Off Topic Climate change/ pollution

Me too (book signed that is), queue around the block. As opposed to when I went to an Iain Banks book signing and there were about 10 people there

 

there was a science fair of some sort at the university some years back (1990s??) and he was there. i got him to sign a book. he more or less apologised for some of his earlier stuff, which was a bit odd, as i hadn't questioned it. he was probably conscious that his writing had improved; i suppose you'd always hope it would, if you were a writer.

i think my version of eric is worth a bit (£100+ ?). one day i'll start reading all the books again from the beginning, but i need to finish the long earth series with stephen baxter first. there's also a collection of early stuff written under a different name to get hold of in the near future. and i ought to get round to playing the two discworld pc games i bought decades back.

 

‘You can walk around in a T-shirt’: how Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold
Ajit Niranjan

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When Glen Peters bought a heat pump for his home in Oslo he wasn’t thinking about the carbon it would avoid.

Convenience played a role; a fireplace was too much of a hassle – the effort of having to buy, prepare and store the wood – and the wall-mounted radiators are too dusty. “They’re a pain in the ass to clean,” said Peters (who is actually a climate scientist).


But the main factor, according to Peters, who had recently swapped to underfloor heating, was money.

In most of Europe, fitting a heat pump is one of the most powerful actions a person can take to reduce their carbon footprint. But in Norway, where clean-yet-inefficient electrical resistance heaters have long been common, upgrading to a heat pump is often a purely financial decision – one to which Peters came late. Two-thirds of households in this Nordic country of 5 million people has a heat pump, more than anywhere else in the world.

For many years, Norwegians and their neighbours heated their homes with fossil fuels. But during the 1973 oil crisis, when prices shot up, the country’s political leaders made a conscious choice to promote alternatives, and, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, they did not back away from that decision once the crisis eased. Denmark rolled out an extensive district heating system. Norway, Sweden and Finland moved more towards heating with wood or electricity. They began to price carbon in the 1990s, and a mix of grants and taxes tipped the balance further away from oil long after the crisis was over.

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In the Netherlands, during the 1973 oil crisis, cars were periodically banned in Amsterdam in order to save petrol. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
“Norway ensured early on that fossil-fuel heating was the most expensive option, making heat pumps cost competitive,” said Dr Jan Rosenow from the Regulatory Assistance Project, a thinktank that works to decarbonise buildings. “They did this by taxing carbon emissions from fossil heating fuels. That’s been the key to incentivise heat pump adoption.”

Norway also trained up a workforce to install them. While the devices themselves can be churned out of factories en masse, fitting them into homes can be fiddly and easy to mess up. In much of Europe, experts say, the lack of a skilled workforce is one of several bottlenecks holding the heat pump industry back.

“The reason we have big growth is that it works,” said Rolf Hagemoen, the head of Norway’s heat pump lobby. “If you have lots of customers who have complaints and bad experiences with heat pumps, they will tell all their neighbours it doesn’t work.”

There are signs that the opposite also holds true. Ole Øystein Haugen, a retired metalworker who lives just outside Oslo, convinced three of his neighbours to get ground-source heat pumps after he got one himself seven years ago. The device heats his swimming pool as well as his home. It takes a little longer to heat the water in the spring than with the old oil burner, said Haugen, but “that’s the only negative thing”.

At its core, a heat pump is just like a fridge or an air-conditioner. The machine does not generate the desired heat itself but instead moves it from outside to where it is needed. They have been around for decades, with the first heat pump built in 1856 by Peter von Rittinger, an Austrian scientist, and used to dry out salt in a marsh. By the 1930s, the Swiss used them to take heat from rivers and lakes and a couple of decades later the Americans used them to draw heat out of the ground.

Heat pumps’ efficiency has been increased over decades, partly because of the early adopters in Nordic countries who tinkered away to the point where a modern version can deliver three to five units of heat for every unit of electricity used to power it. An efficient gas boiler, on the other hand, can only produce as much heat as the energy contained in the fuel being burned. In other words, a heat pump will have a smaller carbon footprint than a gas boiler even when plugged into an electricity grid dependent on high-emitting suppliers.

Kent Eilertsen is a maintenance engineer at the Norwegian postal service Posten Bring and looks after two heat pumps in a sorting terminal in Tromsø, 137 miles (220km) north of the Arctic Circle. “It works very well in the cold,” said Eilertsen. The devices can become less efficient when temperatures drop below -15C, he added, but new versions still run at -20C or -25C.

