With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.
Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.
Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.
Germany has switched from one gas supplier to different gas suppliers.
The past Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck famously once sad:
“Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem – at least not generally throughout the country.”
Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
"As a direct result of the 1973 oil crisis, on 6 March 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced what became known as the 'Messmer Plan', a hugely ambitious nuclear power program aimed at generating most of France's electricity from nuclear power. At the time of the oil crisis most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. "
"Work on the first three plants, at Tricastin, Gravelines, and Dampierre, started the same year and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years."
How do you measure health effects of different sources of electric energy?
If you compare deaths per TWh, then nuclear power is much, much safer then coal energy.
One source of this media. Media loves to write and talk about nuclear incidents and really blow this out of proportion to real health hazards. For decades, newsrooms have operated under the premise that 'if it bleeds it leads'. If something happen infrequently and could have big impact on many people it makes more interesting news story.
Flight industry has similar public perception problem. Transport statistic shows that travel by airplane is safer the car, yet much more people fear flying then driving. A deadly airplane crash is reported in all newspapers, the daily deaths from the car crashes are not even mentioned.
Popular tv-series "The Simpsons" (three eyed fish, green radioactive goo), movies Spiderman (if I get bitten by a radioactive spider), Hulk (gamma rays make you super strong), China Syndrome, the german movie "Die Volke", etc., doesn't help much with education about nuclear power.
Deaths from burning coal don't get much attention in the media, because the happen continuously each year, over decades.
The way the EU forces the electricity market to operate makes them completely unprofitable. Renewables are always given priority in the market, which results in other power plants operating at a capacity factor of 30-40%. Since nuclear power plants are mostly capital expenditure-intensive, this makes the electricity they produce absurdly expensive.
Because the way how the EU electricity market operates first to supply electric power are the power plants with the lowest operating costs. This are usually renewables and nuclear power plants. Both are capital expensive and cheap in operating costs.
Usually the capacity factor of European nuclear reactors is higher than 60%.
That’s just a consequence of how they bid. The marginal cost for a renewable plant is zero. It’s non-zero for nuclear power.
But nuclear power don’t want to shut down since that both increases wear and tear and makes them unable to capture revenue when the prices become higher again.
So they bid negative expecting to eat the losses and let more flexible plant shut down first.
Hydropower and solar have much lower operating costs.
All thermal power plants experience wear and tear and have to be regularly repaired and maintained. Nuclear power plants can load-follow (within technical limits), but as the operating costs (maintance, repair, staffing, fuel) are much lower then capital costs it makes economic sense to run them at full power.
> Europe would be better served by doing, what France did in 1974.
This is 2026. Doing things in 1974 isn't an option because time's arrow points the wrong way.
If you want Europe to do things now that it should have done in 1974 you'd need to explain how it'll stall on all the consequences for years. France, which you held up as a model says it can build a nuclear generator in about 5-6 years, but none of these optimistic projections came true this century, more typically the plant takes 10-15 years and it can be more.
So, suppose they start today likely they'll say the generator goes online in 2032. How does that help with the crisis Trump caused this month ? Worse, come 2032 the date is likely to be 2040 instead.
Now, renewables go a lot faster. For solar it's genuinely possible to get paperwork done in January and be selling electricity made with those panels by summer. It's not easy, plenty of projects will be delayed out a 1-2 years, particularly if local government don't want the project, but with a following wind it can really be the same year. Wind is slower, but still you will almost certainly build it and switch it on in five years, the optimistic guess France never hits for its nuclear plants.
Wind curtailment is the deliberate reduction of electricity output from wind turbines, despite their capability to generate power under existing wind conditions. This practice is typically implemented by grid operators to maintain the stability of the electrical grid or to address specific operational constraints.
"paid to turn off"
Wind energy providers in some countries are compensated for curtailment, this a form of subsidy for renewables. It can be payed directly by the goverment, or it is added to the price of electricity for consumer.
According to International Energy Agency mineral demand for clean energy technologies would rise by at least four times by 2040 to meet
climate goals, with particularly high growth for EV-related minerals.
You can recycle the minerals and you should recycle minerals, but almost no recycling technology can recycle 100% of minerals and recycling has always costs attached to it (this can be for example capital costs, building recycling facilities, operating costs in form labor costs for separation, energy costs for melting material and purification processes).
For example aluminum is recycled, not because we have have a shortage of aluminium ore (Earth's mantle is 2.38% aluminium by mass), but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum.
https://international-aluminium.org/work-areas/recycling/
The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries, by exploiting lax environmental regulations or corrupted environmental protection officials.
> aluminum is recycled... but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum
So what?
> Recycling of EV batteries will lose between 1-10% of the valuable metals
How much gasoline, coal, and natural gas can you recycle?
