I got emotional when you mentioned Italy's superbonus as a viable and efficient solution. I am so accustomed to disparaging my own country's administration that I couldn't believe we did something right, for once.
Very Italian reaction indeed. Italy, you should love yourself as much as the world loves you. You live in one of the most beautiful places on earth with great people. And although there are a lot of things that don't go as they should, never forget that.
Actually the super bonus is a disastrous policy that lead to huge spending with extremely small gains compared to previous bonuses and destroying the efficiency of the spending in environmental aids (CO2/€). I'll promise myself to come back with a more detailed analysis under this comment in the next days, but hearing it as an example is an unexpected slip by Simon (to put it mildly)
@@cesarecertosini4202 Looking forward to your detailed analysis in a few years. Couldn't care less about it in a few days as you're going to be speculating like crazy.
As always, an idea might be good in theory, but everything depends on its implementation. To understand why the super bonus is so dreadful we need to take a step back and look at what the construction sector means in Italy. In Italy there is a long history of public spending in financing (directly and indirectly) the construction sector both in form of low taxes on house ownership (e.g. there's no tax whatsoever on your first house, no matter how rich you are or how much it is worth, unless it's a huge palace) and after the 2008 crysis a series of incentives justified at improve the environmental impact of the households (but with the real aim of cashing in electoral consensus by throwing in the sector public money). The result of this [1] is a ton of micro enterprises with terrible productivity: the average number of employees per firm is 2.6 against 6.3 of Germany and 4.4 of the UK, the number of bigger construction companies is lower (80 with 52000 employees against 309/289000 in UK and 262/152000 in Germany), these enterprises lacks the strength to bring innovation in the market because of their small scale; looking at middle enterprises, the situation is better and they tend to be competitive internationally. This also brings a low level of education in the sector and high percentage of illegal work (with the obvious consequence of facing, like the agricolture sector which relies on illegal exploitation of immigrants, a higher number of deaths compared to similar nations [2]) and shady practices in term of tax compliance (the estimated level of tax evasion in this sector is 22.7% [3]). Examples of other bonuses are: - 50% for renovation expenses - 50% for furniture expenses - 90% for facade renovation expenses - 36% for gardening expenses - 50% to 65% for heating systems renovation - 50% for windows and doors renovation On top of all of this there's the 110%. This seems to me a little excessive to not be justified as a huge transfer of money to a sector that its main source of income is the drainage of taxpayers money from the more productive sectors (but I understand that this is an opinion and, therefore, it's debatable). I'll add further comments about the issues with the 110% later, but I post this to not restart form scratch. I'm sorry that most of the sources are in Italian, but I don't really see a way out of this, I hope that G translate may help you! [1] italiaindati.com/edilizia-e-costruzioni-in-italia/ [2] www.liberioltreleillusioni.it/news/articolo/incidenti-sul-lavoro-una-comparazione [3] www.dt.mef.gov.it/export/sites/sitodt/modules/documenti_it/analisi_progammazione/documenti_programmatici/nadef_2021/Relazione_evasione_fiscale_e_contributiva.pdf
Another point that can be made about heat pumps is that they are essentially air-conditioners running in reverse. This means that in countries where air-conditioners are already common (such as Spain, Italy, etc.), existing air-conditioners could be replaced with hybrid units, which can provide cooling in the summer and warming in the winter.
One important advantage also is that they usually have an efficiency of 450% for a simple system or even more (unit exchanging heat with the ground can exceed 600% even on a small scale system and 750% for bigger system serving a building). Meaning if you produce 1 kWh of energy by burning gas for heating in your home you'll only get 1kwh of heat. But if you burn 1 kWh of gas in a power plant, with efficiency usually ranging between 40 and 60% you'll get around 0.37 to 0.55 kWh of electricity delivered, accounting for grid losses. Those will translate to 1.6 - 2.4 kWh of heat in a simple system exchanging heat with outside air, or exceeding 4 kWh on more efficient system exchanging heat with the ground and serving a building instead of a single house. Thus even if it's energy from gas, you're getting much more useful heat out of it.
Dismissing nuclear power is not helpful. There are countries who were until the war going to close their nuclear power stations. And long term, nuclear power is necessary to meet our demands. In the UK, there are also 'mini reactors' being considered that would be quicker to build.
Yeah, although the question remains on whether Europe as a whole has enough nuclear power plants planned for closing to reduce coal reduction by 40%. Also, since the task is to replace coal in the short term, I don't think the long term concerns are very relevant. I mean, removing completely eliminating reliance on natural gas would be beneficial in the long term too but quite disastrous in the short term. The mini reactor idea sounds promising to me, however.
Around 3:20, Simon claims that insulating buildings "can be widely rolled out rapidly". it would be nice if this were really so, but it isn't really! For starters, this IS being done already, has been going on for many years (and that of course does not invalidate the concept, quite the contrary) - and what's holding back building owners is often, today already, the scarcity of insulating materials and - more importantly - of skilled workers and firms to do the job. Tried calling your local contractors for roofing, windows, wall building lately when they may have time to refurbish your home? You won't get one for next week. If all of Europe wants to accelerate this - rapidly! -, the situation's gonna get worse: Prices increase drastically, without much more work being done in the short term, and it will take some years before capacities come up to levels necessary to "widely roll out rapidly" throughout Europe (or everywhere else). There is also a bit of a problem in that many insulating materials are an environmental hazard in and of themselves. We need others, more eco-friendly ones - and that takes even more time to roll out widely. Similar caution applies to heat pumps - only worse: While some of the handy work to insulate homes can be done by unskilled work (e.g. home owners themselves), this is not at all true for heat pumps, where you need electricians at least (don't fiddle with electricity unless you have thoroughly learned the trade!), but also specialists for drilling deep below your house etc. Nice technology - comes decades too late to avert the current crisis and dependence on Russia. Solar and wind electricity generation should by all means be expanded - but would do little to decrease the use of natural gas in the electric grid, for natural gas plant's classic job is to jump in on the shortest of notices when demand goes up or base supply goes down - the exact two things that solar and wind have a problem with. Natural gas is in storage for that job, and short-term storage is exactly what the solar and wind installations are largely missing (so far). So what we need to, specifically, get rid of gas plants is not so much more renewable production per se but energy storage in the grid, to fill the gaps when solar+wind+nuclear+and all the rest cannot crank up output at short notice. (I suppose some regional grids use more gas than others, and not all of it in that backup role; surely, in such regions, some gas can be substituted on far shorter notice). What everybody can do, right now, is reduce personal use of energy, particularly if you use gas (or oil, where Russia again is a major exporter to Europe), e.g. by reducing target temperature in your home or office by one degree. Or by switching off your heating system two weeks earlier in spring than you ordinarily would. Put on warmer socks, move a little more, and just get used to it.
Perhaps they could propose a "normal" energy consumption for a certain house volume and anything above that would cost a lot more. The advantage of that is that the owner now can think out a solution himself. Perhaps he could indeed insulate his house completely or he could use only one heated room, sleep downstairs for a while, wear a lot of clothes..
@@MatteoBucci95 i hope they did not. the one near me has already problems with driping pipes. there was no maintenance the last 10 years, because they were waiting for their closing.
I think the exact same way - or even without a bonus: just cover the cost! Just cover HALF the cost...! Unfortunately, in Norway today, only "new" technologies are PARTIALLY subsidized. Even though we know just insulating and changing windows and doors would greatly reduce the amount of energy used for years to come, that's not subsidized. Oh, and only rich people can afford the "new" technologies. When I was little, we were so piss poor that we had ice on the inside walls of our house, and I had to wear a jacket to bed. How the frick would families like that benefit from solar pannels?! Just insulating the house was enough to reduce our heating costs by about 90%
The bonus is probably worthwhile. If it's a pure cost-coverage program, somebody might just put off upgrading out of inconvenience, and while upgrading *would* save them money, the money saved is too insignificant over a given timescale, or they experience one of those cognitive effects where money saved is not equal to money gained. The bonus is a little push to get everyone to upgrade as soon as possible, because who doesn't want a few hundred or thousand dollars? That bonus also saves the government money, because the sooner people upgrade, the sooner the natural gas demand goes down, and the sooner the country can stop paying for natural gas imports (or start exporting it instead). Exactly how big the bonus should be depends on how prevalent late-adopters are, and how much adoption is influenced by a certain percentage bonus.
"we were so piss poor that we had ice on the inside walls of our house, and I had to wear a jacket to bed. How the frick would families like that benefit from solar pannels?! " ----Well poor families would have smaller electric bills, thats a pretty obvious benefit
@@alexrogers777 Solar doesn't do much when there is no sun half the year, and even if they did work if whatever heat they proudced is just leaking out of the house because there is no proper insulation you are going to need a lot more of solar panels than should be necessary if people got help to do new insulation in their homes.
@@kattkatt744 In the high north where there is no sun half the year there is also nearly 24 hours of sun in the summer which would make solar do a hell of a lot. I agree, insulation is important. I'm not sure if you're implying that I don't think that but I do.
@@alexrogers777 Yes, there is a lot of sun in the summer, but what is most useful an less wastful, a system that works year round or having two separate systems one for summer and one for winter? Also OP was specifically talking about heating the inside of the house, and at what time of year is room heating needed the most?
Disappointed by the blanket dismal of nuclear. Would've been a great time to discuss keeping existing nuclear power plants open and producing low-carbon electricity instead of shutting them down (Looks at Germany and Belgium specifically). Also if using electric heat pumps for heating then you need to decarbonize electricity production too. And we need all the firm low-carbon generators we can get
I very much doubt germany is going to change their plans of shutting down the remaining plants by the end of the year since it's coming so soon (personally would like to see it) but am glad to see belgium decided to extend their nuclear use to by 10 years to 2035 since they just announced they were going to be shutdown in 2025.
I love your optimism. The thing that frustrates me is that the need to improve insulation and fuel efficiency has been known since at least the 80s if not the 60s. In the 80s my parents had to rebuild their house due to structural damage. The point is for about £60k they could build a house to English specifications or import a house from Sweden to their specifications. Same price, it is just that the Swedish house almost required no heating even in the dead of winter. Thus, if we in England had taken this seriously at least all houses built since the 80s would use about 90% less energy to heat. Why do I say since the 60s? When my mother came to live in England in the 60s she was amazed that basically no houses came close to the triple glazing installed in the apartment my grandmother lived in most of her adult life (in the centre of one of the countries largest cities where the rent was about half of what it cost in a similar city in England and where the heating was included in the rent!). So, sorry if I am not blown away by people saying “let’s do this … sometime in the future”. Shoot ourselves in the foot, wait decades whilst it gets infected and then decide to do something about it just before you die of the infection. Great if you survive in the end, but don’t pat yourself on the back for your foresight! Sorry if that sounds negative, but come on ….
