The world has a lot of potential to be more efficient. Look no further than energy consumption per capita in the US. It's drastically higher than in other developed countries.
> The world has a lot of potential to be more efficient.
This winter wasn’t “efficient” it was cold as hell because we all turned the heating as low as it could go without causing building damage[1] because the price of natural gas more than 10x’ed.
It’s not an example of a sustainable reduction in consumption.
[1] though a lot of people didn’t think things through and set the temperature too low or even turned off the gas and now have mold and other problems in their basements.
I don't know where you're based, but you are mentioning prices in dollars in another comment, so I'm assuming most likely US.
Continental Europe's got much better housing than the bits of the US which I've visited. East coast more relevant here than the West, given exactly where I went, but Boston, Providence, etc., were awful build quality, the "middle class" places around there were even worse than the "working class" Victorian terraces and post-War council houses in the UK.
A lot of stuff in Boston and other places in the East Coast is actually pre-War and pretty terrible. I grew up in the Upper Midwest (Minnesota), and our house, built around 1980, was very well insulated. Double paned windows, etc. Houses built today to even just code are even better, and anyone going a step beyond code has an insanely efficient house.
My current house in Virginia is over 100 years old, and isn’t terribly well insulated and has single pane windows (although we have storm windows which help… also it’s small and is a duplex which helps).
So the places you visited (on East Coast, big old cities) are not necessarily very representative. Any place with newer housing will have better insulation. (And yes, I realize that a lot of people think newer houses are cheap crap, but overall I think building codes have improved average quality significantly, and the reason you don’t see it in some old houses is because the crap old houses were already torn down, ie sample bias.)
It's survivor bias, and a great point to make when people say old construction is better. Really bad construction simply doesn't survive long enough to be considered old
I’m not here to defend US housing quality but if you’d asked me the worst-built houses prior to your post, I’d have said the Eastern US, specifically New England/Boston.
My uni didn't turn on the heating on Mondays at all. When I went there to study in the library (I learn there better than at home) I was always wearing a Parka.
Also, the gas price of my dad increased from 4.8 cents per kWh to 14.2 cents per kWh as an existing customer. People who were moving at the time and were new customers had to sign contracts well above 20 cents per kWh.
So, you probably only didn't "notice any difference" if you have either deep pockets or your energy supplier has a very foresighted buying strategy for a period of more than 1.5 years. (Many utility providers don't do this because they are speculators at the same time. Few like to pay a premium for forward contracts in the far future).
I visited Germany and honestly I felt pretty uncomfortable most of the time. I could tell that people were conserving on heating - everywhere from public buildings to restaurants to where I was staying.
I live far to the north, in an apartment, and didn't notice anything this winter, wherever I went. But I heard someone in their villa here nearby actually moved elsewhere, over the winter, because of the high cost of heating
I guess someone who owns a villa in Belgium doesn't really have to worry about electricity prices :P Unless they suddenly lost a lot of their wealth somehow.
I am 'owner' of a villa in Belgium. Villas in Belgium vary between 250K to 750K for a normal family 3 to 4 bedroom house. Typically a house has 1 kitchen, 1 bathroom. The price is very dependent on the location!
Well we saw the monthly gas+elec price of 150 euros before the crisis, suddenly go 6-fold, so we did worry a lot. We decreased our heating a few degrees and used a lot more bio fuel during winter. Lately the price is about 3 or 4 fold the price of before the crisis.
Edit: by villa we typically mean a house that is not adjacent to another house.
It certainly was much colder at my public sector employer in Germany. My hands turned blue in my office and I had to wear fingerless gloves some of the time.
I was probably not clear enough, my point was that even in normal times, energy use im some countries can be almost double per capita than other similar countries. But even in the more energy efficient countries there's room for improvement - better insulation, more efficient appliances on the individual level, and better urban planning etc. on the society level.
This is always the case. If e.g. petrol moved in tandem with the price of oil, it would have gone up and down by a lot - it's gone from $25 / barrel in 2020 to $110 in 2022.
I for one hope the consumer market will get an overcorrection and I can fix my contract for a few years, since I'm not convinced we've seen the last of energy price fluctuation.
Damn, we had the temp set to 17 or 18, if I walk in and it's 21 it feels like a wall of heat in the winter. I can't imagine having the thermostat set to 24, I'm pretty sure it would be uncomfortably hot unless you never go outside..
24.5, are you walking around in underwear? I couldn't live with that temperature in winter, where I am wearing thick pullovers and jeans.
Unrelated: Does your solar pv really do anything for your heatpump? What's your kwh/kwp for december-february? I don't think it'll be anywhere close to the heatpump consumtion.
In winter, I imagine most people do. You can save a lot of energy by wearing a bit more clothes. Although I'm sure that equation looks different if it's all coming from your own solar panels.
I know it's a sign of prosperity and my perspective is probably lucky.
However, I find it SUPER SAD that... in developed countries people are living less comfortably during the winter than the middle class in Romania, a developing country.
It makes no sense. In Romania, everyone who's at least middle class sets the thermostat to 22-23 degrees and basically only wears t-shirts and shorts indoors.
So a German making €40k net per year lives worse from this point of view compared to a Romanian making €20k net per year.
I am an energy-guzzling American and even for me 24.5C seems crazy in the winter time. That's 76F! My elderly grandmother (who has circulation issues and so is always cold) keeps her heat at 72F. Why would anyone want to wear shorts indoors when they will have to change them anyway to leave the house while it's 10F (-12C) outside? Seems like you're just wasting energy to inconvenience yourself?
The majority of natural gas is extracted along with oil. However, methane is a product of anaerobic decomposition. It can be produced from municipal waste. Natural gas produced from waste is net zero carbon.
In the US, and I assume elsewhere, the single greatest reduction is carbon emissions was achieved by switching from coal plants to natural gas plants. Thats a win in my book. No fossil fuels at any cost is a losing proposition. Incremental progress to sustainable energy is how we get to sustainability.
I'm not opposed to gas as a transitional technology. Same with nuclear. They're both significantly better than coal and oil, and if using them helps us get rid of coal and oil, then that's great and we should do it.
But I don't see them as the end goal; that's still 100% renewable to me.
Energy that isn't consumed is the easiest way to reduce carbon emissions. Obviously no one demands we switch of gas power plants and let coal power plants run instead, but climate change has reached a point where we need to act on all fronts at the same time. So switch to renewables, switch to cleaner solutions and conserve as much energy as possible.
Apart from that, Romania's energy consumption comes 75% from coal, oil and gas. THAT is something that does not makes sense and something that is SUPER SAD. And to walk around in shorts and t-shirt in the winter when you are heating with those sources is just plain stupid.
It's unfortunately these kind of attitudes which will make it hard to reduce climate change.
If we really care about climate change we would take care of the major offenders first. And when we come to domestic heating we would run reasonable insulation programs and heat pump installation programs instead of the laughable "grants", ban OFCH, etc. I think that if I generate 25% of my winter electricity consumption on my own, I may increase my in-house temperature without killing the damn planet. Also don't forget that the total footprint of a heat pump is nothing against a typical OFCH system.
Why would you take care of major offenders first, instead of taking care of all offenders at once? It's not as if you shutting down your heating means the coal power plant next door looks at your chimney and goes "Hey lads, this sucker switched of the heating, add an extra shovel of coals!".
Because my personal contribution won't change anything on the global scale but it would significantly impair my quality of life. Also because I've taken reasonable actions to reduce my footprint. Also because if we take care of the major offenders responsible for 70%-80% of the emissions there might be no need to care about the rest.
I even doubt that anything would change if everyone in the developed world switches to this extreme economy. E.g. Russia burns coal and wastes hundreds of gigawatt hours to heat the atmosphere because of how their heating systems are designed. But of course it's lot easier to force me, a person who works from home, drives a hybrid car with 52MPG on average (and I rarely do more than a couple of hundreds km per month), travels couple of times per year and who installed a heat pump and a solar PV, to live with 19 degrees than to deal with Russia. It's equally easier to force me going full vegan instead of applying seemingly working solutions to reduce meat industry emissions (toilet training, seaweed diet, artificial meat in the end).
> Why would you take care of major offenders first, instead of taking care of all offenders at once?
For the same reason that if you had two jobs with the exact same conditions, but one paid twice as much as the other, you would probably pick the one that pays more. Efficiency matters. Resources are limited. Oil is a resource. The capacity to take care of offenders is another.
2. That's just dumb. Romania reduced its energy usage a ton since 1989 plus its per capita usage is super low, if someone needs to look in the mirror it's the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, China (China for the industrial pollution primarily), etc.
> I find it SUPER SAD that... in developed countries people are living less comfortably
In my country, we say that the bedroom should not be warmer than 19, because that's bad for sleeping :-). So it's really a choice. If I go to bed and the temperature is 24.5, I open the window.
Also I don't find it less comfortable to wear more clothes in the winter than in the summer. Ok, working from home on a computer at 19 degrees is a little bit cold, so I tend to use a warm water bottle. But honestly that's really fine.
OTOH, why sad? I would have found the info sad if Romanians including the middle class could not afford enough heating and had to shiver in winter, whereas people in Germany lived in overheated apartments. According to what you say, many people are happy: Many Romanians are warm, many Germans save money / energy / CO₂ or so (I am happy to have done that myself by hardly ever heating this winter).
I remember when I went to Canada (from Australia). It was snowing outside and many people ansewered their doors with no shirt on as the inside temp was so high!
Obviously PV doesn't do much in winter, it generated just about 200 kWh (my system is nominated for 7.5 kW peak output, I can get about 6 kW peak output in the summer) in December while the pump consumed about 850 kWh. It's a new house with highest insulation rating and even in the winter if there is any sun the house gets hot even without the pump.
Anyways I'm happy enough with my bills, even winter bills.
Clearly not. What's your total energy consumption? Unless your looking at something closer to passivhaus levels of 15kWh/(m^2.yr) your house is too hot (and frankly, however efficient your house is the temperature is absurd). That is a statement of ethics. The price you pay for your energy doesn't even begin to pay for the damage. That is a big part of the problem. Moreover, every kWh spent on overheating your house is a kWh we as a society need to find for all the other things that are less stupid.
Put on a jumper. Or even, let your body adjust. There's plenty of evidence that keeping your body working to stay warm when you are healthy is very good forblood sugar control, which has additional benefits.
> I'm exporting more than a megawatt per year back to grid for free
Do you take into account the energy needed to grow and transport the food you eat? To extract the material needed for objects you own? To build your car? To maintain the roads you use? I guess you obviously don't use fossil fuels at all and instead rely exclusively on the clean energy you produce?
Because if you don't, then you are still overall a consumer of energy.
But even if you were a net producer of clean energy, we as a society have a big problem of consuming too much overall. We will have to reduce that at some point (whether we want it or not). So it would be great if people started thinking about not eating meat for every meal, taking a plane every second week-end, and living in a sauna.
Again, I think that I'm doing better than the majority of the people and it makes zero sense for me personally to save several hundreds of kWt/hs per year (which I compensate through PV) while there are major industrial offenders around. Also I travel rarely but I can't work while on vegetarian diet.
The whole point of the energy / climate crisis that is coming is that it's not about money.
We as a society need to consume less energy (because we depend on fossil fuels that emit CO2), and anyway we will have less energy in the future (because... peak production of fossil fuels).
There is no price on that: we need to do less with less.
Probably, but if your solution is to propose me to reduce my home temperature to 19 degrees instead of dealing with Russia and China burning shittons of coal - that's kinda laughable.
I guess my point is that we will need to do *a whole lot more* than most people are comfortable imagining.
One way is to say "well I don't care, I won't do anything until I don't get a choice, and probably at that point it will hurt a lot".
Another is to face it, start doing things, and pushing your politicians to enforce very big plans. One problem I see is that everyone says "I would be ready to do a lot more if I knew everyone else did", but when it's time to vote, they don't.
Not being ready to go lower than 24.5 degrees (doesn't have to be 19 if that's not bearable for you) in winter does not sound like you are ready to do much, though.
As I said before, I'm living in a house insulated up to the highest standard, I have a heat pump and a solar PV, the largest PV array in the estate. I think this is something reasonable. I work remotely, I don't drive much and I drive with very good MPG, I've figured out that my car has the best MPG at 90 kmph so I drive about 90 kmph, I don't travel often, I'm carefully sorting my waste (most people throw everything into the black bin), I'm trying to buy things which last and I'm trying to repair and sell, I think if everyone does that it would make some reasonable impact.
Though I don't think that 19 or whatever degrees is something of your business.
> you are ready to do much
I'm not ready to do unreasonable (or idiotic) things. Why 24.5? Because I've figured out that it's the most optimal temperature for me.
You seemed to be surprised because people reacted to your 24.5 degrees. I don't see how people could have guessed all that upfront.
> I'm not ready to do unreasonable (or idiotic) things. Why 24.5? Because I've figured out that it's the most optimal temperature for me.
Let's say that your case is extremely special and for you it does not make sense to not overheat, it does not make it unreasonable (or idiotic) to say that the vast majority of people should not overheat, does it?
While what you are saying is true, there has also been a tremendous amount of investment in energy efficiency, and that is something that I would expect to continue for quite a while.
I know my mother (based in .nl) had her heater set to 14 degrees because she simply couldn’t afford the gas bill. And there are huge threads on Reddit about people in similar situations in .nl last winter.
My personal gas+electricity bill went from €180 a month to almost €600. I really think the price of energy is a huge influence in the reduction of usage.
Not if you're young and healthy. Older people get less mobile and stiff when it's 15c inside though. And for health purposes it is suggested to not let the temperature get below 16c due to issues with moisture and mould.
Wife teaches exercise classes for the older 50’s and this is a cyclical problem. High temps mean less movement is required to keep warm which leads to loss of muscle mass and lower mobility, which requires higher temps to keep warm and so on….
