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Did the solar calculation myself but found the best spot (garage facing south west) isn't very good due to trees. For my part it looks like the most effective way to get my heating costs down (no AC) is: -Replace direct electric in garage with air-air heat pump -Install another firewood stove in the house in addition to my mass heater -Go over the HRV system to get the efficiency up
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Apr 25, 2022 07:18
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I'm in Finland and the house is built 2013-14
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Apr 25, 2022 09:44
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Good ole double panes when kept in trim are really drat good though, good enough that swedish studies found it wasn't economical to replace them with triple pane ones until they wore out. I got all triple pane argon etc stuff in my house. No idea what shape it will be in in 20 years though. They don't age as well as the old windows even if they can last many decades.
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Apr 25, 2022 12:16
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Our windows dont let air in, but air can circulate in the outermost layer kinda like in the photo, it doesn't go further though. I believe the reasoning is to prevent trapping moisture since the outer layer is accessible and openable by people and not supposed to be sealed like the inner panes, so it's made with some slight leakage in mind. In the older two layer windows (think internal storm windows, you could remove the inside frame for summer if you liked) both sides would be sealed up tight which would cause condensation on the windows. So people would put jars of hydrochloric acid, or moisture absorbing materials in between the panes: 
His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 06:27
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golden bubble posted:https://twitter.com/shelbywebb/status/1523709326556385285 This is the kind of crazy poo poo that's been happening in europe too, going from dirt cheap to expensive as hell. Even though the transfers are much better and things aren't as localized. Prices jumping all over like this is simply a thing of intermittent power generation. Don't see a way around it anytime soon.
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May 10, 2022 04:21
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https://www.gtk.fi/en/current/a-bottom-up-insight-reveals-replacing-fossil-fuels-is-even-more-enormous-task-than-thought/quote:A Bottom-up Insight Reveals: Replacing Fossil Fuels is Even More Enormous Task Than Thought More in the link, but it's a bigger hurdle than thought, and looks like the idea of renewables are gonna run into real bottlenecks simply based on the sheer amount of material required to build enough of them. We're gonna have to embrace a low-energy future. One wonders how it will look.
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Jun 9, 2022 09:09
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95% to go with intermittent and unpredictable energy generation = higher energy prices on average (with times of really insanely expensive power, usually in winter, and times of really ceap power, usually in summer), and possible grid instabilities. The issue of storage is so far largely an unsolved concept. I've personally started to notice that it reminds me of fusion in that it always seems to be off in the future and will solve all our problems. Then you have a new breakthrough, but then it kinda peters out until the next breakthrough that will make this viable happens. I'll believe in it when it happens on a large enough scale to actually make renewables cheap 365. But given the link I gave earlier, which people tended to mostly argue the nuclear part, I am extremely sceptical. I feel a low energy future is what's gonna happen, for a few decades at least. I've just started to mentally accept it and thinking of ways to spend less power and have les things that have no productive value. His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 04:25
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Thus as I said, low energy future is the future I believe we will all get, regardless of what last minute tricks one might hope technology will pull out of the hat to save us (I don't think there's any tbh). Just keeping on burning fossil fuels will not help either, that will cause other problems that will likely be even worse, particularly for australia. My advice is to prepare and get used to a new standard of living. Start considering the material things you can shed from your life and do so. It'll be less of a shock when it happens, those who are already adapted mentally to living in a world with less material things will do better than those who are used to constant consuming and wasting of energy. I think streaming services and other data-intesive services will be in the cross hairs eventually, data transfer and storage consumes incredible amounts of energy. I think eventually, broadband will cost more, storage will cost more. It will not be feasible to except more and cheaper data. 10 years form now you might have to kiss ideas like 4k youtube and HD streaming good bye, as well as a host of other things.
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Jun 16, 2022 07:22
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Doom Rooster posted:The US at least (but probably a host of other countries) will let the world burn before passing and enforcing any meaningful legislation requiring significant personal energy use reduction. MAYBE if there were some absolutely massive single disaster that killed hundreds of millions globally and that were undeniably, directly attributable to climate change, but not with the slow, inexorable change that is actually happening. I'm not saying legislation will cause this or that there will be a mass voluntary reducation of material standards. I'm saying people won't have a choice, like we don't have a choice now about fuel and energy prices. Because the world will burn.