@@engineeringvision9507 I get the joke. Sad thing is that much of the 2008/9 crash was due to politicians of all parties wanting to promote housing for all (and the financial market working out how to get rich doing this). This led to mortgages being offered to people with no income or other assets. In England, at least, people could even get over 100% mortgages so they could buy furniture and rent out their houses (yes more than one), whilst going on holiday even though they had no income and no assets other than the houses. What a shock that that ended badly (Northern Rock being the first to fail in 2007).
If it shuts off Russia quicker then it's the right thing to do. But only if we accelerate the move to renewables and do everything that Simon suggests here and more.
Another excellent video, hopefully we can move away heating on fossil entirely, insulate and make it a priority for people over spending 40+ thousand on electric cars
i used to burn fossil fule now i just burn my furniture as i can't aford to pay the gas bill or the electrick bill . next week im going to go to my mates house while hes away on holiday and steel all his wooden furniture and burn it . i can't aford to buy food so im also going to catch his cats and cook them on my wood burning stove :) for me the next car will be a hi ho silver [ a horse ]
this individual is feeding you something so degenerative, that it's just astonishing how ppl can even swallow it lol. He simply know nothing about gas, Putin, situation in ukraine, and anything at all. cmmn ppl, you can't be sireous
Moving from what? Spending how much on what? Lol. I'm still on fossil fuels in all mentioned. Not because I want it that way, it's because I have to survive.
Hi Simon, I have a video idea. Whenever I am encouraging wind power I often get people saying that wind turbines kill birds so we shouldn't use them. Maybe you could do a video breaking down these supposed negatives of wind turbines
Those estimates about the number of birds killed by flying into wind turbines pale in comparison to the number of birds that domestic cats kill every year, and yet I don't see people advocating restricting cat guardianship to 'save the birds'.
Birds also fly into buildings and into moving vehicles of all types. It is interesting how those who oppose renewable energy suddenly find a passion for the protection of birds when they have no regard for the survival of animals in general on a polluted planet.
yep i encourage wind power to , if we fitted a wind mill to the top of the houses of pariment / congress [ depending where you live ) we could power the world on pure hot air !
Yeah very good points made in the video. Thankfully Germans stopped Nord Stream 2, but they are continuing to replace their nuclear power plants with natural gas. I get the point that nuclear energy is too slow, but if you already have it working you should keep it working.
@@NoobGamer-sc9lt To which I'd say great! Nuclear offers high-paying jobs to the local community. It also might lower housing/rent costs (which I guess could be a good or a bad thing depending on whether you are a home owner), and conveniently reduces the risk you'll be neighbours with a science illiterate.
@@merrymachiavelli2041 science illiterate!! great choice of words you trying to be politically correct? to be honest I'm a fan of nuclear since I was 13 and even after I become power engineer still like it but the numbers doesn't lie one important number that being ignored is that pricing of power which given by equation taking into account end of life of the plant but there's no handbook say to decommission a plant need $X or fuel and fuel process waste which is part of operation, I don't mind to have nuclear lab with active reactor in every university but for power generation no thank you
the germans have the freaking biggest coal mines in the western world !! and green freaking england shut the mines down ?? i burn imported coal in my fireplace because i can't buy coal from england .
Well tell that to apartment owners that won't ever upgrade anything. Most people don't have any choice of where their heating comes from and just take whatever was installed.
A lot of fossil fuel reduction hopefully will come from the price increases , most houses I work in as an electrician could easily be upgraded particularly with loft insulation. I have gone 18months now without gas in my own home.
Hi Simon, have you looked into nuclear co-generation as an option for process and domestic heating applications? I'm a PhD student myself investigating further co-generation options
I don't know the efficiency compared to PEM Electrolysis etc, but Thermochemical production of Hydrogen via Nuclear Power has been proposed/studied a bit. (Also radiolysis with spent fuel rod cooling pools, but i don't know if that has a contamination risk).
Granted i think short of ultra-remote (Artic+Antartic, Mobile Like Ships/Subs, *Space* etc) / high energy use places (Dense Urban Areas, Captive Power Plants for Huge Industrial Hubs), i don't see much of a role for nuclear in the future, it would have been great as a Centralized Coal Plant Based Grid-era Replacement, but (Fore the most part, some exceptions exist) Decentralized Grids are the future.
Former Warsaw pact countries used waste steam for district heating. I know the Czech republic still uses their turbine exhaust steam for district heating. You can also use the waste steam to drive absorption chillers for air conditioning and refrigeration.
@@gregorymalchuk272 yes. We use waste heat from Mělník (coal) power plant for heating parts of Prague. There is even talk about similar scheme in Brno and Dukovany (nuclear) power plant.
I get that building new nuclear reactors is not going to be fast enough to end reliance on gas, but surely there are plenty of plants that already exist and were shut down because 'nuclear bad' that could be used again for electricity soon, even if some of them require updates and maintenance.
While distributing it through universities prepare also explanation if replacing gas heater with electric one, the electricity comes from????? Indeed, brilliant video! 😆
@@viant3918 im still mystified how the guy in the video transforms a sudden cut-off into a wean. sort of like how a heroin addict is weaning himself off a $500 a day habit in prison.
Firstly, THANK YOU for pointing out the differences in power generation and primary energy consumption! People need to understand that natural gas isn't only about power plants. I am however a little sceptical about heat pumps in big housing blocks - wouldn't they be extremely loud and get inefficient quickly during winter? I realise that for single family houses, heat pumps are the perfect solution. But so many live in dense cities, where it would take years or decades to change the heating infrastructure. What about district heating? How would that work with renewables?
You aren't restricted to one type of heating system in an apartment building. If the government is subsidizing 110% anyway, just install a heat pump alongside the gas burner. Use the heat pump most of the time, and turn on the gas burner for those really cold days. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good - doing something halfway is still better than doing nothing. I don't think noise is an issue for big housing blocks. Heat pumps aren't particular noisy. The mechanical/maintenance room is already pretty loud, and kept away from living spaces.
Heat pumps are just air conditioners, which aren't a significant source of noise in housing blocks at all. They're cheap to run, quiet, and virtually the same cost as non-reversible air conditioners.
Air source heat pumps work efficiently down to -1C and can work just about down to -4C. Temperatures in England hardly ever get that low. They have back up resistive heating for the occasional super cold night. Where possible ground source is better. For a tower block a communal ground source loop would be sensible. Sharing the high cost of drilling the bore hole between all the flats. You could then either have individual heat pumps operating from the shared ground loop, or just have a big one in the basement and pump the hot water around the building.
The problem with renewables is transmission and the time to construct the transmission as the obvious locations have been used up, project timelines are getting prolonged. Nuclear can be built in 4-5 years which is comparable with big renewable projects (the speed of permeting has to be addressed tho)
Great video Simon! Another excellent heating technology is heat networks, which provide heat from a central source to locations, rather than individual users having their own boiler or heating pump. Because it's centralised it can provide much more efficient heating than conventional heating methods, so can both bring down operating costs for renewable projects and reduce gas consumption per KWh of heating
Heat is one of the hardest forms of energy to transport over distances. Losses on heat are usually to do with transport. As an example; Our floor heating system from the electric pump getting heat from the ground (90 meters deep) loses about 60% of the energy transporting it. It's much more efficient in big housing units, but as soon as it has to travel the losses are too big for it to be efficient.
Relative heat loss is dependent on your level of pipe insulation - a lot of multibuilding networks in other countries (networks are used heavily in Norway and Denmark) use an insulation standard much higher than is usually used in the UK to achieve that retention!
@@evildude951 Regardless of insulation, you'll lose a lot more energy transporting heat compared to electricity. Where it's more beneficial it should be used. But for a bulk of places (as of right now) switching to electric heating would make much more of a difference.
@@simmerke1111 The energy loss in a district heating system in a Finnish city is around 7-9%. Electric grid average loss is 3%. In many places the waste heat from electricity generation, industry, data-centers, etc. is used for the district heating. However, for now a lot of the heat still comes from fossil fuel sources just like the electricity.
There are three German reactors decommissioned in 2021 which could be quickly recommissioned, plus new designs for molten salt reactors (among others) which use smaller modules & aren't high pressure can be built quite quickly on a production line & don't require the huge containment buildings which are major factors in the cost & build time of older reactors. Ever noticed how anti nuclear rhetoric always seems to profit fossil fuels? Correlation with or without causation? It remains to be seen, but it is hugely disappointing for you as a scientific explainer to misrepresent the issue so much. Coincidentally, the whole heat pump argument puts the onus on individuals AGAIN, like the "carbon footprint" campaign, leaving fossil fuel companies free to do business as usual. If you really wanted to stop Russian gas quickly, start producing old fashion coal gas & just convert existing appliances. Never mind about the environmental impact, at least it isn't nuclear, and the coal industry will make lots more money... You won't find that in Morning Brew...
sometimes even replacing old gas boilers for new one can do a lot. Changed from one made in 2006, for newer condensation unit with heat water on demand (made 2018), result about 30% less gas used just with that. And now, there are some that are 40+ years old still in use. Our government, gives about 25% subsidy to upgrade to newer, more effective solutions for heating, from wood burning boilers to Photovoltaic. It will not cover all costs, limited brands (mostly local, with exception of PVE) but it helps too. I think will ramp it up some now
I wanna hope that someday I look back on this last month and remember it as being an time of extreme change for the better. It seems the most drastic changes come from times of great global crises. I also hope that I look back and remember this as the final death cry of a dictator in all but name and the dawn of a better era for the Russian people, who have suffered for so long under such corrupt and cruel men.
Here's hoping. I'm desperate for calls to action and organizing to make that change happen, because waiting for the people profiting from destroying the world aren't gonna have a change of heart
The person who cause this damn thing is the USA and NATO ! And Volodimyr Zelenski is a comedian ! He think being president is just like being in the movies ! Haha...haha...
