Here in Germany, there was recently a leak in the news. It said that a single LED sign consumes as much energy as 10 single households[0]. Of course, the companies don't want to give any official information. That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion...
Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.
That's pretty crazy. We used to spend 1400 KWh as a family of three. Didn't check the latest numbers as a family of four, but I don't expect a lot more. We even cook / bake a lot. What on earth are people spending electricity on?
The numbers cited here included electricity for warm
water and heating. Both are outrageously energy-intensive. The figured for electric appliances only are roughly in line with yours.
> What on earth are people spending electricity on?
I guess there are just a lot more appliances in use today and we're more lazy.
When I, approaching my 40s, compare our household with my parents household when I was a child there a various notable changes in habits:
- My mother hang the loundry to dry. We seldomly do this anymore, instead we're using a dryer. These things are insanely power-hungry.
- Electronics for entertainment and communication: A landline phone, a TV (for the evening news), a radio + casette player. Now I'm powering/charging at least 10 devices (like mobile, laptop, smart watch, tablet) at any given time.
- When dark outside, about 3 100W light bulbs would illumate the living space for 5 people. Now we have „power-saving” LEDs. But a lot of them. So many, I can't even compare them.
- When it was hot, well, you endure it. Now we have three ventilators (others start to use ACs, which has always been a very awkward thing to do in Germany).
Edit: I come to think, while a lot has to do with being lazy, another lot has to do with being selfish. Things like hanging the loundry. We use the dryer, so we safe time to do more productive things like working on our careers.
Air drying clothes indoor is pretty bad. It is slow, takes space, and leaves textile in a bad state (at least for cotton and wool). Drying outside is good but not possible everywhere and not always. Also things like sheets and towels really should not be left to dry indoor.
I live in a place where it rains all the time and the driest month in terms of humidity is 80%, sometimes if I can’t hang things outside clothes take so long to dry inside that I end up having to wash them again because they start to smell
It greatly depends on where you live, and season. In my apartment in Bucharest, especially during the summer, clothes dry indoors in ~4h, and a bed sheet takes maybe 6h. In the winter, the time is usually double.
Still, drying clothes indoors has no ill effects, I have no idea where you got this. It's definitely better than exposing them to high temperatures like in most apartment tumble driers.
> during the summer, clothes dry indoors in ~4h,
> drying clothes indoors has no ill effects
Maybe the first is why you think the second is always true? Where I live if I just leave laundry on a drying rack it won't dry for days, and once it is dryish it already smells stale and mouldy.
I'm glad that it works for you, but maybe the advice differs based on location, climate, maybe even architectural choices.
They started out right and acknowledged that things can be different in different climates. But then in their second paragraph they made a categorical statement: “Still, drying clothes indoors has no ill effects, I have no idea where you got this.”
That is a general statement. They don’t think drying clothes indoors can have any ill effects. Ever. At any humidity level.
So they realise that the drying time can change quantitatively. What they miss is that there are qualitative effects which can happen too. And in their hurry they dismiss other people’s lived experience.
You're right, I do understand that if it takes days to dry, the dampness has a good chance of allowing mold to form, and that can be extremely harmful.
Not the OP, but indoor drying in winter at least where I live has the issue that (a) it tends to be so slow that the wash sometimes starts smelling stale,
(b) it's just extracting heat from the house by evaporation, so it's going to raise your heating bills anyhow, perhaps?
(c) you might end up having issues with indoor humidity, such as moldy walls.
Heat pump or condensing dryers may well be a better option.
Almost certainly the perfect solution will be situational. I mean, if your house is too dry in the winter, a bit of extra humidity might even be a feature, after all...
> you might end up having issues with indoor humidity
Winter air tends to be much drier than summer air, so much so that my bath towels dry on the rack in the winter overnight, but may stay damp for a whole day in the summer.
That said, water will condense at heat bridges (?)(poorly/not insulated parts of the wall) in the winter, causing mold, if the place is poorly insulated.
That's relative humidity, not absolute. Absolute humidity has an additional Arrhenius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation) factor. For instance, 100% relative humidity at 40 C is 51.1 g/cm^3, while at 20 C it's only 17.3 g/cm^3.
Clothes and bedclothes dried outside are much nicer than the same dried in a tumble dryer.
I don't have space (I live in an apartment), but I regularly did this in England. It takes slightly more time to hang them out vs. stuff them in the dryer, and (in England) you need to keep an eye on the weather, but they end up smelling fresher.
