I read about companies that had survived both world wars but this trade war with Russia and EU they didn't survived.

And this is a very tiny project that's simply just easy recurring revenue. The bigger units that are being built and tested all day everyday will go through 100kWh just warning up.

It puts things into perspective were I can bend over backwards at home to save energy, but at work if I order a unit to be retested "just to be sure", it can wipe out months of energy I saved at home by being especially conscientious.

Not saying it's a waste to be efficient at home, I do it myself. But man, industry uses _a lot_ of energy, and it's not clear how to make it more efficient. I can't test a 25kW supply without running it at...25kW.

In general sometimes it gets really difficult to be the good citizen. Over here in The Netherlands, we have a special inheritance provision for family businesses, where below €1 000 000 in size you pay zero inheritance tax. Due to intense lobbying, it has now been extended to any company, except that companies above €10 000 000 have to pay 25% tax. So now it includes gigantic billion euro companies like Heineken.

Stuff like that makes me scratch my chin and think “fuck you, I am going to dodge and cheat any tax I can”. And I generally fall in the camp of “tax me to death and build great things with it.”

Can’t you dump it back to power grid (easy to say, probably not so easy to do)? There will be losses, but better than nothing.

Most people in Germany can't afford to buy an apartment let alone build a new house and you're taking as if your situation si representative for the average German.

Just because you're wealthy enough to afford a new EV and to build a new modern house, doesn't eman Germany has no problems.

You're proving the point that ecology is a tax on the poor, as the wealthy can afford to buy EVs and build new well insulated homes with solar panels and heat pump making their running costs super low, while poor people who can't, will own older ICE cars and older homes that are much worse energy efficient meaning they'll pay way more in running costs than the rich despite having less income leading to ever increasing wealth inequality.

Most people in Germany don’t buy the apartments they live in, because renting in Germany gives you more or less the same rights as owning a leasehold flat in the UK. If you really want to buy a flat, tax-wise it is more convenient to rent it out and rent another one to live in.

In many cities there are rent control mechanisms that make renting extremely cheaper than buying.

Have you seen new rent prices right now? It's definitely not "extremely cheap". It's only extremely cheap for those in grandfathered contracts.

So you’d be better off renting and investing the deposit, the stamp duty, notary costs and the 2000€ you save each month in government bonds.

https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings.jsp

The ROI absolutely does not make sense but it's real. A large portion of the world believe that the only two investment classes are real estate and government bonds.

We would be all better off if people invested in the stock market instead of “investing” in properties (including landlords)

Then, who builds the new apartments that people rent? If 50% of people in Germany rent and there is no ROI from building for rent, then who finances the new buildings??

People are overly obsessed with home ownership and being free and clear as soon as possible so they blindly repeat adages like "paying the landlord's rent" and "flushing your money away" without running the numbers.

Would you buy an apartment in Taipei, where a $1M apartment rents for $1k a month? I'd gladly pay my landlord's mortgage in that case.

It all depends on interest rates, rent to price ratio, and opportunity cost.

The rest of the country is a suburban wasteland

- 2.84 million people in Germany were able to afford a new car in 2023 [0] - 1.25 million dwellings were constructed in 10y 2011-2021 [1] - The homeownership rate in Germany is very low compared to other countries but still around 50% [2]

While parent's situation is likely above the median, it doesn't mean it is not representative.

> Just because you're wealthy enough to afford a new EV and to build a new modern house, doesn't eman Germany has no problems.

Parent commented on their energy usage change over the years, not on wealth or problems. Where does you comment come from?

Also, what's your point?

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/587730/new-car-registrat... [1]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Housin... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-ra...

Because policies on being eco-friendly is a matter of wealth. Wealthy countries and wealthy people are less effective by switching off fossil fuel dependency and can afford to be green without major sacrifices to their finances or their lifestyle. Poorer countries and people are hit the hardest.

We’re also rapidly heading towards the possibility of EVs with the same purchase price as an ICE. As long as you don’t need long range.

LFP batteries, motors with little or no neodymium magnets, power electronics are getting fairly cheap, 48V is enabling less use of copper, … we probably have all the tech we need, but since car companies can sell all the EVs they can make anyway, they’re still focusing on the higher end higher margin models.

Similar thing goes for heat pumps. They were pretty expensive 10-15 years ago. Now half my neighbours have gotten one, and many of them have very average jobs.

I live in an Apartment building from 1964, got doubled sided windows, and during the winter I do not need to turn on any heating on 98% of the days. And the quality of housing there is no difference between owning and renting....

Now even the worst insulated homes, are not that far off. Sure there are some very very bad apartments for rent, but those are in the minority.

sure not many can afford an EV, but there is also a large part of the population does not own a car at all, because of public transit which is a way better reduction in the energy requirements per person. There are even a lot of people that own a car but go to work using public transit.