I agree that the most importat is to improve the energetic efficience. In the case of heating improving the isolation of buildings. However, this is not an easy task. It is something that needs to be done, but can't be done in a short term. Regarding changing boilers for heat pumps to consume electricity instead of gas, it would be a good option as long as the electricity is not generated by burning gas. In addition, when producing electricity, a large part of the gas chemical energy is lost as heat. This heat is not used for heating normally. For this reason, producing electrical energy to later use it for heating does not seem the best option, unless the generation totally avoids the use of fossil fuels. Something that we should be able to do is to be able to take advantage of the thermal energy lost in the production of electrical energy. This energy could be use for building heating, at least in the proximity of generation stations. On the other hand, although it is true that nuclear energy is not a short-term solution, the current situation should make us think about the consequences of abandoning the use of nuclear energy. We should reconsider the policy of closing nuclear plants in the future so that we can get rid of the use of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Instead we should promote the construction of new nuclear power plants of the new generation. These new plants considerably reduce radioactive waste and have more advanced safety mechanisms.
Even if ALL the electricity used to power a heat pump is generated by gas, that heat pump lowers overall gas consumption, because they are 3 to 4 times more efficient than gas boilers. The heat produced by gas power plants is already being used for district heating. But this only benefits a handful of homes, in comparison.
It is as or sometimes more efficient to run a heat pump off of natural gas burned in a power plant than it is to burn it locally, unless the weather is extremely cold with air sourced heat pumps. Another advantage with heat pumps heating water is that they can modulate their power based on available generation at night for example or during the peak solar production periods
In Nuremberg the electrical plant uses heat generated by the plant to pump hot water through the city as "Fernwärme" (distance heating). Lots of nuremberg households use this instead of a central heating unit. The plant also has a huge, very well insulated tower full of water. When there is a lot of green energy produced in the grid the plant powers down and/or heats the watertower. This increases the efficiency of the whole grid, by storing excess energy as heat and later using it to heat the city. This is a fairly easy concept to implement and doesn't require geological features like pumped-storage hydroelectricity. But I guess it only makes sense if you already got a "Fernwärme" net in your city to take advantage of that heat reservoir.
@@Eckendenker This is exactly what it needs to be done! Congratulations! I know that is something that is done sometimes, but unfortunately I'd say that this is not the most of the times. I wish, that it was enforced in all the thermoelectric generation stations.
the question is can Europe super grid take the blow ? heating is such energy intensive process and by shifting the load from gas burner to electric heater or heat pump will surely strain the grid since it's almost double the load from the heating alone. I don't know about the data but when people turn on all of their heat pump and heater at the same time during winter, it will overwhelm the grid while the rest of the renewable is also producing less power.
Dunno about the rest of Europe, but that's never been an issue in Sweden where the wast majority of the homes are heated with electric heaters and electric stoves are the standard outside of restaurants.
it's true that shifting to heat pump might increase the load, especially during winter, but the efficiency is far better than burning efficiency, so the increase is not that much important. +Ľuboš Rybanský yes it depends on the outdoor and indoor temperature, but even in the worst case efficiency is still incredibly higher with heat pump (1 for gas against 5-6 for heat pump)
Well in Romania more and more people are getting AC and even the cheap ones are capable of heating , the electric grid is already strained in some parts of the country in summer when everyone uses them for cooling , the grid will be upgraded but we need to teach people that electric heat pumps are better than gas powered heating . I know a lot of people here that don't use the AC(heat pump) for heating in winter even if it's cheaper because they still think gas it's cheaper :)) .
yeah of course, nuclear plants takes 10 years to built (maybe 5 because of burocracy) and wind energy takes 12 months. Well, now you need to talk about x5 energy generation (could be a 3000 Mw/h nuclear plant) and it is on 90% of time meanwhile wind is on maybe 30% of time that is why, after 20 years of heavy expeding in renewable energy, wind is still no match to nuclear energy
You can heat / cool your building with geothermal...drill a few meters down, install pipes to circulate water, and you get back water that is warmer / cooler than the atmosphere come winter / summer...also, solar water heaters ftw...
on the re-newables point: ( btw I 100% agree with redudcing emmsions where ever posible I am definaly not a climate deniter) I appologise in advance for my spelling a grammar I am dislexic. The grid can be thought of as a living thing. we need to generate the power as we need it and re newables are not very good at changing the ammount power output on demand, so can be unreliable. Another point is that there are two types of power when you're dealing with AC, which are real and reactive power. And for current to flow you need both. And renewables are not that good at creating reactive power, so thats another disadvantage. That being said these point can definaltly be adressed if there was more investment into related technologies like grid storage.
One important advantage also is that they usually have an efficiency of 450% for a simple system or even more (unit exchanging heat with the ground can exceed 600% even on a small scale system and 750% for bigger system serving a building). Meaning if you produce 1 kWh of energy by burning gas for heating in your home you'll only get 1kwh of heat. But if you burn 1 kWh of gas in a power plant, with efficiency usually ranging between 40 and 60% you'll get around 0.37 to 0.55 kWh of electricity delivered, accounting for grid losses. Those will translate to 1.6 - 2.4 kWh of heat in a simple system exchanging heat with outside air, or exceeding 4 kWh on more efficient system exchanging heat with the ground and serving a building instead of a single house. Thus even if it's energy from gas, you're getting much more useful heat out of it.
Nuclear is good, but not for this war its true. But we should get more on it, as for the 2035-2040 we'll probably have reached the saturation of renewable on out grid and already started working on energy storage system to cope with the non controllable output from renewable. By that time it's gonna be fundamental in the war against climate change serving for covering part of the base load and thus reducing the enormous amount of energy storage otherwise required by renewable only.
the more I learn about Wind energy the worst it looks. Cost a ton in material for the amount of energy it can produce, almost all of it is unrecyclable in ways that can be profitable enough to do so, take a huge amount of space, is too unreliable so you need basically as much as it can give as back up if you don't want blackout (usually done with coal or gas. Looking at you Germany) Require a huge amount of cable to gets the energy where the population actually is which result in a big lost of efficiency. Offshore costs are even worst and have the potential to destroy the marine ecosystems which we need even more than forest to clean the air. It also has less potential to improve in the long run than solar or nuclear.
Not possible right now. At least not before a decade has gone by. Majority of European housholds heat with gas and the factories run on gas. Heat pumps and electric cars are not an option for majority of households until whole powergrids get rebuilt for huge power drains. If majority of households switch to heat pumps right now we would have huge blackouts in winter. Already we have local blackouts in summer when air conditioning use increases. Its only going to get worse. Green energy right now is only for rich people and not reachable for majority of people, especially you can forget us who live in Eastern or Southern Europe. Same regarding insulation.
The fact that nuclear plants take a long time to build isn’t enough of an argument against their upsides. Carbon free power not dependent upon favorable weather or on imports from OPEC. Start now and by next decade we can make some ACTUAL progress.
If you want to talk about how 'not clean' it is- talk about the radon content. Not only are natural gas and coal plants 1000x more radioactive than nuclear power plants but that radon decays into radioactive lead and polonium.
We were hoping to get a heat pump when our boiler died recently, but even with the potential grant it was so much more expensive then another boiler and we just didn’t have money to 😔 As much as we want to do the right thing, it’s very hard to do when we’re struggling financially already. 😔 I feel a lot of people are probably in the same boat.
Same story for so much of this tech. Here in NZ the government has just dropped $0.50 tax from petrol to help those struggling. I think a much better use of their discount would be to offer low interest loans for electric/efficient vehicles-owning a gas guzzler means you already have a 'loan' to fuel companies. Banks refuse (affordable) loans to people in this situation and so I think it's the Government's job to fill this space.
‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ ~ i agree nuclear isn’t the solution on the short term but we must do this long term. But Simon we can’t fix the current crisis with wind and solar (also not with efficiëncy), i believe you are being bit to optimistic about the heating story. It is more likelly that when people need to chose people will heat with wood again. We must think long term and stop with the short term thinking because what we see today is more harm to the climate because of more fossil investments and lowering of taxes on fuel further increasing demand. Let’s stop with the this isn’t a solution now and start working together to plan for a long term solution, let’s be realistic.
at least in the US most of the gas power plants are peakers because they can spool up faster than coal or nuclear, so they run when renewables aren't producing as much power. Because of that, I think the real replacement for gas power plants is probably not more renewables, but giant battery banks or other energy storage systems. I'm also pretty sure that something like the Tesla Megapack system is now cheaper than a new natural gas peaker plant, except that the battery system is very supply-constrained. If you have the spare off-peak generation to spare or build more renewables for the lower efficiency, liquid air storage like Highview power might make more sense if only because it isn't supply-constrained at all.
I know batteries are getting cheaper but as of a year ago they were still so expensive it was actually cheaper to build a nuclear power plant than battery storage, if you work out the LCOE, ie dividing all the costs by the total electricity output. (even including decommissioning and waste). Even if in terms of number of plants peakers are higher, because they only run a small amount of the time the actual amount of gas used is smaller. Don't worry about the peakers until all the standard gas plants are no longer needed.
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 I was thinking about peaker plants because they are the ones you tend to get more instead of less of as you add more renewables. I'll readily admit that I don't actually know all the costs though, so correction apreciated.
I have double insulation on my home (walls are 35cm tick) + double glazed windows, as many of my neighbours. We don't even have gas in our opart of city, so nobody use it. Anyway, for heating we are plugged to the city grid which recive hot steam from coal plant. Temperature is sometimes unbearable (goes to 30-35 degrees inside the home) if automatic termometar is not installed. Few of my neighbours didn't want to use that sort of heating (to expensive) so they installed heat pumps. None of them are happy. First, sometimes temperature is not what they expected to be, second their electricity bills are enormous. So if you don't have solar panels to produce at least part of your power need i don't see the advantage (power is produced in same coal plant) of installing heat pumps.
Perhaps not what you are looking for but Simons argument that it take a long time to construct a reactor is true that is for generation 3 reactors. Generation 4 is competitive with renewables without problems of intermittency and low energy density.
Simon, you missed an important part of the move to heat pumps, and that is the source of the electricity. More electricity will need to be generated when the weather is cold. The important missing point, and it is a gaping hole in Germany's 'Energiewende' is international storage of energy. Solar PV generates in summer, but its output is required in winter. Technology is available today to deal with this (eg. Electrolysis to store the energy as compressed hydrogen in salt caverns and generate from that stored hydrogen in winter using gas turbines, gas engines or fuel cells. Storelectric in the UK has an interesting patent combining this with the oxygen separated by the electrolysis) But there is currently not a sufficient market mechanism to make it worthwhile to build, even though it is needed urgently
Can you please explain how "roof insulation, wall insulation, window insulation" is supposed to be "rolled out widely and rapidly"? You can mandate these items being included in newly built units from this point onward, but how do you expect to update every single older building in europe, and who will pay for it? I would be hard pressed if you could update every building in europe faster than you could just drill for more nat gas.
