People who decided to use directly grid electricity for heating but are not willing or able to pay for it during cold spells will find they have a summer house. Consumers can of course have electricity contracts that have fixed monthly prices as a derivative bought from electricity market actors. As the transition doesn't happen overnight, people and the social safety net will have time to cope and adapt.
In cold climates people have increasingly well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non grid electric heating. And can also shift power usage around the day because it takes a day or so for the house to cool uncomfortably.
Well, it's good that you're transparent. People should abandon their homes because of your policy.
Which energy sources that emit less co2/kWh than nuclear power should be used to heat houses in that case?
> (In cold climates people have well insulated houses that are relatively affordable to heat, and mostly use non electricity heating, like thus far)
What are talking about? What kind of non-electricity heating? Let's burn some coal or what?
I'm in Sweden. It gets cold. Houses are well insulated and typically heated via quite efficient electric air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps. Our electricity has been like 98% co2 neutral since the 70s because of a 50/50 mix of hydro and nuclear as a base load.
Now, ironically, the leftist politicians (including the green party) here are dismantling all of this because they and the journalists don't understand the concept of base power, because they don't understand the difference between power and energy. Their solution is to build lots and lots of wind power plants.
So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with local hydro and nuclear power?
By non electric heating methods I meant CHP and biomass based heating.
But yes, old energy inefficient houses in cold climates should be replaced. There's no need to get dramatic over it, houses are machines for living and it depends on circumstances how far to extend their lifespan. (Except some historical houses of course)
> So why would the electricity prices become unaffordable for heat pump heating in your well insulated houses with local hydro and nuclear power?
Umm. This whole thread is about the existence of nuclear power. Is it hard to understand that if nuclear power went away, the baseload would become extremely expensive during cold and wind-free days? That's a substantial part of the year, here.
In a nuclear rampdown scenario, hopefully it would not come as an overnight surprise. Usually there are plans on a 10 year timescale or more. But I'm not arguing against nuclear, just for dynamic electricity pricing.
That's the kind of thing we need to design for and handle using contracts containing hedges or cutoffs and price reactive usage. Texas isn't a cold climate place so relying on grid electricity to cover the exceptional weather is probably not the best plan in the post fossil future. But insulation will help with this and hot weather AC electricity usage both.