That is not what we hear in other countries. Coming from the UK, which sold fewer heat pumps last year than anywhere else in Europe, and living in Germany, where the unassuming grey boxes have become unlikely fodder in a fierce culture war, I find the Nordic acceptance of clean heat particularly hard to wrap my head around. Powerful campaigns against heat pumps have been run in parts of the UK and German press, which continue to argue that the devices are inefficient and break down in cold weather. Some of the campaigning has been linked to gas lobby groups.

The popularity of heat pumps across Nordic countries should be enough to dispel that myth – Sweden and Finland join Norway at the top of rankings of heat pumps per 1,000 household. Studiesshow the same thing. In mildly cold climates, a standard air-source heat pump produces two to three times as much useful heat as the energy needed to run it, and the ratio only drops below two in temperatures far below freezing.

The Norwegians also benefit from well-insulated houses. “When I was a kid we either sweated like pigs in summer or froze to death in winter,” said Peters, who grew up in Australia. “Norway is very different and quite luxurious in the sense that in the middle of winter you can just walk around in your T-shirt and it’s 20- plus degrees in your house.”

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The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are shown a heat pump during a visit to renewable energy company in Slough, Berkshire. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
For now, heat pumps are still, in most countries, pretty small scale. The global stock meets only about 10% of the heat used in buildings, according to the International Energy Agency, and their needs to almost triple by the end of the decade to be on track for net zero emissions by 2050. Despite a boom since the recent energy crisis, when fossil gas prices soared, sales in parts of Europe and elsewhere suggest that goal is still well off-track.

Norway’s success is not easy for countries to replicate. It is one of the wealthiest on the planet, so citizens can more easily afford the higher upfront cost of a heat pump. Norway also makes cheap, renewable electricity from hydropower dams, which lowers the monthly bills for people running a heat pump.

But with European governments continuing to subsidise fossil fuels – and setting carbon prices well below the cost of polluting – the Nordic experience shows that politicians in much warmer countries could opt to clean up their heating systems.

 

I still don't get it, "The machine does not generate the desired heat itself but instead moves it from outside to where it is needed" when it is minus 20 outside and you would like plus 20 inside something must make the heat.
It also didn't mention that Norway gets a lot of electricity from hydro generation making it a cheap green energy already.

 

That's all well and good but what's their agenda?

 

They're basically refrigerators the opposite way round, but like a refrigerator, they don't work well or efficiently if the door is open or the walls and floors aren't insulated.... Or if the windows arent double glazed, which is a lot of older UK housing stock

 

Cheap to produce but not cheap for the customer where market forces prevail, and with high voltage cables linking the UK, Denmark and Germany, there's always a market to sell to.

 

Two people I know, one lives in a new, mass-built house complete with ASHP. Doesn't work, house is cold. The other lives in a new build which was built with ASHP in mind, ie lots of insulation, correct rad sizes, pipework etc. It works a treat. Draw your own conclusions.

The apparent success of the scandinavian model is assisted by the fact that their houses were built to withstand cold weather to start with so they had a head start.

Not to say we shouldn't be using them but it isn't as simple as the govt and ASHP salespeople would have us believe.

Oh and also, the current grid couldn't support the govt's target of 600k ashp's by 2028, and that's without taking into account all the electric cars we're supposed to be buying.

Personally I'd love to be using an electric car and a cleaner way of heating the house but it's not practical enough for me yet.

 

Ranges will hit 800km/500 miles in a couple of years - not many drive more than that a week, so for everyone with off street parking, they'll be fine. Internet and fibre infrastructure was done fairly quickly in the 1990s, so no reason why a charging infrastructure can't be built.

My Tesla finally gave up life, so I bought a 2021 Audi etron (ca. 300km range) with 70,000km and 3 more years of warranty and service plan for the equivalent of £21000... They're giving them away.

 

Don't have an issue with range but I don't see the money/commitment to infrastructure yet.

 

I like it but 20% is quite a lot, I was surprised at that figure.

edit: Just been reading about them, built to passivhaus standards, explains the 20% better.

 

Come back to me when they can achieve that range tugging a tonne and a half caravan.

 

They also work better when there is a big difference in temperature between indoors and outdoors.

The need for the building to be virtually hermetically sealed brings its own health and comfort problems if it is not done with a full understanding of the requirements, which very few installers will have.

 

Or if you are driving at night in winter with the heating on...

 

Love watching stuff like this. Some really clever people put there and some very clever people in big business with the money to put a persuasive case out there.

 

Of course it's true that lights/heating/ac will deplete the battery quicker but to be fair most people do most of their distance driving during the day, heat and ac are optional. Anyway if someone does need to recharge during the night there's less chance of a queue at the machine!

 

Have you never had a woman in your car?