Also, traditional landline phones (no hands free short range radio etc) draw power from the telecom central office. They aren't on your standard grid so you are effectively paying for that electricity on your phone bill.
Because they are power-hungry and everyone knows that.
More generally because the climate in central Europe is not like Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, California but hospitable during the summer season without AC.
AC makes it more comfortable during hot days but it is still doable without.
This is only true for private households. Since 10 years ACs are widely used in a business environment.
Except, modern AC is pretty efficient. I have a decent monoblock cooler in our apartment in Berlin. I also have a 1-second sampling power meter. The AC unit uses about 700 watts when active cooling, but of course it cycles so that's not all the time. We also only run it when it's 30+ during the daytime.
Overall, it's only added about 15-20kWh to our monthly usage. (2-person household, about 200kWh/month average)
> What on earth are people spending electricity on?
It's exactly that. An AC, probably one additional appliance among others, adds another 10% to the total and somehow we manage to frame this as efficient and thus the right thing to do.
That seems an entirely reasonable incremental usage. In particular when the using A/C allows you to sleep and not running it means you get too little sleep and of poor quality. When the nights at 30-35C and the humidity high, an A/C can be a blessing.
Germans should be using heat pumps for their homes anyway, it can't be beaten for efficiency. Every time I mention this there's someone who doesn't know that heat pump systems don't require excavation: they don't.
This gets you air conditioning literally for free, and you get to be the one to frown at your neighbors for continuing to burn something to stay warm.
Are they more power-hungry than heat? A window unit can be used in the room you sleep in, and if you've done a reasonable job at reducing leakage and insulation , and reducing light ingress (external shutters, etc.) can be pretty efficient. Even in San Diego with the sun bearing down on my flat we managed to have a pretty low load factor on our window AC to keep it around 24-25C at night.
Remember that when you're too hot in an office, there's really nothing you can do about it and you just have to suffer. At least you have the option to do things like put on a sweater when you're too cold. Given that, it seems to make sense to keep the office at the coolest temperature preferred by anyone in it.
I like your logic And like lower temperatures when working. The idea that someone would ask for the whole company to be set at the temperature they want and everyone else wears a jumper quite funny.
My girlfriend strongly believes this comes from "patriarchal society" and specifically a "study" that said office thermostats are set based on an old formula designed in like the 60s and that only looked at how HVAC interacted with men.
I thought the idea that offices set thermostats to an actual standard instead of just whoever cries the loudest or has the most power to be almost laughable, so I looked for the "study" she got it from. Indeed, I don't remember the details, but the governmental bureaucracy involved in recommending HVAC did actually use a formula that was obsolete and didn't consider women. However, there was zero evidence in the study that anyone actually used that formula in consideration of anything.
I don't know if it's what the OP meant but the standard "German window" is a shape that makes an AC a lot more difficult than in e.g. the US. You can't mount it in the window directly and the insulation required is relatively irregular.
Home server PC at around 100W. That adds a surprising amount, on it's own that's getting close to 1000KWh to run for a year.
And then there's the main PC setup, running maybe 12hrs a day (inc. WFH). And that was build for gaming, so it's quite power-hungry, especially when the GPU is kept busy, working on Unity projects.
But on average? Does the average person have a home server? A desktop PC?
I don't know any non-techy person who isn't using a laptop exclusively, and then pretty rarely, as most things nowadays happen on the smart phone. AC is non-existent in Germany. So I'm really curious. I have a 24/7 Homeserver and laptop, and am at ~1200kwh a year.
I'd agree normal people don't have those things, but also add that things not mentioned — e.g. TVs, ovens, and fridge/freezers — will add up. At such a low average, even lighting will contribute non-negligibly.
Two questions though: how common are TVs in Germany? And how common is electric hot water for showers/baths? My sample size is pretty small (and mostly limited to Berlin).
I'd say TVs are still the norm, my social circle is 30~50 and o think everyone got one, for streaming mostly. As for the older generation it's also still a thing you just need to have. As for sizes, I think they've also increased over the last decade or two, but at least in the cities if you're limited to a smaller place I think people go for 40 rather than 50 inches. Can't really speak for the younger generations, but I feel they're more comfortable watching stuff on their phones, college students probably also due to financial or space reasons.
Hot water mostly comes from central heating with gas, some homes in my city have district heating. At least up until now, electric heating, be it for water or the whole apartment was way to expensive so that you'd only consider that if you really have no other choice, for example, an old building from 100+ years ago with retrofitted central heating might have an electric water heater for the kitchens as they only did the bathrooms.
