Denmark is often seen as a very green country, and a very big reason for that is that we have a very large GDP/Joule. However, Danish energy policy is not always logical.
My house was built in 2002 with 1" walls using the old standards. This was the minimum requirement at the time, today walls need to be thicker than that (I think the current minimum standard is 15cm insulation + 15cm bubble concrete + 10cm insulating bricks), houses are pressure-tested etc., and there are energy requirements on the air exchange ventilators (max 25W) and on the efficiency of the passive heat regenerators. It is heated using gas from the North Sea, so our heating emits CO2, although not as much as a house built back in the 1990s, of course, or even older houses.
Our gas heater broke down a couple of weeks back, with freezing temperatures outside, while we were not at home. When we got back home, everything inside was freezing, but using our oven in the kitchen, we could easily heat the entire house. I guess that's about 2kW.
It would make a lot of sense to use electrical heating, especially because we have so much wind power, but it is not legal, and electricity is heavily taxed. However, this is changing. The grid is becoming more intelligent, and several central heating systems that are based on gas or oil, have had an electrical heater retrofitted. This makes it possible to use excess wind power. Electricity prices are sometimes negative, because of the high degree of wind power, but because of the heavy tax, consumers would not be able to make money on electrical heating.
However, this is our house - many houses in Denmark do not have their own heater. Instead, they use heat from nearby electricity plants, decentral biogas plants, garbage burning facilities or similar. I don't think there is a single home in central Copenhagen that produces its own heat, and even in many country-side villages, heat is centrally produced. It is currently not legal for those heat plants only to produce heat - they must also produce electricity or something like that, because heat is a waste product from electricity production, and we want electricity production to be efficient. Biogas is very popular, because we have a lot of farming. Instead of having all those flammable climate gases evaporate into the atmosphere, it is used for producing electricity and heat.
More and more homes are zero-energy or "passive" houses, that do not need any or very little heating - and this is the future. Heat pumps are not as popular here as in Sweden, but I guess that we will see more of those, too, when our electricity grid gets smarter, especially with regard to billing. Sweden has cheap electricity and permits the use of electricity for general heating - based on the idea that nuclear power plants are good for the environment, and should be used as much as possible. Denmark does not have nuclear power plants.
On a global scale, much more energy is wasted on cooling buildings down, than on heating buildings. In the 1990s, there was a trend with using glass for new office buildings. This lets a lot of heat in and keeps it inside, so cooling is required. That has triggered a response: Office buildings must be designed so that they do not spend energy on cooling. Several methods are being considered:
* Cooling may only be done using water exchange with the ocean (like it is required in several places in Switzerland).
* Central cooling plants that are much more efficient than decentralized cooling. This can be done using sea-water, too.
* Architectural designs that keep the heat out.
I don't know what the current legislative state is, but energy usage in office buildings is going to be lowered, that's for sure.
However, all this stuff doesn't matter if energy consumption reductions here mean increased consumption elsewhere. We use more than 80% of the energy of coal, but chinese power plants only use 30%. By all logic, this means that energy-heavy industries should be here, and not in China. But the Kyoto agreement moves all the stuff towards China, and that's just plain stupid. A good deal means that the worldwide demand for fossile fuel is reduced. |
