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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Excellent news. I wish the EU would follow suit. Does anyone know how it is in the UK wrt heating with fossil fuels? Is there a ban on the horizon there too?

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> Does anyone know how it is in the UK wrt heating with fossil fuels? Is there a ban on the horizon there too?

There was a planned ban on gas heating for new build houses from 2025[1] announced last year.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47559920

For heating it makes the most sense to use gas and put subsidies into insulation.

In The Netherlands we are - for some boneheaded reason - killing gas and replacing it with burning wood. With the subsidy spent on that we could insulate every building in the country to a high level and have a massive war chest left over to further build out EV infrastructure.

Modern wood burners are quite efficient at full combustion and wood is a renewable, carbon neutral fuel if sourced from sustainable forestry. Pellet burners are particularly excellent.

It's counter-intuitive but compared to burning non-renewable, a valid option for reducing co2 emissions.

Meanwhile in the UK... about 10 years ago I bought a wood burning stove that was built to meet UK clean air regulations. I have a friend with a wood, so I thought I would do my bit for CO2 emissions Unfortunately, currently particulate pollution is enemy number 1, so wood burning stoves get you tutted at.

"More or Less" on BBC Radio 4 did an investigation of the supposed particulate pollution from wood burners. Basically, although data is thin (and misused by HM Gov), if you have a modern stove and properly dried wood you won't be a particulate polluter.

Thermodynamically speaking heat pumps or using waste heat from other processes makes more sense than burning gas just to heat a home.

Amazingly you can watch live(ish) what goes into the grid. I'm sure this has been shared here before:

http://grid.iamkate.com/

GridWatch is another great site that presents the same data, plus also data for France: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

Nice.

Anyone knows why biomass is categorized as "other" and not under "renewable energy"?

The whole thing is so meaningless they could move it forward to 2025 and the market would be largely unaffected. It's touted as "petrol and diesel cars" ban, but it's nothing of the sorts - after all, hybrids are exempt from the ban, so all you're going to see is every manufacturer making a "mild hybrid" version of their cars, usually by adding a tiny 1kW battery to help with start-up and....that's it. That's already happening with most brands and models as it is.

Now I don't mean to say that the "hybridisation" is bad per-se - but such a "lazy" effort is not exactly super useful either. For example - Volvo is replacing all of their engine options with at the very least mild-hybrid engines, no doubt in anticipation of this regulation. But for example, looking at the figures for the XC60, there is pretty much no difference between petrol/diesel T5/D5 models and the hybridised B5 models, not to mention that its battery doesn't last for more than a mile and the electric motor can't drive the car faster than 20-30mph anyway - so as soon as you start you know, actually driving anywhere....the car is no different than a regular ICE car anyway, except you're lugging the weight of the battery with you. In my opinion it's an option that only exists to fulfil the regulatory requirement and nothing else, it won't actually be any more eco-friendly in real life usage.

TLDR - the regulation is mostly toothless, since it's very easy to circumvent with a very weak mild-hybrid drivetrain, which most manufacturers are at least in the process of doing.

Edit: - apparently I'm wrong, the new deadline includes full ban of both hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

The article states that the ban also includes hybrid vehicles. Check the emboldened sentence under the first image

If I drive my UK small-city commute by car, it's mostly stop-start traffic through 20/30 mph roads. It won't help on the motorway but the carbon efficient replacement for that is a train, not an EV.

The ban also includes hybrids

Right, I just had to look it up - the old ban didn't include hybrids and plug-in hybrids, the new one does:

"In 2018 the government announced plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2040 onwards as part of the Road to Zero Strategy, but it said that ultra-low-emissions vehicles – including hybrids and plug-in hybrids – emitting less than 75g/km of CO2 would still be allowed.

However, the new plan will ban the sale of any vehicle that is not zero emissions. Based on current technology, that would allow only electric or hydrogen vehicles to be sold. "[0]

[0] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/updated-non-zero...

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