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Jun 16, 2022 12:24
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To me the outcome is all very much in doubt and I tihnk a significant reshaping of society will be forced on us. You can call it luddite dreaming if you wish, but is techno-optimist dreaming any better? At least if I am wrong, I'll be perfectly happy to be wrong. At any rate I still lived life the way I wanted to.
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Jun 16, 2022 13:10
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From a capitalist point of view, nuclear is bad. Huge investment, long time to get repayment or maybe not at all. Wind power however is good from a capitalist POV now. Smaller investment, faster repayment, particularly with higher eneryg prices. As long as there's nothing in the regulations about having to provide a measure of stable power generation (backup) and there aren't any other regulations about requiring grid stability then it's a real swell deal to invest in.
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Jun 17, 2022 10:35
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Since all the nuclear shutdowns in europe, electricity prices for consumers have risen a lot, particularly in Sweden which has done a lot of wind power expansion and nuclear shut downs since the 2000s. Just the testing output of Olkiluoto 3 kept the market quieter here in Finland and consumer prices down this spring, also thanks to lacking export cables so surplus couldnt be sent to more expensive locations. So to me, particularly after the winter of 2021-22 where people in sweden started up fuel oil boilers again due to electricity prices and record breaking prices. My lived experience tells me that wind power and it's intermittency issues (that it's owners do not have to give two fucks about) equals on average higher consumer prices and particularly in winter time, you can occasionally have really cheap power in summer, when power is not needed as much anyway. This is not a good trade off for the consumer to me. I think it would only be fair that wind power plant owners had to provide backup-power and factor in that in the price of wind power generated electricity. If your wind turbine is rated for 10 megawatts you should be held to producing that a minimum amount of the time, 80% perhaps. If you cannot fulfill this you will have to buy power elsewhere and factor that cost into the power sold from your power plants. I dunno just spitballing, I jusy think there needs to be some economic incentives so that wind power producers have to cover their own externalities, namely that of grid & price instability. This should incentivize them to finally start doing something about that storage they always keep talking about but never end up doing, it's like they expect someone else to build that for them while they just rake in the cash.
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Jun 20, 2022 09:12
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Yeah I got a letter too that I got another 30% increase on my power so I now pay 10 cents / kWh + transfer fees. loving Olkiluoto get online we need you.
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Jun 21, 2022 18:35
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I thought this was interesting, a spin-off of fusion technology might make geothermal a lot more viable: https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-millimeter-wave-drill/ Basically that laser tech they've used to start fusion reactions can be repurposed as a hella good drill that also won't need to shove down pipe for support, since it glasses the surrounding and the hole supports itself. The articles have got that typical breakthrough that won't lead anywhere feel though. But the concept sounds pretty down to earth. Here's hoping, we need something else.
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Jun 23, 2022 13:40
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Electricity prices in northern europe have generally become a lot more expensive since closing down reliable nuclear which produced the cheapest power historically, and shifting in intermittent solar and wind instead, with fossil fuel backups. I don't really buy that solar and wind are cheaper, at least not for the consumer. For the producer... I guess if they don't need to do anything to address their energy sources intermittency problem then yes it's a pretty sweet deal to be an owner of wind or solar, particularly if the intermitency issues means on average higher costs for consumers as they historically have here, win-win for them.
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Jul 2, 2022 19:18
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CommieGIR posted:Thus isnt really true though. Its expensive in a market where fossil and renewables are heavily subsidized. And for the consumer intermittent supply = higher prices on average. We have record breaking prices now and I literally read today that prices won't normalize until OL3 is online. Until then we can only hope for a mild winter.
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Jul 3, 2022 15:20
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Wibla posted:IIRC they did, yeah. Seems like the germans can't stop loving over europe nomatter what they do...
