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Notes -
While this sentiment is probably unpopular in the green space these days, over the past year or two I've realized that actually fielding scaled renewable systems anywhere roughly north of the Mason-Dixon line requires something like two orders of magnitude more battery capacity than even "battery-backed renewable" systems design for these days. Expected grid usage needs to go up. Way up.
To fully switch from fossil fuels, we presumably need to switch heating over from largely combustion furnaces to heat pumps: heating a home in northern Europe in winter takes far more energy than cooling one in a warmer climate. Electric transportation adds to grid usage. Including these, total demand is almost certainly highest when solar is least useful. A few net-zero days in summer is cute, but doesn't really provide a viable path to storing summer sunlight for winter, and without that investments in solar would be better placed in nuclear.
Question(I am a licensed HVAC tech and am well aware of the shortfalls of heat pumps)-
Are heat pumps enough for Northern Europe and Germany in the winter(heat pumps can’t keep up very well below 25 degrees F, and better insulation doesn’t extend that well) and can Europe afford to buy them(that is, install an AC unit in every house/apartment)?
Use of heat pumps in, say, Spain or France where it doesn’t stay frozen all winter probably makes sense. But my understanding is that Germany and Northern Europe are significantly colder.
My understanding based largely on this video is that state of the art heat pumps manage to perform such that even in places like Chicago using them to heat with energy from a natural gas power plant uses less fuel even including transmission and generation losses than a domestic furnace when the temperature is above -15C (5F). I'm not quite sure how cold any given place in Northern Europe gets, but Chicago isn't exactly known for being warm in the winter.
I'd like to see what the cost premium for "state of the art". Skimming the web I see that there are heat pumps that start to struggle below 40F, some 25, some 15, and I'm sure nobody's deliberately buying the crummy models to spite their electric bill, so there must be some kind of tradeoffs.
I had a house with a heat pump, and it worked fabulously through 95% of each of our mild winters ... right up until the temperature was freezing enough, at which point our options were "turn off the heat" or "auxilliary heat" ... which the manual said works via resistance heating, but my bills suggested that Aux Heat simply sets dollar bills on fire until the house is warm. More seriously, it looks like you can get around the problem with a lower-temperature refrigerant and a freeze-proofed outdoor unit, but is that a few hundred extra dollars per house or a few thousand or what?
It's one of those things where there are both generations and quality tiers. A Mitsubishi hyperheat that supposedly works down to -17F will cost 5x as much as a Midea which performs as well as the last (-5F) gen of Mitsubishis.
I'm keeping my wood stove for when it gets down to the teens, but I'm lucky to live in a mild climate where that's as low as it gets.
Don't know why anyone who has gas as an option in places that get below 0F would want one, unless it's mostly for summer AC and they have a long shoulder season.
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Is there any kind of portable fossil-fuel heater you roll out for emergencies?
Massachusetts is giving incentives to install heat pumps as part of the HVAC unit when it is time for replacement. It has been going on for a few years so there has to be some data on how it works.
Portable indoor combustion is surprisingly dangerous for emergencies; IIRC when I've looked into cold-wave death totals it's turned out that maybe 1 person froze to death and 100 people asphyxiated themselves from inadequately ventilated CO while keeping warm. Plus, although 95% sounded like hyperbole it was if anything an underestimate; burning dollars one or maybe two days every year or two was cheaper than buying a backup system would have been.
Not my problem any more; I'm now living with gas for heat (which is fine) as a marginal decision on top of getting a house with gas for cooking (which is fantastic).
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If you believe that you've never been in a cold place "heated" by an air source heat pump. The problem isn't just efficiency, it's efficacy. Burning stuff provides just as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm. A heat pump can't move nearly as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm.
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It used to get pretty cold even in Southern Finland. Then global warming happened and now we’re lucky to get a solid snow cover that lasts even some weeks. The highest electricity demand (natural gas is practically never used for heating / power here) is in late december / early january while the coldest weather is more likely to hit only after that, so heat pumps would generally work well enough.
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It doesn't actually get very cold where most people live. I live in Stockholm and it rarely gets below 25f for extended periods.
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