I do that every winter - not because of the high prices for heating but because heating gets my skin dry. So I keep it around 18-19° and wear a jacket/warm clothes and drink hot tee and have a hot-water bottle. I also have a wearable blanket which is just super comfy.
Humidifiers are things that I will only run if I have to. I would much rather turn the heat down than run a unit that has to be refilled with de-ionized water constantly and blows moisture into whatever it is next to, and makes a huge mess if knocked over. It also has to be cleaned constantly because even with RO/DI water in it mold still grows.
I keep my house at 18C. It feels ok with a jacket or a blanket. There's no mold in sight anywhere. I guess you would need to have a humidity problem in your house to be affected by mold (my house has a central ventilation system which also keeps the humidity at bay - never above 40%).
If you are sitting all day in front of a computer, you need something. If you walk around, you'll be fine.
I reduced the indoor temperature this year to see how it was, and kept ~18'C. I think I'll keep it anyway - less energy used, and it's totally doable. When I have someone over for dinner, I bring it back to 20-21'C.
It is very difficult to compare self-reported temperatures! Really if you get into it, there are many crappy sensors, crappy thermostats, thermostats mounted near single pane glass, etc... I spend some time complaining about my Nest V3, many people did, but it's just too difficult to get a reliable measurement. Btw, in the end my conclusion was that the Nest was doing quite well. Just the Shelly and the Hue sensors were easily 1-2 degrees off.
Btw, what's up with Nest? I want another V3 in my new house, but they are not available anymore??
Maybe we mean something different with "jacket". Don't people wear sweaters and thermal underwear at home? And with those you would be conformable at 15 to 17.
English is not my first language. I suppose you would say "sweater" (but I said jacket because I prefer those garments with a zipper at the front: which I thought was always called "jacket" regardless of whether it's very light or thick).
You're not wrong. What people think will depend on context, and probably on region. In US English, jacket is a wide ranging term that could easily include a zip up sweater. If you wanted to be extra clear, you could saw "sweater jacket" or "fleece jacket" (if it's not woven).
When I was sitting at my computer for long periods I'd just make a warm bottle with hot water to put my feet on and also drink hot tea. That was enough to be comfortable even at around 16°C.
I've been keeping it cold for at least 7 years. Maybe because my bathrooms have heated floors, so there's never any water after a few hours you've showered, there just isn't any mold at all, it's perfectly clean.
It's both. Humidity will more readily condense on lower temperature walls and windows resulting in mould. You need a combination of ventilation to lower the dewpoint and warmer walls so as they don't meet the dewpoint.
Your choice of spelling of "mold" is consistent with your apparent lack of experience living in high humidity parts of the world :-)
In most buildings, ventilating a room while preserving temp in winter involves heating the incoming air. So there's a sweet spot between heating and ventilating when it comes to avoiding humidity.
If you can't crack the windows open a few times a day for a few minutes, then you got bigger problems that require proper solutions. In this case a proper dehumidifier is much more energy-efficient than keeping the heaters on.
If you have a old house, with a basement and lots of stuff, than it is quite hard, that the ventilation reaches every corner.
And those corners will get moldy.
Oh and I don't have a house, nor a mold problem, but know enough people who do have, even though they do ventilate reasonable. Houses were build with the assumption, that they are heated.
Now you can build new houses that are better designed - but you cannot magically adjust all the existing houses.
>Houses were build with the assumption, that they are heated.
Yes and no.
It depends on the country and areas within it and it applies mainly to houses built in the last 60-70 years or so, maybe a few more years back in cities (for heating with radiators) before that time many, many houses were (poorly) heated by fireplaces and/or stoves.
Besides, the permeability of the building materials was traditionally much better, and windows/doors were leaky, guaranteeing a much better ventilation.
At least here in Italy the heating was a luxury until well after World War II, particularly in the country and in small vilages, anecdotally my family used to have a house in a small village in central Italy where the heating until the '70's was based on the devices that can be seen here (Italian):
Particularly the kitchen and dining room was heated by the "stufa economica" that was also used to cook meals, the sitting room had a fireplace that heated also (a little) the bedroom behind it, and there was another large bedroom heated by a "stufa in terracotta", having a "prete" for each bed was needed.
The house was anyway very, very cold, particularly at night/early morning.
Well, obviously it does, but I would think most houses in europe do have to be heated and were build in the last 60-70 years and those I was refering to.
And before that, yes it was something like 2 bugs cancel each other out. Leaky windows prevents mold.
(And in general only rich people could afford to heat the whole house)
Dehumidifiers are actually a pretty good way to heat your house if you have a humidity problem. You recover significant amounts of latent heat of vaporisation when running it.
I suggest buying a hygrometer so you don't have to guess. In most places you'll quickly find out that you can bring humidity down to acceptable levels with a few minutes of "shock" ventilation. You can of course turn on the heating for a few minutes to bring humidity down a few percent-points more (entirely optional), but it absolutely doesn't have to be turned on all day long to have acceptable levels.
I believe the idea from above poster is not that you should stop heating and "live like a caveman", but that many people would make great savings by wearing a wool sweater on top of their t-shirt and turning the temp down a couple degrees. As a case in point, I never spent a winter with 22°c indoors, usually it's around 18-19°c.
That being said, as someone else said, controlling humidity is also a concern for the long-term viability of buildings.
Anything under 21 during night for me makes it uncomfortable to sleep. At 22 for me it is the perfect temperature and in the winter I wear a normal clothes, too cold for t-shirts at 22.
Jesus, I got uncomfortable just reading this. 21 at night would be insufferable for us (we’re in western Canada).
17 at night, 19.5 during the day is as hot as our house has ever been in winter; though with a new baby I suspect that might change by 0.5 for a while.
I'm in Ireland. My ancient cottage gets down to about 13°C with every-other-day heating, even if it's 0° outside. Rarely colder. I do indeed just wear a jacket or a sweater, and I have a heated blanket on the couch. You get used to it and start to prefer it! If it were 22° in here I'd be in a T-shirt opening windows to let some heat out.
Maybe we can just agree on this: set the temperature in your home to whatever temperature you feel like. Depending on the setting that might be more or less expensive but that is an optimization problem for you to solve, not others. Don't pretend you are some kind of climate change martyr because you are wearing a sweater.
We set ours to 18.5 and we felt fine al winter by simply using warmer clothes at home than what we were used to. Your mileage will vary, but for the environment warmer clothes are much friendlier than warmer houses.
Try to do office work from home with a subpar temperature. I hate it and it's unhealthy. 20 celsius is a healthy temperature, I'm not taking anything less.
Everybody's body is different. I'm normally very resistant to cold, esp, if I'm moving, yet I cool down when I don't move, and esp. at nights (when body slows down even more), so I need a warmer environment (~20 degrees C) to live comfortably at nights.
Today I'm walking around in a T-Shirt when everyone has some kind of thin coats on, but when I sit and idle for an hour, or get hungry, I cool down considerably.
My wife is extremely resistant to heat, but this disadvantages her in normal and cold weather severely. Her baseline is 22-23 degrees C to live comfortably, with long sleeved warm clothes.
Also, temperature doesn't always indicate cold's penetration power. If the air is dry, -18 degrees C is survivable with a mid-thickness polar coat. If it's humid, try to survive 2-3 degrees C with a down / wind-resistant coat. It won't be easy.
Your observations are spot on. People are different and thus handle temperatures differently. The bit about humidity is absolutely 100% in line with my experience. I could handle -11 degrees C in Germany with clothing that would leave me freezing in the UK at -2 degrees C.
The same goes for handling heat and humidity. I grew up with average temps of 35 degrees C in a dry climate. It was not a problem at all. 28 degrees in high humidity I find unbearable.
> Everybody's body is different. I'm normally very resistant to cold, esp, if I'm moving, yet I cool down when I don't move, and esp. at nights (when body slows down even more), so I need a warmer environment (~20 degrees C) to live comfortably at nights.
You're describing something that is true of every human on Earth. Everyone gets cold when they don't move. Everyone's body cools down at night. You don't need 20C to sleep at night.
If you need a warmer temperature at night to feel comfortable, I would strongly recommend trying out a waterbed. It is more expensive than a normal mattress but if correctly fitted to your body it is infinitely more comfortable and always the ideal temperature for you. I would also assume that it is more energy efficient to heat the (well insulated on the bottom/sides) mattress and keep the room cool than heating up the entire room.
Thanks a lot. Sleeping in the cold with a blanket is not a problem for me. My gripe is the period between dinner and bedtime. Body slows down, hence I can't heat myself even with warm clothing if the room is cold. To keep warm, I need a kind of blanket, which impedes my mobility a lot.
Also, feeling cold at night lowers my mood, and I don't want to do anything. However, I'm fine during the day when my body's running at its usual. I live with a t-shirt all year round, even.
As I said elsewhere, problem is not about sleeping. It's the time period after dinner and bedtime. My body loves to sleep at colder temperatures.
Being tired, not being able to warm oneself after dinner at home because of a slowed down metabolism at 18 degrees C is not comfortable for me (yes, even with warmer clothes, socks, etc. Hot drinks helps, but temporarily).
I set mine to 18.5, but I draught-proofed every door and, more noticeably, put plastic film taped over each window - inside and outside: already double-glazed windows became 4x so with the addition of two extra air barriers.
Cost maybe €25 for seven glass doors/ windows.
Bathroom temp inside 19C, behind the first layer of added plastic 17.5C, behind the glass 12.5C, behind that 10C. I also have wooden blinds - draught-proofed and lined with bubble-wrap - temp was 7.5C and actually outside was 5-6.
Add: warm shower when I got home, or got up, sensible warm clothing, and whilst my neighbours thought my plastic looked crappy I was happy with my results.
I also send in over-read meter readings thru the year: late december i told the truth...gas bill was actually -€30 ie €0. Waiting for the electric bill.
64 degrees is going to be extremely cold for most Americans. At least in the north where I've spent considerable time.
I grew up in a household that would keep it at 60 during the day, and 52 degrees at night in order to save money. I then took on a job that had me doing service calls into people's homes and it was eye opening that even the most poor run down apartment I'd visit would have the heat blasting at 75+. Oftentimes with a window cracked to boot.
I don't think I have a single friend these days that keeps it lower than 70, usually in the 72-74 range. And yes, I find it extremely hot when visiting.
No wonders that country is one of the worst polluters in the world. Windows open at 75F in the winter? That's just stupid. Plain stupid and irresponsible.
It’s only cold me at nights, after my body slows down for the night.
Since my body cools down at night, warmer clothes doesn’t help (since I generate way less heat). I need to get under a blanket, which hampers my mobility a lot.
Skimmed through the article. Not a word about many factories closed in EU this winter, or moving to other countries (e.g. USA where energy is cheaper).
Of course, according to propaganda, it's all "efficiency" and "saving" and definitely not US effectively killing EU industry.
If you cherry pick to push and agenda, sure you can do that. You can do the opposite too, for example Poland, which is a country in EU, overtook the US to become world's 2nd largest Li-Ion battery manufacturer.
Industry changes over time depending on the the conditions. Europeans are not fond with an aggressive gas station on their footstep, cut back on buying stuff from it and obviously see the negative impact from buying from a gas station further away. They also live less comfortably but it's far from doom and gloom, which many suspect might follow if that gas station expand its power.
Everybody knows its not ideal to spend more and everyone knows its not fun to consume less. Sometimes, you have no choice unless you are nihilistic.
What you do is cherry-picking. Energy is universal confound across industry, more expensive energy implies loss across all industry, even if local variation due to different factors shows that some industries do fine.
Poland had a shortage of carbonated drinks for some time, because the main plants that provided CO2 (as a byproduct of manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer) shut down.
You couldnt buy artificially carbonated water for some time. Naturally carbonated water and cola (different suppliers?) was available.
"They are, however, well behind China, which has 77% of global capacity." says the article. So Poland is ahead of the US in a market that the US doesn't attempt to compete in.
The US really isn't the country to beat for manufacturing, we're a fair way in to the 21st century by now.
I didn't set the first goalpost, I'm just pointing out that the EU was defeated before it began. The industry can't leave, it barely exists. Although whatever they have in the Li-ion space must be tougher than a tardigrade to even get 10% market share against far-superior Chinese manufacturing capability.
Who knows, maybe we'll even get to see it growing through a nuclear winter at the rate the EU is going.
That's a completely different topic, called de-industrialization. What I'm trying to make argument about is the OPs claim that EU industry is failing(because choose not to play by Russian wishes) and all the factories are moving to US and soon EU will be selling nothing more than museum tickets.
Now I know China is well known for their green credentials and the EU have been underinvesting in Green technology by policy... of wait, no it is the opposite of both those things. That is what failed EU industry looks like. The EU has been trying to set themselves up with batteries for a decade now and China is 5x-ing them by just knuckling down and producing stuff without worrying about political correctness.
The fact that the first market you thought of was one where the EU has been drubbed so badly should be a concern to everyone. Except maybe China.
The EU also managed to avoid recession, contrary to what people expected last year.
I think the reason is the same as for the lower then expected impact of the sanctions on Russia. People are quite resourceful when facing an acute crisis. When millions of people have an actual motivation to find better ways of doing things, they tend to find solutions they would have never considered under normal circumstances.
Historically, due to the very high correlation between GDP and economic activity "recession" has been a shorthand for "reduced energy use".
You might easily find that a "recession" is less damaging to people than a period of drastically cut energy consumption. People unable to heat themselves in winter undermines the idea of a growing economy - the metrics aren't supposed to be a shell game of excuses where some drops are papered over because it is politically inconvenient.
I mean, how are people supposed to be better off if we're seeing these types of sharp drops in energy use? It strains credulity that someone in the Netherlands can cut their gas use by 24% in a year and claim that their material living standard didn't decline. There'd have to be something mighty positive happening - what is it? They haven't had time to build up capital to keep themselves comfortable.
