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Norway To Ban the Use of Oil For Heating Buildings By 2020 (independent.co.uk)
Norway, which is the largest producer of oil and natural gas outside of the Middle East, is set to become the first country in the world to ban the use of gas to heat buildings. The country plans to pass legislation that will stop the use of both oil and paraffin to warm buildings from 2020 onwards. The Independent reports: Vidar Helgesenlaid, the nation's Environment Minister, laid out the plans in a statement, saying: "Those using fossil oil for heating must find other options by 2020." The country advises its citizens to research alternatives to oil such as heat pumps, hydroelectricity, and even special stoves that burn wood chips. By some stage, the legislation could be widened to include restrictions on using natural gas to heat buildings. The Ministry of Climate and Environment said the ban would apply to both new and old buildings and cover both private homes and the public space of businesses and state-owned facilities. The ministry says the plans are expected to lessen Norway's emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by an estimated 340,000 tons per year, compared to overall national emissions of 53.9 million tons in 2015.
If cutting their emissions by 1% will somehow disproportionately lower global temperature by a noticeable amount, then hooray!
No single measure will have a massive impact on climate change but many of them together will.
Otherwise why take away efficient heating from people in a freezing-cold country? Won't this likely increase the mortality rate among the sick, elderly, etc. come winter?
Welfare in Norway is good enough that this isn't an issue.
So the submitter already has no clue what he's talking about.
Add to that, the title mentions oil, the first paragraph mentions oil and natural gas as being banned. The quote just talks about Oil. So TFS seems to be written by a fool.
The world's first floating windfarm has taken to the seas in a sign that a technology once confined to research and development drawing boards is finally ready to unlock expanses of ocean for generating renewable power...It is also notable because the developer is not a renewable energy firm but Norway's Statoil, which is looking to diversify away from carbon-based fuels.
Wood is a renewable resource.
Also, when trees are planted to make the wood chips, said trees consume carbon dioxide. Trees and other plants have always done that.
I assume lots of people will switch to propane. No, they're not going to shiver.
Otherwise why take away efficient heating from people in a freezing-cold country?
Because oil is more valuable on the global market than to sell domestically (Norway). Making powerful people money has always been more important than keeping the plebs warm in the winter. And in this case, they can paint it as environmentalism, even though they'll still be selling the oil and it will still be consumed somewhere in the world.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Norway has a long history of doing things better and smarter than the US. So yes, it's going to happen.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Its warm enough not to need serious heating but cold enough to be uncomfortable.
Yes, most Australians have no central heating (I guess Canberra is an exception?), and often just a lounge-room heater.
Mornings can be cold, which is why we invented ugg-boots. They are really just over-sized slippers, and not to be worn outside the house.
You're probably thinking that coal is just old forests that got buried. If we wait a few million years some of our current forests should turn into coal.
Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. The current forests will decay into carbon dioxide too quickly. Why didn't that happen millions of years ago? The decay agents of the time weren't as efficient as today's.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
I did a bit more reading on this and discovered something interesting. Currently about 85% of Norwegians heat with electricity, the balance being oil, natural gas, and wood. I did not see a breakdown of how that 15% is distributed but it is quite clear that the plurality is from wood. So that leaves something like 10% of people heating with petroleum.
What I also saw was that oil and natural gas use is growing quickly. It seems that electricity prices spiked in 2003 and since then non-electric heating has found a new demand. This has lead to plans to install natural gas service to where it was not before. What happens when electric heating starts to see competition? They lobby the government to make the competition illegal of course.
The electric energy sector held a near monopoly on heating for a very long time. This no doubt made them a lot of money. This allowed them to raise prices in recent years. It got to a point that petroleum is now looking attractive for many more people than it did just a few years before. Rather than lowering prices to stay competitive the electric sector turns to the government to protect their monopoly.
The electric energy sector is only doing this now because petroleum is a threat to their profits. They can just veil this with protecting the environment because that is popular right now.
Assuming Norwegians still have the ability to vote they are going to vote to keep their heating costs low. That's what people always do, vote with their wallets. That is why I believe this effort to make petroleum heating illegal will fail.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
And is shocking to me that people in Norway heat their homes with camping equipment. At least get a wood stove.