Its fantasy. He is not taking into account that every European country is already heavilly in debt cause of the whole economic crisis going on from 2008 and which has been affecting every country in a different way. Where is the money going to come from?
Very happy with the replacement of gas hot water & home heating from our home. We replaced them with heat pumps. We also improved our cooking with an indication stove.
Just because nuclear is slow to implement doesn't mean it should be left out of the mix. It's the best way to eventually replace natural gas completely like France did since it also provides "momentum" to the power grid and the waste is microscopic in comparison. If only NGOs stop fear-mongering it by citing the only 3 accidents in history
In Australia we had a massive home insulation program about 10 years ago. It was cancelled by the following government, because 4 deaths from electrocutions happened…. But the media in Australia never talked about the benefits from the energy saved.
I saw the thumbnail and thought this video was about gastric trouble in the stomach :D ..honestly, that would be a lot more useful to know than this - what are people supposed to do with this information you're giving in the video?
As far as I know, gas-based electricity production is helpful to satisfy peak demand. Are the alternatives capable of modulating production as fast as necessary?
@@atrumluminarium nuclear cannot fill this role, the exact opposite actually. nuclear is energy production method with the solwest ramp up/ ramp down time, making nuclear power plants the worts option in terms of feasability to replace gas peaker plants
@@atrumluminariumphysics engineer living in France, I know that nuclear shoulders a little bit of the daily variability, but not the fine-tuned, minute-to-minute variations. Nor could it. Gas plants, on the other hand do take care of the peaks in demand (it is, by the way, their main use on the French grid).
Green policies always lead to fuel poverty. I have very little faith to these suggestions. The UK needs to frack its huge shale deposit and in the longer term invest in nuclear energy.
I live in Finland where temperatures go below minus 25 degrees Celcius regulary. I'v been using geothermal heatpump for a decade now. Works like a dream.
the heat pump question was debated on uk radio LBC a couple of months back, and the (right) conclusion was reached: the government needs to take decisive steps on policies encouraging infrastructure overhaul. the sooner the dallying stops the better
The cheapest way is to install an Air Conditioning system able also to heat (it has a heat pump). You can use the AC during the day when outside temperatures are >0 so the heating efficiency is very high (>4). I did it and works very well. I am using gas only to heat water and for home heating during night.
Phenomenal vid! Couple things: 1. The Poteen pun had me pause the vid and laugh for a solid 30 seconds 2. Your physical fitment is showing! Might be time for a new shirt haha
Not sure why wind and solar are thought to be a good way to replace electricity generation in UK as it needs to be sunny and or windy for this to work? This is not the case all the time and so you need fossil fuelled powered backup power stations to take the slack. Also nuclear is definitely the future as although it make take up to 10 years to get a station online, it is both clean and can generate the 10s of GW of power the UK and European countries each need.
Nuclear isn't a great way to replace electricity generation in the UK because it needs to be in the future to work, and we are unfortunately stuck here in the present.
About heat pumps; Electric power in heat pump is a bit more complex than that; if you are using gas to generate electricity at 40% efficiency, you are wasting the energy that you save with the heat pump in the electricity generation and transfer losses. If you use the gas directly for heating, you get good thermal efficiency (depending how much heat captured from exhaust). But if you generate the electricity with something else, OR if you generate the electricity in a combined electricity and heat generation plant where you also capture the heat and for example use it for district heating. In this case the electric heat pump saves energy. And of course it always saves energy over direct electric heating. Also; heat pumps don't necessarily have to be electrically powered. You can also make a gas powered heat pump, etc. 😂 So how much heat pump makes sense depends of what you use to generate the electricity!
Ok so using heat pumps instead of gas, that would boost the energy consumption , I highly doubt those countries most affected by the Russian gas have enough power on their power plants to support this change in a massive scale, and if Russian gas is used for the local power generated then is a no go option. Actually a lot of these sound like good options at first but its collateral effects are poorly or not even mentioned in this video.
Insulate Britain was ahead of the game until the media demonised them and the government persecuted and changed the laws to jail them. Also the cost of electricity per kWh is 3 times the cost of gas per kWh and air source heat pumps are pretty rubbish, best bet is ground source heat pumps but cost of installation is extremely high, and equipment is expensive. I say build passive houses and use the sun to heat your house, and wait for big nuclear plant to supply you with hot water.
Air source heat pumps are certainly not rubbish. They are the standard even north of the Arctic Circle in Nordic countries. But insulation is very important to make them work well, at a lower temperature than most boilers.
Also I hope this war puts an end to the unreasonable nuclearhopbia among some European politicians and the anti-nuclear crusade Germany and some countries have been waging.
Canada supplies clean Gas & Oil (carbon catching product now from the ground to delivery (that the extremists don't seem to understand or care about) New Gen--Read , Study, learn--- Anyway, Cheers ")
The electrical grid cant support much more load and we cant get people to work in retail where are all the skilled trades coming from to do all this work?
You do not mention energy storage that we need to use renewables to their maximum & also that of any new wind turbines. Rolls Royce & other firms are building mini-nuclear power units that can be mass produced & certainly do not take 10 years or even one year. My energy company Ecotriciy produces gas from grass. Try using less energy too. There is a far-far wider range of options than you present in this Post. I doubt if we can come completely off fossil fuels without Nuclear & far greater energy storage. At least in high population industrial areas in the North. Portugal for example could make it on renewables alone, not Poland or similar.
Yes nuclear takes a long time to implement - that is third generation nuclear and not fourth generation. But meanwhile Germany and Belgium should not even be considered closing down their remaining powerplants especially now.
People that live in the south part of Europe also have lot of sunny days and there are pretty cheap solar water heaters. Also maintaining gas infrastructure for heating is expensive, can leak and cause lot of pollution.
I still see a problem how to get the electrical energy for all these heat pumps. They are needed most when we rather have a lack of renewable energy (called winter). Yes, wind can cover some part, but there are times when neither wind nor sun deliver sufficient energy. And biogas is definitely no solution; we rather need to stop all energy plant- farming activities; we are heading to a global food shortage. Therefore, I still see the challenge about energy storage.
You are true about isolation and heat pump, but i'm not so sure about renewable. Untill you don't have storage system renewables can't be the solution. And we have to say that if EU rely so much on gas it is also because of the deployment of renewable (deployment which is a good thing according to me) because gas is the better energy in co-generation with renewable, because easy to manage. In short term I don't think we have that much solution to get out of Russian gas, except reduce our energy consumption by consuming less, decrease the indoor temperature... And in medium/long term we have the deployment of renewables but also nuclear because if we don't do it now, we won't have it in 10 years, and we will again be in the emergency. Sobriety is the only true solution to climate crisis and fossile fuels depletion, new technologies are a useful tool but we have to be careful not to dream too much of it, we might be disappointed
Excellent video! I had the opportunity to see the actual IEA press conference with their 10 point plan before watching this vlog and i must say, the analysis in this video is way better than the Q&A session during the press conference. One question though on the comparison on timeline between installation & commissioning of wind vs nuclear (12 months vs 10 years roughly). How big is the output or size of the projects considered here, are they comparable? Thanks for any insight. I think any way, decentralised grid saytems would be a better/ controllable way forwad as compared to centralised grid.
“A choice people are already having to make in some third world countries, like the United Kingdom.”
-Simon Clark 2022
ICONIC
Savage
I fucking died 😂
Replayed to make sure i heard him right 😬
Brilliant!
I got emotional when you mentioned Italy's superbonus as a viable and efficient solution.
I am so accustomed to disparaging my own country's administration that I couldn't believe we did something right, for once.
Very Italian reaction indeed. Italy, you should love yourself as much as the world loves you. You live in one of the most beautiful places on earth with great people. And although there are a lot of things that don't go as they should, never forget that.
Posso dire lo stesso!
Actually the super bonus is a disastrous policy that lead to huge spending with extremely small gains compared to previous bonuses and destroying the efficiency of the spending in environmental aids (CO2/€).
I'll promise myself to come back with a more detailed analysis under this comment in the next days, but hearing it as an example is an unexpected slip by Simon (to put it mildly)
@@cesarecertosini4202 Looking forward to your detailed analysis in a few years. Couldn't care less about it in a few days as you're going to be speculating like crazy.
As always, an idea might be good in theory, but everything depends on its implementation.
To understand why the super bonus is so dreadful we need to take a step back and look at what the construction sector means in Italy.
In Italy there is a long history of public spending in financing (directly and indirectly) the construction sector both in form of low taxes on house ownership (e.g. there's no tax whatsoever on your first house, no matter how rich you are or how much it is worth, unless it's a huge palace) and after the 2008 crysis a series of incentives justified at improve the environmental impact of the households (but with the real aim of cashing in electoral consensus by throwing in the sector public money).
The result of this [1] is a ton of micro enterprises with terrible productivity: the average number of employees per firm is 2.6 against 6.3 of Germany and 4.4 of the UK, the number of bigger construction companies is lower (80 with 52000 employees against 309/289000 in UK and 262/152000 in Germany), these enterprises lacks the strength to bring innovation in the market because of their small scale; looking at middle enterprises, the situation is better and they tend to be competitive internationally.
This also brings a low level of education in the sector and high percentage of illegal work (with the obvious consequence of facing, like the agricolture sector which relies on illegal exploitation of immigrants, a higher number of deaths compared to similar nations [2]) and shady practices in term of tax compliance (the estimated level of tax evasion in this sector is 22.7% [3]).
Examples of other bonuses are:
- 50% for renovation expenses
- 50% for furniture expenses
- 90% for facade renovation expenses
- 36% for gardening expenses
- 50% to 65% for heating systems renovation
- 50% for windows and doors renovation
On top of all of this there's the 110%.
This seems to me a little excessive to not be justified as a huge transfer of money to a sector that its main source of income is the drainage of taxpayers money from the more productive sectors (but I understand that this is an opinion and, therefore, it's debatable).
I'll add further comments about the issues with the 110% later, but I post this to not restart form scratch.
I'm sorry that most of the sources are in Italian, but I don't really see a way out of this, I hope that G translate may help you!