Given how wasteful is in general comfortable western life I wouldn't be surprised if we could cut consumer energy use by half without a drop in basic comfort by simply being a little more mindful.
Stage-1) Politicians should be the first and their energy expenditures should be cut by law to half of the median with some painful consequences for breaking it.
Stage-2) After a couple of years same goes for top 1% and government offices.
Stage-3) After another couple of years do this for top 10%
This is really not the case. People did not do anything, the increased prices and government mandates did. Yeah people survived this year, and will continue doing so, except those of course who will get fucked up. What happens is that indeed we have a lot of layers to fall from one down to the next one and again and again without reaching the bottom yet.
Managed to avoid recession yet the cities are full of tents and other homeless encapments... things we were seeing only in US in the past are in every major EU capital now. The homelessness is out of control.
Your claim wasn't that there are homelessness issues (which there are and they got worse over the last decade at least) - you alleged cities full of tents and other encampments.
And the Bahnhofsviertel always had some presence - sometimes more, sometimes less.
Mostly fresh migrants who believed that Europe has a certain living standard for everyone and spent ungodly money to get trafficked from Turkey or Libya.
Homelessness is out of control in the US and elsewhere too.
The real question is whether there was a statistically significant difference compared to previous years ceteris paribus (same location, same time of year, etc.).
Also the influx of various refugees over the years should be taken into account.
Anecdotal evidence that there is homelessness does not automatically mean doom and gloom for a country.
I live in Brussels. I walk/run throughout the city every day. There's tents next to the rail station, there's tents next to large supermarkets, next to parks... everywhere. 3 years ago that was not the case. Metro stations are also overwhelmed with people passed out on heroin or whatever drugs they use. The difference is more than noticeable.
I visited Frankfurt just 1 month ago and was shocked to see the situation being even worse.
I believe a lot of it is a post-effect of covid where some people fell through the craks and now are just lost to drugs or other addictions.
Well to be fair, it is not US's issue that EU does not do independent politics and blindly follows US in all affairs. It has been shooting itself on the foot for many years now, and keeps doing that even more over last year.
That's correct, but the TFA is about how Europe cut energy consumption this winter.
I think the reason is twofold:
1. Industries can probably not afford to cut production immediately
2. At least in France, there were worries about gas availability for the winter. The government tried to have industries lower their consumption to not run out of the reserves during the winter.
The French national gas distribution company was talking about a significant reduction in industry consumption of 23% compared to 2018-2019 (to exclude covid), even when adjusted for weather.
Well, the government asked them to consume less so some reduction is expected.
The part of the claim you have taken upon yourself to substantiate is that the reduction is mainly (or even mostly) due to industry getting closed down completely or relocated specifically to the US.
The article you linked is also an example of "spinning" things to make them sound worse than they are: "They are now prompting BASF to lay off thousands of workers and shut down sections of its flagship facility in Ludwigshafen, Germany" - the "thousands of workers" (actually 2600, just enough to qualify as "thousands") are worldwide, in Ludwigshafen itself it's 700 over two years (according to https://www.chemietechnik.de/service-standorte/basf-schliess... - actually the number of 700 is also mentioned at the very end of the c&en article).
BASF is moving some production to China, but even that seems to be a bad decision now with the breakdown of trust with the authoritarian countries pushing for a multi-polar world.
Germany is in bed with China in the same way it was in bed with Russia, and you can see how that went.
"But it's never mentioned in such oh-so-wonderful super-objective democratic example of western journalism as this Economist article, LOL.
The western journalism started to hit the lowest bar set by third-world countries in the last 10-15 years. Or maybe it always was the same propaganda, I just never paid attention and blindly believed it until around 2008-2011."
This has very strong "old man yells at clouds" energy. So where does such an incredibly enlightened person such as yourself get news from?
The alternative the US was happy with was probably the one right next door. Poland has powered itself ~80% with coal for decades - attracting almost no flak for it.
The US followed their interest, and got everything they wanted out of this conflict, which is fine, that's how countries generally act. It is rather a question of what Germany should have done, 10-15 years ago. Pushing the Association Agreement and the Maidan revolution were not in Germany's interest, in no world is putting Ukraine into our sphere worth escalating tensions so close to our borders and losing access to Russian resources. A region is only safe if all players in that region can feel safe, and Russian security interests were disregarded at every point since 2000.
Done is done, but what I really can't forgive is that while pushing for this asinine conflict, there was literally no plan on how to deal with the consequences. Instead of diversifying our energy supply, we are now dependent on the US, which given its trajectory, will bite us in the arse 5 years down the line. Outside of France, there is literally 0 foreign policy competence left in the EU, and it is really showing with how helpless every crisis since 2008 has been handled.
Our propaganda blames Putin for every financial problems we have here (Czechia). Naturally. When people start asking questions like "Who care about green deal if my kids freezing and my pocket is empty beause ridiculous energy prices".
Our ministry of interior has even official guides how to promote this blaming of Putin in media.
I still can’t comprehend who the EU leadership are actually the leaders of. If they actually wanted to be the leaders and protect the EU they wouldn’t be doing what they are doing. Their policies are basically designed by the US and benefit the US.
The fact that so many in the EU don’t realise this just points out how amazing American propaganda is
The only way this war could "have been avoided" is if Russia didn't decide to invade it. Anything else is just victim blaming Russian propaganda that tries to justify Russia's naked imperialism.
It could have also been avoided by not offering Ukraine an Association Agreement - or retracting it when it became clear that this was a red line for Russia, and there was a deep societal divide within Ukraine on whether to align with the West or Russia. The Maidan protests had barely 50% support across all of Ukraine (but much higher in Kiev and the western regions of Ukraine). The risk of Ukraine fracturing over this was very obvious, but apparently completely acceptable to European leaders.
> Anything else is just victim blaming Russian propaganda that tries to justify Russia's naked imperialism.
That's such a narrow and poor way to talk about international politics, and it is exactly the reason why we have a war in Europe, and broken countries like Syria and Libya on our doorstep. Even if your intentions are good, it is worthless if the consequences are terrible. In general the "everything that doesn't align with my worldview is propaganda" is a pretty good sign someone loves eating propaganda.
Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin is a lunatic who wanted Ukrainian land to be part of Russia because he things that would cement his legacy. That is the only reason. Everything else is lies. The invasion has caused Finland to join NATO, which was a predictable consequence of the invasion.
The blame lays squarely on Russia. No argument about it. The point was that with the right policies in the beginning of 2000s the US could have prevented this outcome but had chosen not to. The EU could've done the same at the time but it always plays poodle. After Putin's second return to power it was probably too late anyways.
By actually pushing idea that everything is "great powers" game and no one else has any agency.
Russians desperately want to present the idea that they truly fight powerful US and NATO and still pushing; and not getting kicked ass by Ukraine getting 5% of US defense budget.
i was just about to post a reply telling the parent poster that his mind is being controlled by putin. and here you beat me to it
... except ur serious :(
EU includes a bunch of countries that either directly border Russia, or border Belarus, which now has to be considered a Russian puppet state. Russia has long (as in literally decades; I remember such talk in late 90s growing up in Russia!) directed rhetoric at some of those countries that is similar to what was said about Ukraine before the invasion. Thus, for them, the benefit of supporting Ukraine right now is to avoid having to fight a war like that on their own territory.
>German industry, the driver of the EU economy is basically destroyed without cheap Russian energy.
Because Germany was dumb enough to make itself energy dependent on gas from Russia, a warmongering country lead by an autocrat, that having invaded several countries in recent years (Ukraine, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria) and supporting military separatists in various European countries (Transnistria in Moldova), and despite the US warning them several times about this risk.
But chasing the sweet teat of cheap Russian gas like a dog in heat was too good too pass for German industrialists who saw only easy money, so all national security concerns went out the window despite all the warnings they got.
Maybe Germans will vote better next time and realize you can't have be Europe's heavy industry nation while being non-nuclear and also energy dependent on an antagonizing adversary with expansionist tendencies.
>"a warmongering country lead by an autocrat, that having invaded several countries in recent years (Ukraine, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria)"
Chechnya is part of Russia. Country can not invade itself. It can commit atrocities against their own and this is what Russia did during the war. This happened because Chechnya tried to secede. Unilateral secession of the region will not be appreciated in any country and will likely lead to internal war and this is what did happen.
In Syria Russia was invited by their official government. You might not like the government and for good reasons but it is irrelevant. Btw what legal basis other countries have being in Syria?
Try doing a bit of fact checking when posting.
And while you bitch about Germany - The US and Canada for example had industry / manufacturing largely destroyed by moving it to China. If for example China disappears tomorrow we are fucked big time for a while. Not sure how long it'll take to restore our independence from 3rd world manufacturing. It is general trait - if companies can earn extra buck doing something they would do it no matter what unless stopped by Government (which they largely own).
Chechnya is not really "part of" Russia. It was conquered by the Empire, then declared independence after the dissolution of said Empire, then was reconquered by the Soviets. Same as happened to Ukraine. Same as happened to Georgia.
And yes, no real difference from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, etc.' If those places wanted to secede, and the US bombed them flat, would many be supportive of the US "legal right" to do so?
>"Chechnya is not really "part of" Russia. It was conquered by the Empire"
If you want to go that far come back to me when you return California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to Mexico. And this is a beef just between 2 countries. There are many more.
Besides nobody gives a fuck about your "not really". What matters is what is recognized by the other countries and they accept Chechnya being part of Russia
I do include those. They are all part of the same state-building playbook. Although really, those states were taken from the indigenous people, by Mexico. Chechnyans and their ancestors ARE the indigenous people of the area.
No, that doesn't matter. It's still an occupation. Many people in the Caucasus gave and do give a "flying fuck."
That wasn't the question. Where did i say Russia has no right to exist? Nowhere. I said Chechnya is not "Russia". None of the Caucasus were Russian before they were conquered by Russia. They then declared independence and were reconquered. That is why there was an insurgency in Chechnya, and why there was a military campaign against it by the Russian state, and why they installed a strongman afterwards who has been loyal to Putin since.
It's also why they campaigned in Georgia, and in Ukraine, and why all the ex-USSR states are convinced that they are targets.
It is not. Russia would exist without Chechnya just fine. They have 0 legitimate reason to be there. Non-Russian people have lived in the Caucasus since before Russians even existed as an ethnicity.
You've lost interest in the conversation because you are emotional and don't want to be wrong.
The irony is that Russia itself had a decently sized nationalist movement with "stop feeding Caucasus!" as a slogan. That is, they wanted Caucasian republics to separate so that Russia wouldn't have to "waste money" on them, and to avoid free movement of people from there into territories that are predominantly ethnically Russian.
Yup, the Caucasus are only good for two things to the Russian state. Defense (the mountains are way easier to defend than the plains of southern Russia) and oil.
I was talking about general and scholarly opinion, not recognition by other states which only matters if there is enough power on their side to make the Us/whoever care. Which is not the case so the US doesnt.
Great logic bro. Ignoring your snarkiness, if you have to choose between Uncle Sam and Putin, which do you think is the better option for a stable business relationship?
If you use your brain for a second, the answer is easy.
^This guy thinks that "shutting down nukes" means nuclear weapons. Bro, nukes means nuclear powerplants.
And be snarky all you want, but the US didn't force Germany shut down their nukes, they did that to themselves, and the US didn't force Germany to get buddy-buddy with the Putin autocrat, but the contrary.
This kind of ignorance is why we're in this mess in the first place. Your leaders make bad decisions and you simp for them and then somehow blame the US.
in the same way that ussr was the only country that mattered in the warsaw pact
.....
edit: it is highly likely that russia would never have invaded ukraine had the us not meddled and sponsored the overthrow of an elected ukranian government. russia and eu would have a stable energy contract. russia would not form an alliance with china and would continue to be europe orientated, eventually becoming a normal european country. ukraine would have kept its original borders, paid off its debts to russia, and have a stable country for all its citizens
> in the same way that ussr was the only country that mattered in the warsaw pact
The list of NATO interventions are: former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and counter-piracy in Yemen.
The list of Warsaw Pact interventions: invading Hungary and Czechoslovakia when they wanted to leave.
Quite a distinction. Only one of the NATO interventions was driven by the foreign policy of the US--all of the others were being driven more by Europeans' foreign policy concerns.
Ok, so you agree that the US couldn’t have done anything to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine. That‘s great.
Could you then explain why it would be in the interest of European countries not to react to Russia invading countries on their doorstep? It seems inconceivable to me that European countries wouldn’t have reacted with sanctions and arms for Ukraine even if the US had kept completely out of it.
It seems crystal clear to me that making sure that Russia cannot win this war is both in the interest of the US but also and especially the interest of European countries. You don’t want a dictator that invades neighbors and is successful at that at your doorstep.
Agreed. I don't even think that the Russian state would really dispute that "making sure that Russia cannot win this war" is in the interests of e.g. Polish or Lithuanian states. They just ... have other interests.
Technology sanctions on China (for example, ASML in the Netherlands). Sanctions on Russian energy.
Basically Germany's entire foreign policy is economic suicide and very much driven by a US stooge (Baerbock). The total penetration of the German Green Party (formerly pacifist) is an excellent example of American influence.
Technology sanctions on China are from US. Since ASML is using US tech for EUV they need to comply. These also make sense give China is building up its military using this and if they invade taiwan or other neighbors we'd be forced to fight them.
Sanctions on Russian energy are a response to invasion. Apart from moral reasons, they also are meant to cripple russia so we don't have to fight them later in the baltics, in poland or romania.
> Sanctions on Russian energy are a response to invasion.
I might get downvoted for this, but the duty of every head of state is to ensure its country's economic and citizens well being is above anything else.
And what the EU as a whole did was exactly the opposite with the sanctions.
