The energy thread

[Skybird]

Not to mention the costs. Buying LNG gas in the years to come will kill us.

IF we get the ammounts we need.

And IF there are sufficient tankers needed to transport the ammounts Germany need. So far, these free tankers are not there. The Germans so far chartered 4. But would need 30-35. Tankers that for years exclusively drive just for Germany. Good luck with that.

The Greens still put ideology before interest of the people and economy. Now Habeck has accepted to keep 2 nuclear powerplants in resewrve until april next year. Then they should be shut down. The third reactopr should eb shiut down this Decembre. In the press conference h lecturd the public about that his stress test showed that ther could be "hour-wise" electricity blackouts in winter, and then the nuclear reactors should be switched on. Note: this ingenous planned econoym experts know not onlyx that there will be shortages, no, they are so brillkiant that they know that these hsxortages will last only hours amd thenm will go over again.

No word on the situation next winter, 2023. Either they plan to have all renewables in place next year this time , or they plan to do business as usual with Russia again and get their gas from them, as before. They are too smart for me.

There was a nice calculation shown yesterday. It showed that in total, if you weigh in all financial aspects: trade, aide, support, costs for energy, everything, Germany pays more than 30 times as much money still to Moscow, then it gives in support to Ukraine. The Ukrainian parliament's president was just in Berlin, showing a plan they prepared for months that gave details on financing plans and timetables and agreements by the industry for getting German tanks from industry reserves. Scholz completely and totally blocked it (again) and left no doubt that he will not allow such deliveries. The Ukrainian was poltie, but left while barely being able to hide his fuming anger.

Germany is more on side of Russia than the Ukraine, no matter what Bubbleboy Olaf the Untouchable claims in mighty phrases. He lies. Last but not least to the German people. For every german Euro that reaches Ukraine, Germany gives over 30 Euros to Russia, in many ways. Let that sink in.

[Jimbuna]

Soaring household bills look set to be subsidised by energy companies using government-backed loans.

It's thought the government plans to freeze household bills at their current level for roughly 18 months.

Small business are also expected to be offered some relief in the plan set to be announced on Thursday.

Incoming Prime Minister Liz Truss used her victory speech on Monday to pledge to "deliver on the energy crisis" - with a price freeze widely expected.

Energy bills are rocketing and the cap on prices will go up on 1 October, meaning a typical British household is set to pay £3,549 a year on gas and electricity.

Energy bosses have insisted for some time that a government-backed superfund from which they could borrow to subsidise bills "is the only game in town".

Under such a plan, the government would guarantee loans to energy companies that would be used to freeze or at least lower bills this winter and beyond. These loans would be repaid from bills over the next 10 to 20 years.

Scottish Power has said that freezing all bills at the current price cap of £1,971 for two years would cost nearly £100bn.

However, Dermot Nolan, former chief executive of energy regulator Ofgem, warned that this estimate could be "conservative", and also questioned how much it would benefit the most vulnerable.

"This kind of price freeze means that a multimillionaire will get exactly the same level of protection as everybody else," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"I hope that at the very least the £400 that is currently being given to more vulnerable people is kept, and hopefully extended," he added.

He said there were a number of questions about what a price freeze would mean in practice, including how long the support would last, and whether it would mean higher energy bills over time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62801913

[Catfish]

Producing hydrogen out of moist air, directly. Could be a game changer. University of Melbourne, Australia:
"Researchers say their prototype produces hydrogen with greater than 99% purity and works in air as dry as 4% relative humidity"
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...droidApp_Other

"The device is estimated to produce up to 93 litres of hydrogen a square metre an hour. “If you have 10 sq metres of this unit, you can power a whole house … to replace your consumption of natural gas at home for cooking and heating,” Li said."

Burning hydrogen just creates warm water vapour as exhaust, also all common fuel engines are capable of using hydrogen instead of fuel (not Diesels of course). Need another tank and a modified ignition and that's it. Better than electricity when you look at accumulated energy ballance.

Some obstacles, apart from directly using it in a house (as long as the sun shines and humidity is more than 4 percent in the air), you will have to store it. So you need a pump for compressing, and a tank.
Still, this is a great achievement!

[Skybird]

How much electrical power is needed to produce so and so much hydrogen this way? Thats where the crux is with current methods. Also, costs for transportation(money, power) must be considered in the math. Finally, the ratio between energy per volume-unit, this is quite disadvantegous with LNG which makes Germany's LNG tanker plans so insanely expensive, but I have no idea how it is with hydrogen?