[1] italiaindati.com/edilizia-e-costruzioni-in-italia/
[2] www.liberioltreleillusioni.it/news/articolo/incidenti-sul-lavoro-una-comparazione
[3] www.dt.mef.gov.it/export/sites/sitodt/modules/documenti_it/analisi_progammazione/documenti_programmatici/nadef_2021/Relazione_evasione_fiscale_e_contributiva.pdf
Another point that can be made about heat pumps is that they are essentially air-conditioners running in reverse. This means that in countries where air-conditioners are already common (such as Spain, Italy, etc.), existing air-conditioners could be replaced with hybrid units, which can provide cooling in the summer and warming in the winter.
Sometimes called ' reverse cycle heatpumps'.
I install these systems, they are really amazing.
One important advantage also is that they usually have an efficiency of 450% for a simple system or even more (unit exchanging heat with the ground can exceed 600% even on a small scale system and 750% for bigger system serving a building). Meaning if you produce 1 kWh of energy by burning gas for heating in your home you'll only get 1kwh of heat. But if you burn 1 kWh of gas in a power plant, with efficiency usually ranging between 40 and 60% you'll get around 0.37 to 0.55 kWh of electricity delivered, accounting for grid losses. Those will translate to 1.6 - 2.4 kWh of heat in a simple system exchanging heat with outside air, or exceeding 4 kWh on more efficient system exchanging heat with the ground and serving a building instead of a single house. Thus even if it's energy from gas, you're getting much more useful heat out of it.
How this can solve a energy problem?
@@DontMansion With a heat pump giving 3kwh or 4Kwh of heat for every Kwh of electricity , we need less power in total.
Dismissing nuclear power is not helpful.
There are countries who were until the war going to close their nuclear power stations. And long term, nuclear power is necessary to meet our demands. In the UK, there are also 'mini reactors' being considered that would be quicker to build.
Yeah, although the question remains on whether Europe as a whole has enough nuclear power plants planned for closing to reduce coal reduction by 40%. Also, since the task is to replace coal in the short term, I don't think the long term concerns are very relevant. I mean, removing completely eliminating reliance on natural gas would be beneficial in the long term too but quite disastrous in the short term.
The mini reactor idea sounds promising to me, however.
Yes exactly. In reality when investing in wind and solar you are inadvertently investing a natural gas baseload.
I'm from Ukraine a d I've been watching you since you PhD journey. Its nice to see people covering the issue from different angles
Around 3:20, Simon claims that insulating buildings "can be widely rolled out rapidly". it would be nice if this were really so, but it isn't really!
For starters, this IS being done already, has been going on for many years (and that of course does not invalidate the concept, quite the contrary) - and what's holding back building owners is often, today already, the scarcity of insulating materials and - more importantly - of skilled workers and firms to do the job. Tried calling your local contractors for roofing, windows, wall building lately when they may have time to refurbish your home? You won't get one for next week. If all of Europe wants to accelerate this - rapidly! -, the situation's gonna get worse: Prices increase drastically, without much more work being done in the short term, and it will take some years before capacities come up to levels necessary to "widely roll out rapidly" throughout Europe (or everywhere else).
There is also a bit of a problem in that many insulating materials are an environmental hazard in and of themselves. We need others, more eco-friendly ones - and that takes even more time to roll out widely.
Similar caution applies to heat pumps - only worse: While some of the handy work to insulate homes can be done by unskilled work (e.g. home owners themselves), this is not at all true for heat pumps, where you need electricians at least (don't fiddle with electricity unless you have thoroughly learned the trade!), but also specialists for drilling deep below your house etc. Nice technology - comes decades too late to avert the current crisis and dependence on Russia.
Solar and wind electricity generation should by all means be expanded - but would do little to decrease the use of natural gas in the electric grid, for natural gas plant's classic job is to jump in on the shortest of notices when demand goes up or base supply goes down - the exact two things that solar and wind have a problem with. Natural gas is in storage for that job, and short-term storage is exactly what the solar and wind installations are largely missing (so far). So what we need to, specifically, get rid of gas plants is not so much more renewable production per se but energy storage in the grid, to fill the gaps when solar+wind+nuclear+and all the rest cannot crank up output at short notice. (I suppose some regional grids use more gas than others, and not all of it in that backup role; surely, in such regions, some gas can be substituted on far shorter notice).
What everybody can do, right now, is reduce personal use of energy, particularly if you use gas (or oil, where Russia again is a major exporter to Europe), e.g. by reducing target temperature in your home or office by one degree. Or by switching off your heating system two weeks earlier in spring than you ordinarily would. Put on warmer socks, move a little more, and just get used to it.
Solar and wind would add to the base level of available energy, and thus less gas would be needed to fill in for temporary increases in demand.
Perhaps they could propose a "normal" energy consumption for a certain house volume and anything above that would cost a lot more. The advantage of that is that the owner now can think out a solution himself. Perhaps he could indeed insulate his house completely or he could use only one heated room, sleep downstairs for a while, wear a lot of clothes..
facts don’t matter when you’re pushing a fairy tale
What about NOT closing ALREADY built FULLY FUNCTIONING nuclear plants? Looking at you Germany..
Apparently they listened you
And Belgium....
@@MatteoBucci95 i hope they did not. the one near me has already problems with driping pipes. there was no maintenance the last 10 years, because they were waiting for their closing.
nah nuclear Energy just can't be the solution, the effects on the enviroment via the warming of rivers e.g. is just not gonna cut it
@@ragazzotedesco4216 I smell irony 😄 (or utter stupidity)
I think the exact same way - or even without a bonus: just cover the cost! Just cover HALF the cost...! Unfortunately, in Norway today, only "new" technologies are PARTIALLY subsidized. Even though we know just insulating and changing windows and doors would greatly reduce the amount of energy used for years to come, that's not subsidized. Oh, and only rich people can afford the "new" technologies.
When I was little, we were so piss poor that we had ice on the inside walls of our house, and I had to wear a jacket to bed. How the frick would families like that benefit from solar pannels?! Just insulating the house was enough to reduce our heating costs by about 90%
The bonus is probably worthwhile. If it's a pure cost-coverage program, somebody might just put off upgrading out of inconvenience, and while upgrading *would* save them money, the money saved is too insignificant over a given timescale, or they experience one of those cognitive effects where money saved is not equal to money gained. The bonus is a little push to get everyone to upgrade as soon as possible, because who doesn't want a few hundred or thousand dollars? That bonus also saves the government money, because the sooner people upgrade, the sooner the natural gas demand goes down, and the sooner the country can stop paying for natural gas imports (or start exporting it instead). Exactly how big the bonus should be depends on how prevalent late-adopters are, and how much adoption is influenced by a certain percentage bonus.
"we were so piss poor that we had ice on the inside walls of our house, and I had to wear a jacket to bed. How the frick would families like that benefit from solar pannels?! "
----Well poor families would have smaller electric bills, thats a pretty obvious benefit
@@alexrogers777 Solar doesn't do much when there is no sun half the year, and even if they did work if whatever heat they proudced is just leaking out of the house because there is no proper insulation you are going to need a lot more of solar panels than should be necessary if people got help to do new insulation in their homes.
@@kattkatt744 In the high north where there is no sun half the year there is also nearly 24 hours of sun in the summer which would make solar do a hell of a lot.
I agree, insulation is important. I'm not sure if you're implying that I don't think that but I do.
@@alexrogers777 Yes, there is a lot of sun in the summer, but what is most useful an less wastful, a system that works year round or having two separate systems one for summer and one for winter? Also OP was specifically talking about heating the inside of the house, and at what time of year is room heating needed the most?
Disappointed by the blanket dismal of nuclear. Would've been a great time to discuss keeping existing nuclear power plants open and producing low-carbon electricity instead of shutting them down (Looks at Germany and Belgium specifically). Also if using electric heat pumps for heating then you need to decarbonize electricity production too. And we need all the firm low-carbon generators we can get
I very much doubt germany is going to change their plans of shutting down the remaining plants by the end of the year since it's coming so soon (personally would like to see it) but am glad to see belgium decided to extend their nuclear use to by 10 years to 2035 since they just announced they were going to be shutdown in 2025.
The point is that those things can't be done in a short enough time frame, as he said.
Oh God, I so hope this situation is solved by decarbonizing and not by just importing gas from somewhere else.
I love your optimism. The thing that frustrates me is that the need to improve insulation and fuel efficiency has been known since at least the 80s if not the 60s. In the 80s my parents had to rebuild their house due to structural damage. The point is for about £60k they could build a house to English specifications or import a house from Sweden to their specifications. Same price, it is just that the Swedish house almost required no heating even in the dead of winter. Thus, if we in England had taken this seriously at least all houses built since the 80s would use about 90% less energy to heat. Why do I say since the 60s? When my mother came to live in England in the 60s she was amazed that basically no houses came close to the triple glazing installed in the apartment my grandmother lived in most of her adult life (in the centre of one of the countries largest cities where the rent was about half of what it cost in a similar city in England and where the heating was included in the rent!). So, sorry if I am not blown away by people saying “let’s do this … sometime in the future”. Shoot ourselves in the foot, wait decades whilst it gets infected and then decide to do something about it just before you die of the infection. Great if you survive in the end, but don’t pat yourself on the back for your foresight! Sorry if that sounds negative, but come on ….
Being able to afford a house? You are funny!
@@engineeringvision9507 I get the joke. Sad thing is that much of the 2008/9 crash was due to politicians of all parties wanting to promote housing for all (and the financial market working out how to get rich doing this). This led to mortgages being offered to people with no income or other assets. In England, at least, people could even get over 100% mortgages so they could buy furniture and rent out their houses (yes more than one), whilst going on holiday even though they had no income and no assets other than the houses. What a shock that that ended badly (Northern Rock being the first to fail in 2007).
How much do you want to bet that some countries will just start turning on coal power plants again?
If it shuts off Russia quicker then it's the right thing to do. But only if we accelerate the move to renewables and do everything that Simon suggests here and more.
Well Germany just shut down a bunch of nuclear power plants that they could, you know, just restart.
Another excellent video, hopefully we can move away heating on fossil entirely, insulate and make it a priority for people over spending 40+ thousand on electric cars
i used to burn fossil fule now i just burn my furniture as i can't aford to pay the gas bill or the electrick bill .
next week im going to go to my mates house while hes away on holiday and steel all his wooden furniture and burn it .
i can't aford to buy food so im also going to catch his cats and cook them on my wood burning stove :)
for me the next car will be a hi ho silver [ a horse ]
this individual is feeding you something so degenerative, that it's just astonishing how ppl can even swallow it lol. He simply know nothing about gas, Putin, situation in ukraine, and anything at all. cmmn ppl, you can't be sireous
Moving from what? Spending how much on what? Lol.
