A number of “100% renewable” studies foresee wholesale electrification as the best way to cut emissions. In this post I compare load curves from three European countries where electric heating is not widely used (Spain, Germany and Poland) with one where it is (France). The annual load curves for Spain, Germany and Poland do not show large seasonal load variations or high winter peak loads, but because of electric heating the load curve for France shows both large seasonal variations and a strong winter peak. France’s electric heaters will therefore have offset a substantial tonnage of CO2 emissions at the expense of making the grid more difficult to manage. Considerations such as the performance of France’s nuclear fleet and the impact of France’s electric heaters on “demand response” are also discussed.
Figure 1 shows the locations of the four countries considered. They have a combined population of 235 million, a combined GDP of $8.1 trillion and cover an area of 1.8 million square kilometers:
Figure 1: Country locations
A few basic statistics are listed in Table 1 for reference:
As discussed in numerous previous posts, matching electricity supply to demand (load) 24/365 in a country where a high fraction of generation is provided by intermittent renewables is problematic if not impossible. Regardless of the generation mix, however, the problem will usually be lessened if the annual load curve does not show significant seasonal variations. Three of the four countries considered, Poland, Spain and Germany, show no large seasonal variations except during the Christmas/New Year holiday season in Germany. (All the data used in this post are from the P-F Bach hourly data for 2015except where otherwise specified:)
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Last week Gov. Jerry Brown signed 
In late February 2018 high pressure over the North Atlantic and low pressure over the Mediterranean combined to generate a strong easterly airflow that brought Siberian temperatures to Western Europe, increasing heating demand to the point where there was a shortage of natural gas. The outcome was an increase in UK coal generation, partly because coal briefly became cheaper than gas as a source of electricity generation but mostly because the UK did not have enough gas in storage to fill both home heating and electricity generation needs. The UK, however, plans to shut down all its coal plants by 2025, and in this post I speculate as to what might have happened if they had all been shut down in 2018. The conclusion is that the UK would not have been able to cover peak load deficits during much of the cold period owing to inadequate gas supplies and installed gas capacity.
In this week’s Blowout we continue our recent focus on energy storage, featuring the just-published ACOLA study which claims that Australia can get 75% of its electricity from intermittent renewables with 105 gigawatt-hours of long-term storage, enough to cover demand for all of four hours. We follow with Russia jumping into bed with OPEC; the race for light crude; France considers spinning off EDF; the truth about Chernobyl; Germany’s coalition crisis; Tesla meets its battery deadline; interconnectors in Europe; subsidies in UK; Hinkley under fire again; Brexit and Euratom; EVs as virtual power stations: a Swedish coal plant that burns old clothes; the cooling properties of deep fat fryers and how climate change makes lizards less intelligent.