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Jul 7, 2022 10:34
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I'm starting to think we should kinda cut the cables to the German grid and let them handle their own poo poo
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Jul 9, 2022 09:36
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Potato Salad posted:It's also pretty hilarious to watch people cite "Germany is over half renewables!" with (1) the obvious gaping hole that is the rest of the (growing) fossil share and (2) the slice of German "renewables" that involves importing entire forests from Africa and Southeast Asia at horrifying rates to burn as sacrifice to the German Green Party's false gods of "sustainability" and "stewardship." Also loving over it's neighboring countries by becoming an electric black hole and creating record prices for other people. So german decisions are loving over not just themselves. Which is why this has soured me on the whole notion of a european grid with lots of transfers. Insane vulnerability to what others are doing as well as possible grid damage, not to mention the environmental issues with building all that infrastructure (just general waste of resources) and losses incurred transferring power that far. Way better to decentralize, be nominally self-sufficient and just do load balancing with your neighbors instead of trying to power entire countries with power generated really far away.
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Jul 10, 2022 07:04
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ShadowHawk posted:The distance between most of France and most of Germany is approximately that of the state of California, which manages to get by with a unified grid, power generation very far from humans, and only ~5% transmission losses. Long distance high voltage transmission lines are just not that big of a loss compared with the other stuff. The long term plan for europe is an integrated grid over the whole EU, the idea is that the wind must blow somewhere, so wherever it blows, there should be enough wind mills and enough transfer lines to transfer power all across europe (to whoever pays the most). It's an insane plan IMO but is what they have seen as the partial solution to intermittance issues (it's not though). And it puts consumers in a bind since we will suffer for the actions of other member countries like Germany. We're currently living through that just now and with further grid integratrion this will only grow worse. Except for Germany who will get more access to power from abroad to make up for their own failures, they get lower prices while the rest of EU consumers gets higher prices. It's funny, it's like the euro, it's undervalued for germany while overvalued for everyone else, so again Germany reaps the profits while others gets to loose. It's like further integration always serves the center more than it does the periphery...
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Jul 10, 2022 10:22
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ShadowHawk posted:Alternatively, you could conceptualize this as Germany being a giant reliable export market for all the countries willing to actually build power plant capacity, including nuclear capacity. Germany's policy combined with a unified grid is basically nuclear NIMBYism, meaning whoever is willing to build still gets all the jobs and export income. Well the problem I see with that is we're having a doozy of a time getting nuclear online for just our own purposes, and the swedes are doing even worse on that front, doing a mini-germany. So I don't see it as plausible that enough generation will come online in time to prevent decade(s) of high energy bills for consumers. For producers it would be pretty darn nice though, it's just those pesky consumers who get the shaft as usual.
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Jul 11, 2022 15:15
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VideoGameVet posted:Yeah, if the plasma drilling thing works out you could convert existing coal/gas thermal (steam) plants to geothermal right on the site. It would be a good solution for millennia. This is why I don't think ITER or any such projects will ever be a bad investment even if they lead to utter failure.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:29
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I read a few weeks ago that due to drought, Hoover dam was no longer producing any power, the water levels were too low.
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Jul 19, 2022 19:18
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When it comes to the economics of energy production, I think you need to consider, for whom is it economical? The producer or the consumer? Wind in particular here in europe is cheap now to build and install and with the power crisis stemming from german choices and now the war in ukraine, it's really economical in terms of getting a fast return on investment. It's not so economical fore the consumers however because of intermittancy issues leading to lack of energy and thus record high electricity prices on average, while it can also have real lows. Until the fantasy tech of cheap large capacity storage is ready that's how it will be. Nuclear is the opposite, it's a lot less attractive for investors because it's a lot of money that will take a long time to yield returns, but it produces cheap power and reliably so, lowering the price on the market. This is good for the consumer, but bad for the producer. OL3s test output and promise of generation lowered market prices noticeably in finland this spring, and when it was delayed to december, prices raised another 30% and experts say that's how it will be until OL3 comes online. Historically in Sweden when they had all their reactors online they had an extremely environmentally friendly energy production in the form of nuclear and hydro, during this era they had some really cheap electricity, almost too cheap to meter one might say. Since then they have spent a lot of time moving away from this model, also deregulating heavily in the 90s, now they reap the rewards and the government did stuff like hand out emergency money last winter to help people pay their heating bills. I suppose one might also consider what's "economical" for the planet? I remember reading studies recently that wind and solar require more resources per kWh produced than nuclear, so producing power via wind and solar will require more raw materials than nuclear power. It's clear to me a huge part of tghe probvlems we face are because of trhe private sectors involvement in energy production and the marketization of electricity which skews incentives towards more expensive electricity. The free market producing lower prices is of course a fairy tale.