How do you heat your appartmen/house? There might be quite some differences between oil, gas or heat-pump. I'm not sure whether these numbers include/exclude that part.
My household has seen 1800 kWh of electricity consumption in 2021, a year in which I worked a full-time job on a computer and two displays at home. So did my wife. We have two little children.
While we might not be close to the average consumption in Germany, because our house is quite new, I'm regularly wondering what other households are doing with that much energy.
I use more than that by myself per month. Granted, I have all electrical appliances, heat, and a car, but even without those I have to imagine I'd still use significantly more.
It definitely can scale much better, we are using around 1800 kWh (2 parents, 1 small child) and I think it’s safe to say going below 1300 for one of us would be hard, especially when working from home. But we live in a flat and there are many 2 or three persons households in a whole house, probably with several computers and may be even tvs and certainly more lights. May be you do save a bit on cooking and the fridge, but cleaning things should roughly scale linearily.
Your source includes "Electricity for heating, hot water". Maybe this includes households using heat pumps for heating, so this could explain the difference?
And also probably the single least efficient source of heat for a home. An apartment using resistive heat instead of a heat pump should not be allowed anymore.
Wait, what? How could electric resistive heating with its 100% efficiency possibly be less efficient than gas or oil, which are the main alternatives in use at this point?
Heat pumps have >100% efficiency, which makes them stand way out at the top, but they're an exception rather than the rule.
If the electricity for resistive heating is coming from a combustion process, it would be more efficient to burn that substance directly in the home to produce heat directly. Otherwise a lot of heat energy is lost being converted to electricity and traveling through the power lines.
> In most states in the South average household consumes that per month.
That's what happens when you live in cardboard houses in the middle of a literal desert.
In Europe more people live in better build houses or flats with centralised heating and no AC. I used 1500kwh last years while working full time from my living room and spent maybe 100 euros on heating
On the other hand, because of AC the American south also doesn’t have swaths of people dropping dead when the daily temperatures rise above 80F. And considering that’s a daily part of living in the US south for roughly 6 months of the year, that’s probably a good thing.
The South (which means southeast in US parlance) would be cardboard houses in the middle of a literal swamp. The houses in the middle of a literal desert are in the Southwest.
Average American "cardboard house" is better insulated than average European brick or concrete house. Having heavy walls make your house feel "sturdy" but it has nothing to do with energy efficiency. A lot of houses in Europe are just brick or concrete with no additional insulation. In US it's it's rare to have uninsulated houses.
In US more people live in very hot places like Texas and Arizona and people mostly live in single-family houses. Single-family houses obviously takes more energy to cool than "flats". Plus average American house/flat has twice the living area.
1500W of LEDs is... rather bright; on the order of 150000 lumen. I guess there will be significant losses perhaps, but I sure hope most signage is using a lot less than that.
We are using 1000 kWh per year as a couple including hot water. With that we are very low in Germany, but even that is really without much optimization (though we lack some energy-intensive devices like a clothes dryer).
Newer devices sold in the EU are relatively energy efficient. A typical fridge-freezer combo uses 150kWh.
That would be a small <150L E class fridge, kept at 21C (with an air conditioner during the summer)
Fridge efficiency has not increased much in the last decades (LG infamously had an efficient but horrendously unreliable 'linear compressor') - the only part that can increase efficiency is the time(s) it gets opened and how good seals the fridge has, and ambient temperature. Also smaller compressor by design cannot be super efficient.
The newer devices part doesn't affect fridges all that much - vacuum cleaners have been limited, lightning requires LEDs (effectively) - which comes w/ its own issue of retrofitting, TVs (also relying on LEDs for backlight or OLED directly), power factor correction (for 75+W) and what not. Direct drive (brushless DC) and low temp washing for washing machines. Yet, there is no recent groundbreaking technology, it's just that the EU changed the efficiency labeling to prevent massive A+++ stuff.
Well, infamously, German households tend to generate heat using gas, and not electricity. AC is rare. EVs are rare.
Either way, I wanted to know what the actual power draw of those signs is, and since it was given in multiples of a (German) single household, well, that's probably about the number they are working with.
Using gas is worse than use geothermal, unless you somehow have gas powered geo thermal pumps (and still worse than solar+geo thermal). So the energy use would be higher.