Why are you comparing apples to oranges? Germans don't care what it's like in America since it doesn't lower their energy bills.

America can afford to be wasteful with energy, since it's energy independent, has much cheaper energy than Germany, including oil, gas, and nuclear, and has higher incomes. Germany doesn't. Cheap Russian gas is gone and their nuclear also so of course their energy is much more expensive to the point it affects industry and consumers more than in the US.

>but there is also a large part of the population does not own a car at al

Passenger car ownership has reached record highs in Germany. Outside of big dense cities with great public transport like Berlin where car owners are in the minority, the majority of people own a car statistically.

just because Germany produces less does not mean there is less energy available...

would be the same as saying that since california does not produce enough energy on its own, its industries are doomed...

This process predates both the green energy movement and the nuclear power exit. Steel and aluminium manufacturing just needed more power than dozens of buildings filled with office workers.

And in the special case of Germany, the relatively small amount of industry that remained domestic kept Germany relevant globally. If Germany looses that, it becomes a fully service-based economy which the anglo-states are much better at (think finance, IT).

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

And I think the counterpoint is that all sorts of processes are vastly more efficient nowadays, so less energy isn't necessarily indicative of bad things. If a factory switches to LED lights, more efficient machines, installs a few solar panels on the roof, starts using electric golf carts for people to move around the factory grounds, upgrades their computers to modern ones, implements smart switches so that everything is really cut off at night, etc. their electricity consumption will be drastically down... and that doesn't mean there will be less output.

Artificially increasing energy price can actually make an economy more competitive in the log run, when at one point in the future energy price will rise anyways. Even if we did not have any CO2 disposal problem, the era of fossil fuels would still end some day. Perhaps not even that far in the future, because imagine how much faster consumption would have risen in absence of any CO2 considerations.

That's a silly assumption, unless you're expecting technological progress to grind to a halt.

Energy prices are dramatically cheaper than they were 100 years ago, when they were dramatically cheaper than they were 200 years ago.

Centuries ago, our primary power source was lumber. Later it was coal and then whales and then oil. In the future it will be solar panels and fission and then fusion. The energy output of 1kg of fuel for a fusion reactor is many orders of magnitude more than what can be captured from burning 1kg of lumber.

And it's not a matter of "discovering a deposit". Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the solar system and in the universe.

If you have an old, inefficient appliance (e.g. an incandescent lightbulb) and electricity is cheap, then it makes perfect economic sense to just keep operating the appliance and only replace it with a newer more efficient model once it actually breaks down. If electricity prices suddenly triple (which they did for a brief time in Germany), suddenly it starts making a lot of sense to start moving up the replacement date for those older less efficient appliances.

Don't get me wrong, the energy shock was indeed quite economically harmful to Germany, but saying that pure demand destruction is the only thing that explains a drop in electricity usage is just wrong.

So the demand destruction happened in the most energy intensive and lowest value-added sectors, which make up less than 100% of the economy. That's what I would expect, it's not a contradiction. If a hawk eats the slowest lizard, the lizard population gets faster -- but not because any individual lizard got faster.

I hope your conclusion is correct, but your reasoning around the alternative hypothesis isn't.

https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-trends-p...

It’s quite easy to become “energy efficiency improvement king” for a few decades if all you have to do is pick the low-hanging fruit that everyone else already has.

Efficiency in of itself is not a useful work product. To game theory it - if you had an unlimited source of literally free energy, no one would waste time or effort on gaining efficiency. They would be working on making new products and services.

Every person or monetary unit working towards efficiency gains means those resources are not available on moving forward. It's basically the broken windows economic theory. You have to do a lot of this work just to keep up with previous outputs.

This is certainly reductionist, but I think it does bear out at least somewhat in real life. Instead of making a brighter lightbulb, you are focusing on getting the same lumen output out of the same watts. The goal of a lightbulb is not to be efficient - it's to output light. Efficiency is simply a design constraint.

I can spend my money adding new insulation to make my current home more efficient - or I can spend that same money adding a spare room as an addition to my property and increasing my quality of life. If I have to spend that money just to keep my heating bill the same it was 20 years prior, that's money I can't spend elsewhere.

But we don't have an unlimited source of free energy - energy efficiency has been a goal of much of the developed world since the 1970s, for example the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conservation_in_the_Uni...

Economic Metrics are sort of like the dashboard of a car - you need to analyze the speedometer, the odometer, the gas gauge/battery level, tire pressure, etc when driving.

Concentrating on one metric alone is useless as it is a dynamic system.

There are changes happening in Germany. That said, it is slower than in other countries, but then again, better late than never.

There are some very prominent issues with Germany, but it appears that Germany and the US seem to get the brunt of bad takes (often by Americans and Germans respectively). I've found both countries to be so similar in personality and outlook that it leads to clashes ("I hate me" - Jerry Seinfeld)