buying the crummy models to spite their electric bill, so there must be some kind of tradeoffs.

I had a house with a heat pump, and it worked fabulously through 95% of each of our mild winters ... right up until the temperature was freezing enough, at which point our options were "turn off the heat" or "auxilliary heat" ... which the manual said works via resistance heating, but my bills suggested that Aux Heat simply sets dollar bills on fire until the house is warm. More seriously, it looks like you can get around the problem with a lower-temperature refrigerant and a freeze-proofed outdoor unit, but is that a few hundred extra dollars per house or a few thousand or what?

It's one of those things where there are both generations and quality tiers. A Mitsubishi hyperheat that supposedly works down to -17F will cost 5x as much as a Midea which performs as well as the last (-5F) gen of Mitsubishis.

I'm keeping my wood stove for when it gets down to the teens, but I'm lucky to live in a mild climate where that's as low as it gets.

Don't know why anyone who has gas as an option in places that get below 0F would want one, unless it's mostly for summer AC and they have a long shoulder season.

Is there any kind of portable fossil-fuel heater you roll out for emergencies?

Massachusetts is giving incentives to install heat pumps as part of the HVAC unit when it is time for replacement. It has been going on for a few years so there has to be some data on how it works.

Portable indoor combustion is surprisingly dangerous for emergencies; IIRC when I've looked into cold-wave death totals it's turned out that maybe 1 person froze to death and 100 people asphyxiated themselves from inadequately ventilated CO while keeping warm. Plus, although 95% sounded like hyperbole it was if anything an underestimate; burning dollars one or maybe two days every year or two was cheaper than buying a backup system would have been.

Not my problem any more; I'm now living with gas for heat (which is fine) as a marginal decision on top of getting a house with gas for cooking (which is fantastic).

If you believe that you've never been in a cold place "heated" by an air source heat pump. The problem isn't just efficiency, it's efficacy. Burning stuff provides just as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm. A heat pump can't move nearly as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm.

It used to get pretty cold even in Southern Finland. Then global warming happened and now we’re lucky to get a solid snow cover that lasts even some weeks. The highest electricity demand (natural gas is practically never used for heating / power here) is in late december / early january while the coldest weather is more likely to hit only after that, so heat pumps would generally work well enough.

It doesn't actually get very cold where most people live. I live in Stockholm and it rarely gets below 25f for extended periods.

LNG isn't as cheap as pipelines, but it's how a majority of the world imports their gas (Japan, China, India, South Korea....). And it's only a medium-term solution for Germany.

Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work

You seem to be operating with outdated information. In 2021, renewables provided 250 TW/h out of Germany's electricity production of 600 TW/h, about the same proportion as fossil fuels, the remainder being made up by nuclear power. In fact wind power alone was the single biggest source of electricity production if one separates out lignite and hard coal as fuels.

Energy storage is still a problem, but one that we're making great progress on. Gas and nuclear can cover base load medium-term, and there's exciting stuff also happening in geothermal. Ultimately the answer will be integrated global energy grids and lots of redundant electricity storage capacity (maybe fusion too), but we'll be waiting a while for that.

Why does it matter what the majority do? They already have the infrastructure set up for LNG, Germany doesn’t. Once it’s set up it will still cost far more than using a pipeline.

That’s great and all that they manage to eke out that much energy from renewables, why isn’t it 100%? Because my information isn’t outdated. Germany is still a cloudy place without much wind compared to many other places.

Progress is being made on storage but it won’t be made quick enough by winter. Gas prices are still going to be eye watering and the worlds 4th largest economy is likely to go into recession

LNG seems to be competitive with pipelines over long distances, so while local gas is always better LNG imports at least have lower per-mile costs and higher flexibility.

But have you seen graphs of German solar production? It doesn't matter how much power you produce in July to push your annual average up, you're not running heat pumps off it in January. And you're not running it off a battery for six months either!

"Net Zero" is the biggest con of renewable advertising. The net is full of fucking holes in important places.

