However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]
I was offered to return it or try to fix it myself. In the end the fix was even easier than initially thought and it's working great since. No idea if that's because I am in the EU market and not US. They did take their time to respond but otherwise service was ok.
The first time I entered a Lidl (in Germany) more than 20 years ago they had wide aisles and a very clear structure. Aldi was the opposite, a little bit shabby and chaotic.
Today I'm more and more annoyed by Lidl: a messy obstructive placement of product islands and displays everywhere while Aldi is a role model of order and structure.
I guess the reason why I don't switch supermarkets is simply habit.
Well, my experience is that people start eating when the lights go out but are nearly finished with the popcorn when the ads and trailers end and the movie starts.
Most people. There's always that one person near you who eats for most of the movie.
Anyways, the point is that with the advent of big home TVs, streaming, I've virtually stopped going to movie theaters. The experience is always subpar every time I go due to eating noise and talking.
> [it] become[s] cheaper than gas heating within 11 to 14 years
This a no-brainer for buildings with high energy use. But we looked into getting a heat pump last year but it doesn't pan out because our house (15 years old) has a very low energy use and we would not recover the costs (about 20K euros after subsidies) for 20+ years.
It did for me. 40-year old furnace was starting to sound bad and subsidies locally were excellent; I now have a 3-ton heat pump and my house is fine in winter or summer for far less money than gas. It might have been harder to justify without subsidy, but we do need people to make this shift and a lot of homeowners will not consider things with 20-year ROI.
Yes. It also depends on the age of your gas heating as in Germany you get 20% subsidies when your system is 20 years or older, unfortunately this subsidy decreases 3 percentage points every year so when we are due it will be about 5%.
in my case: 3k at most for a replacement gas furnace, and heat pumps would require new wirings as well. Many things would need to break at once to make it worth considering when you have older homes
New homes with mandated PV and battery, that's another story.
Where I live every house has the wiring for AC anyway, so a heat pump only needs a different valve in the system you will always have (this is about $50 in parts, but they charge thousands extra for it)
I paid for it anyway - my furnace was 50 years old (probably 60% efficient when new), and I have no idea how bad the AC was. That said, for less money I added more insulation to my house and that has a better ROI. (unfortunately the design of the house doesn't allow for even more insulation even though I could save a lot more if it could be done)
> [it] become[s] cheaper than gas heating within 11 to 14 years
They also always stop the savings estimates right before the expected lifespan of the heatpump, at which point you have to buy a new unit which destroys the actual savings
At the moment, heat pumps are mostly retrofitted to homes not designed for heat pumps, which adds to the cost. You can't compare that work to a future heat pump swap which is a much smaller job.
I'm building a house right now, it's much cheaper to invest in insulation, well designed window placement and passive cooling (ground/air or ground/water exchangers) than heat pumps and other high tech solutions.
Heat pumps are like pellet stoves in Europe a few years ago, the day the subsidies go away nobody wants them anymore.
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