And no, no one would have had to fight anywhere else in Europe.
They are doing that by ensuring future conflict is much more unlikely.
If these measures were done earlier perhaps russia would not have started current invasion and we'd be much better off.
So perhaps politicians failed by being compliant up to now.
Try telling the baltics, poland, romania that they should not fear russia and continue trading... Same countries russia constantly threatens and are part of EU and NATO.
Imagine germany's position if Poland is conquered by russia.
> And no, no one would have had to fight anywhere else in Europe.
That's a bold statement considering russia's posturing, threats, history and leaked initial plans.
Germany in particular has been handling this crisis extremely well, showing itself to be much more adaptable than many feared.
I’m very proud of that and I think cutting dependency on Russian gas – while we might not have necessarily wished for it to go this fast – is just plain good policy, making Germany more resilient in the future. Obviously there have been some short term bad consequences, that‘s pretty much unavoidable with any such drastic shift. But consequences have been far from catastrophic or existential for us. Germans and Europeans are going through some times that are a bit tougher – the people suffering, however, are in Ukraine.
I see Germany and Europe coming out of this more resilient and safer, especially if we make sure Putin cannot win this war.
Look no further than Ukraine. Was Europe as eager to sabotage itself when the US invaded two fucking countries based on idiotic lies? No, almost everyone had to help the invasions in one way or another. We actively helped the bad guys.
This time we're tripping over ourselves to to make life harder for the Russians no matter the cost, seemingly lacking any self awareness.
When it comes to Ukraine I think EU and US interests mostly align for one and it highlights the lack of actual coherence. (We could have had group buys for gas long ago rather than letting Russia do price diplomacy)
I agree tho. Beyond that we've been pretty much a lapdog.
Yeah, we live in a puppet state. We can't even vote for Von der Leyen, and then they have the gall to criticise China!
And the worst part is they even fail at providing a good single market. You still can't work for a Spanish company from Germany (without being a freelancer), or pay your taxes in Spain with a French bank account. If you start a company, hiring across Europe means having local payroll offices to handle local taxes and labour laws in local languages in every single country (and possibly more internal autonomous regions). Trade unions differ in every country so there's no central negotiations.
Residence registration and ID is done independently in every single country, so you might be delayed by months when moving for work.
I suspect that, in many parlementary systems where the results of elections would have looked the same as the last European Parlement Election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_elect...) , lacking a clear majority, or a clear coalition, the "head of state" (prime minister, chancelor, etc...) might very well have been a "non candidate", chosen as a compromise between the various parties.
This is what we have in the EU at the moment - VDL as a "compromise" between Center-Right, Center-Left, Center, "South-bloc" and "North-bloc", coming from the party that won the election.
None of the other major party candidates would have been able to form a commission (maybe Margarethe Vestager, but then the party arriving third would have won, which would have been weird and undemocratic to some.)
I know some people would rather have the head of the commission elected directly - but, seing the crazyness of French system, completely centered on the election of a single person, I'm starting to reconsider...
As for being a "puppet state", well... I guess we come back at the US by forcing people to implement GDPR popups ;) ?
The main thing is that having them elected directly would mean holding an election across all EU countries - and I think that would be great for European unity. Like have French, Spanish, Greek, Swedes, Germans, etc. all debating and voting - and people would actually know the background of who the President of the EU commission is!
Right now VdL has just failed upwards, being a terrible politician in Germany who was moved to the EU to get her out of domestic politics, and it seems she'll be NATO leader soon (again unelected).
The ePrivacy Directive is different from the GDPR btw. The GDPR is actually not so bad tbh - although a bit too over-reaching, but at least it's a step towards making some things like I mentioned in the previous comment a bit more uniform.
> The main thing is that having them elected directly would mean holding an election across all EU countries - and I think that would be great for European unity.
I'm not sure I get your point. The European Parlement Election _is_ held accross all EU contries "almost" at the same time. It's spread accross a few days to respect the voting tradition of each member state, but the campaign very much happen at the same time for everyone.
There were debates between the "heads", but there you hit the language barrier - we're not going to see a Spanish candidate arguing with a German one in English on French Television any time soon.
> Like have French, Spanish, Greek, Swedes, Germans, etc. all debating and voting - and people would actually know the background of who the President of the EU commission is!
To be honest, the 2019 elections were the first time it _did_ felt like the voting was occuring across the bloc. Each cross-european party had a few clear faces for candidates for the Commission, beforehand.
Had the PPE received a clear majority, we would be talking about the Webber Commission - except, no-one really won, and they had to pick a compromise candidate.
> Right now VdL has just failed upwards
She is the grand tradition of the parlementary leaders chosen because they were "the least worse alternative", and "bad enough to be acceptable by everyone."
Again, I don't know if it is structural, or just the result of an election without a clear majority.
I understand this is an issue because she was only known in Germany. Would it have been better to at least choose a "compromise candidate" that had previous EU-level experience ?
Ironically, you have to notice that the British People did not vote for Sunak either ;)
I don't know what's the structural way to avoid "an elected body not agreeing on a name chosen before the election". Do you stick to the name, until you reach gridlock ? Do you setup your elections to ensure a clear majority, artifically reducing the diversity of your electorate until you have a duopoly ?
> Ironically, you have to notice that the British People did not vote for Sunak either ;)
But VdL is the head of the Commission not Parliament (which is also far too weak IMO). The equivalent would be the King in Britain, which is obviously even worse, same for the House of Lords, etc. but two wrongs don't make a right.
I think really the Parliament should be more powerful with PR voting for the European blocs directly rather than local parties with the lists, etc. and the President should also be directly elected.
Basically give the EU parliament more power in return for greater democracy.
There will be an election across all EU countries in 2024, to decide the composition of the European Parliament. The previous one was held in 2019. That you apparently don't know that indicates that simply holding an EU-wide election doesn't guarantee sufficient debate.
But you vote for the parties in your country who form a bloc - it isn't really a vote across borders in the same way as a Presidential election would be.
The Parliament is also very weak and can't propose laws, etc.
This seems pretty common in "fédérations" (or similar systems.)
I guess Californians and Texans can both vote for local politicians under the same party, but nothing force the politicians to vote together once in Congress ?
Also, I think as a bloc, the EU is not entirely ready yet for, say, French people to directly vote for non French people. But who knows.
As for the balance of powers in the EU, it's far from perfect. But coming from France, who am I to judge ?
It can be done. But this wasn't done for efficiency or to fight climate change, but out of solidarity with Ukraine, and Europe had to reduce its dependency on Russian gas.
Still, if we can do it for that, can't we do it for climate change too? It's a more abstract problem though; not as concrete, immediate and urgent as a war. And frankly, I wouldn't mind being able to put my temperature back to 20 next winter. 19 doesn't sound like a big change, but it's still a bit chilly.
Tbh, for me (in the Netherlands) it was the costs that went from 120 euro per month up to 600 per month. I'm ashamed to admit we were able to cut about 40% by simple measures.
As a Dutch citizen I'm using up an entire African village worth of water every month because it costs almost nothing.
There are probably people on this planet right now living like the Fremen.
I'm not sure if it's intended to be smug. It's a statement of fact, and to me, it sounds like it implies that maybe these things should be more expensive, to encourage us to conserve more.
Calling it solidarity with Ukraine is an understatement. People reduced the consumption because they couldn't afford it anymore — for big economical and diplomatic reasons.
I know plenty of people who reduced their gas consumption way before their contracts got updated. No financial stimulus, pure feeling of civic duty and solidarity - with Ukraine, with those who already had adjusted contracts, and out of fear for what would happen in the coming winter.
Desire to develop agriculture was not good emotional drive for nomads that hunted and gathered until there was nothing left, but it was an important civilisational step. Also I've lived in Germany for over a decade now, and I've concluded it's the least efficient country one can imagine. But it's rational to save and not waste energy just as it is to nurture and not destroy your surrounding.
At least for Germany it was very mild. You could've worn a T-Shirt on New Year's Eve. Its average temperatures may not stand out among the last 5 winters because they were all particularly mild, but compared to the past 50 years, it absolutely was standing out.
That is not what you’re source says. Your source is only talking about gas consumption for production of electricity. But most consumers will use gas for heating, which isn‘t mentioned in that article at all.
But ignoring that, the chart at the end shows that coal, gas and solar increased their share in electricity production, whereas it was nuclear which showed the biggest decrease.
I wonder if the world, or countries should mandate Energy Efficiency, or insulation on all new housing. And if they could have some side benefits of housing price where older housing with no insulation would be marketed at a lower price.
But most of the US lives MUCH further south than Europe, requiring a lot of AC, and also heating in the winter, because the temperature swings are so wild. Europe is more temperate, you don't get as often +25C and then freezing weather in 2 days.
The large decrease in the Netherlands is primarily explained by the large number of greenhouse farmers halting operations or switching to a crop that doesn't need heating
The basic equation is ROI on insulation and other energy efficiency investment, which is directly dependent on energy prices. We know very well how to implement really good insulation (eg passive houses in -20C climates), heat recovery for ventilation, and non fossil heating sources. But fossil energy is too cheap and regulated incentives lacking to improve building energy efficiency.
Let's hope the EU policy in the works[1] will fix some of this and not get gutted by the anti-green populist factions.
> Look no further than energy consumption per capita in the US. It's drastically higher than in other developed countries.
There are many reasons for this:
- they are richer, so they can afford bigger houses and larger cars. You think Europeans wouldn't like to live in a larger house, or drive a larger car? This is not a choice, or efficiency improvements, this is just Europeans not being able to afford more.
- they have more land, so they can afford to live in quiet suburbia, surrounded by trees and lawns rather than noisy, polluted neighborhoods.
- they produce their own energy. Oil import-export is close to net zero and they export gas. Producing oil and gas is energy intensive. Europe on the other hand imports energy, and don't have to account for those emissions.
- they live further south, and need constant AC in the summer.
There are inefficiencies in the US, for example houses are poorly insulated; but these inefficiencies are a little overblown, when compared to Europe. If Europeans would live at the same standards of living like the Americans, and produce their own energy, they would be close in energy consumption.
Per capita 42.1MWh for Germany vs 76.6MWh for USA in 2021 (before the war and any special energy savings) [1]. The living standard is comparable and the output per GDP is 0.98kWh for Germany vs 1.48kWh for the USA (in 2018) [2].
So it should be easy for the USA to reduce by 1/3 their energy consumption without affecting productivity and without even switching to other energy sources.
There is a lot of potential in energy efficiency also in Germany and other countries of course.
No credible aggregate analysis says that living standards are “comparable” in the US and Germany.
If you assume your conclusion, it’s easy to make convincing sounding arguments.
There are many ways that Germany is more pleasant than the US, and if you care a lot about those things you can construct arguments for why being in Germany is preferable.
But ability to consume goods and services is not one of those arguments. The US is MUCH richer than Germany.
> The world has a lot of potential to be more efficient.
Well nobody really measured how capping the temperature at workplaces at 18.C affects productivity, nor long term effects in health, so the "more efficient" part has a lot of different caveats.
As a non-American,I can't understand for the life of me why a lot of American homes are equipped with home-wide underfloor heating systems and AC's running on freaking diesel just to be able to walk around home with shorts and t-shirts. And I too live in an area where it gets frigid in winter but it's nothing a wool sweater and a blanket can't fix.
> As a non-American,I can't understand for the life of me why a lot of American homes are equipped with home-wide underfloor heating systems and AC's running on freaking diesel just to be able to walk around home with shorts and t-shirts.
As an American, I can’t understand for the life of me where anyone would get the idea that either of these is a common thing. I mean, an AC running on diesel isn't completely unheard of, in that a house might have both AC and a diesel backup generator, but underfloor heating or anything in the home powered primarily by diesel are not even remotely common.
Doesn't explain the AC, which I agree is really rare, but in some parts of the US (North East) fuel oil is commonly used for winter heating. Depending on grade, fuel oil is sometimes synonymous with diesel, with the two are being served from the same tank. Map here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3690 (with "fuel oil" being called "heating oil").
You can’t understand why a lot of American homes are equipped with home wide underfloor heating systems cos most homes are not equipped that way - where is this idea even coming from ?
Source : lived in america for a decade and make decent money and my million dollar home has absolutely big standard heating and cooling. Underfloor heating is a luxury and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in a home in all my time here.
I live in Germany, and have been more mindful of how high I turn the heaters and how much electricity and hot water I use. Honestly, all I did was stop wasting it mindlessly. Certainly wouldn't call it living in cold and hardship. The same is true for the people I know (though I admit I might live in a bubble).
Interesting to see The Economist doing modeling. Curious that they see no problem in it being utterly unauditable. Unlike a research paper that would cite specific datasets and model parameters, this is just "here are some numbers we're taking as true because model". They don't even appear to have done any validation on their model (holding back a few years from the training set to see how well it predicted them).
> We trained our model to predict the daily average gas demand per person for 26 countries (Britain and all EU member states except Malta and Cyprus, which use little or no gas), for each winter month between January 2013 and February 2022. After the model had learned the relationship between temperatures and gas demand, we gave it real temperatures from this winter and asked it to predict how gas usage might have played out had Russia not sparked an energy crisis.
Welcome to the majority of "journalism". All it takes is a look one or two levels down into the "facts" presented to realize they're wildly and poorly extrapolated to fit a narrative by whoever is paying the bills.
tuning a model to a statistical sample of the past doesn't give as much assurance about it's predictive power as people think.
then, only in the future do we find that the model failed to predict, by which time they tell us, "yeah, but we have a new model", to which the only appropriate answer is "yeah, but you had the same certainty about your old model that did not work"
I'm not saying that there's no point in modelling: you learn a lot about the dynamics of the system when you are working on the model; but that's not what the resultant model conveys.
This is less insightful then you might think, as it's not limited to modeling. We just have a tendency to use previous observations as truth for future endeavors. Mainly because it's usually fine and works fine.