I'm still on fossil fuels in all mentioned. Not because I want it that way, it's because I have to survive.
Many countries have shutdown their nuclear plants. Are they completely useless or even demolished now or could they be brought back online again?
Hi Simon, I have a video idea. Whenever I am encouraging wind power I often get people saying that wind turbines kill birds so we shouldn't use them. Maybe you could do a video breaking down these supposed negatives of wind turbines
I bet 95% of the people who say 'turbines kill birds' as argument eat meat every day, probably multiple times each day.
Those estimates about the number of birds killed by flying into wind turbines pale in comparison to the number of birds that domestic cats kill every year, and yet I don't see people advocating restricting cat guardianship to 'save the birds'.
Birds also fly into buildings and into moving vehicles of all types. It is interesting how those who oppose renewable energy suddenly find a passion for the protection of birds when they have no regard for the survival of animals in general on a polluted planet.
yep i encourage wind power to , if we fitted a wind mill to the top of the houses of pariment / congress [ depending where you live )
we could power the world on pure hot air !
@@colinvanful A VAWT (Vertical Axis Wind Turbine) installed in a chimney leading up from the houses of parliament could capture that 'hot air'.
Yeah very good points made in the video. Thankfully Germans stopped Nord Stream 2, but they are continuing to replace their nuclear power plants with natural gas. I get the point that nuclear energy is too slow, but if you already have it working you should keep it working.
it was people choice to shut it down if you go and ask them today they'll tell go and build nuclear in your community
@@NoobGamer-sc9lt To which I'd say great! Nuclear offers high-paying jobs to the local community. It also might lower housing/rent costs (which I guess could be a good or a bad thing depending on whether you are a home owner), and conveniently reduces the risk you'll be neighbours with a science illiterate.
@@merrymachiavelli2041 science illiterate!! great choice of words you trying to be politically correct? to be honest I'm a fan of nuclear since I was 13 and even after I become power engineer still like it but the numbers doesn't lie one important number that being ignored is that pricing of power which given by equation taking into account end of life of the plant but there's no handbook say to decommission a plant need $X or fuel and fuel process waste which is part of operation, I don't mind to have nuclear lab with active reactor in every university but for power generation no thank you
the germans have the freaking biggest coal mines in the western world !! and green freaking england shut the mines down ??
i burn imported coal in my fireplace because i can't buy coal from england .
@@colinvanful oh dear some smart @ss will say this is bad for the environment
Well tell that to apartment owners that won't ever upgrade anything. Most people don't have any choice of where their heating comes from and just take whatever was installed.
Building new nuclear isn't obviously going to help, but recommissioning plants that have been decommissioned could be useful.
A lot of fossil fuel reduction hopefully will come from the price increases , most houses I work in as an electrician could easily be upgraded particularly with loft insulation. I have gone 18months now without gas in my own home.
Coudn't some countries who decommissioned their Nuclear Power Plants put them back into work in less than those 10 years?
Hi Simon, have you looked into nuclear co-generation as an option for process and domestic heating applications? I'm a PhD student myself investigating further co-generation options
Until recently Russia had 60KW thermal reactors in Siberia.
I don't know the efficiency compared to PEM Electrolysis etc, but Thermochemical production of Hydrogen via Nuclear Power has been proposed/studied a bit.
(Also radiolysis with spent fuel rod cooling pools, but i don't know if that has a contamination risk).
Granted i think short of ultra-remote (Artic+Antartic, Mobile Like Ships/Subs, *Space* etc) / high energy use places (Dense Urban Areas, Captive Power Plants for Huge Industrial Hubs), i don't see much of a role for nuclear in the future, it would have been great as a Centralized Coal Plant Based Grid-era Replacement, but (Fore the most part, some exceptions exist) Decentralized Grids are the future.
Former Warsaw pact countries used waste steam for district heating. I know the Czech republic still uses their turbine exhaust steam for district heating. You can also use the waste steam to drive absorption chillers for air conditioning and refrigeration.
@@gregorymalchuk272 yes. We use waste heat from Mělník (coal) power plant for heating parts of Prague. There is even talk about similar scheme in Brno and Dukovany (nuclear) power plant.
Bro your videos are getting me through my degree, you are an absolute champ, if I ever run into you I owe you at least 142424152 beers
I get that building new nuclear reactors is not going to be fast enough to end reliance on gas, but surely there are plenty of plants that already exist and were shut down because 'nuclear bad' that could be used again for electricity soon, even if some of them require updates and maintenance.
This is a brilliant video. You've delivered what I've been asking my university lecturers about for the last few weeks 😅
While distributing it through universities prepare also explanation if replacing gas heater with electric one, the electricity comes from????? Indeed, brilliant video! 😆
@@viant3918 im still mystified how the guy in the video transforms a sudden cut-off into a wean.
sort of like how a heroin addict is weaning himself off a $500 a day habit in prison.
Firstly, THANK YOU for pointing out the differences in power generation and primary energy consumption! People need to understand that natural gas isn't only about power plants.
I am however a little sceptical about heat pumps in big housing blocks - wouldn't they be extremely loud and get inefficient quickly during winter? I realise that for single family houses, heat pumps are the perfect solution. But so many live in dense cities, where it would take years or decades to change the heating infrastructure. What about district heating? How would that work with renewables?
You aren't restricted to one type of heating system in an apartment building. If the government is subsidizing 110% anyway, just install a heat pump alongside the gas burner. Use the heat pump most of the time, and turn on the gas burner for those really cold days. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good - doing something halfway is still better than doing nothing.
I don't think noise is an issue for big housing blocks. Heat pumps aren't particular noisy. The mechanical/maintenance room is already pretty loud, and kept away from living spaces.
In hot climates heat pumps are already in big housing blocks - an A/C unit is just a heatpump.
Heat pumps are just air conditioners, which aren't a significant source of noise in housing blocks at all. They're cheap to run, quiet, and virtually the same cost as non-reversible air conditioners.
Air source heat pumps work efficiently down to -1C and can work just about down to -4C. Temperatures in England hardly ever get that low. They have back up resistive heating for the occasional super cold night. Where possible ground source is better. For a tower block a communal ground source loop would be sensible. Sharing the high cost of drilling the bore hole between all the flats. You could then either have individual heat pumps operating from the shared ground loop, or just have a big one in the basement and pump the hot water around the building.
I got slightly confused about this insulating "your house" part. How exactly would one go about "owning" one of these houses exactly?
The problem with renewables is transmission and the time to construct the transmission as the obvious locations have been used up, project timelines are getting prolonged. Nuclear can be built in 4-5 years which is comparable with big renewable projects (the speed of permeting has to be addressed tho)
Flamanville unit 3 is taking more than 4-5 years as is Hinckley point C
@@waynecartwright-js8tw those are outliers. The median time of construction of a nuclear reactor is 6.3 years.
Great video Simon! Another excellent heating technology is heat networks, which provide heat from a central source to locations, rather than individual users having their own boiler or heating pump. Because it's centralised it can provide much more efficient heating than conventional heating methods, so can both bring down operating costs for renewable projects and reduce gas consumption per KWh of heating
Heat is one of the hardest forms of energy to transport over distances. Losses on heat are usually to do with transport. As an example;
Our floor heating system from the electric pump getting heat from the ground (90 meters deep) loses about 60% of the energy transporting it.
It's much more efficient in big housing units, but as soon as it has to travel the losses are too big for it to be efficient.
Relative heat loss is dependent on your level of pipe insulation - a lot of multibuilding networks in other countries (networks are used heavily in Norway and Denmark) use an insulation standard much higher than is usually used in the UK to achieve that retention!
@@evildude951 Regardless of insulation, you'll lose a lot more energy transporting heat compared to electricity. Where it's more beneficial it should be used. But for a bulk of places (as of right now) switching to electric heating would make much more of a difference.
@@simmerke1111 The energy loss in a district heating system in a Finnish city is around 7-9%. Electric grid average loss is 3%. In many places the waste heat from electricity generation, industry, data-centers, etc. is used for the district heating. However, for now a lot of the heat still comes from fossil fuel sources just like the electricity.
yeah it's also very easy for the government to shut off heating any time, not to mention single point of failure and heat loss.
There are three German reactors decommissioned in 2021 which could be quickly recommissioned, plus new designs for molten salt reactors (among others) which use smaller modules & aren't high pressure can be built quite quickly on a production line & don't require the huge containment buildings which are major factors in the cost & build time of older reactors. Ever noticed how anti nuclear rhetoric always seems to profit fossil fuels? Correlation with or without causation? It remains to be seen, but it is hugely disappointing for you as a scientific explainer to misrepresent the issue so much. Coincidentally, the whole heat pump argument puts the onus on individuals AGAIN, like the "carbon footprint" campaign, leaving fossil fuel companies free to do business as usual. If you really wanted to stop Russian gas quickly, start producing old fashion coal gas & just convert existing appliances. Never mind about the environmental impact, at least it isn't nuclear, and the coal industry will make lots more money... You won't find that in Morning Brew...
Well this definitely went very well and there is absolutely no power catastrophes
sometimes even replacing old gas boilers for new one can do a lot. Changed from one made in 2006, for newer condensation unit with heat water on demand (made 2018), result about 30% less gas used just with that. And now, there are some that are 40+ years old still in use. Our government, gives about 25% subsidy to upgrade to newer, more effective solutions for heating, from wood burning boilers to Photovoltaic. It will not cover all costs, limited brands (mostly local, with exception of PVE) but it helps too. I think will ramp it up some now
Hi Simon thanks a lot for all the hard work in your videos keep it up
I wanna hope that someday I look back on this last month and remember it as being an time of extreme change for the better. It seems the most drastic changes come from times of great global crises.
I also hope that I look back and remember this as the final death cry of a dictator in all but name and the dawn of a better era for the Russian people, who have suffered for so long under such corrupt and cruel men.
Here's hoping. I'm desperate for calls to action and organizing to make that change happen, because waiting for the people profiting from destroying the world aren't gonna have a change of heart
The person who cause this damn thing is the USA and NATO ! And Volodimyr Zelenski is a comedian ! He think being president is just like being in the movies ! Haha...haha...
I agree that the most importat is to improve the energetic efficience. In the case of heating improving the isolation of buildings. However, this is not an easy task. It is something that needs to be done, but can't be done in a short term.