For one of the richest countries with one of the biggest car industries being only 25th is a great achievement in mobility. Yes, we could do better, but just compare it to the default country (#7 in car ownership, #2 if you exclude microstates).
>obesity rates above average than EU
47th in the global ranking, after Iceland. And USA is right after Oceania.
It depends on the perspective.
It isn't about the absolute numbers (even though they aren't 'good' for Germany specially if you remove micro/extreme poor states), is the 'holier than thou' attitude from Germans. It's like an obese person going to the morbidly obese: 'here we don't stuff our mouths with food like you' while having no sense that they are just in a slightly better state than the ones they are chastising.
I do not understand your argument. We do not use personal cars as often as USA or some other countries, instead relying more on public transportation and bikes - as a result, electricity costs for transportation are quite low for individual households. What's your point? That less than 25% of population do not eat healthy and this is somehow relevant to the conversation?
Among the EU, germans drive more km per car than anyone else except Austria (data from 2000, can't find newer).
Among the EU, Germans rank 6th on car ownership per capita (2020 data).
Going these together, and it shows within the EU, Germans are the on the top of km per capita and not 'we drive less than others' (except maybe the US)
Your reply to someone asking about charging their EV(thus need to drive) was that in Germany that isn't a problem because there you eat healthy and cycle, which is a lie (you drive more than most/all of the EU). (as per cycling data, DE is 7th on daily usage of bikes in the EU, but couldn't find any data regarding number of kilometres though)
Data from 2000 is missing two decades of economic growth in Eastern Europe and major EU-funded investments in infrastructure in that region. But let's assume, Germany is still high in the ranks. What does it prove? In Europe the life style from Dublin to Warsaw isn't that different: we often live in an apartment rather than in a house in suburb, we rely on public transportation and have great networks, using a bike is a norm in many cities etc. This all means that electricity budget of an individual household is unlikely to include EV charging at the moment. This will be different from USA, where having individual house and traveling by cars is often the only option. So, what's your point exactly?
It's still very likely Germans drive more - Germany is very decentralized (which is amazing, e.g. no grid locks), and it has one of the best railroads in the world... still has likely one the best highways as well.
The only East European country that can possible change the stats would be Poland (but personally I don't believe that) - the rest are just too small.
You compare yourself to the most car-dependent and obese OECD country and then congratulate yourself, completely missing that Germany is very car-dependent and obese, and it's not exactly improving.
Also would not brag about public transport, - most of your rich neighbours do better.
I think you completely missed the point of what I was saying and replying in the middle of the thread is not helping here. Please re-read it again, your comment does not make sense. I did not congratulate myself.
You can call it geothermal, when it comes from underground pipes ;) District level heating still exists in some areas, also quite often there’s a single oil or gas boiler for a multi-apartment building.
Germany also has mechanical signs that mechanically scroll different posters past a (full-size) viewing window. Banning the electronic ones won't cause there to be less ads.
Everyone lauds LEDs for being super energy efficient, but the reality is that they really aren't. It's just that they are being compared to even worse light sources that were so bad at efficiency it's hard to really grasp how much they sucked.
LEDs are super efficient, household LED bulbs retrofit for e14/e27 are just a terrible example of overdriven ones with bad lifetime. That has very little to do w/ properly constant current (not over) driven LEDs. (Edit overdriven - higher heat output and worse efficacy)
The max efficacy woulod be 683 lm/w. Blue LEDs can reach 1/3 of the theoretical maximum.
The lifetime is pretty good when driven correctly to be sure, I was just talking about raw efficiency. Underdrive a led as much as you want, but you'll still lose half of your energy to waste heat. The heat will just be spread out more and be less noticeable on each chip.
Like, I'm sure we can agree high power LEDs have gigantic heatsinks and fans for other reasons than cosmetic.
I read a neat article recently that talked about the "Dubai Lamp". They're lightbulbs that Philips makes for Dubai that are twice as efficient as their standard LED bulbs. The difference is simple: LEDs are more efficient when run at lower power, so by increasing the number of LED elements in the bulbs and reducing the voltage across them you get 600 lumens for 3 W. For reference, California requires lightbulbs to operate at 80 lumens per watt or higher.
Not when you consider that it's still heating the room with 3 of those watts.
If you asked me to build a house and I threw away more than half of the bricks you'd call me crazy. But when it comes to leds it's called "incredible efficiency". It's only efficient in comparison to the other options, not in any objective sense.