You can see it in every second discussion about any topic that's currently being researched:
I.e. there is nothing guaranteeing we won't have a super viral virus with 90%+ chance of death. It could happen...
There is nothing guaranteeing that LLMs ability to output relevant data will get better, even if it's been tremendously improved within the last year alone.
You can basically see this in action whenever someone is making a prediction. The likelihood of it coming true might be good enough to work with it, but you can always have something go amiss, or a meteor out of currently unknown materials hits the sun causing a chain reaction which causes it to go supernova...
It usually isn't. John Kay and Mervyn King wrote a good book on this issue. They talk about events in three categories. Deterministic predictions, say where is the earth in five years in the solar system, probabilistic predictions based on past data, i.e. how likely is it that the volcano will explode in the next five years, and the most important one which they call 'radically uncertain' events.
Complex human events are almost always in the last category. Using the language from the first or second class of events to make predictions about completely dynamic systems that are entirely dependent on human intervention that have no clear relationship to the past makes no sense. Using quantitative language in that case is actively misleading because it creates the impression you have any notion of the total space of possible events at all. "X has a 80% of going to war in Y years" is an example. What they really mean to say is "I believe it is likely that..", but that 80% number is completely made up.
Or as Frank Knight put it: “A measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.”
But modeling is always a thing of probabilities, with a low confidence rating for getting it entirely right.
What you seems to have an issue with is how it's often reported on or used in politics... But the people actually creating the models are in my experience always aware that the results are never proving anything by themselves... And blaming the act of modeling for the actions of politicians and reporters is misguided, as they're just using whatever is convenient. If it wasn't a specific model, they'd find something else to validate whatever asinine bullshit they're peddling.
They also failed to grasp that outside temperature might not be the only factor affecting power consumed for heating, assuming we want to keep constant inside temperature. The most obvious is sunlight - when it's 0C outside, my home requires much less energy when the sun is shining through the windows and on the roof.
Interesting indeed. Isn’t a machine learning model kind of an overkill for this kind of data analysis? Wouldn’t linear regressions suffice in this instance? Don’t you risk introducing unknown biases or even overfitting by using such a powerful technique when a simpler one is available?
This kind of reminds me of when some journalist on twitter used machine learning to find hate-speech against British politician. Of course the journalist found exactly what they were looking for. There was more hate speech against conservatives... Of course, the journalist was only an amateur in statistics, and used a flawed model, that could have yielded anything they wanted
disclaimer: I didn’t read the article because paywall, and waiting for an archive to be posted.
You can’t write an article about just scrolling through twitter, but if you pile up enough linear algebra it becomes an Officially Interesting Thing to report on.
Basically the model was developed at google to find “toxic speech”, but the researchers had a very biased definition on what constituted as “toxic”. Racist speech didn’t count, while angry shouts did.
I would expect there is more racist speech against white people than anyone else. Regardless, race doesn’t put someone in a particular political group so I don’t see how it debunks anything. Did the critics measure racist speech?
Short answer: Yes, they tested the model with racist speech, and it failed.
> I entered a selection of racist tweets I’d received in the past year into Perspective’s API, of varying lengths and sentence complexity. Just to make it easy for the machine, I deliberately chose one which included a common racial slur against South Asians.
> None of these were registered as potentially toxic at all by the AI – but, “You’re a fucking G”, a compliment, popped up with a 90.29% likelihood of being toxic.
Your hypotheses that white MPs experience more racist speech than non-white MPs, is testable. I have a pretty strong feeling that you are wrong, but I haven’t seen any data to support either (only anecdotes; and this deeply flawed analysis). What you can do to test your hypotheses is find all British MPs on twitter, scrape all tweets directed at them, and measure the proportion of racist speech against them. However, I advice you to do a more traditional cluster analysis, rather than a training model, the latter is very likely to yield a flawed model just like the journalist’s “8 month labor of love”.
Russia did slow down and then stop gas through Nord Stream 1 in 2022. For example here’s an article about it resuming at a reduced rate in July [0], and here’s one about it stopping in August [1]. Gazprom blamed Western sanctions for poor maintenance on the pipeline but didn’t deny reducing and then stopping the gas.
As for who blew up Nord Stream, I don’t think any of us know for sure. Last I heard the US were blaming a pro-Ukrainian group though. I haven’t heard anything about Norway, but haven’t looked into it a lot.
As you say, Russia played overt stop-blackmail-start-repeat games with Nordstream in 2022, but they started reducing gas deliveries to the EU already in 2021. Myopic market "analysts" interpreted it as a trade tactic [1], but to those who were paying attention to the troop buildup around Ukraine and the increasingly frantic "diplomacy" (it's not often you see a CIA director travel to Moscow [2]), it was another ominous sign. In hindsight, it's obvious they wanted to "soften up" Europe by making it go into winter 2021-2022 with lower gas storage levels than normal.
Looks like they are effusively talking about a linear regression "model". We did those in high school. You can basically look at the graph or points and fit line to audit it.
Not to brag but this winter I didn't turn on radiator once. The temperature never dropped below 20°C inside (I live in a flat that few years ago had 10cm of isolation added to it). Yes I know, some of the heat was probably from neighbors but I can't do anything about that. I also shortened hot showers to minimum and wore warm underwear and sweater. The winter was quite warm [1], coldest was around -5°C
Not some of the heat, all of the heat save for what your body generates and such was from neighbors. In most reasonably managed apartment buildings what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you. In total it rarely ends up being an energy save because the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.
I have been a renter for most of my adult life and I own several apartments that I would argue are "reasonably managed" and I am not aware that a landlord (in Germany) can prevent tenants from "leeching" heat from neighboring apartments. A renter usually has to guarantee a reasonable minimum temperature in the apartment, as well as regular fresh air, both to prevent mold. But the level of heating required for this is way below 20°C.
Also: I'm pretty sure that in most reasonable scenarios not heating one apartment in a house that has a decent outer layer of insulation would overall reduce energy input, because the overall average temperature would decline and heat would propagate more efficiently between apartments than to the outside. But I'm no expert so what do I know.
Where I am, the heating costs include a shared portion for this reason... you can turn your heating completely off and still pay 1/3 or 2/3 of a regular bill (don't remember) as the building's "shared" heating costs.
That also means if you turn on your heating, you add to both your bill and some of the shared costs others pay.
I live in a modern, well insulated building as the grandparent comment. I haven't run the heat for years, we need to occasionally open the windows cos it gets too warm and stale obviously, i don't think it makes sense to force me to turn on the heat even more and open the window even more.
edit: this was more a mix of reply to the parent comment and a bit to yours, sorry got it in the wrong spot.
> In total it rarely ends up being an energy save because the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.
Really? GP is effectively acting as an apartment-size layer of insulation between neighbors and the outside. Put another way, if everyone did what GP did (for instance, lower thermostat to 20C) the entire building would be cooler and use less energy. Perhaps GP’s behavior even encouraged others to lower their thermostat because of higher electric bills!
Is that considered a low temp for heating your house? I think that's about a perfect daytime temp summer or winter. At night that would be too warm honestly.
Apples and oranges, depending on where you live it can be anywhere between insanely expensive and practically free to keep your house at that temperature.
This is so demonstrably false it needs calling out. The overall losses will be lower, which is easy to note by considering the heat flow across the outer envelope which scales monotonically with the internal temperature. If one apartment is at a lower temperature for whatever reason, the total loss to the outside will be lower. Yes, one apartment might need to produce more heat to compensate for a neighbour being cooler, but that would be more than compensated for by the savings of that cooler apartment. This is absolutely just insulation.
Yes, from the neighbours and internal generation. That's not disputed. What I was challenging was the idea that all the apartments being at the same temperature is a net saving (presumably over some of them being cooler as described in the GP).
What you call a reasonably managed apartment, I call an apartment woefully built without reasonable insulation between dwellings. If I leave for the winter, why should I pay to heat a space I won't be in?
So people in the UK aren’t allowed to lower their temps when they leave for vacation? Am I really supposed to believe this? I guess you’ll tell me you need a license to watch TV next.
But if you think logically, there are some things you can't do in apartment, e.g. listen to loud music at night, or drill holes when others might be sleeping.
Turning down heating to zero is one of them. AFAIR in some places there is a limit of how low your heating should be and if it is lower then you still pay a given set price - this is to discourage cheaters.
It can't be both ways. Either the home is sucking up enough heat from the neighboring units to be significant, and so it warrants insulation, or it's not, in which case why would management care about something so tiny?
Insulation is the first thing you do to improve the thermal characteristics of a home. It's not expensive.
> the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.
Pretty sure this is incorrect. Conductive heat flow goes with the temperature difference. The higher the temperature difference, the more heat flow. If you kept your room cold versus everyone else, then your room would be leaking heat to the outside less than everyone else's, assuming everything else equal.
I used to live in a flat where we never turned the heating on at all. It got so warm we had to open windows even in winter. If my neighbors were responsible, I wish they would have turned their heating down!
can someone explain to me how this would not save energy? I have a very basic model in my head of "energy in/energy out" and it feels like if in the end one person is taking advantage of leakage (but probably not enough to actually get to the same temperature as people around them), then there would be less energy used, but are there non-linear forces at play or something?
I don't believe the energy consumption would be higher, but a plausible mechanism is this: When your neighbor heats their apartment only, their radiators need to produce more power than if all apartments are heated. To generate more power, the radiators need hotter water. Producing hotter water lowers the efficiency of the heating system. So there is a tradeoff curve between higher heat loss (because more parts of the building are warm) and heating efficiency. There might be a point where it makes sense to heat more of the building, but I doubt that somehow.
I generally have my heating at 18, anything more I am opening windows or taking off my jumper. 20 degrees would be too hot for me, if I lived in an apartment that mandated 20 degress heating at all time I wouldn't be happy about it.
My apartment mandates 23C in most rooms, 25C in one. Also, once you hit 16C, you get rapidly growing mold everywhere due to increase in humidity compensating lower temperature.
That can lead to water condensing on other surfaces which on the right surface can start mold growth. Wallpaper, exposed wood, stucco walls and some painted surfaces are all subject to this.
That is really cold, but the temperature I would keep an unused house at. If I tried to do that in our current place, my family would be extremely angry - we have it at 20 and even then I get complaints.
Your apartment mandates rooms stay at least 73.4 degrees F? 77 in another? I'd be wearing a tanktop indoors at all times. I'm having a very hard time believing this is true.
It's a common clause in rental agreements so that any mold problem can be blamed on the tenant because obviously they didn't heat their rooms to some ludicrous temperature while also opening the windows ten times a day.
Well my landlord was repeatedly explicitly pointing out these in the contract. I guess he doesn't want this luxurious apartment to degrade and lose value.
If it were my apartment, I just wouldn't do it. If the heating were centrally controlled, I'd open up the windows. 77F is simply way, way too hot inside, unless it's the summertime (and even then I'd be wearing shorts). That's insanely hot, and the idea of wasting all that energy to maintain a literal sauna inside your apartment is insane.
>In most reasonably managed apartment buildings what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you.
In your idea of "reasonably managed" buildings, everyone is forced to keep the heat on way too high, so a bunch of people open their windows wide open to bring in cool air, resulting in a massive and ridiculous waste of energy. The problem is that some moron in charge of the thermostat wants it much hotter (in the winter) or colder (in the summer) than ecologically- and economically-minded people who prefer to save energy. There's never any kind of democratic system for setting the thermostat, plus different people have different comfort levels.
If the neighbors don't like high utility bills, then they should stop using so much energy. There's nothing requiring them to keep it as warm as they do: it's not hard to put on some warm underwear.
because of what the other comment said and because this argument makes no sense
> what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you
if you don't turn up your heater, your neighbors don't have to heat more, the air in an insulator, some heat will leak in your apartment, but will also leak back to theirs, it will soon reach an equilibrium, unless you keep the windows open to cool down your apartment or turn on the AC.
Anyway most of the heat that leaks is through the heating pipes in the walls, it would leak anyway, the temperature of the wall is always gonna be lower than the water in the pipes. So you are heating up your neighbors walls even if your neighbors are keeping the heating on.
For whatever reason, I’m in the same situation, but in a relatively modern building where the hallways are warmed and slightly positively-pressurized for fire/smoke mitigation, so there’s a constant slight heat source coming in from the hallways. Combine that with good insulation, some base loads and southern exposure and we go all winter running the hvac for just a few hours.
It would be too hot if we ran the heat.
This is in Toronto where it’ll average a bit colder than continental Europe.
This doesn't add up with the way thermal mass or thermostats work..
the unheated unit wall will have less heat, but the thermostat is checking the air, which is protected by wall.
The above poster didn't have his neighbors turn up the heat for them to be comfortable.
I used to live on the 3rd story interior apartment; had to turn the ac on early in mild winters (southeast us) because one of my neighbors must have enjoyed living in a tropical house.
That's why in a lot of apartment buildings the heating bills are actually averaged between flats - so one person using nothing will not make their bill drop to zero.
It’s usually because the hassle and account fees from submetering doesn’t make up for the conservation it encourages.
It’s a huge waste of money in smaller residential units where people don’t have a garden or car to wash. And sometimes not even responsible for their plumbing or appliance choice/efficiency/maintenance.
Paying $x/month in account fees and meter reading means someone else burns some other resource while you work to conserve (if one even bothers).
Similar case here. New, well insulated apartment. I think we did turn it on when older, temperature sensitive guests came over. We also clearly benefited from neighbors who (probably) still had heating on. But a good insulation is indeed a game changer.
We managed to travel to Berlin, west London suburbs, and Strasbourg in early-mid December. The temperature was never more than a few degrees above freezing, and often well below, in each of those places, for just shy of 2 solid weeks. It was pretty amusing to go through that and then be hearing reports all winter about what a warm winter Europe was having :)
Equally shocking was seeing the gas meter showing GBP15+ per day to heat a rowhouse to what was still an incredibly cold indoor temperature (14-15C) and drafty).