Regarding changing boilers for heat pumps to consume electricity instead of gas, it would be a good option as long as the electricity is not generated by burning gas. In addition, when producing electricity, a large part of the gas chemical energy is lost as heat. This heat is not used for heating normally. For this reason, producing electrical energy to later use it for heating does not seem the best option, unless the generation totally avoids the use of fossil fuels.
Something that we should be able to do is to be able to take advantage of the thermal energy lost in the production of electrical energy. This energy could be use for building heating, at least in the proximity of generation stations.
On the other hand, although it is true that nuclear energy is not a short-term solution, the current situation should make us think about the consequences of abandoning the use of nuclear energy.
We should reconsider the policy of closing nuclear plants in the future so that we can get rid of the use of fossil fuels as soon as possible.
Instead we should promote the construction of new nuclear power plants of the new generation. These new plants considerably reduce radioactive waste and have more advanced safety mechanisms.
Even if ALL the electricity used to power a heat pump is generated by gas, that heat pump lowers overall gas consumption, because they are 3 to 4 times more efficient than gas boilers.
The heat produced by gas power plants is already being used for district heating. But this only benefits a handful of homes, in comparison.
It is as or sometimes more efficient to run a heat pump off of natural gas burned in a power plant than it is to burn it locally, unless the weather is extremely cold with air sourced heat pumps.
Another advantage with heat pumps heating water is that they can modulate their power based on available generation at night for example or during the peak solar production periods
In Nuremberg the electrical plant uses heat generated by the plant to pump hot water through the city as "Fernwärme" (distance heating). Lots of nuremberg households use this instead of a central heating unit. The plant also has a huge, very well insulated tower full of water. When there is a lot of green energy produced in the grid the plant powers down and/or heats the watertower. This increases the efficiency of the whole grid, by storing excess energy as heat and later using it to heat the city. This is a fairly easy concept to implement and doesn't require geological features like pumped-storage hydroelectricity. But I guess it only makes sense if you already got a "Fernwärme" net in your city to take advantage of that heat reservoir.
@@Eckendenker This is exactly what it needs to be done! Congratulations! I know that is something that is done sometimes, but unfortunately I'd say that this is not the most of the times. I wish, that it was enforced in all the thermoelectric generation stations.
the question is can Europe super grid take the blow ? heating is such energy intensive process and by shifting the load from gas burner to electric heater or heat pump will surely strain the grid since it's almost double the load from the heating alone. I don't know about the data but when people turn on all of their heat pump and heater at the same time during winter, it will overwhelm the grid while the rest of the renewable is also producing less power.
Dunno about the rest of Europe, but that's never been an issue in Sweden where the wast majority of the homes are heated with electric heaters and electric stoves are the standard outside of restaurants.
it's true that shifting to heat pump might increase the load, especially during winter, but the efficiency is far better than burning efficiency, so the increase is not that much important.
+Ľuboš Rybanský yes it depends on the outdoor and indoor temperature, but even in the worst case efficiency is still incredibly higher with heat pump (1 for gas against 5-6 for heat pump)
Well in Romania more and more people are getting AC and even the cheap ones are capable of heating , the electric grid is already strained in some parts of the country in summer when everyone uses them for cooling , the grid will be upgraded but we need to teach people that electric heat pumps are better than gas powered heating . I know a lot of people here that don't use the AC(heat pump) for heating in winter even if it's cheaper because they still think gas it's cheaper :)) .
@@TheRybka30 If done correctly (and to be fair, most manufacturers already do this) Heatpumps can also be used as AC in summer
@@TheRybka30 You can easily upgrade an AC unit to a heater by adding a single valve and a little bit of piping.
Grew up in a place with decently cold winters and quite hot summers--the heat pump in the house I grew up in was an amazing thing
yeah of course, nuclear plants takes 10 years to built (maybe 5 because of burocracy) and wind energy takes 12 months.
Well, now you need to talk about x5 energy generation (could be a 3000 Mw/h nuclear plant) and it is on 90% of time
meanwhile wind is on maybe 30% of time
that is why, after 20 years of heavy expeding in renewable energy, wind is still no match to nuclear energy
We should be grateful for Putin that he is incentivizing the EU to transition away from polluting energy.
You can heat / cool your building with geothermal...drill a few meters down, install pipes to circulate water, and you get back water that is warmer / cooler than the atmosphere come winter / summer...also, solar water heaters ftw...
That is a very substantial amount of electricity that needs to be generated for heating
on the re-newables point: ( btw I 100% agree with redudcing emmsions where ever posible I am definaly not a climate deniter)
I appologise in advance for my spelling a grammar I am dislexic.
The grid can be thought of as a living thing. we need to generate the power as we need it and re newables are not very good at changing the ammount power output on demand, so can be unreliable.
Another point is that there are two types of power when you're dealing with AC, which are real and reactive power. And for current to flow you need both. And renewables are not that good at creating reactive power, so thats another disadvantage.
That being said these point can definaltly be adressed if there was more investment into related technologies like grid storage.
One important advantage also is that they usually have an efficiency of 450% for a simple system or even more (unit exchanging heat with the ground can exceed 600% even on a small scale system and 750% for bigger system serving a building). Meaning if you produce 1 kWh of energy by burning gas for heating in your home you'll only get 1kwh of heat. But if you burn 1 kWh of gas in a power plant, with efficiency usually ranging between 40 and 60% you'll get around 0.37 to 0.55 kWh of electricity delivered, accounting for grid losses. Those will translate to 1.6 - 2.4 kWh of heat in a simple system exchanging heat with outside air, or exceeding 4 kWh on more efficient system exchanging heat with the ground and serving a building instead of a single house. Thus even if it's energy from gas, you're getting much more useful heat out of it.
would rather replace gas with nuclear before more wind
Nuclear is good, but not for this war its true. But we should get more on it, as for the 2035-2040 we'll probably have reached the saturation of renewable on out grid and already started working on energy storage system to cope with the non controllable output from renewable.
By that time it's gonna be fundamental in the war against climate change serving for covering part of the base load and thus reducing the enormous amount of energy storage otherwise required by renewable only.
the more I learn about Wind energy the worst it looks. Cost a ton in material for the amount of energy it can produce, almost all of it is unrecyclable in ways that can be profitable enough to do so, take a huge amount of space, is too unreliable so you need basically as much as it can give as back up if you don't want blackout (usually done with coal or gas. Looking at you Germany) Require a huge amount of cable to gets the energy where the population actually is which result in a big lost of efficiency. Offshore costs are even worst and have the potential to destroy the marine ecosystems which we need even more than forest to clean the air. It also has less potential to improve in the long run than solar or nuclear.
All Technology Connection viewers know of the boons of the heat pump
Next video should be on how to replace cars with teleporters.
Not possible right now. At least not before a decade has gone by. Majority of European housholds heat with gas and the factories run on gas. Heat pumps and electric cars are not an option for majority of households until whole powergrids get rebuilt for huge power drains. If majority of households switch to heat pumps right now we would have huge blackouts in winter. Already we have local blackouts in summer when air conditioning use increases. Its only going to get worse. Green energy right now is only for rich people and not reachable for majority of people, especially you can forget us who live in Eastern or Southern Europe. Same regarding insulation.
Unfortunately, italian superbonus has been mostly used for installing gas heaters.
Nuclear power, induction cooktops, heat pumps, and district heating and cooling from the turbine exhaust steam.
The fact that nuclear plants take a long time to build isn’t enough of an argument against their upsides.
Carbon free power not dependent upon favorable weather or on imports from OPEC.
Start now and by next decade we can make some ACTUAL progress.
I love how it's been "too late" to build new nuclear for the past 40 years
If you want to talk about how 'not clean' it is- talk about the radon content. Not only are natural gas and coal plants 1000x more radioactive than nuclear power plants but that radon decays into radioactive lead and polonium.
He talked about nuclear not being an appropiate Tool because construction Times are Long and permissions are complicated, etc.
Nucleair reactors. Thorium.
Wind and solar won't do much.
We were hoping to get a heat pump when our boiler died recently, but even with the potential grant it was so much more expensive then another boiler and we just didn’t have money to 😔 As much as we want to do the right thing, it’s very hard to do when we’re struggling financially already. 😔 I feel a lot of people are probably in the same boat.
Same story for so much of this tech. Here in NZ the government has just dropped $0.50 tax from petrol to help those struggling. I think a much better use of their discount would be to offer low interest loans for electric/efficient vehicles-owning a gas guzzler means you already have a 'loan' to fuel companies. Banks refuse (affordable) loans to people in this situation and so I think it's the Government's job to fill this space.
‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ ~ i agree nuclear isn’t the solution on the short term but we must do this long term. But Simon we can’t fix the current crisis with wind and solar (also not with efficiëncy), i believe you are being bit to optimistic about the heating story. It is more likelly that when people need to chose people will heat with wood again. We must think long term and stop with the short term thinking because what we see today is more harm to the climate because of more fossil investments and lowering of taxes on fuel further increasing demand. Let’s stop with the this isn’t a solution now and start working together to plan for a long term solution, let’s be realistic.
at least in the US most of the gas power plants are peakers because they can spool up faster than coal or nuclear, so they run when renewables aren't producing as much power. Because of that, I think the real replacement for gas power plants is probably not more renewables, but giant battery banks or other energy storage systems. I'm also pretty sure that something like the Tesla Megapack system is now cheaper than a new natural gas peaker plant, except that the battery system is very supply-constrained. If you have the spare off-peak generation to spare or build more renewables for the lower efficiency, liquid air storage like Highview power might make more sense if only because it isn't supply-constrained at all.
I know batteries are getting cheaper but as of a year ago they were still so expensive it was actually cheaper to build a nuclear power plant than battery storage, if you work out the LCOE, ie dividing all the costs by the total electricity output. (even including decommissioning and waste).
Even if in terms of number of plants peakers are higher, because they only run a small amount of the time the actual amount of gas used is smaller. Don't worry about the peakers until all the standard gas plants are no longer needed.
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 I was thinking about peaker plants because they are the ones you tend to get more instead of less of as you add more renewables. I'll readily admit that I don't actually know all the costs though, so correction apreciated.
I have double insulation on my home (walls are 35cm tick) + double glazed windows, as many of my neighbours. We don't even have gas in our opart of city, so nobody use it. Anyway, for heating we are plugged to the city grid which recive hot steam from coal plant. Temperature is sometimes unbearable (goes to 30-35 degrees inside the home) if automatic termometar is not installed. Few of my neighbours didn't want to use that sort of heating (to expensive) so they installed heat pumps. None of them are happy. First, sometimes temperature is not what they expected to be, second their electricity bills are enormous. So if you don't have solar panels to produce at least part of your power need i don't see the advantage (power is produced in same coal plant) of installing heat pumps.