Not really. Converting all the energy to work would be 100% efficiency, converting none of it would be 0%. It's an absolute measure.
Now sure there are subcategories where 100% efficiency is the maximum theoretical efficiency (like the carnot cycle limit of 37% for heat engines), but that's already misleading info if not specified.
You provide no points to refute my statement. Being bounded between 0% and 100% is irrelevant, unless you think only 100% efficient is not inefficient - which would be absurd due to the impossibility of obtaining an “efficient” label.
> That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion...
There is a widespread belief that Advertising serves no purpose to humanity.
Advertising is like anything in life: In high doses it is harmful. In lower doses it is useful. If there are regulators in your country that prevent advertisers from making false claims, even better.
Advertising has helped me hone onto products and services in my whole life that I've found useful. Many times I would have not been able to find the product or service if it were not for that advertisement. [You could claim that I was "brainwashed" into buying that product but that could be applied to any interaction in life. For example, if my spouse convinced me to do something, it usually means the logic was sound and it is highly unlikely that I was brainwashed to do her bidding].
No one likes being aggressively marketed to. No one likes being duped. But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.
Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look. By selling to you, the customer, we can make a profit and you can get the benefit from our product". Advertising can be a win-win.
Advertising can allow manufacturing at scale. It has helped bring about many the marvels of technology that would have cost millions of dollars a few decades ago to be just a few hundred (e.g. our laptops that are more powerful than supercomputers of of the 1990s). Without advertising many companies may not have reached the sales volume to keep bringing down costs year after year.
I could go on. Adverting is useful. Bad actors must be weeded out. However, Advertising in itself is useful.
> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational. Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look. By selling to you, the customer, we can make a profit and you can get the benefit from our product".
I cannot recall one single advertisement I ever saw in my life, other than some institutional/non-profit ads, which remotely fits that idyllic description. So it's really a moot point. "What if advertising were just calm factual information", well but it's not! It's definitely not! It's psychological warfare of moderate-to-high intensity. So what use is pretending it's something it's not? It's very disingenuous to pretend it can ever be "gentle, honest, and educational" (lol)
I also don't see how advertising is responsible for chip mass-production and Moore's law.
Are you thinking strictly in terms of massive, multi-national companies? For myself, it would be far more handy if I had seen ads for local plumbers, chimney repair, barbershops, etc. I try to support my local economy whenever I can, and I don't mind paying a premium for smaller shops since they usually do a better job, or are at least incentivized to do so.
When it comes to something like buying a car, I don't want to be advertised to since the manufacturer of that product 1) isn't a part of my community and 2) isn't supported by the people in my area.
I can absolutely think of cases where I would have liked to know what services are available for specific products, like chair making, or a project I have in mind, rather than having to ask around to figure out who even does it in my area. Obviously, I would still have to do some research to figure out if the person advertising is any good, but the fact that a small business has a budget for advertising is a very positive indicator that they are at least professional enough to have some revenue.
Advertising, when it relates to something a small business can exist within, reduces the amount of time and effort I have to put in to seeing how many competitors are in that space. It's not something that I'm thrilled about, but it does have benefit within certain circumstance.
>I can absolutely think of cases where I would have liked to know what services are available for specific products, like chair making, or a project I have in mind, rather than having to ask around to figure out who even does it in my area.
We had this, it was called phone books. And I guess a phone book is technically advertising, but there's clearly a difference between info and manipulation.
Total disagree. New trends, improvements communicate itself one or the other way.
If I want a new X, I'd rather research on my own, best are objective tests, or worse then selective advertisements I choose to view.
Even non-aggressive mild advertisements that just try to snatch my attention involuntarily are just not needed and a pain. The world could be much better without that crap.
I don't buy the argument that advertisements were necessary for manufacutring at scale, any source?
> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.
Erm wtf what, no, just no, leave me alone please. I want to find you in a dedicated magazine / tests / reviews if your something is something I currently want, otherwise this attention grab is hostile.
You’re just negotiating who pays for searching and communication. You want to pay someone (a magazine or review site) to gather the data for you from the companies. Other people want the companies to pay so they get the information for free.
There’s a qualitative argument there as well, and whether to value not having to pay for ad-supported publications and services, but that’s essentially the question in the preference for or against advertising: who pays and who gets paid to make the right buyers and sellers aware of each other.
There is one thing that extremely easy way to retain the "benefit" you claim: make advertising opt-in. Truly, continuously opt-in. Every time there is an ad, you have to tap "yes, I'd like to see it" (or "yes, show all ads for this movie", but not across movies). If there is truly advantages to ads, people will choose to see them.