> We managed to travel to Berlin, west London suburbs, and Strasbourg in early-mid December. The temperature was never more than a few degrees above freezing, and often well below, in each of those places, for just shy of 2 solid weeks. It was pretty amusing to go through that and then be hearing reports all winter about what a warm winter Europe was having :)
We used to have winters with permanent snow on the streets for months.
Well done! As someone in an appartement I also only used about a third of the heating in 2022 that I used in 2021. I only say this because SAVING energy (and thus CO2) can be quite significant and this has to be known and published more. IMO we have to do it to save the planet (harsh words but imo true).
For the ones who say that this is freeloading on the neighbors: not so much since at least in Germany one pays his own but also proportionally for the whole building (e.g. 50/50 or 70/30).
You were basically freeloading on your neighbors; there is no way you'd keep 20C inside without any heating source. Without your neighbors footing the bill you'd have ended up with massive hard-to-get-rid-of mold patches near windows by spring.
If he shut off his heat counting on neighbor heat to keep him warm, then maybe it would be freeloading.
But if his heating system was on and he set the thermostat to 20℃, which is in the normal indoor temperature range according to most sources I've seen, and it just happened to never turn on because his neighbors set theirs to higher I wouldn't consider that to be freeloading.
Modern insulation is very effective. I could see 10cm of insulation preventing basically all heat loss if there are few windows and those they have are triple-pane low-E coated. They get radiant heating from the sun as well, so if you're losing almost no energy then you're basically a greenhouse.
If he lives in typical block of flats in Slovakia, he pays part of the heat of the neighbors. Typically, part of the heat cost is based on your consumption and part is based on total consumption of the whole block divided between flats.
Ahoj sousede! Sounds like you have a well insulated home. Here in Prague I had to use heating in the evenings for most of December and January and part of February, because without it my apartment was getting down to 15°C.
Which would be fine if it was just me as it could be solved with a hoodie, but I was worried about moisture damaging electronics and causing mould, as well as the comfort of my dog.
I haven't calculated it but I would estimate that I at least halved my usage from previous years.
I never turned the heating on either, though sadly I'm in a drafty Victorian London flat so the temperature dropped to 9°C at one point. The dehumidifier likely saved the day.
Here are numbers for the German electricity mix, comparing 2021 with 2022 with 2021:
* German electricity consumption (Netzlast) went down by only 4.1 %
* German electricity production (Energieerzeugung) went UP by 0.4 % (I guess the surprising difference w.r.t. consumption has to do with electricity exports to other countries)
* German electricity production by gas went UP by 2.1 %.
* German electricity production by lignite (Braunkohle) went UP by 5.4%
* German electricity production by coal (Schwarzkohle) went UP by 21.3%
Yes, France went from being the largest exporter in Europe to being an importer. Something had to pick up the slack once a quarter of the nuclear plants went out unexpectedly.
I agree, but regarding using coal for electricity there isn't much room for discussion. There aren't many "green" aspects to it. For gas, it isn't that exact.
I cut my energy (electricity) consumption during this winter by about 40% compared to previous years with an investment of 4.5k EUR last summer including installation; I think I got a good deal. That got me:
- Two very efficient and quiet Mitsubishi Electric "nordic climate" version air-to-air heat pumps (MSZ-LN35 and MSZ-LN25) replacing 20 year old much less efficient equivalents - those couldn't really keep up, so additional resistive heating was necessary before the upgrade.
- One very affordable and relatively noisy Chinese noname air-to-air heat pump replacing resistive 10C maintenance heating in a side area.
I ended up having a higher indoor average temperature in the house than in previous years.
There is a general 30% tax deduction (up to a limit; coincidentally also about 4.5k EUR/yr/person) on craftsman work that takes place in a home that you own; this applies to the installation work. This deduction was about 500 EUR in total.
I would have paid 5k EUR without this tax deduction.
The installer handles the accounting/tax agency reporting - so the invoice was for 4.5k EUR, not 5k.
Yep, but you don't say how much (in EUR) is the 40% you saved.
IF (say) that 40% is 1,000 EUR you (and partially your state) payed in advance for five years heating.
And you were in a particular situation (already 20 years old heating that probably needed replaacement anyway), if you replaced that with new devices of the same type as the old ones you would have probably not spent so much less.
I just wanted to point out that you were in a particular situation (obsolete existing plant probably needing replacement anyway at a possibly not too different cost) + state incentives (even if only 30% of the man hours) and you had the money to invest.
Usually the break even point should be in the 5 or more years range (unless there are more substantial state incentives) for a "plain" replacement (i.e. with a working furnace + conditioner replaced by a heat pump).
Anecdotally, a couple of years ago (in a shop, not a house, but the reasoning should be the same) I replaced a gas furnace (that was to be replaced anyway) and an air conditioner (that also was likely to fail being old enough) with a new heat pump. Both had a heat exchanger and heated/refreshed water that circulated in a few fan-coils, so there was in practice no need of masonry or hydraulic work besides replacing the (external) units.
Replacing them with a new gas furnace + new conditioning unit was quoted around 4,000 Euro, whilst the new heat pump was quoted around 10,500 Euro, at the time it was possible to have 65% state incentive (directly credited by the supplier), so I paid only around 3,700 Euro, i.e. roughly the same as replacing the old units with the same ones instead of using the new technology.
Without this (very substantial) incentive I calculated that it would have taken a little less than 6 years to get even at a projected saving of around 1,100 Euro/year.
Finland: a lot of anxiety about high electricity prices early on. Luckily there is no direct gas heating in Finland for obvious reasons - only source of gas was Russia. Who would set themselves up to be blackmailed like that?
It turned out to not be such a huge deal. Check electricity price from the app before doing something that uses a lot of power (the biggest is if you have a sauna, we don't). Have shorter showers, maybe turn down the thermostat one degree. We got used to also checking the price when deciding to do laundry or making food in the oven. Often things can be moved a few days. More about principles than actual costs. The large amounts of installed wind power made it so that every now and then power was very cheap. Now that they got the massive nuclear plant online, it's always quite cheap that nobody's looking at the price anymore.
What winter? I'm in Poland and there's been some little snow every now and then but then I see blooming outside plants since the middle of January. The grass is green since summer. Flies and fruit flies maybe took a break for a month.
There were maybe two days which called for winter boots. Was supposed to get new ones when needed and so I didn't. Walked the whole winter in loafers or similarly low laced shoes which you don't have to take off at airports.
Seriously I live in Warsaw and there was no winter this year. Just a 6-month long October. Very depressing but good for low energy consumption I suppose.
That's what you get when you do stuff like this [1]:
> Half of European ammonia production plant closed
> Spiralling gas prices have caused a decline in European ammonia production, thereby aggravating the shortage of fertilisers in Europe. CRU Group analysts estimate that around half of European ammonia production plant and 33% of nitrogen fertiliser plant has closed down as a result
All this will, of course, be reflected in even higher prices for basic food stuff further down the road.
The long term effects seem harder to judge. Fertilizer imports likely increased. Some farmers likely started using fertilizer more effectively because higher prices encourage investment in efficiency improvements (reduced waste).
Looking at youtube farmers I follow... They reduced usage of fertilizer in exchange for lower yield. In the bottom line, they made as much profit due to higher prices and less expense. But for consumers it means raised prices. Food processing industry will have problems with sourcing raw material. Exports will drop and internal consumption will be more expensive for several years.
Presumably at higher prices, otherwise the European plant fertiliser industry wouldn't have been in active the first place.
> higher prices encourage investment in efficiency improvements
As far as I can understand agribusiness is already highly efficient, not sure it can make up for a double-digit decrease in availability (or increase in prices) for one of its core inputs.
Also, guess who is one of the bigger fertilizer manufacturers? Russia & Belarus. For example Belaruskali. Wonder how much of re-badged fertilizer will make it into EU...
I live in the Netherlands. My own gas usage was 25% lower in 2022 compared to the average over 2019-2021. We didn't do anything drastic to reduce gas usage. The first 3 months of 2023 were somewhat colder with gas usage is much closer to Spring 2021 and nowhere near as low as Spring 2022. I wonder how accurate the model used in this article is. The article isn't very clear on what kind of temperature values are used as input to this model. Is it daily mean? Hourly? I can imagine that you want to somehow factor in the diurnal cycle which would be obscured by daily means.
I find it interesting how all the sudden nobody bats an eye, whereas running up to autumn a lot of people were claiming Europe will freeze and there will be blackouts and rationing.
We are _still_ at 60+. We’ll absolutely be back at 90+% before next winter. And there will be a significant number of replaced heaters.
On the other hand. This winter was exceptionally mild.
But on balance. Next winter should be _significantly_ easier to deal with than last (or more likely: with less world-wide side effects)
IIRC we (Germany) should be getting about heat pump installations of about 1% of the heater installation base in Germany this year [0]. Add to that the number of replacement units [1] and the switch in grid scale units (there are a number of waste heat to Fernwärme projects) I would expect a reduction of 5-10% in the reliance on gas compared to 2022.
It’s not going to change the game completely, but it makes the situation much simpler. Add to that the experience we gained this year, and I would be extremely surprised if we have to resort to “outbid everyone in August and September on the worldwide LNG market”, which is basically what we did last year (to the point of having ships idling of our coast because all storage capacity was full..).
I’m not saying that we don’t need to buy gas on the international markets, just that next winter will be easier to manage than this one. (And this one really wasn’t that hard either.) Which should be a good thing for the rest of the world market too
[0] well really between Nov 22 and Oct23, but that’s relevant for the difference in gas consumption in the next heating period
[1] though it’s entirely anecdotal, but a number of people have replaced their old gas unit this year already. Don’t think that’s overly smart as an idea. But replacing a 30 year old unit with a new one does decrease fuel consumption somewhat
Just rough numbers of the top of my head: heaters get replaced after around 20 years as is required by e.g. German law. Gas/heat pump has an around 50/50 split for new installations. That would be around 2.5 percent reduction in gas consumption per year.
Less affluent EU countries likely have lower numbers.
60%+ might be due to industry going bankrupt/decreasing gas consumption as well. Many chemical plants basically stopped since gas prices exploded which will lead to pharma/fertilizer shortages. We'll see what the future holds soon.
It’s not exactly related to electrical energy consumption, but i’ve been observing huge changes related to what source of heating people use to heat their houses in Poland. The surging natural gas and coal prices caused a lot of people to modernize their heating infrastructure. A lot of people in suburban areas have photovoltaic installations sometimes even exceeding their needs and a whole bunch of people started using heat pumps or air conditioner units to heat their houses.
Personally I put a heater literally next to my office char, with a cover on top of it and me. This means I could work all day feeling warm without heating the whole flat.
So yes, we did cut energy consumption.
The PR around this was much better than the one around covid, one consistent clear message for month prior the event.
Turns out when the government does its job, people are not that dumb.
We saved energy this winter, but not because of any particular plan. It's because it was just warmer and we didn't need to turn on as many radiators.
we have an apartment at the top of an old house that has old pipes, every winter we have every radiator on and we still freeze in the top of the house.
This winter we had basically half the radiators on.
The neighbor also noted a month ago that the heating for the whole house cost less this year than it normally does, and that the heating company had given money back.
At least in Germany households use about 10% less energy compared to prior winters at similar temperatures. Industry and commerce saved similar amounts.
Partly for heating as well – industrial buildings need to be heated but are generally not very well insulated so turning down the temperature by a few degrees results in nice savings at the cost of people having to wear a warm sweater. But there is also "process heat" (at least that is the term in German), which is heat needed to make stuff. You can make less stuff or make it more efficiently. Same thing with electricity and the use of natural gas in certain industrial processes.
Right, but i thought you can’t make a factory more efficient on a whim. Especially somewhere like Germany. So when they say the industry cut the consumption within last year then the first thing they comes to mind is less production.
Reducing energy consumption: Cutting production because it's no longer economically viable with the increased energy prices, and maybe to a much smaller extent switching to more efficient methods
If you're only looking at one energy source: Switching to another. For example, gas was scarce and expensive while oil was less affected, so some factories switched from gas to oil (some systems can be switched relatively easily).
I applaud the fact that there was apparently no plan.
I am done with government planning things for the masses. The pandemia has shown that they are definitely not capapble of doing so, and if they try, they end up becoming more totalitarian.
And yes, I agree with you, most of the savings come from a fairly mild winter. I saved some 20% heating by buying 10 EUR rubber bands to isolate the old windows and doors in my apartment. I guess some people have done something similarily simple...
I know this is hyperbole, but at least in Britain's case, the fact that so many people had to choose between heating their homes or feeding their kids really isn't something to celebrate. Let's not pretend this was some kind of collective decision or green victory.
> Let's not pretend this was some kind of collective decision or green victory.
It wasn't just that, but there definitely was a collective shift toward energy saving, also among those who could've afforded the high energy prices. (at least here in NL)
I agree we shouldn't celebrate the decision of the poor to be energy-frugal, they had no choice in most cases. But those wo had a choice, still chose to conserve energy, often structurally. We should celebrate that for the environmental win it is.
* I tried to find a contractor for some work on my house. Very few were available, none were available short-term. Most told me this is due to extreme demand for isolation measures.
* Lead times on heat pumps rose to half a year, presumably also due to demand.
* People dressed warmer.
* The most common thermostat temperature for people around me temperature dropped from 20c to 19c.
* "How to isolate" was a very common topic in most Dutch media, far more than in previous winters.
It was a fun game for the well off green voters indeed. LARPing that they are saving the planet by reacting to a higher energy bill. Tracking it all with their fun home assistant gadgets and showing off at work how much they are saving. It had no real impact on them, and most would go fly around the world to celebrate the holiday as soon as they had the chance.
