If we want to get rid of the volatility of the gas market, we need an energy policy that makes gas unnessesary, both for electricity and heat - heat: For low density areas, the country side and suburbs, heat pumps have very good economics - Short time scales for repayment of the investment, and very low maintainance and operating costs, but for the cities where there isnt a convenient garden or field to bury pipes in, the only alternatives to gas heating is electric resistance heaters and district heating.
Carbon neutral district heating means "Build nukes in city centers" what with windmills not producing much waste heat, and while that would probably become politically possible if people wiev it as a choice between that and freezing, it also means we would need a nuclear design that was easily scaled to the size of the city in need of heating, rather than the actual current situation of "reactors come in a choice of Enourmous, gigantic, and mindnumbingly large" -
Electric resistance heating works with any source of power, and if designs with heatsinks are employed, could do demand management by heating said sink at night during minium power demand and price, but this also means that power needs to be cheap and reliable, which again, means nukes, tough this solution plays nicer with the actually existing designs, and lets you place the reactors where you like.
Peak electricity dispatch: Only even remotely economic way to displace gas here, is with pumped storage facilities, which are not strictly speaking generation, but more a way to turn base generation into peak generation.
Gas-fired plants are the ideal complement to wind in that they can step in when wind is not available (and hydro or pumped storage is not), so the goal is not to eliminate gas, but to keep for the most valuable roles.
For district heating, I doubt that nukes can do it. The Danes have been pursuing biomass CHP plants and that can be peplicated in a number of places. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Of course, incinerating garbage does pose the problem of rendering unrecoverable a number of non-renewable raw materials that could otherwise have been reused. Whether this will become a dealbreaker remains to be seen, but it is a problem that we will have to deal with, because burning off perfectly good reusable resources is a luxury we can ill afford in this century.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
The new garbage incinerator here in Uppsala is a state-of-the-art CHP system. A bit over 100 MW IIRC.
Of course, incinerating garbage does pose the problem of rendering unrecoverable a number of non-renewable raw materials that could otherwise have been reused.
This problem is easily overcome. When Sweden signed the antipersonell mine ban treaty and couldn't use AP-mines anymore, we renamned them "defence charges". Hence, we got the brilliant idea of renaming garbage incineraion "energy recycling". ;) Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
It's the copper, aluminium and iron that goes up in the air and is scattered to the winds...
Or, at best, is oxidised so far into uselessness that recovering them becomes a real energy hog.
Butning off perfectly good petrochemical feedstuffs is another thing we can ill afford. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
Of course, a week after they've explained that it was an economic impossibility Fortum went out and said they'd like to incorporate district heating for Helsingfors (Helsinki) when they build their new nuke at Lovisa... Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