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Meanwhile, Germany. Minister Habeck has bowed to the radical ideologists and said two of three nuclear reactors should remain "in reserve", but not actively producing power for the grid, until April. The third one should be switched off in Decembre. This third dne lies in a federal state where the Greens are in election campaign - the link is obvious to me.

Not only does the electricity math of the Green still make no sense, but Habeck has not understood what the difference between oil and gas powerplants and reactors is: the first you can quickly engage and disengage to stabilise fluctuations in the grid, the nuclear powerplant you can't, if you drive it up, it needs around 7 days before it can feed electricity into the grid. Which means it is completely unsuited to serve as a reserve to prevent Blackouts and sudden grid instabilties. It cannot react fast, within hours or minutes. It needs a week.



The Greens are riding the risk of economic doom just for stupid ideology, and election chances.



Ich hoffe diesen Winter wird es richtig brutal krachen.

[Skybird]

Oh dear. Trottel am Ruder - beware. FOCUS writes:
------------------



In a letter obtained by " Spiegel ", the operator of the Isar 2 nuclear power plant, the company Preussen Elektra, writes to the Ministry of Economics - and the letter has it all.

"Sending two of the three operating plants to cold reserve at the turn of the year in order to ramp them up when needed is technically not feasible and therefore unsuitable to secure the supply contribution of the plants," writes Preussen Elektra CEO Guido Knott in the letter to the ministry, according to "Spiegel." In stretch operation, "a flexible increase or throttling of the output is no longer possible." The ministry had already been informed of this on August 25.

In particular, once the plant is shut down - as Habeck says is planned - such a plan is hardly feasible. "Then, with the limited possibilities of such a reactor core, a restart in advanced stretch operation is not feasible and certainly not in the short term within a week," "Der Spiegel" quotes from the letter.

Such a procedure has never been used before, Knott cautions. "Testing a start-up procedure that has never been practiced before should not coincide with a critical condition of the power supply."

[Jimbuna]

The European Union's executive body has proposed capping the price of Russian gas, within hours of Russia's leader condemning the idea as stupidity.

Energy prices have soared in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, forcing the EU's 27 states into action.

"We must cut Russia's revenues which Putin uses to finance this atrocious war," said European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen.

But Mr Putin said Moscow would react to a cap by halting supplies completely.

"We will not supply gas, oil, coal, heating oil - we will not supply anything," he said, if it went against Russia's interests.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62817566

[Skybird]

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
------------------------------
Crisis prevention expert Herbert Saurugg (Austria) warns of a large-scale power blackout. Mistakes have been made for at least a decade, he says, calling the energy transition unrealistic.

The fear of a widespread power blackout lasting several days is widespread. According to the current trend radar of the software specialist Lexware, more than a third of the self-employed and small businesses surveyed fear that they will not receive sufficient energy in winter. Only 20 percent had an emergency plan in case gas was curtailed, but 75 percent had already started to reduce their energy consumption.

But how many companies have already dealt with a major power outage remains unknown. Although Chancellor Olaf Scholz considers such a blackout unlikely, the current report on the stress test of the German transmission system operators states: "In all three scenarios considered, the supply situation in the coming winter half-year appears extremely tense - in Europe, the load cannot be fully covered in the electricity market."

Austrian blackout expert Herbert Saurugg draws attention to this in an interview with the F.A.Z.. The former major in the Austrian Armed Forces is president of the Society for Crisis Preparedness and a regular contact in the neighboring country's media as an expert on supply security.

And he has been warning of the blackout scenario for a long time, especially since this would be associated with dangerous interruptions in the supply of food or even wastewater. He sees the current stress test on German supply security not only as confirmation of his previous assessment: unfortunately, all concerns have also been reinforced.

Basically, everyone still assumed that a critical power shortage situation should be manageable with a planned power shutdown. "From my daily work, I assume that very few actors are neither aware nor conscious of the consequences of such a planned large-scale shutdown."

Should power shutdowns possibly be required simultaneously in several countries - as is currently becoming apparent - no one knows how such a complex system would then behave and whether these measures would remain manageable. Existing safety systems were not installed for such a situation. "Therefore, there is a very real blackout threat that we should take seriously. The issue is not whether the event actually occurs, but that we are not prepared for it and the damage would be immense."