Kerosene, in this sense, is basically the same thing as heating oil as used in the US northeast. Kerosene, Diesel, Heating oil, RP-1 rocket propellant, and Jet fuel are all closely related. The main difference is the specific fraction and how much control is put on some of the components.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Heat pump is a pretty broad term. All heatpumps work by moving the thermal energy up a gradient. The higher that gradient, the less efficient they are. Air to Air heat pumps do not work worth crap in low temperatures, such as what you have in the midwest. Ground source heat pumps, which I presume this article is talking about, are a very different beast. They offer about a 3:1 energy gain; 1 watt of electrical power in means 3 watts of heat out. Since their heat source coils are buried below the frost-line, there's little variation in performance between summer and winter.
While it doesn't get that cold here in Vancouver, BC, one of the new towers downtown did something pretty cool. When building the foundations for the tower, the bored hundreds of deep wells under the structure and filled them with heat exchanger pipes. During the summer, the building's air conditioning systems sink their waste heat into the block of earth under the tower. In the winter, they heat pump off of that. The AC effectively salts the heat pump source for the winter months.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
How can a building heated by "special stoves that burn wood chips" possibly have lower emissions than one using heating oil ?
Large/mid-scale hog fuel/chip boilers can be extremely efficient and clean. They work by burning the wood chips at high temperatures in an oxygen deprived atmosphere. This produces significant quantities of Carbon Monoxide, Hydrogen, and other flammable gasses. These gasses move to the other part of the boiler, where they are combusted with forced air, heating the water. A portion of the exhaust gasses are then cycled back into the primary combustion chamber, where they serve to reduce the oxygen content and keep the chip bed hot.
Because the majority of the energy comes from combustion in the gas phase, they are extremely clean and low emissions. What ash is produced can be filtered out relatively easily.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Unlike the US, Norway has heavy royalties that are paid to the state sovereign wealth fund, which benefits all norwegian citizens. It's not just going in to the corporation's pockets.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
they also have shitloads of hydroelectric. if they use that hydroelectricity for heating instead and export the oil, it's a win on the national deficit/surplus for them.
but anyways. oil is not gas so wtf the article stub is even talking about is a bit of a mystery.
oil is a liquid. the oil is similar to diesel. it goes into a burner and that heats up water and that circulates around in tubes in the house to make it warm. it's not natural gas, propane or whatever, it's not petrol..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What does the future of Norway electricity use look like? I assume that their demand for electricity is growing. I assume that after decades of using hydro power that they are running out of good places to put dams.
A quick Google search tells me that Noway is increasingly relying on natural gas and imports for electricity. Seems to me that they've pretty much maxed out their ability to grow hydro power. More efficient uses of their existing electricity supply can stretch that out some, which includes using heat pumps over resistance heating when practical.
If trends continue Norway is going to have to burn more natural gas (and natural gas derived electricity for heat is always going to be more expensive than burning it for heat directly), import more nuclear power from Sweden or...?
The electricity sector in Noway cannot simply ban competition from natural gas because people will vote with their wallets and overturn this ban. I don't see that happening with the possible exception of nuclear power providing an out. This could be Swedish nuclear power or Norwegian nuclear power, but it will be natural gas or nuclear power to fill that gap. Personally I'd like to see growth in nuclear power but I also have nothing against natural gas.
Actually, the forecast is an increasing surplus in of electricity in Norway, even after electrification of the transportation sector (goal: all new small cars should be zero emission by 2025).
There is no use of natural gas in power production in Norway today, with the exception of off shore oil platforms. There was one plant, but it closed down.
Norway has the highest percentage of electric car adoption in the world, so I don't think they are being hypocritical. If they stopped pumping oil ad gas from the North Sea, it would just mean more money going to Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Here in Ontario Canada, we also use electric resistance for back up with ground source heat pumps. Some times we get winters with -30C or even colder. In these few days of the year, the electric heat can come on. It's a very rare occurrence most of the time. Your brother's system might not have kept up without the electric resistance but if it was sized properly then it wouldn't have happened except on the very coldest of days in the winter. The ground is always around 50F/10C so even in the dead of winter you can still heat your house off of that. You can also put the ground heat exchanger in a pond if you have one. Ponder looking out to your frozen over pond and then imagine that you're heating your house from the water in that pond. That is a reality with ground source heat pumps. Air source heat pumps are a lot better than they used to be these days but they still struggle in the very cold winters.
such an American answer.