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Jul 22, 2022 08:41
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Who is this armory b lovins dude, some anti nuke chuds keep referring to his brilliant study which apparently claims nuclear has 1/3rd the CO2 footprint of coal.
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Jul 26, 2022 18:37
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I do think an SMR just cannot be as efficient as a large reactor can be though. I've seen that being used now by anti nuke people. SMR's will cause 30% more NOOOKULAR WASTE ASDFGLDAS! They exaggerate the reality of the situation is my guess and even a less effective SMR is still more effective than anything else in generating energy with a small CO2 footprint and nuclear was just isn't a problem.
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Aug 5, 2022 07:11
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Lets deny the german government electricity I say.
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Aug 17, 2022 07:16
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Owling Howl posted:You can have 100+m diameter rock pistons anywhere though so Something tells me this will be atocious in terms of resources (concrete, steel, etc) to kWh.
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Aug 21, 2022 12:19
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karthun posted:I've always been skeptical of the hydrogen economy after it was pushed HARD by the Bush administration. The promise was always electrolysis but the goal was steam reformation of methane and that CCS will be 10 years away. It's now been over 20 years and CCS is still 10 years away. And I don't trust you that electrolysis will be more efficient than steam reformation. Much like grid storage for renewables is just around the corner any day now seriously, just look at this pop sci article about some new breakthrough that will revolutionize this for sure this time.
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Aug 21, 2022 17:51
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Is there a chance the French are just knocking over a lot of maintenance pre-winter ready to run them bad boys flat out and at great profit? Covid lockdowns made them postpone a lot of maintenance, now it's all catching up, plus they found extra issues in their aging plants that also needs fixing.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:27
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Does anyone have any good and reliable studies on the problems of large scale energy storage, what kind of resources it'll require and if it's feasible or not.
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Aug 25, 2022 09:01
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I did find this which has some numbers: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-analysing-feasibility-grid-scale-options/
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Aug 25, 2022 15:04
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If it grows locally and harvested in quantities that are sustainable sure. Something tells me that since it's the germans, they'l probably import it from abroad in quantities that are anything but and probably fell some old growth forests while they're at it.
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Aug 27, 2022 05:40
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It was my cynical take at how it's likely to pan out if firewood demand in Germany spikes from this energy disaster and they suddenly feel this need to pull in firewood from all over the world. As a firewood user in Finland I sure hope the germans don't take to firewood and instead do sometihng else, burn gas, live in darkness, whatever. Because whenever the german does something, he ruins it for someone else near him.
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Aug 29, 2022 09:13
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Well the Energiewende for one. And the whole austerity thing.
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Aug 29, 2022 10:59
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I visited my parents today and they said they're prepared for a few years now They recommended me to buy firewood now because soon those germans are probably gonna hoover it all up across europe. Just personal observation but people in real life and online are quite often complaining about the germans now.
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Aug 29, 2022 17:27
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mastershakeman posted:If this is actually your parents they need to get that stuff stacked instead of just a giant pile It's not the best I know. But the wood was already dry when it got tossed in. The worst thing about piles is that you tend to have a core of old wood that never gets used up as it keeps getting filled over. edit, here's my firewood storage, this was from my own trees, mostly pine and fir:  On wednesay I bought another two cubic meters of primo birch firewood just in case, currently building some improvised firewood storage to get it up and off the ground so it'll keep. 1m3 of birch firewood here is 50€ right now, used to be 40€.   His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Sep 2, 2022 |
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Sep 2, 2022 04:29
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A random comment I read elsewhere on the topic of renewables and storage feasbility.quote:In today's situation, it is not completely useless to have battery storage to parry rapid swings.
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Sep 4, 2022 12:56
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Now we're cooking with radiation. Finlands energy supply was 51.5% nuclear last night as Olkiluoto 3 revs into higher gear and produced 1200MW of power for a while, down to 800-ish again now but will ramp to 1200 today again and then in a couple of weeks it'll go for 1600MW Kärnkraft nuclear light green is wind blue hydro yellow stuff like peat, pellets etc dark green unspecified
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Sep 9, 2022 06:48
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Easy to assemble, if you got any problems just call. 
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Sep 9, 2022 07:57
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