> The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries
That's going to happen as long as those countries are poor. They need to develop their economies quickly to demand better laws. Climate change will be a danger for many of them in the coming years.
Better, less-polluting recycling tech will help them far more than continuing to burn fossil fuels.
I just wanted to show that there no such thing as perfect recycling technology.
If you want to choose least material intensive source of energy, you choose nuclear energy. By choosing nuclear energy you get the benefit of almost decarbonizing you electricity production as can be seen in France.
Nuclear isn't perfect either. You can be embargoed for uranium way more easily, if you don't already have it. It's more expensive to build than solar and takes much longer (and don't BS me with "it's because of the regulations!" - everything, even solar, has regulations that drive up the cost and construction timelines).
If you can build price-competitive nuclear energy without government backstops or insurance, you have my blessing.
I personally think nuclear's time is in the far future when we have more advanced, exotic materials that make it radically safer and cheaper. For applications where solar isn't sufficient, such as space propulsion.
No energy technology is perfect each has it's benefits and drawbacks.
Yes a nuclear power plant more expensive than solar power plant. But an electric grid based on renewables, if we add the costs for storage, backup generator, power lines upgrades needed for smoothing out regional variations of production, is more expensive (or it can be cheaper if you have access to cheap natural gas, Texas power grid).
> But an electric grid based on renewables, if we add the costs for storage, backup generator, power lines upgrades needed for smoothing out regional variations of production, is more expensive
Even the Texas power grid makes heavy use of wind and solar.
> So stockpiling few years worth of fuel is not a problem
Weird you were oddly concerned about being "China dependence for PV" but this you just wave away. Stockpiling a few decades of PV and batteries is also not a problem.
"Rare earths" (not really used in panels) are plentiful too. Refining them is polluting and low-margin so developed countries prefer not to deal with them. Btw uranium is the same.
> Nuclear energy also quite safe
I didn't say anything about it being unsafe. But making it that safe currently costs a lot of money in materials, labor, and regulations.
Honestly it feels like you decided beforehand "nuclear is the way" and are trying to make every fact fit that. Or you're a troll/paid off by Big Oil. Sorry.
In Europe between 4–6% of oil and gas is used for producing plastics and globally around 6% of global oil is used. By contrast, 87% is used for transport, electricity and heating.
If we could reduce our oil usage by 94% I'd weep with joy. Yes that's still a lot of oil. But it would be a complete sea change from what is currently happening.
These 20% will still make you dependent on foreign country.
For example Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG.
In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels.
Panels aren't burned to make electricity. If literally everyone stops selling you panels (nearly impossible) you continue generating electricity the old way. Nothing bad happens. The panels you already have continue working.
Other countries make panels too. India has a glut right now.
You can't base energy of an modern industrial country on purely solar panels alone, they don't produce any electricity in the night and have electric output reduced by weather. You have always to combine them with other power sources for backup.
So you admit then that using as much solar and wind and storage as possible reduces the need for imported gas. As such it should be a national priority.
It should be a national priority to use as much already installed solar and wind and storage as possible, when the operating costs are low. The big question is: where should the future investments be made, who will pay them? How much further investments in solar, wind and storage will decrease the need for gas? 2x, 10x, 100x of current yearly spending? Because gas is already very expensive in Europe, it's used precisely when renewable don't produce enough electric energy.
The German decision to phase out nuclear power was a very big and very costly mistake. The French almost made the same mistake.
> The German decision to phase out nuclear power was a very big and very costly mistake
It's time to stop talking about it. It's done. Unless the stopped plants can be restarted (which I'd support) this is completely useless. It doesn't mean anything.
> How much further investments in solar, wind and storage will decrease the need for gas?
The upper bound today (keep in mind battery tech gets cheaper all the time) it would cost $5tn to power Germany on batteries for 6 months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446112
You don't need to run Germany on batteries for 6 months. Even 1 month is more than plenty.
> Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG. In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels
There is merit to putting one's energy policy on autopilot by doing the opposite of whatever Berlin is up to.
but much less dependent. Its way easier to stockpile a big buffer supply of LNG if its only 20% of your supply, for example. Its way easier to trim some 20% demand and still keep the country largely running, for example.
"much less dependent" is still a huge win. Sure 100% independent is better. Isnt this obvious? i dont understand the point.
One of the lasting consequences of Carter's administration is the strong increase in worldwide CO2 output. Why? Yes they did encourage, at that time, developing countries (now becoming industrial countries) to pursue renewable energy resources but the main goal was to stop them developing nuclear technology.
Notable absent from the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978" is the word "coal". Developing countries were barred from developing nuclear technology, but were free solve their growing energy needs using coal.
https://www.irena.org/Innovation-landscape-for-smart-electri...
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
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