For the working class however, the people really affected by the green policies, it was a matter of choosing between heat and groceries.
For the environment it doesn't matter one bit as China is using more energy than the whole western world combined. It's telling that only the people that can still easily pay the bills see this as something to be celebrated.
Britain is a special case unfortunately. While energy costs going up will have an impact on everyones bottom line, if they are already so close to the edge then any price increase in anything essential is going to force people into those positions. People are already cutting all non-essentials, there is no more financial slack and it doesn't matter which essential thing is going up: housing, food or energy.
The only reason I would even suggest that higher energy prices are good for ecology would be that businesses started genuinely doing things to cut consumption, like turning off lit advertising and office lights.
That people are essentially priced out of living healthy is nothing to be celebrated of course, but there is a small silver lining and it should be discussed.
that people cant afford to live is a pretty massive failing of the UK and its policies. That’s been talked to death though.
Yeah, nice try.. inflation was a factor but as a dual national Brit/Swede it is at least twice as bad if not more in the UK.
The financial assistance offered to Swedes for the power consumption is contentious as most people didn’t expect anything to be paid back and it was taken from the energy companies profits too.
It’s not even remotely the same, even though the Murdoch media would like to make you think so.
You’re counting only the last year, I suppose, but even then you’re not really telling the truth because they’re comparable over the last year, and only if you take one year into account.
If your food inflation was 10% year 1 and 18% year 2 then your total inflation over two years is 35.7%.
If your food inflation on year 1 is 5% and year 2 is 20% then your total inflation over two years is 26%
You might look at the year two value and claim that inflation is higher, but food prices in the UK relative to income are definitely higher due to inflation (which is seemingly being underreported) over the last 5 years.
To be fair, the lines look quite comparable, but when I compare the monthly shop I do to what my friends and family do, and I factor in salary- it doesn’t nearly paint the picture that Sweden and the UK are comparable.
“Cost of living crisis” is decidedly not a thing in Sweden, not to the same scale, even if there are a contingent of people who struggle a little. Choosing between heating and eating is uniquely a British position in this regard. Similar to gun crime in the US, it seems like the Brit’s are pointing to all other countries as if they have the same issues and of course they do not.
Well, in a weird way it does make sense though. As a different example, if you want to cut fuel consumption nationally just double the prices - you will see how much less fuel people will use because they will just drive less. Will it impact poor people disproportionately? Ensure that some people won't be able to go shopping or to see a doctor? You bet. But the overall green goal will be achieved - the problem isn't the increase in prices(as such), it's the fact that the social safety net wasn't there to help those truly in need. No one in this country should have been choosing between heating or feeding their families - but I know people were.
> Will it impact poor people disproportionately? You bet.
Sane countries roll out a mini-UBI to account for this.
Canada has a system of quarterly payments for every tax payer to make carbon taxes revenue-neutral (in theory). The belly-aching whining is truly extraordinary.
Now, if we could convince the government that cutting labour taxes would increase supply of labour during a “labour shortage”, we might be getting somewhere.
It isn't UBI and it isn't revenue neutral. It's a revenue-generating tax that makes most families poorer.
> "When both fiscal and economic impacts of the federal fuel charge are considered, we estimate that most households will see a net loss,” PBO Yves Giroux said in a statement following release of the report. “Based on our analysis, most households will pay more in fuel charges and GST—as well as receiving slightly lower incomes—than they will receive in Climate Action Incentive payments.”
Which means the grants should be increased. But for some reason you’ll mostly hear from the anti-carbon-tax lobby.
But if you want to see who’s truly a net winner or loser, if the rich lose more than the poor lose, the poor are still be better off if they’re net recipients of government services.
Your quote is referring to modelling from 2030 when the carbon tax rises to $170/tCO2e. That's a reasonably high carbon tax and I'm not surprised that it would be costing households on average. It would be much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels unabated, but only if your modelling doesn't include a dollar figure on the negative externalities of CO2 emissions.
Same in the Netherlands. There's quite a bit of energy poverty with people no longer being able to afford to properly heat their homes. That's especially an issue for people living in older, poorly insulated apartments on low incomes.
Lots of people that just sit on the couch under a blanket to stay warm. Apparently, hypothermia with elderly people has been a thing. That also increases the likelihood of strokes and other issues. Especially people with poor circulation. Other issues include respiratory issues due to cold and increased humidity in the apartments.
Electricity prices have literally tripled or quadrupled for some people - and for poor people the effect was even worse because the poorest groups are on prepayment meters which are on the most expensive tariffs of all.
So yes, there were people for whom the choice was "well I have £5 for today, either it's going in the meter so I can put heating on for a few hours and stay warm, or I need to use it to buy food to feed my family". This isn't some theoretical edge case scenario - this was a dilemma that many British families were faced with this winter.
What’s worse is they still get charged the standing charge so if the meter has been empty for days, then adding credit to it may just get swallowed up by paying the standing charge due for those days
For every percent that utility prices go up (or really: non-optional bills), A larger and larger slice of people simply cannot make it work and have to sacrifice something.
There's an important point: how much of this was non-optional vs. luxury? I keep my home at 22, but if I had to, I could probably set it to 19 and tell everyone to wear a sweater in the winter. So not everyone, but definitely some slice of the population probably went from 19 to 16 or lower.
In Canada this can be a serious issue. My gas bill literally doubled for the same volume compared to last winter. This can be a sudden $100-200 extra monthly expense. Luckily it's illegal to ever cut anyone off from gas in the winter... but that doesn't fix the financial catastrophe.
Wait, you are not wearing a sweater inside during winter?
19 is like, the temperature we set during off-peak hours, otherwise it's more like 18 (and we let it coast down during the evening).
Admittedly, it's quite cold when not moving around, so I spent most of the winter with at least 3 sweaters, a hot water bottle, and a blanket (and 2 layers of pants, usually).
When moving around, 17-18 is quite comfortable though, a long sleeved shirt or light sweater is usually enough.
Yeah, turns out if you ramp up electricity prices, people will cut usage in any way they can.
The issue is more that for competitive industry we really need cheap energy prices. Sure consumption was cut, but how much industry has moved to the USA now? (especially with the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies).
Latest economic data is showing at least in Germany that manufacturing is recovering reasonably well, and grew more over the past couple months than expected. I'm sure it would have grown more if this crisis didn't happen, but it is at least still growing.
A lot of European manufacturing is so specialized that energy prices aren't a very large portion of their cost. The energy prices certainly are affecting the steel and chemical industries, but at least if the rest of the industrial economy is doing well they can afford to subsidize the less specialized industries that they decide are strategically important.
This kind of race-to-the-bottom logic risks undoing efforts to mitigate climate disaster. The alternative is to plan for the future where rampdown of fossil fuels will reward early movers and penalise laggards when the consensus trade agreements regime swings the pendulum to regulate rest of the fossil production away and implements whatever carrots and sticks are required to leave known oil & gas deposits in the ground.
I cut my gas use, turned down the thermostat. (I bought a 100 year old house that was last modernized in the 60's, just before gas prices shot up.)
But then I noticed moisture buildup on the inside of the roof. Screws sticking through the roof had water dripping from them. I turned the radiators back to full and the thermostat up again.
I'm restructuring the house, so not everybody will see it so clearly as I do, but we have to watch out. Our houses, particularly old ones are constructed to only stay nice with a good heat source inside during winter, in every room. Hot air will transport moisture out and keep it from depositing. If things cool down, fungi and moisture are a big risk. Hot humid air you breath out will find a cold spot to deposit it's moisture. It may take years before you find out where that is, and from experience I can tell you it can get quite disgusting when you finally rip out some plating.
The answer is: good, vapor tight (at the hot side, cold side should be open to vapor, or completely waterproof/tight!) insulation combined with good ventilation. That last one is very important, I also heard from people that closed their ventilation ducts... until water was dripping down the windows, or moist spots appeared in their wooden floors. Btw, a CO2 monitor can provide a good proxy measurement for your ventilation, imo.
Watch out people, you can save a lot on gas, but invite a lot of new problems. Don't go too crazy.
When I renovated my house (temperate EU climate), this was actually mandatory: active ventilation and breathing vapor shield in front of the insulation layer.
Indeed, older houses rely on "gravity ventilation", as my architect described it: high-temp heating is used to move stale air around by induction, plenty of nooks and crannies together with the density gradient would suck in fresh air.
When you renovate partially, adding insulation layers and plugging holes, you need to open up the windows for about 5-10 minutes once or twice a day. Paradoxically, the heat loss is mitigated because the fresh air is typically drier, which heats up easier.
I'm doing it all myself so there is no real "mandatory", contractors will do it properly of course and by the rules (at least they should, but I sometimes wonder how careful they are taping all small holes on the inside of the insulating layer with aluminum tape, etc). People doing it themselves, I feel, just put mineral wool everywhere. Quite unwise, I hear some alarming stories.
But I really spend a lot of time reading and thinking. I am insulating my roof, insulated the ceiling. But CO2 buildup is very rapid in the living room now, even though there are 2 large ducts in the wall leading directly outside (easily >1500 PPM while cooking and the 4 of us in the room). So I'm looking at installing stuff like this now: [0]. Imo such things are very necessary and I feel that many people "modernizing", insulation their own house are inviting a lot of issues.
The article does not support the title; gas is only one slice of the whole energy consumption pie. Would have been interesting to see at least some analysis of total energy consumption so that we could have seen how much of this was now actual reductions vs shifting to other forms of energy
You’d have to amplify the effects since nat gas is usually where your marginal capacity comes from.
For electricity, it’s the last to get turned on and first to turn off.
And I don’t imagine a quick change to non-natgas building heating except for those that have existing dual-fuel (e.g. using the wood stove for once). Unsure if oil heat became cheaper than natgas but that’s unusual.
But the whole equation is even more complicated. Did Europe import more ammonium fertilizer instead of making it itself? Then that’s just pushing the energy consumption elsewhere. Same for glassmaking, aluminum smelting, etc.
> The article does not support the title; gas is only one slice of the whole energy consumption pie.
In Europe most homes are heated by natural gas for one. Secondly, there are a lot of combined cycles gas turbines that supply a large part of actual energy demand. And then there's the advantage that is way more cleaner than coal and provides more power per unit. And this is not counting the gas usage in the industry that powers a lot of other things.
If you put everything that relies on gas together you will be surprised about how much we actually rely on gas for.
There is lot of country-to-country variation here; while some countries like Netherlands are completely dependent on gas, others like Sweden barely use it at all. On aggregate level gas is biggest source, but that is driven by few big consumers like Germany and Italy while in most EU countries gas is actually a minority energy source for heating.
It was reported that the total electricity consumption in Finland was 6% lower in 2022 when compared to 2021. December 2022 had 10% lower total electricity usage than December 2021.
What's the insulation and air sealing opportunity like in Europe? I wonder how much of a permanent reduction can be done with retrofits for places that haven't had them done yet.
I'm in the UK and it's famously bad due to the age of the housing (lots of it predates WWII or was built cheaply just after WWII).
Multiple successive governments have started grants to share the cost of insulation, however these come with onerous paperwork requirements, complex financing schemes, accreditation schemes for contractors, and then are cancelled 18-24 months in due to low takeup. It's gotten to the point where the small companies that provide these services don't even try to join the schemes because they know it won't work out.
There is a lot of opportunity, though I'm not sure how much is possible. Some old historical buildings are very hard to make better, and the law may not even allow the required renovations.
However Europe is a large place. Some places are much better than others. Some people live in a "passive house" already and so have no opportunity - or need - to do better, while others live in a house that may as well be a tent for as bad as it leaks. There are places where almost every house is well insulated and so people living there think all of Europe is in great shape, meanwhile the next country can be in terrible shape.
I am under the impression that a lot of people live in rented flats, and good luck having the landlords put some insulation and have the apartment unavailable for some time instead of just renting it to a new person.
Although it seems F and G flats will be illegal to rent soon in my city, so that could help.
Meanwhile, I've had single pane windows in most of my flats. Can't wait to move somewhere better insulated (I can hear the wind hissing through small gaps in the sliding windows right now). This is in a major city in France.
I wish I could cut my heating bill but sadly I'm using central heating which massively overheats the house. This winter was so warm I kept my window open 24/7 and it was still too warm inside (I'm located in the Baltic states).
And it's not like I have good insulation otherwise - the snow occasionally falls through the cracks on the edges of my windows.
I would love to fix them but honestly - what's the point if central heating still overheats the house.
In Poland in early 90ies your story could sound likely. Since then most places using central heating will bill you for "calories" consumed.
Since then a lot of investment went into insulation and replacing windows. I barely know anyone who doesn't have "new" windows, even in less affluent household, window replacement and insulation is a highly prioritized expense.
Actually it has caused some problems with too much humidity in the buildings.
I would assume baltic states are mostly similar since you folks are not swimming in free energy afaik too. So your case sounds like a bit weird outlier.
I know a lot of people near us (in the UK) went out and bought log burners for their houses - chatting to some neighbours last year and they were saying there was a 6 month waiting list to have one installed.
For the first time in 8? years we struggled to get hold of logs - especially oaks.
Nobody seemed to be able to get hold of anything.
Is there enough wood production to make that a serious idea? It seems quite unlikely on the face of it that mass movement to wood burning would explain this.
Probably not, but from a anecdotal observation I've heard a lot of people say they were getting one installed, and there has been a shortage of logs this year (Of course that may be due to other factors)
Might have helped contribute to using less gas for heating, but maybe not in a large way
Somehow I don't see this, I thought that here in Poland they would react by e.g. disabling lights in storefronts where these are closed, or turn of lights in places which are not visited at night, or just turn off billboard lights to save even tiniest bits of energy. Nope, none of that happened. Instead the electricity costs skyrocketed.