With the Ukraine war, climate change and drought, he said, unexpected stress factors have been added, and even without them, the problems would have increased significantly. Saurugg is concerned about the increasing number of last-minute changes to plans, because they cannot be implemented at this speed in reality and there is no assessment of the consequences and side effects, if this is still possible at all.

According to him, the problems were already foreseeable ten years ago. The blackout expert considers the fundamental problems to be one-sided and unsystematic economic optimization, the reduction of all fallback levels, reserves and redundancies, and an energy transition that is far disconnected from reality and does not take physics and technical conditions into account.

Here, he points to the non-existent storage and grid capacities, which are particularly necessary for wind and solar energy, which are susceptible to fluctuations. Saurugg criticizes the energy turnaround in Germany because, in his words, ideological demands have pushed technical changes here.

In his view, Germany is virtually unprepared for a major blackout in all areas. This could have catastrophic consequences, he said. "The topic of preparedness has always been ridiculed or equated with right-wing preppers," Saurugg says. As a result, the broad masses have no precautions. For the black start, i.e. until large parts of Germany can be supplied with electricity again, a period of one week is expected, according to his information.

In this context, Saurugg also criticizes the liberalization of the electricity market, as since then only business optimization has counted. "In the meantime, virtually all of the generation overcapacity that was still abundant 20 years ago has been eliminated." As a result, he said, there is hardly any buffer left to respond to unforeseen events. For Saurugg, the current upheavals in the electricity market are just a symptom of the expected shortage.


In the short to medium term, Saurugg no longer sees any chance of changing anything, because far-reaching changes would be necessary for the already very fragile state. In the short term, the escalations would have to be stopped and, at the same time, the causes would have to be addressed: a lack of reliable generation capacities, storage facilities and transmission lines.

[mapuc]

Now and then I hear or read about Solar cells and how we need to improve this product.

Now and then I hear or read about windmils and how we need to improve this product

Now and then I hear or read about solar collector and how we need to improve this product.

I can't remember hearing or reading about improving the end product in the other end of the powerline.

I know there's a race on to develop Lightbulb who use laser instead of LED-And should use 1/20 of what LED use. I know there's a race to develop new type of refrigerator and freezer who use sound(I kid you not)
( https://gizmodo.com/sound-waves-coul...erator-5624610)
Which should be a lot cheaper than todays A+++ .
And many other things in our home is waiting for a huge upgrade on how much electricity/Watt it use.

Markus

[Catfish]

@Mapuc: The new australian invention produces hydrogen by a special type of "solar cell", directly. So these are not only normal solar cells, they get the necessary energy by sunlight and directly produce hydrogen, and lots of it. They already are the power plant.

"The device is estimated to produce up to 93 litres of hydrogen a square metre an hour.“
"So if you have 10 sq metres of this unit, you can power a whole house … to replace your consumption of natural gas at home for cooking and heating"
I cannot quite imagine this is true, but ... 93 litres of hydrogen an hour per square meter! Probably only under optimal conditions (strong sunlight, moist air), but this alone is a full tank for a contemporary car.

Seeing is believing, of course.

re Nuclear plants i am all for letting the german three ones work longer, after all the environmental damage has already been done, from impact of the total energy ballance to heating up rivers, to burning 160 kgs of enriched uranium a day (that have to be dumped somewhere), to all accidents, and the risks remaining when trying to dismantle them (hint: you cannot).
The way humanity uses nuclear energy is 70 years old, using nuclear energy to power steam engines. This is ridiculous and dangerous.
But Habeck is not informed enough to decide this, imho. You cannot switch reactors on and off, they need weeks to power up properly, and likewise to cool down. Ballancing the daily electric load by a combination of pump settings, uranium rod managing and steam turbines alone is hazardous.
This kind of powerplant is still unsafe, even without external disasters like in Fukushima. Better not think of the inherent unstable and unsafe russian reactors, some new ones now being built in Hungary

So ok let the german ones run a year more and then see what has happened to energy production, and if alternative methods can then replace them AND coal plants.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by FOCUS

Energy economists like Claudia Kemfert from the DIW do not accept the argument that green energy cannot be stored.

Sinn: We will not succeed in storing the necessary seasonal weather compensation in the foreseeable future. The existing pumped-storage plants are a drop in the bucket, and they cannot be increased sufficiently. Batteries as seasonal storage systems are still tens of orders of magnitude away from the economic viability threshold. Hydrogen is the only option. However, the loop from electricity to hydrogen back to electricity wastes three quarters of the energy generated, the plants are extremely expensive, and hydrogen embrittles all materials that could be used for pipelines.

