Its estimated that a PV panel is co2 neutral aver 2 years.
And the great thing is: this is only if the panel was produced with fossil fuels. So due to increase in green energy everywere, this number goes down too and a PV can easily be used for 15 years and after. After that it might just be more economicly to reinvest in a new set of PV panels while the old ones can be sold and used somewere else.
About 1/10 or so of the output of the panel, e.g. 1 barrel of input energy making and transporting panels saves 10 barrels in fossil fuel energy. That's a rough number assuming a particular mix of oil based energy and no energy cost to procuring the fossil fuels used in the comparison.
Long time ago when Siemens in Germany was still building nuclear power plants, I was working in the nuclear power plant engineering department. After the year 2022 when the Russia invaded Ukraine, the gas shortages and the following costs hikes renewed my interest energy sector. Why didn't German reverse it's anti-nuclear stance, even with war in Europe?
Was is the general lack of knowledge of physical, technological and economical aspects of energy, both in German population and decision makers?
The political aspect became clearer after reading "Akte Atomausstieg" by Daniel Gräber.
I think solar and wind are interesting technologies, (solar almost magical - turning photons of light inside thin layer of doped silicon into electrons) but by itself insufficient to power modern world. They are intermittent, weather dependent and low density. Yes the sun and wind come free from Sun, the machines that convert the energy, store it and distribute it are not. Minerals have to be mined, machines build, transported, installed and then disposed off.
Recommended reading:
"Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air" by Sir David John Cameron MacKay
There are still big hydrocarbon reserves, gas/oil for atleast 100 years, coal 200 years, at current consumption rates. I fear that, if we don't use the only carbon free high density energy source and cling our hopes to the mirage of renewables, we will transform our atmosphere to hell.
When even the oil and gas giants advertise for renewables, you know that renewables will never replace fossil fuels.
The real question is "why are nukemen so desperately against renewables (and therefore by default in favor of fossil fuels)?" The all-nuclear future had its moment in the sun in the 70s and has been comprehensively lapped. Only France came close.
> the machines that convert the energy, store it and distribute it are not. Minerals have to be mined, machines build, transported, installed and then disposed off
This is of course also a valid argument against nuclear power.
I dislike ‘energy religion’. Nuclear is necessary for Europe. We simply can’t heat our homes and power our industry with renewables in winter. At the same time wind and pv can be built up faster and is simply cheap. Hydro where topography and local bio conditions allow it. We need all those technologies, so we can move away from fossil (climate, resilience and depletion).
On your map, let's say the source is valid, UK has $0.4.
I'm from CZ, we have $0.35.
UK has more than double median salary, DOUBLE. Which means that in some cities it will be actually more like 2x or 3x smaller. But price of electricity is more or less same in the whole country here.
Don't tell me something about expensive electricity and saving money. Because on top of that, let's check affordable housing stats
EU is loosing in energy competition. Energy prices are higher then in US, much higher than in China. It's highly dependent on fossil energy imports, it's the single biggest import item.
But that's the whole point: make prices as high as possible politically to make transition faster. It will have to be done in any case. When it happens now is a lot better situation than 2022 one because back then, political threshold was quite low: it was possible to just surrender to Putin to "fix" things. Now, there's no one to surrender to, it can't work anymore, or not at the time scale necessary. So possible price level became a lot higher -> transition a lot faster.
As for imports/exports: EU is a major net exporter and has always been, but it doesn't really help (or harm) things much.
By making energy prices high you are sabotaging European industry and economy in the international competition. High energy costs make EU net importer as can be seen here:
By "transition", you mean transition to renewables? It's quite possible that by increasing share of solar and wind renewables (there is not much potential for hydropower expansion if Europe) we just:
1. don't decrease electricity price in the long term. Backup power plants, big expansion of grids to transport renewable electricity over long distances are quite expensive (remember the $400bn price tag for Desertec). To encourage decarbonisation we need much, much cheaper electricity cost - we are competing with cheap Chinese coal.
2. become even more dependent on China. 95% of PV is produced in China. China is strongly pushing for export of Chinese wind turbines. Politically, I don't see much differences between governments in Russia and China.
3. don't decrease consumption of fossil fuels. Renewables need reliable backup, that's mostly provided by fossil fuels. Uncompetive energy prices will cause European industry to move to other regions and Europe will become a mix of agricultural and service economy. That's already happening now:
Decarbonisation is world wide problem and has to be solved world wide. For example if country A, B, C each decrease CO2 emissions by 2 millions tons of CO2 and country D increases CO2 emissions by 6 millions tons nothing is gained for the atmosphere (or maybe the voters in countries A,B,C will feel better, because they personally are doing something).
You have to invert the priorities. Lots of wind, then useful amounts of storage and backup energy (probably domestic coal in Germany) and little bit solar.
In Europe most gas consumption is in winter, when PV does not produce much. (The sun is not shining much, that's the reason why outside temperature are low...).
Europe will burn gas in winter for a long time, but it can stop burning gas in summer.
Solar is cheaper than wind. For the energy transition, it doesn’t matter who makes the panels. I mean I agree that keeping the know how in Europe is important. But it’s not like they suddenly stop working (unless they get hacked, I guess.)
Some German politician speak about past errors, but they don't intend to correct them. There is still a very vocal opposition to nuclear energy. Because Germany can always fall back on coal, it's politically easier and cheaper to not change anything related to nuclear power.
Considering the article is talking about the UK, which recently axed a significant portion of its new high-speed railway corridor: don't count on it.
Even worse: railway electrification is not at all a given in the UK. A big downside of being the first country to roll out railways is that a huge number of railway lines (crucially, including tunnels and overpasses) were built to the dimensions of early trains. In practice this means that electrification isn't just adding some wires, it means having to re-dig all of the tunnels and having to raise all of the overpasses. To illustrate, the UKs universal loading gauge is small enough that you can't even fit regular intermodal container trains into it - and that's without overhead wiring!
There'll be no new third rail electrification, though (apart from some minor infill, or reorganisation around depots).
The conversion of remaining mainlines to 25 kV overhead AC is going slower than anyone wants, but already over 70% of passenger rail journeys use electric traction (and actually more like 80% by passenger kilometers).
There are an awful lot of low-traffic rural lines that it won't be economic to electrify using current technology, so we'll need to rely on battery electric for those.
Either way, it's largely orthogonal to the problem of electrifying road transport.
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.
> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.
Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.
Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.
For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient. This process is accounting for 1–2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions, and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption.
Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Heating storage (also cold storage) in industrial applications is possible and is done, but in many cases you are limited by allowed temperature range of chemical/physical processes. For example you are limited on the lower side by melting temperature of material and on higher side by high temperature corrosion.
In cement industries models have been developed to flatten the grid's hourly demand curve by minimizing the industrial customer's hourly peak loads and maximizing the shifting of demand to off-peak periods.
> For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient.
I should note that this process doesn't require external heat input (except at startup). The reaction is exothermic and the excess heat is used to make steam that either is used to make power or to provide steam to other processes. It does require pressurization, but that's an input of work, not heat.
It would be nice if the process could be run at lower temperature, but we just don't have the catalysts for that.
> Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.
Electric resistance heat is very storable and can provide heat 24/7, possibly even 24/7/365 at high latitude with PV.
You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.
Germany has switched from one gas supplier to different gas suppliers.
The past Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck famously once sad:
“Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem – at least not generally throughout the country.”
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/18/chinas-cheap-electric...
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