Welfare in Norway is good enough that this isn't an issue.
It's not even a question of that, but of cost. Heating oil in Norway is considerably more expensive than electricity, and having travelled and worked in Norway I can't remember when I saw something other than electricity (radiator or under floor heating), though of course wood (often in the form of pellets) is also popular.
Electricity is dirt cheap in Norway, so people even typically don't have a heat pump (like we do in Sweden), but just heat directly with electricity. As an example, for a 600 sq foot apartment with three outside walls, in the "cold" part of the country (two hours north of Oslo) I paid about $50 USD per month for electricity. That includes heating. In winter. Rent was $750 USD/month, so heating/electricity didn't add much.
In the Nordic countries we haven't installed oil fired boilers since before the energy crisis in the seventies. It's only houses with a very old heating system that burns oil these days. A system that should be well past its replacement days.
So that's why the Norwegians make this rule now. Usage is already virtually nil, so banning them won't have any real effect. Furthermore a typical oil fired boiler can be converted to burn wood pellets for, say $1000 USD or so, so even though a cheap conversion like that has it's disadvantages, it's not exactly a deal breaker if you own a house.
Stefan Axelsson
Smart countries have realized that fossil fuels are on the way out. In the Middle East they are mostly investing in tourism as an alternative, and in Europe countries are investing in renewable energy technology that they can export.
Everyone else is missing the boat.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Coincidentally, 2020 is the year when the EU directive on passive houses jumps onto the housing scene like the proverbial 800 lbs gorilla. So perhaps there's some connection between the two. Norway isn't strictly in the EU but many measures are going to be similar.
Ezekiel 23:20
Thing is, electricity doesn't work well in countries like Canada where the distances are vast The grid can't handle it, it's also more expensive then any other method for heating. It's why charities that exist to pay for heating ran out of money last winter a few months into the winter season, and the people who primarily use them are the ones who use electricity for heating. At 0.185kWh @peak those charities were out of cash by December last year. The winter season in most of Canada runs from mid or late october until april or may. Charities that supply wood on the other hand barely squeaked by. On top of that this was a mild winter, it was also a mild Nov-December period this year.
It's the same reason why my sister's electricity bill went from $80/mo to $260/mo with the same usage, when the Alberta NDP shut down all the coal power plants. Gee that's a brilliant idea, we're literally swimming in coal, it produces cheap energy but fuck you! You're gonna get screwed over to boot. Now the kicker, when they have those randomly high winds and storms which knock out power for days on end. Their little shithole of a town which had electricity no longer does. They truck in diesel fuel to keep the government offices, fire hall, and mall open and heated so people don't freeze to death when it hit's -42C.
It's the same in Ontario, where the liberals blow $1B on two ridding seats to shut down a natural gas power plant, pay producers to not produce electricity, sell it for pennies to the US, and on top of that implement a "green energy" act that drives the price through the roof. Yeah the top two concerns in Ontario for the last few years are "high electricity prices" and jobs. Great combination.
Om, nomnomnom...
That's not really true, solar panel and wind power are both seeing annual double digit growth, and around 10% of the power generated in Europe now comes from wind. Indeed, already worldwide more than 50% of all new electricity installations, both capacity and delivered energy are now renewable. That means as the existing equipment wears out it's being replaced with much 'greener' equipment. And that can only accelerate. That's not 'token' gestures it's because wind in particular is actually competitive and solar is becoming ever more so. Even in America, which is moving slowly, the same economic forces are playing out and coal mines are closing.
The cost of electric car batteries are dropping at a similar rate.
A lot of people think that there's a difference between primary energy and electricity, but actually electricity has low entropy; watt for watt electricity is much more valuable than primary energy. So even though electricity is greening up, it's tending to replace primary energy; you need a lot less energy to drive an electric car than a fossil car, and electric cars are almost completely nicer to drive.
-WolfWithoutAClause
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