No shit, my electricity bill doubled while my consumption decreased (Germany)
People can't afford to heat their home, small businesses can't afford to operate (bakers are a good exemple), so they just don't do it = lower energy consumption
Energy prices over winter were high enough that I started reducing room temperature to 15 degree Celsius whenever I expected not to be home (or using a particular room) for at least two days.
I also mostly showered in gyms, like 4 out of 5 occassions.
If you don't heat your home for a while, and it's cold enough, the pipes can freeze, break, and flood your home. It's happened to more than a couple of people I know and they're in the UK - so it doesn't need to get very cold for it to happen.
This, plus I don't want to return to a completely cold house that takes about three days to heat up to 20 degrees Celsius again. The building is built of bricks, it has a certain thermal mass and the floor heating isn't very powerful. Letting the inner temperature to drop close to zero would mean a very uncomfortable period after return.
I was never absent for more than 5 days anyway, so...
In addition to other replies you want to keep the relative humidity <60% otherwise you get condensation (your 20C air, 40% relative humidity gets cooled to 15C and that becomes 55% relative humidity, cool it to 10C and it becomes 75%). Condensation can cause mold, short circuits and all kinds of other expensive problems.
Getting humidity under 50 per cent in a freshly built house over the winter ... turned out just impossible.
We fought hard to keep it at least under 60 per cent, as you say. If it froze outside, windows in the bedroom would be covered with water droplets in the morning.
(Actually, it froze last night, quite late in the season, and the windows were wet again.)
Yeah it's a bit counter productive - you build a house with great insulation so that there is almost no heat escaping outside. And then you have to install ventilation that literally creates vacuum in your house to suck cold dry (absolutely speaking) air in to keep the humidity in check. And then you sit in the living room wondering why is there such a draft. At least new houses are built with heat recovery to solve this
Keeping humidity low is all about making sure the air doesn't cool too much, or if it does, replacing it with drier (colder) air from outside. There is a certain amount of water in air and when it cools this water will condense. Good insulation (keeping inner temp constant) is key.
Letting it get too cold could lead to plumbing damage if you parts of your house get below freezing. 15C is probably higher than I'd leave it if it were vacant, but you do want to leave the heat on and a decent buffer to account for temperature variations in other parts of the house.
I discussed the temperature with the guy who oversaw the construction and he told me that, given that the house is still pretty fresh and moist (it was finished in November '22), lower temperatures would mean a risk of mould developing. 15-16 is the sweet spot according to him.
In addition to other replies, in hot and humid climates, you still want the A/C running for de-humidification purposes. So you set it high instead of turning it off completely.
Interesting how important one degree is. In my home, if I set the thermostat to 23 degrees, I can comfortably stay in t-shirts, but at 22 degrees it is not comfortable. The cost/energy consumption between 22 and 23 is so small.
I know that this is a very personal preference and also dependent on the house you live in, but 23°C would feel uncomfortably warm for me, even in a t-shirt. We set the thermostat to 19°C this winter and mostly wore sweaters and were fine.
Turning down the heat by 1°C saves about 13% energy, which I wouldn't say is "small": https://cambridgeenergy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/CA... In the report they actually look at a temperature reduction from 19 to 18°C, so dropping from 23 to 22°C should result in an even larger saving.
My warm water heater is part of my heating system and keeps 60-100 liters of hot water available throughout the day.
I now run it only between 6AM and 2PM. This has not affected our comfort level, as we have a full boiler at 2PM, but it avoids the system turning on every ~2 hours to top up the warm water.
Just this change has resulted in over 10% savings on the yearly electricity bill.
The goal should not be to make grandmas bundle up and be cold in their houses. That’s a reduction in standard of living. We need to decrease the cost of energy while making more of it. Cheering that less energy was used is like cheering that we went backwards in human development - some people wish we go back to living in huts, but I’m not one of them.
On the contrary, maybe it's time to acknowledge that some economies may have over-extended in their promises about what standards of living we can come to expect.
Rich western countries still depend heavily on other parts of the world being cheap. The last 100 years were the result of the riches extracted from previous centuries of plunder and occupation, and the rush to modernize after the largest government spending projects in history (WWs I and II) induced an unsustainable march toward technological "progress" that could not continue without some later shock and consequent regression due to the inevitabilities (some refer to them merely as externalities) borne of dependence on finite resources. We are currently living through that shock.
No, that's the nocive and ridiculous ideology that is destroying Europe.
The issues the continent has been facing are purely due to inept policy. There is no problem with producing enough low emission/zero emission energy to maintain living standards.
Now, globally living standards have to drastically increase to get rid of poverty. That means drastic increase in consumption as well. The problem that noone is keen to acknowledge is the global population level.
Hardly, we should be investing in nuclear power and renewable energy to become energy independent as a priority. And throwing everything we can at nuclear fusion research.
We can achieve energy that is "too cheap to meter".
That is efficiency gains. But merely cheering that less energy is generated is incorrect. Standard of living heavily correlated to total power generated. We should generate more energy, cleaner for sure, but having to bundle up is terrible. We should all be warm and comfortable - that is called “standard of living”.
I moved to a bigger place but my bills throughout winter were 3-5 times higher despite going from heating the whole house to 18, occasionally 21, to keeping the majority of the house at 11 degrees and whatever room was occupied at 15, only when in use.
This year we saved around 3000 M3 of gas with our appartment complex, in the Netherlands. Still our bill was twice as high as before. I don't mind sitting on the couch with a blanket. Reminds me of Saturday mornings as a child haha.
Sure was expensive. Prices for gas are coming down luckily. We put our thermostat at 17°C and wore an extra sweater, had a fluffy blanket during WFH.
After a year long wait, we finally got the heat pump installed last week.
Too late to help with the winter and to take the worst of the gas prices, but better overall.
Can't self-generate gas, electricity at least a bit even in winter.
Still is? The going rate for electricity here is 70.10 €/MWh and the peak figure for today was 118.10 €/MWh. So that's 7-12 cents per kWh. That's not what I'd consider "very expensive".
Yes, still is. Prices for individuals have not decreased yet here in the UK, probably because they were capped to start with, and the government's direct subsidies have just ended.
I have just paid my monthly bill to the end of March and it still came to £230 for electricity + gas. That's for a period when use of heating had started to drop because of spring in addition to our self-imposed restrictions because of high prices.
No, Russia did not remain a stable producer and it wasn't the West's "sanctions and sabotage" that did the real damage. Russia turned off the taps, plain and simple - in fact they started turning down exports and draining Europe's gas storage the autumn before. In some cases they may have made excuses about how sanctions meant they couldn't get the parts to operate their gas pipelines, but those excuses were bullshit, loosening the sanctions to give them what they supposedly needed just caused them to give more and increasingly bogus reasons for not supplying gas, and often they didn't even bother with that.
Because Russia saw what was coming and Europe's efforts to mitigate sanctions that were coming but not yet in effect. Europe was trying to buy as much gas as they could before the sanctions went into place, so by stopping early Russia had a better change of the sanctions hurting Europe enough that they stopped them.
Between the warm winter and the other mitigations Europe did there was no problem and Europe didn't hurt too much, but that was the goal.
>Russia remained a stable producer. It was the Western reaction, i.e. sanctions & sabotage, that did the real damage.
What sanctions? Russian gas was basically the only thing the EU wouldn't touch. Gazprom was the one that pulled the plug. The closest we got was refusing to insure oil tankers if Russia sells over $40/bbl, and that was months after Russia cut off European gas.
> It was the Western reaction, i.e. sanctions & sabotage, that did the real damage.
There is an actual death toll and very real crimes have been committed. Your ‘comparing and contrasting’ needs a bit more thought if you think the consequences equal.
> Russia is primarily responsible for causing death in Ukraine, closely followed by the other material participants, due to its choice to destroy Ukraine's military.
That isn’t the aim though, why are so many attacks targeted at civilians and civilian infrastructure? This isn’t about destroying their military, it’s about destroying Ukrainians and their country.
> why are so many attacks targeted at civilians and civilian infrastructure?
This simply isn't happening. The better question is why didn't Putin flatten Kiev on day 1, or any day hence, since his goal is "obviously" to kill as many Ukrainians as possible? Washington showed it was possible in Baghdad.
Russia's economy is in very bad shape. They can pretend otherwise, but the west is hurting them. It isn't as obvious as the results of military action, but it still hurts.
Germany's gas storage were half-empty in 2021 and prices in Europe were high. Russia had brought a large share of those gas storage facilities under its control. Gas deliveries were lower than usual. In the winter Putin than started the war against the Ukraine. Putin had prepared for the situation - sanctions against Putin were supposed to create energy shortages and fear among European citizens, give how much Europe's energy supply (gas, oil, and not to forget nuclear) depended on Russia. Sanctions were supposed to damage Europes economies, too. And they did, prices went up.
The war was supposed to last only a few days and then Russia would control the Ukraine - Putin would have the Ukraine, the Pipelines, the energy. But that was not what happened.
Putin miscalculated the situation and the reaction. Instead, the Ukraine government survived the first Russian attack, the war is now more than a year old, several stages of sanctions were brought into place, Europe&US delivers support for the Ukraine, Russia's energy industry is now largely decoupled from Europe, Russia is a political paria, and there were hundreds of thousands war victims and millions of refuges, due to Russias war on the Ukraine. Russia has yet failed to react to the political & military pressure against it with any signs of willing to end the war.
>Pipeline deliveries from Russia declined by 25% year-on-year in Q4 2021. This decrease in Russian pipeline supply to the EU became more pronounced in the first seven weeks of 2022, falling by 37% year-on-year. The last pipeline deliveries to Germany via the YAMAL pipeline (which goes through Belarus) were on 20 December 2021. Gas flows via Ukraine to Slovakia have fallen from an average of over 80 mcm/d in December to just 36 mcm/d in the first seven weeks of 2022.
The sanctions were a reaction to the Russia’s genocidal war. Late reaction, as it should have happened in 2014 or even in 1999, but it’s better than nothing.
So, yes, the putin’s war has wrecked the energy markets in Europe. And many many peoples lives as well unfortunately.
Another way of achieving that moniker is raping and murdering your way across a country, taking the children and killing the rest while erasing cultural symbols and monuments.
This is an absurd nitpick. First, nobody would read the claim as a literal one that Putin blew up the relevant gas infrastructure, especially since the background assumptions to the Western reaction include one that Putin would be willing to continue selling. If he weren’t there’d be no debate on energy sanctions. Also gas continues to flow through Ukraine as any fule kno.
Second, a further ‘important technicality’ is that even if the West (quite correctly) blew up Nord Stream II, it wasn’t in use, so its destruction didn’t disturb energy flows.
Third, Western interventions would also be described as ‘wreaking havoc’, so this isn’t the gotcha proving Western hypocrisy you think it is. And even if it were, the answer is to consistently oppose, not acquiesce, to imperialist aggression; many people are capable of opposing more than one thing.
You're being downvoted, I can understand why, but there's some truth that must be addressed before deeming your comment completely bogus.
Gerhard Schröder, former German chancellor, was a big advocate for the Nord Stream pipeline and then was appointed in the board of Gazprom, the sole (Russian) shareholder of the aforementioned stream.
Germany paid the highest price when Russian gas was cut off and the government, led by a coalition that includes the Green party (die Grüne), had to open new coal mines.
Something was obviously wrong in our (the EU) energy policies.
What is "wrong" about Germany buying cheap energy from a willing local producer, and profiting enormously from it?
In Washington's fever dream, where it is "right" that Germany should instead buy expensive energy that is shipped across the Atlantic and lose its industrial advantage as as result.
It is totally, comically absurd. Untethered from reality.
Because we now have 20/20 hindsight that Russia is an evil actor and would not reform. Therefore Germany should have spent the previous 10 years getting off Russian gas (leave nuclear power plants open is one obvious example)
If your geopolitical thesis includes the word "evil" you need to work harder on it. That word is meant for children's books. The real world is complex.
> Self-interest also implies that it works for Russia.
define "works".
there's a big divide in the World on this war, it could be considered a victory for Putin, he made friends fight over it, turned allies into adversaries and made enemies even more suspicious of each other. We are at a peak high level of conflict, like we haven't seen in decades.
EU has problems because of massive foreign influence (mainly Washington), not because individual participant states promote their own interests, as they should.
It's hard enough to maintain a federation of neighbor states. It's impossible to do that while also catering to the whims of a distant superpower.
Could be, not wanna open that discussion, but teaming with Putin (Gazprom equals Putin) it's not the smartest of moves, especially if you are a former influential European politician.
Let's put it this way: there were (are) plans on every desk of every Prime Minister or President in Europe that say "we could let Putin take Ukraine and avoid a conflict that could harm us all".
I fail to see what is wrong about maintaining the spirit of the Budapest Memorandum. Since the events of 2014, it can't be totally restored, but the spirit can be reimplemented (by Minsk, etc). It seems that many thoughtful EU statesmen, like Schröder, believe that.
> I fail to see what is wrong about maintaining the spirit of the Budapest Memorandum.
> It seems that many thoughtful EU statesmen, like Schröder, believe that
I believe one doesn't maintain the spirit of the Budapest memorandum by entering the board of directors of the largest Russian gas supplier and becoming director of the board of Rosneft, largest Russian oil producer, years after Russia invaded Crimea. Don't you think?
But I concede Schroeder that he might have truly believed that he could keep Russia from invading Ukraine. Nonetheless mixing politics and business was a bad mistake on his part.
It's not because of Putin, but because of inflation caused by lockdowns. Prices of gas rises 600% in December 2021 (at least in Czechia), 3 months before "blame Putin for everything".
Naturally, with ridiculous prices you do whatever to reduce consumption. We switched from heating by gas to wood. Like many others.
The world has a lot of potential to be more efficient. Look no further than energy consumption per capita in the US. It's drastically higher than in other developed countries.