I don’t quite understand your optimism here. Time will tell

Environmentalists have been claiming we can insulate and save our way to zero energy for decades, and they've got people believing it. We can't. The US EPA estimates a typical 20% reduction in heating and cooling in the most favorable climate zone. Unless European houses are typically uninsulated with leaky windows, it's not likely to be much better there. Now, 20% is a big number... but not when you're talking about the kinds of shortages expected in Europe. Same for thermostat reduction (and the better your insulation, the less you save from that)

I am a licensed HVAC tech and the 20% reduction number is a lie from the people who make these products so they can convince homeowners they’re cost effective. The real number is usually a lot less.

Do you have any sources for this? (I have no understanding of any of this but I know some people considering getting a heat pump)

Sources, no. Experience, yes. HVAC and insulation improvements are sold, mostly, financed, with the goal that the customer pays sufficiently less on the electric bill to make up for the payment. In general that doesn’t happen and the note on the improvements are rolled into the house payment the next time the homeowner refinances.

Now there are energy efficiency gains from a lot of that stuff(double paned windows, extra attic insulation, etc), just usually not enough to pay for itself in power bills(which the marketing data these EPA claims are based off of is trying to prove).

As for heat pumps in specific, they’re usually cheaper than electric resistor heating and more expensive than gas. They may or may not be greener than gas; depends on what your electricity comes from.

The 20% number wasn't heat pumps, but overall improvements from insulation. Looking at the EPA pdf, they make some pretty major assumptions that homes have no underfloor or rim joist insulation, 23% duct leakage, dreadful windows, and an arbitrary 4% HVAC mischarging figure.

I've been around a lot of homes, and haven't seen many that would make me consider that an average sample to base improvement estimates on.

Hell, my piece of shit house was cobbled together in the sample era and has none of those issues left to fix as low hanging fruit. Other than half the west wall currently being a plastic sheet... I should probably get back to that.

Unless European houses are typically uninsulated with leaky windows, it's not likely to be much better there.

I've never felt as cold as indoors in Germany in early March. It was quite a shock for someone who was used to -25C outdoors temperatures barely affecting indoor temperature due to decent insulation and central heating (that I always have to turn way down to avoid boiling inside).

I swear I get sick every time I go to a Mediterranean country in the winter. Usually when the day temps are like 15C. My body just cannot take the shock of insides of houses being colder than the outside.

It was also a revelation for me when visiting Ireland how much colder it feels when you actually can't escape (comparably milder than in Finland) outdoor temps to warm insulated homes for most of your time.

Dunno about Germany, but having spent a few weeks in Airbnb in winter in Ireland, wow. The host gave us electric blanket and told us to never mind that the room was not room temperature. And Ireland is not even cold!

Yeah I think this is a common thing! Coming from the Netherlands, I've heard people from Eastern Europe complain about the cold here. I was confused at first like "bro wtf, it's like -20C right now where you are from, how on earth are you cold here?!", but yeah, if you don't go outside too much and you crank up that thermostat indoors, I guess the Netherlands is effectively colder in the winter.

Likewise, I've experienced the opposite going to Norway in the winter. Everywhere inside was uncomfortably warm and stuffy for me. I prefer a bit of fresh air and 19C indoor temperatures all day.... But I guess that's harder to manage when it's -25C outside, compared to when it's 5C.

The Netherlands are also super humid. -20C and dry is much better than 5C and humid.

This is a huge effect.

Montreal and parts of ontario are near massive rapids, so no matter how cold it gets there's a constant churn of moisture entering the air.

I've almost fallen over shivering when the wind was right and it was -10 in Montreal, which would usually take -30 and heavy windchill in dry rural Ontario

(mind you very cold and dry conditions still messes up your skin vastly more... your core temperature might be find, but you get the equivalent of a major sunburn from just the wind)

there's probably quite a lot of low-hanging fruit to be plucked, whether it's turning down the thermostat 1 degree, turning it off for longer periods, waiting till later in the year to turn it on. Much of that will happen organically as people see their gas bills

There's already a bunch of journalists and politicians making hay of asking that of people. But I doubt that will be of much consequence compared to whether the winter is mild or harsh.

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