Are cities in Europe cold and dark due to lack of Russian gas?

Factual Questions
61

Most Victorian homes aren’t listed - it’s very common to live in a late Victorian house (mine was built in 1880), and there’s nothing architecturally special that needs listing in it. I do live in a ‘Conservation area’ which carries some restrictions on what I can do to the outside - I’d have trouble getting a dormer window put in the roof, for example, as it would change the roofline of the area, but otherwise I’m pretty free to do what I want.

Also, listed houses come in different grades - Grade 1 listing is the most restrictive, and I wouldn’t dream of buying such as a house as getting any kind of changes even to the interior are a headache. Grade II is much more common and generally affects only the exterior of the house. It prevents owners replacing all the windows with something aesthetically unsuitable such as uPVC, for example. Basically, if you want to change the appearance of your house, you’d be well advised to NOT buy a listed property. I think these property renovation programmes are full of people who buy these houses thinking they can change them and moan about restrictions afterwards.

Back to the heat question - my house does get a bit cold when the heating is off, but adding insulation would be very costly and disruptive, so I have bi-fold doors between the living room, dining room and kitchen areas so I can zone things off (these would originally have been solid walls, but hey, who doesn’t want to be open plan these days?). I also have a climate-destroying wood burner that keeps my living room cozy.

My monthly bills are also double what they were a year ago - from £80 per month to about £170 (dual fuel). That’s for a 3 bedroom house. From speaking to my friend in Amsterdam, it sounds like they’ve had the same kind of rise.

62

My mother lived in a 17c almshouse in a Cotswold town. Her heating bills were pretty low because the stone walls were at least 18" thick and there were only four windows, all facing South.

The house was one in a row of three which had originally been six. Each “house” consisted of two rooms, one above the other and connected by a ladder. They were built in 1680 by a charity whose patron was a local landowner, and were intended for “destitute widows”.

In the 70s they were all empty because no one wanted to live there. The charity rules were amended with some difficulty to allow widowers and enough funding was raised to achieve a sympathetic alteration to join two together to add a separate kitchen and a bathroom, together with a proper flight of stairs. The charity has a decent maintenance budget and keeps on top of any work that needs doing.

They can’t be sold, but I suspect that should one ever come on the market it would be worth £1m plus, just for the history and the location.

63

From my understanding and I encourage you to fact check me thoroughly. I believe about half of our “canadian” pellet production is for US or UK market and is over 60% actually “new forest”(and old growth which is supposed to be illegal to cut) and not from those so called renewable forests we are bragging about up here a lot. (which are mostly monoculture tree farms really not so much a renewable forest like they claim, from what I read its kinda half way in between both, plausible deniability?).

It seems like every other “green” mission is actually another Burns Omni Net ™. Always some sleazy person behind the controls of course. (on edit I had no idea how to do the Trademark thing I’ve seen a bunch of you doing and just did it by accident. that is awesome).

64

Well, Hell.

65

Yes, I recall a TV expose on one of the Canadian networks a year ago or so (Marketplace? Fifth Estate?) which essentially decried the same thing - “green” energy production in UK being fed by environmentally destructive logging in Canada. There just isn’t enough byproduct to feed the demand, so it’s new timber.

66

This didn’t get enough attention in the rest of the UK thanks to Brexit. But wood pellets basically brought down the NI government.

67

Using new timber for such things isn’t necessarily bad since you can use fast-growing species that are poor for timber and that can theoretically be grown on more marginal land. I’m not saying that’s what they did, or that after all the harvesting and processing it isn’t still a net energy loss, but new growth wood isn’t automatically a problem. Using old growth wood to make pellets is ridiculous though.

68

That would be the Drax group. The UK built some huge power stations in the 1970s that were coal fired. The Selby site had the capacity of 4GW, which is huge. These have now been migrated to burning biomass - boat loads of woodchips from the US and Canada.

The company is very proud of its achievements and trumpets its sustainable power generation credentials. They also invest in carbon capture technology and creating Hydrogen for a carbon free future. It fits into a UK government energy strategy that sees the development of such technologies as a new industry that should be encouraged.

This is the power generation industry attempting to a make best use of its sunk assets by pivoting their investments to be consistent with a political decision to migrate towards zero carbon power generation. A similar process is going on with the Gas industry, which is desperate to replace its fuel with Hydrogen and keep hold of its extensive pipe network. They are keen to be seen as the solution to the net zero target that is now a wide political consensus.

The case they make depends on the fairly recent development in the accounting world that is nothing if not contentious. Environmentalists point out that carbon accounting makes some dubious assumptions and leaves out some significant sources of carbon released into the environment in the process between cutting the forests and the electricity being generated. There are also some serious questions about environmental cost of forest plantation mono-cultures and the pollution from international shipping and its fondness for burning bunker fuel.

This is the greenwashing debate.

The auto industry in Europe did a similar thing by persuading politicians that diesel engines were the key to a low carbon future. They got away with it for a while and won tax concessions for their cars until the VW Diesel-gate scandal exposed the rigged tests.

All these old established businesses have tried to develop strategies for mitigating the threats to their business. In fairness, all the new power generation technologies for zero carbon are yet to become available at grid scale. There is no big battery to even out the intermittency of renewables, so we need to constantly generate power according to demand. There are no grid scale electrolysers to generated hydrogen from surplus windpower and hydrogen is troublesome to handle using the existing gas pipe network. Renewables generate energy in places that are not near big population centres. Moving the energy generated it is a problem.

Nuclear power has its own issues with the technology at scale. It cannot be separated by the importance of maintaining nuclear skills that are transferable to national security, especially in the UK and France. That is maybe why it is so expensive.