I'd go even further: have different platforms compete as "and serving" places, basically opt-in targeted advertising sites. They aren't allowed to use any external data, just a questionnaire and your behaviour on the platform, and the user must choose to go to the site by entering it into their browser or looking it up on Google. No ads anywhere else.
If ads are truly as beneficial as you describe, people will go for it. Let the market decide whether ads are good for the consumer
> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.
I don't disagree, but there are a few points that I see differently.
First of all, I think that what you're looking for is promotion, that is based on someone or some entity promoting your products and services, putting their face on it and leveraging their reputation of connoisseur of the matter at hand. It's based on trust and works best especially for tech products
Nobody buy smartphones based on adv, well except iPhone users that buy the brand iPhone - that could be seen as a confirmation of the trust based promotion, they trust Apple -, people watch reviews on YouTube channels that they trust.
Advertising is low effort. it's usually someone writing a script for you, pretending to be you, that it is the company that is talking directly to you, but it's in fact an agency that wrote a claim and a story to tell, to actually sell, not promote, the service or product in question by exploiting your feelings.
Secondly, I don't believe that advertising made laptops affordable, research did.
Super computers still cost millions and are an order or two of magnitude more powerful than you regular laptop of today.
> What?? If there ever was proof that HN is completely clueless about reality not empathetic of their fellow humans
The simple answer is that the real disconnect is thinking that since someone comments on HN, he is some kind of a mythical creature.
I am a middle aged man from Italy that saw mobile phones birth when was 20 already.
Don't assume that your experience is my experience.
Nobody I know closely knows what HN is, they ask me what phone to buy or which laptop, because I've always been the "techie" of the family/group of friends and because they care about not wasting their money but can't navigate the bullshit they see in the ads.
I guess that "blast past fast" or "do what you can" don't really say anything about the device true capabilities and why one should spend their money to buy it.
unless the reason is "I will buy whatever rich people buy" or "I like the colour of this one"
Of course the iPhone ads work, because they don't promote the phone, they sell a way of life, a lifestyle, their target is the "cool kids" that want to be "content creators" and that appeals to their desire to be part of what is fashionable among their peers, but that's exactly what brainwashing is.
Ads is brainwashing and it's scientifically weaponized against the reference target.
repetita iuvant: they don't promote the product, they exploit your sentiments, desires, fears, whatever works, to make you buy the product.
But are actually a bunch of lies.
Well, how about opening an online plattform for advertising then?
Stopp invading my space (public spaces, software, websites), and put ads there for people that are interested in being suggested products they might like.
And, instead of tracking all my activity, put a form that I can fill out with the details I am comfortable with.
Not gonna happen, because they're paying people and companies to annoy you with the ads almost nobody wants to see
Yeah I'm happy to throw out that baby with the advertising bathwater. Fuck it, I'll even break the news to the few friends in advertising that society has decided to evolve and that their services won't be needed any longer. But unfortunately, ads are how people prefer to pay online so we're stuck with it.
But lying, manipulating your emotions, etc. are efficient ways of doing ads. If something is OK when done poorly and harmful when optimised, maybe it was a bad thing in the first place?
Consumers can be served better by independent review of products in magazines, etc. Or if you really want to by catalogues put together by sellers. (I used those when I was younger quite a lot to discover and buy new things.)
The random road signs for biggest bank in the land, or one of the three telecom companies in the land, or for things like well known beverages is quite ridiculous. Almost everyone knows these companies exist already.
Good point, ads can be really useful. For me, the question is how much we are exposed to it, in which context, and the transparency about things being ads.
Examples:
- Obvious ads vs. sneaky product placements
- There should be spaces/times without ads allowed
Another thing that makes me wonder is big know companies (soda for example) constantly making ads. This is not the case of "Hey we made something new" as literally everybody knows the product for years. This constant cognitive exposure has some similarities to propaganda. We are not allowed to forget them.
> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.
> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.
Do you like being approach on the street by solicitors? Personally, I hate it. When I’m walking, I appreciate undisturbed personal space. I feel the same way about advertising. I don’t care that the company is proud. I want my personal space undisturbed. You can show me something if I ask, but to assume I care to see anything you have to offer is rude.
> There is a widespread belief that Advertising serves no purpose to humanity.
