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Denmark Plans To Be Coal-Free In 10 Years
merbs writes "Earlier this year, Denmark's leadership announced that the nation would run entirely on renewable power by 2050. Wind, solar, and biomass would be ramped up while coal and gas are phased out. Now Denmark has gone even further, and plans to end coal by 2025.
Russia has demonstrated that it is unwilling to engage in above-board transactions for their fuel exports.
[...]
It's a shame that Denmark can't get off of natural gas sooner than coal.
Thanks to the North Sea, Denmark is a net exporter of oil and natural gas. It's actually the coal they need to import. And compared to natural gas, it's actually the coal that is considerably dirtier. I personally don't see anything wrong with their plan. Few countries are in the position they're in, they will even benefit from what's going on with Russia right now.
Where are they going to get enough biomass? Farms aren't going to grow low value biomass instead of high value food.
Britain gets enough by importing wood from America, with plenty of subsidies to make it affordable. Everyone, except the politicians, agrees that the policy is idiotic and counterproductive.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
Denmark pays a whopping 41 cents per kilowatt hour.
OUCH !!!!!!!
3.5 times the avg cost in the U.S.
It really doesn't take much for other energy sources to beat that. Going out on a limb here I suspect renewables could be cheaper by just not being subject to whatever it is they do that makes their current energy sources ridiculously expensive.
Canada (35m) has a larger population than Australia (23m)
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
Denmark pays a whopping 41 cents per kilowatt hour.
OUCH !!!!!!!
3.5 times the avg cost in the U.S.
It really doesn't take much for other energy sources to beat that. Going out on a limb here I suspect renewables could be cheaper by just not being subject to whatever it is they do that makes their current energy sources ridiculously expensive.
As with many things i Denmark, most of this is taxes (approx. 75%). The rest is the actual cost of producing the energy.
The coal-based plants in Denmark are very efficient and they produce many tons of acid and all sorts of chemicals from the emissions from the plants, before letting it out into the atmosphere.
As a side-story, the government recently cancelled a very popular funding-arrangment that made it very popular to install a local (6KW) solar plan on your roof. The ones who installed it in time, now have free electricity.
Food is biomass, and according to Wikipedia, half of all food - 100 kg per person per year - is wasted. Dunno if it would be enough to cover the need, but a low-cost, low-maintenance, high-reliability gas generator could potentially have markets, at least in apartment buildings, assuming it's actually possible to build one.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Renewable" energy requires natural gas in order to compensate for fluctuating output.
That is true but not necessarily the way you think. In the long term the idea is to create substitute natural gas (SNG) from excess energy that would otherwise go to waste using hydrogen and CO2 for example with the Sabatier reaction. This is the same process Nasa is planning to use to produce rocket propellant on Mars. It's not a super efficient process but if you can harvest the CO2 from the atmosphere, you can still store energy that would otherwise be wasted and unlike drilling and fracking it's a closed cycle as opposed to a release of sequestered carbon. SNG it has the advantage of enabling you to recycle the existing natural gas distribution infrastructure.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
A lot of the Scandinavian housing stock is highly insulated so less energy is used to heat it, keep it warm or cool it and keep it cool. If all houses where built to or close to the Passivhaus specification , energy use would drop and people would spend less on energy.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Also note, very few people in Denmark uses electric heating as you can get hot water from centralized production into your home (not clean only for use in radiators). My parents gets their heating from a power plant 20km away.
Not to nitpick, but danes refer to that centralized production as "surplus heat". The "surplus" heat is heat generated as a bi-effect from producing electricity.... - from coal. So, when the electricity all comes from wind, the danes need to find some other way to heat their houses during winter.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
Having grown up next to a Danish first oil then coal powerplant, I can testify that some of the plants are actually dismantled while other have been converted to running on gas. One side effect of this was that many workers lost their jobs as a modern gas driven plant can be run by way fewer people.
I believe the housewives of the town are happy though. When I was a kid they were always complaining that their laundry hanging outside for drying was getting dirty by the smoke from the powerplant and the dust from the trucks driving the slag away.
It's mainstream now with real advantages and disadvantages, has been for years. Live with the reality instead of attacking it as a political symbol.
Show me a country that runs on 100% gasoline, 100% hydro, 100% whatever - oh wait, such a request is incredibly fucking stupid and ignores the problems of monocultures. How about a sensible discussion instead of the political wank of being a useful idiot attacking what you see as "green" political symbols?
Who the fuck fed you that bullshit? The peaking power is not nuclear for a start, there's base load coal at places like Cordemais, there's hydro and there's even tidal hydro at Le Havre that's been running since the 1960s! What an utterly stupid and pathetic bluff - I'm really insulted that you have some much contempt for the people who read your comments that you tried it.
I really don't get why people decide they want to shed 100 points of IQ if there is a political barrow to push.