So the pipelines have to be replaced every few years. The hydrogen route and derived e-fuels are technically possible, but only at horrendous cost, robbing us of our prosperity.

Also, as I posted a week ago already after the Canada meeting, the energy-per volume unit ratio for hydrogen does not compaare to that of LNG gas. If you store H2 or transport it in tanks (tankers), you need 3 times as big volume capacities to reach the same energy

content of LNG in a given amount.

I was a fan of H2 for long time, but did not know these two details. Since then I have become sceptical. Replacing pipes for H2 every couple of years? Thats like the railway replacing its complete track grid every couple of years. Madness. Absolutely ruinous.


Quoted Kemfert - how much i dispise this so-called "expert" - claimed we have already very huge eneryg storage capacities. She was wrong, as I pointe dout alredy when I quoted that first. These reserve facilties would keep Germany runnign for 40-50 minutes only. A time period of so sun and wind however could last for a week and long, in winter, and that that happens every winter, repeatedly. You would need 200-250 times more power storage capacity than there is to get over one such dark and windstill week in winter!



Thats the kind of realism our experts and government are basing on. With so much concentrated incompetence, one's hair can only stand on end in fear.


I expect official inflation rate sin Germany exceeding 12% over the cours eof this winter, and absolutely possible and likely to climb higher next year. I also expect that the delayed wave of Corona bancrupts and now energy- and inflation-related insolvencies will dramatically, drastically wash across Germany in the coming months.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Catfish

"So if you have 10 sq metres of this unit, you can power a whole house … to replace your consumption of natural gas at home for cooking and heating"
I cannot quite imagine this is true, but ... 93 litres of hydrogen an hour per square meter! P

Its no perpetuum mobile, the moisture and air taken out of the air, are then not in the regional air anymore, obviously. Changes in micro-climate, more dryness? We know that in huie metropoles with huge and high buildings you even have city-created micro weather zones.



I do not mean to kill this new idea in its cradle, but I am sceptical regarding that there are no costs involved. These we must learn about, and only when we know it we can make an educated assessment of how useful or dangeorus this concept might be.

[Jimbuna]

Prime Minister Liz Truss has announced plans to cap average household energy bills at £2,500 a year from October.

The support will last for two years, she announces in the Commons, saying "this is the moment to be bold"

A typical household's gas and electricity bill had been due to rise from £1,971 to £3,549 in October.

Businesses are also getting a support package for six months which will provide "equivalent support"

After the six-month period, further support will be targeted at "vulnerable industries", Truss says.

The government is also lifting the ban on fracking - which involves extracting gas and oil from shale rock.

[Jimbuna]

PARIS, Sept 5 (Reuters) - France will send gas to Germany if needed while Germany stands ready to provide it with electricity, President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday, saying this showcased European solidarity in the face of the energy crisis stemming from the war in Ukraine.

European gas prices surged, share prices slid and the euro sank on Monday after Russia stopped pumping gas via a major supply route, in another warning to the 27-nation EU as it scrambled to respond to the crisis ahead of winter.

"Germany needs our gas and we need power from the rest of Europe, notably Germany," France's president told a news conference following a phone call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The necessary connections for France to deliver gas to Germany when needed would be finalised in the coming weeks, he said, adding that France, which had long been a net exporter of electricity, will need help from its neighbours because of technical problems its nuclear plants face.

Macron, however, said that he did not understand demand for a third gas link between France and Spain, rejecting calls to increase capacity with a new pipeline.

He added he was open to changing his mind on that point, should Scholz or Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez argue convincingly for it.

Ahead of a meeting on Friday of EU energy ministers, Macron said France was in favour of buying gas at a European rather than a national level and called for European Union measures to control energy prices.

He said it was necessary to act against speculation on energy prices at EU level and also said France was in favour of putting a cap on the price of pipeline Russian gas.

Macron also repeated calls for all to turn down air conditioners when it's hot and to limit heating to 19 degrees Celsius this winter.

"Everyone has to do their bit," he said.

[Jimbuna]

[Dargo]

The US will help Europe build gas reserves before winter, White House spokeswoman Karin Jean-Pierre said. According to her, "in order to further diversify sources of energy resources, the United States will closely cooperate with its allies".