It's worse than that. Advertising persuades people to buy ever more stuff they don't need, thereby causing enormous damage to the planet. Advertising is among the top of things we should ban to reduce climate change.
> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.
There is no such thing as honest advertising. The conflict of interest is inherent. The best information comes from third parties but even that gets corrupted by advertisers eventually.
> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.
When I want companies talking to me about products, I'll visit their website or I'll open their store app. In those cases it's not even advertising but information. I asked to see the products. Advertising is by definition an intrusion, uninvited.
Most of the time I don't want companies talking to me about offers. Their insistence is abuse.
That ideal of advertising you described is virtually non-existent. It's generally manipulation of the lowest sort concocted by sociopathic people.
And beliefs that an open society, free flow of information and free market economics are good things are of course highly political and strongly ideological. They are just largely uncontested (at least amongst the types of people who read hn)
But I don't think that the current society is open and free. It is open-er and freer than what it replaced. It is also open-er and freer than some proposed alternatives. It is not the best, most open, and most free society that could ever be conceived.
I don't like political arguments on hn but if you're truly interested I can try to summarise them when I get home later.
It barely delays the inevitable, it's less than a drop in the bucket, everything you gain there will be instantly counteracted 10 fold somewhere else because we don't want to face reality.
But sure, let's stop using plastic straws and switch off our routers at night while we continue absolutely ravaging this planet
A large portion of the advertising is to get people to switch brands. A smaller portion is to get new customers. Banning advertisement increases the profits for the already established brands (for at least the short term).
Like higher quality / cheaper prices wouldn't spread by word of mouth... if anything advertising behemots are keeping actually improved products out of the spotlight by selling us whatever pays most in advertising costs, regardless of externalities.
What's the alternative with some high power lights aimed at a non-LED sign? I'd expect for similar brightness the power usage is going to be almost the same. Maybe even more because you're relying on reflected light rather than emitted light.
> This means out-of-home advertising displays at bus stops, train stations and in underpasses could still be operated according to invidis managing director Florian Rotberg. “Most contracts explicitly require outdoor advertising companies to operate backlit city light posters and screens well into the night to provide passengers with more security in the waiting area. Autumn will show whether and how the exemptions will be used,” he said.
Most contracts require lighting because otherwise people can't be spammed with ads without their consent at night and they're pretending it's for public safety. I hope whoever decides on this comes down hard on them for having the audacity to pretend lighting from ads is anywhere close to helping public safety. They can get bent about contracts, contracts do not supersede the law.
It isn't the ads, really: They are realistically speaking of lighting in bus stops, underpasses, and train stations.
Lighting in those areas, which tend to be dark or populated, helps folks feel safer. Taking away the ads makes these places darker, and I can understand not suddenly having nervous folks not take the bus or train.
Though, I agree: They can get bent about the contracts. The proper response is to install proper lighting without the ads. Hopefully this is in the works.
I can see this degenerating into some sort of efficiency metric that will be engineered around. For instance, it wouldn't be too hard to take the Google logo and make it a proper "light" with some LEDs. Or simply write out the name in white LEDs.
Yeah I was purely viewing this from an environmental perspective, not an economical one. But you're right. This is of course the reason it's done that way.
It goes further than that.
They outsourced public transportation to private companies and those private companies outsourced the busstops to ad companies.
At least here the bus shelters are owned by ad companies.
Public lighting is still another topic, I thought. Because many things are done by private companies (most?) but still those are mandated to provide a certain quality of service.
Often the entire bus stops are financed by those advertising there. At least that has always been the argument against finally disallowing tobacco/smoking ads in Germany because then smaller communities would (allegedly) not be able to finance these things.
I'm sure that some communes might struggle paying for something that's been paid for by someone else in the past but the argument really lacks if it's used to justify keeping tobacco ads around.
Like you said, other advertisers would probably happily replace them and even if that's not the case I think a country as wealthy as Germany should be able to find some way to finance bus stops ;-)
Pretty much. The article says that the contracts require the lighting so that the area is illuminated. I'm gonna guess, however, that they wouldn't keep up the lighting if it weren't required.
Which really isn't so surprising, considering how pervasive advertising is in many societies.
It's not only for safety for the passengers. The light also helps the driver to see the bus stops and stations. Especially bus driver who often switch routes seem to have demand for this.
Those areas are the only areas I can think of that have LED signs in Germany though. Of course not entirely sure but I don't think there's a single one of those large LED screens (like the ones on time square) in Hamburg. Maybe Berlin/Frankfurt have some?