It is not easy to develop a national energy strategy when you don’t know what technology will become viable in the future or suddenly a major supplier decides to go to war.

I am not sure if any country has got a sound energy strategy. They are all, to some extent, hostage to their own geography and history.

They only credible part of the UK strategy seems to be to pursue wind power. As Boris Johnson said he want the UK to become the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of wind power. At least it would be credible if his own party could be persuaded to cease objecting to land based wind farms because they spoil the view. Putin’s energy crisis may yet change a few minds on that policy.

69

Is this their Twitter account?

https://twitter.com/draxlndustries

70

Nope!

71

I guess you could argue that a company that draws attention to itself by sharing its name with an actual Bond villain probably doesn’t have a sinister agenda to wipe out humanity and replace us with a master race. But maybe it’s a double bluff.

72

The truth is a lot less entertaining. It is just the old ‘smoke stack’ industries trying to pivot their business and adopt technologies that purport to be ‘net zero’.

Drax are clearly quite have a PR department that have embraced greenwashing. Environmentalists say it is all smoke and mirrors and dodgy accounting.

Nontheless, this wood chip burning business is no small undertaking, generating an appreciable percentage of the UK electricity demand. They will no doubt try to sell this solution around the world to countries wanting to migrate away from burning coal in power plants.

Well, at least it is less damaging than coal. Gas burns much cleaner and was going to be the transition fuel….but that plan has come seriously unstuck by Putin’s escapade.

We are going through a very interesting period when the developed economies are trying to find grid scale solutions for power generation that do not melt the glaciers.

There are not a lot of viable options and all involve huge capital investment.

The UK responded to the 1970s Oil crisis with the ‘Dash for Gas’ developing the North Sea Oil and Gas fields. France built a fleet of nuclear power stations. Germany dug up brown coal and later embraced the Soviet/Russian gas network.

We are now going through another energy transition toward renewables to mitigate the climate crisis. There are some promising technologies like wind farms and high capacity power cables, but there is a huge push back from established players who are trying to maintain their position. The old coal burners with wood chips, gas burners with unproven carbon capture tech and various kinds of hydrogen production. Then the nuclear power industry who are low carbon when built but hide huge costs and a dangerous legacy of waste.

At the same time there is the Russian gas crisis to deal with. The fact that the lights have not gone off this winter and we can still keep warm in Europe has been a remarkable success. Though it comes at a significant financial cost.

Long term strategic energy planning is not easy. They involve huge capital commitments and projects that take decades. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Germany embraced Russian gas - big mistake. The US and Canada invested fracking and shale gas production which was barely economic and this has turned into a big win. For now.

One lesson is quite clear, developing your own home grown energy source is an insurance policy and renewables are a way to achieve that without destroying the environment.

Putin’s crisis has underlined the economic threat of dependency. Trade can bind nations together by tying their economies, but depending on one supplier for a key resource is a significant risk.

One day we will use less energy and get it from micro grids and store it. Large amounts will come from supergrids linking solar, tidal and wind farm resources in an energy trading network.

I can dream…

73

Are the solar cells charging batteries in the building, or just supplying current to the city’s electrical grid?

74

Well, I don’t have solar cells at home (which is a rented apartment anyway) so I don’t have much insight into that tech, but I think there are different models, depending on how old the solar panels are and how much space they cover. For instance, a friend of mine has some solar panels on the roof of his house that was built in 2005 that originally only supplied the heating of hot household water (maybe that has changed and extended since 2005, I’d have to ask him). Then there are installations that provide general electricity for use in the house and feed current to the public grid if it produces more than what is consumed at that house. I don’t know about batteries in homes to store solar power and I suspect that they would be to unwieldy and expensive to be economical, but maybe they exist.

75

Solar cells in 2005 were not very efficient compared to today’s. But those are getting close to 20 years old, so they probably need to be replaced soon.

They do exist, see Tesla Powerwall for an example. Yes they are expensive, but lots of people are buying them anyway. Especially in places that have had recent lengthy power outages, e.g. California and Texas. Some rich people who have large houses have two or more.

76

Some people want to build a house somewhere without existing connections to the power grid and find that the utility company will charge tens of thousands to run power lines to them. So installing solar panels with a battery pack like the Tesla Powerwall might make sense.

77

It’s worse than that. Drax the Bond villain was named after this place.

78

Nitpick: Although in Moonraker “Hugo Drax” was actually the villain’s good-guy cover story name, pretending to be a native English self-made industrialist and philanthropist. His true villainous identity was the German aristocrat Graf Hugo von der Drache.

79

And of course ultimately the power station is rather mundanely named after the nearby village, which dates back at least to the norman conquest.

80

If people could be persuaded to switch off appliances at times of peak electricity demand, this can add up to a big saving. Maybe a power station or two would not be burning gas.

The retail energy company Octopus has a scheme for its customers with smart meters. You agree to switch off your electric appliances for a specified hour on a date of predicted to be high demand. You win points and these go towards reducing your monthly electricity bill. There are only a handful of such energy saving sessions at the moment. Mainly during these cold, dark winter months.

This sounds like an interesting exercise and I am going to give it a try. Voluntary schemes for moderating consumption like this, enabled by smart meters seems like a step forward. It helps promote an understanding of exactly what devices use the most electricity. It is not easy to track everything down.

So yes, some people will be sitting in the dark for an hour or running on batteries of their portable devices. Central heating is most commonly provided by thf natural gas network and it is not included. I guess that will come later.

Energy awareness is no bad thing for those who depend on the grid. I daresay off-grid households are much more aware of where the watts go.