Short answer...they cannot do anything! They will do as they are told!
7:30 About the time taken for Nuclear vs Wind power projects, how would they compare if normalized for power generated ?
Perhaps not what you are looking for but Simons argument that it take a long time to construct a reactor is true that is for generation 3 reactors. Generation 4 is competitive with renewables without problems of intermittency and low energy density.
Simon, you missed an important part of the move to heat pumps, and that is the source of the electricity. More electricity will need to be generated when the weather is cold.
The important missing point, and it is a gaping hole in Germany's 'Energiewende' is international storage of energy. Solar PV generates in summer, but its output is required in winter.
Technology is available today to deal with this (eg. Electrolysis to store the energy as compressed hydrogen in salt caverns and generate from that stored hydrogen in winter using gas turbines, gas engines or fuel cells. Storelectric in the UK has an interesting patent combining this with the oxygen separated by the electrolysis)
But there is currently not a sufficient market mechanism to make it worthwhile to build, even though it is needed urgently
Germany doesn't have a problem with that since it pulls huge ammounts of power from Polish coal plants and French nuclear plants during whole year.
Can you please explain how "roof insulation, wall insulation, window insulation" is supposed to be "rolled out widely and rapidly"? You can mandate these items being included in newly built units from this point onward, but how do you expect to update every single older building in europe, and who will pay for it? I would be hard pressed if you could update every building in europe faster than you could just drill for more nat gas.
Its fantasy. He is not taking into account that every European country is already heavilly in debt cause of the whole economic crisis going on from 2008 and which has been affecting every country in a different way. Where is the money going to come from?
Very happy with the replacement of gas hot water & home heating from our home.
We replaced them with heat pumps.
We also improved our cooking with an indication stove.
Just because nuclear is slow to implement doesn't mean it should be left out of the mix. It's the best way to eventually replace natural gas completely like France did since it also provides "momentum" to the power grid and the waste is microscopic in comparison. If only NGOs stop fear-mongering it by citing the only 3 accidents in history
In Australia we had a massive home insulation program about 10 years ago. It was cancelled by the following government, because 4 deaths from electrocutions happened…. But the media in Australia never talked about the benefits from the energy saved.
I saw the thumbnail and thought this video was about gastric trouble in the stomach :D ..honestly, that would be a lot more useful to know than this - what are people supposed to do with this information you're giving in the video?
As far as I know, gas-based electricity production is helpful to satisfy peak demand. Are the alternatives capable of modulating production as fast as necessary?
Nuclear... If NGOs stop fear-mongering about it. Look at France's electricity model
@@atrumluminarium nuclear cannot fill this role, the exact opposite actually. nuclear is energy production method with the solwest ramp up/ ramp down time, making nuclear power plants the worts option in terms of feasability to replace gas peaker plants
@@atrumluminariumphysics engineer living in France, I know that nuclear shoulders a little bit of the daily variability, but not the fine-tuned, minute-to-minute variations. Nor could it. Gas plants, on the other hand do take care of the peaks in demand (it is, by the way, their main use on the French grid).
@@benjaminbrat3922 I'm guessing hydrogen would then be the best bet
@@atrumluminarium so, I guess, storage (either hydrogen, battery, inertia wheel, ... )?
Green policies always lead to fuel poverty. I have very little faith to these suggestions. The UK needs to frack its huge shale deposit and in the longer term invest in nuclear energy.
I live in Finland where temperatures go below minus 25 degrees Celcius regulary. I'v been using geothermal heatpump for a decade now. Works like a dream.
the heat pump question was debated on uk radio LBC a couple of months back, and the (right) conclusion was reached: the government needs to take decisive steps on policies encouraging infrastructure overhaul. the sooner the dallying stops the better
1:24 did this guy sneak into technology connection's house to record this?
OMG I SEE IT NOW LOL
The cheapest way is to install an Air Conditioning system able also to heat (it has a heat pump). You can use the AC during the day when outside temperatures are >0 so the heating efficiency is very high (>4). I did it and works very well. I am using gas only to heat water and for home heating during night.
Phenomenal vid! Couple things:
1. The Poteen pun had me pause the vid and laugh for a solid 30 seconds
2. Your physical fitment is showing! Might be time for a new shirt haha
We found Insuladd painted on the ceiling mixed in out paint of choice, reduced our fuel bill by a third over the year.
Not sure why wind and solar are thought to be a good way to replace electricity generation in UK as it needs to be sunny and or windy for this to work?
This is not the case all the time and so you need fossil fuelled powered backup power stations to take the slack.
Also nuclear is definitely the future as although it make take up to 10 years to get a station online, it is both clean and can generate the 10s of GW of power the UK and European countries each need.
Nuclear isn't a great way to replace electricity generation in the UK because it needs to be in the future to work, and we are unfortunately stuck here in the present.
About heat pumps; Electric power in heat pump is a bit more complex than that; if you are using gas to generate electricity at 40% efficiency, you are wasting the energy that you save with the heat pump in the electricity generation and transfer losses. If you use the gas directly for heating, you get good thermal efficiency (depending how much heat captured from exhaust). But if you generate the electricity with something else, OR if you generate the electricity in a combined electricity and heat generation plant where you also capture the heat and for example use it for district heating. In this case the electric heat pump saves energy. And of course it always saves energy over direct electric heating. Also; heat pumps don't necessarily have to be electrically powered. You can also make a gas powered heat pump, etc. 😂 So how much heat pump makes sense depends of what you use to generate the electricity!
As a Canadian, I am extremely offended that you would dare put an image of Putin together with the delicious dish of poutine.
Ok so using heat pumps instead of gas, that would boost the energy consumption , I highly doubt those countries most affected by the Russian gas have enough power on their power plants to support this change in a massive scale, and if Russian gas is used for the local power generated then is a no go option.
Actually a lot of these sound like good options at first but its collateral effects are poorly or not even mentioned in this video.
Insulate Britain was ahead of the game until the media demonised them and the government persecuted and changed the laws to jail them. Also the cost of electricity per kWh is 3 times the cost of gas per kWh and air source heat pumps are pretty rubbish, best bet is ground source heat pumps but cost of installation is extremely high, and equipment is expensive. I say build passive houses and use the sun to heat your house, and wait for big nuclear plant to supply you with hot water.
Air source heat pumps are certainly not rubbish. They are the standard even north of the Arctic Circle in Nordic countries. But insulation is very important to make them work well, at a lower temperature than most boilers.
Pausing at the beginning to say the answer should be “build more nuclear”, but I’m going to guess that I’ll be disappointed with what’s actually said.
Renewables + Nuclear is the best long term solution.
I think he even made a video about this
Good Video, and whilst agree that Heat Pumps have a positive part to play, they are 100% useless unless the property is well insulated.
Simon has the best videos. Another fine one, lad! 👍
Presumably, methane emissions would be reduced as well?
Going full nucelar on III+ gen and investing in IVth gen nuclear power.
I think you meant "removes inertia from the system". Gas let's us quickly change in response to demand
Also I hope this war puts an end to the unreasonable nuclearhopbia among some European politicians and the anti-nuclear crusade Germany and some countries have been waging.
How Europe can wean itself off Russian gas : Horse carriages. Oh, we don't have horses either.
Stay strong, Russia !
Canada supplies clean Gas & Oil (carbon catching product now from the ground to delivery (that the extremists don't seem to understand or care about) New Gen--Read , Study, learn--- Anyway, Cheers ")
The electrical grid cant support much more load and we cant get people to work in retail where are all the skilled trades coming from to do all this work?
All of your civ6 training has been paying off.
You do not mention energy storage that we need to use renewables to their maximum & also that of any new wind turbines. Rolls Royce & other firms are building mini-nuclear power units that can be mass produced & certainly do not take 10 years or even one year. My energy company Ecotriciy produces gas from grass. Try using less energy too. There is a far-far wider range of options than you present in this Post. I doubt if we can come completely off fossil fuels without Nuclear & far greater energy storage. At least in high population industrial areas in the North. Portugal for example could make it on renewables alone, not Poland or similar.
Yes nuclear takes a long time to implement - that is third generation nuclear and not fourth generation. But meanwhile Germany and Belgium should not even be considered closing down their remaining powerplants especially now.
People that live in the south part of Europe also have lot of sunny days and there are pretty cheap solar water heaters. Also maintaining gas infrastructure for heating is expensive, can leak and cause lot of pollution.
are all materials (especially rare earths) required for renewables readily available outside Russia and China?
I still see a problem how to get the electrical energy for all these heat pumps. They are needed most when we rather have a lack of renewable energy (called winter). Yes, wind can cover some part, but there are times when neither wind nor sun deliver sufficient energy. And biogas is definitely no solution; we rather need to stop all energy plant- farming activities; we are heading to a global food shortage. Therefore, I still see the challenge about energy storage.
Lp0
Great video! I like that it’s so solution-oriented and concise :)
You are true about isolation and heat pump, but i'm not so sure about renewable. Untill you don't have storage system renewables can't be the solution. And we have to say that if EU rely so much on gas it is also because of the deployment of renewable (deployment which is a good thing according to me) because gas is the better energy in co-generation with renewable, because easy to manage.
In short term I don't think we have that much solution to get out of Russian gas, except reduce our energy consumption by consuming less, decrease the indoor temperature... And in medium/long term we have the deployment of renewables but also nuclear because if we don't do it now, we won't have it in 10 years, and we will again be in the emergency.
Sobriety is the only true solution to climate crisis and fossile fuels depletion, new technologies are a useful tool but we have to be careful not to dream too much of it, we might be disappointed
@@luciendardaraurore7433 says every ostrich hat wearer. You are bringing nothing new to the table, leave
do you know how much electricity has gone up in Spain? cant do electric heating
Excellent video! I had the opportunity to see the actual IEA press conference with their 10 point plan before watching this vlog and i must say, the analysis in this video is way better than the Q&A session during the press conference. One question though on the comparison on timeline between installation & commissioning of wind vs nuclear (12 months vs 10 years roughly). How big is the output or size of the projects considered here, are they comparable? Thanks for any insight.
I think any way, decentralised grid saytems would be a better/ controllable way forwad as compared to centralised grid.
Pan-European geothermal power plants could generate enough electricity from reliable source to compensate for reduction in natural gas import.