Unless I'm completely blanking on these signs being used elsewhere, excluding the bus-stop signs sounds like this will not have any noticeable effect apart from providing a nice sounding headline.
In very rural southern Germany, I know several electronics stores who have 7x4-meter panels, and I know a spot where they are mounted to a mast next to a federal road (with farmland around it). People always think "Times Square", but ultimately, the problem is bigger for the displays are smaller.
>but I don't think there's a single one of those large LED screens (like the ones on time square) in Hamburg
yes, I also did not notice any of those here in Hamburg. there is a smaller one in Harvestehude; even those are so rare that I clearly noticed this one.
> to pretend lighting from ads is anywhere close to helping public safety
i thought it was a known fact that more light during nighttime equals more safety. there's a reason violent crimes happen on low lit alleyways. not that germans are actually out and about after 6pm :)
For real, when they installed some of these ultra bright billboards by the street, I'd get blinded by them as I waited at the traffic light, especially on shorter winter days. The operator claimed they don't run them in the dark, but that was definitely a lie.
> The operator claimed they don't run them in the dark
I think the following progression of events leads to many of those blindingly bright digital signs at night:
Original sign conforms with regulations and comes with a light sensor to dynamically adjust brightness. It's bright during the day, dim during the night.
After a few months the light sensors gets gunked up with dirt. Display now thinks its night all the time. It's way too dim to see in daylight.
People running the display don't like that you can't read their ads during the day. They realize that cleaning the sensor every X days will be expensive, so they get someone to defeat the light sensor altogether and get the display to run at full brightness all the time.
Result is a sign that's still making money during those valuable rush-hour traffic times, at the cost of beaming deathrays into driver's eyeballs at night.
FWIW, it's trivial to determine sunsets and sunrises for years in advance. If the only concern is day/night, and not also clouds/rain/whatever, then that is the cheaper, more reliable solution.
It's not only a gunked up light sensor, it is buggy software as well that is running those panels. At least that is what I heard from a friend working in the industry maintaining those displays.
There are several of these ultra-bright LED signs in my neighborhood that are very annoying at night. One is at a nearby church displaying the schedule and various upcoming activities. It is at eye level and is just off to the side of the street (as most church signs are) and is so bright that it lights up everything within 200 meters. This is the same for several banks and liquor stores in the area. Honestly, I don't see how the people that live across the street get any sleep at night.
Even outdoor lighting is not without problems, especially two recent trends are worrying:
- shift from low-pressure sodium lamps (which emit 95%+ of light in the narrow peak, so are a bit easier to filter out in astronomy application, and also don't trigger blue-light neural response in humans, and animals alike) to LEDs (which pollute across the visible spectrum, with plenty of blue light component);
- as light efficiency increases, people often choose to utilize it to increase lighting intensity within same electric power budget, rather than keep same output in lumens, and save some power.
My village recently switched to LED street lamps, and I hate them. The light pollution has definitely become worse here over the last ten years. The village lights switch off around 1am, but that doesn't seem to make a jot of difference to my astrophotography, because the town 4 miles to the South and the city 10 miles to the North keep theirs switched on.
I really missed the sodium lamps after my university "upgraded" to LED. There was something peaceful about the monochrome, and their gentle whine when they got too old.
At first I loved LED street lights because I could see so much better by them (and I presume that they have an increased deterrent effect on crime though I have not checked this).
These days I think disrupting wildlife is more important than human safety and I wish we could get rid of nearly all street lighting.
I wonder if the ubiquitousness of people carrying flashlights in the form of smartphones could be leveraged into doing away with street lights as an expected practice. I don't think I would actually support that, but I think that kind of shift in culture is a possibility right now.
It can, but one would need a bit of a ettiquette to not point it into other people's faces. Pretty sure some people would use headlamps if it was necessary for everyone to bring their light source and that is plenty annoying.
Much of the time using a flashlight is superfluous, or even counter-productive, if it's not pitch black, unless you have very poor night vision. Your eyes will never adjust to the dark and you will end up seeing less.
But wouldn't animals be able to adapt to a single, predictable light source that illuminates a certain area more easily than to an arbitrary number of individual light sources in an arbitrary number of configurations/angles moving around?
That said, maybe one could equip street lights with a sensor so they don't need to run at all times?
Yes, yes I do. We're doing incalculable damage to animal life (e.g., disrupting birds and insects which are essential pollinators for plants). This is but one facet of the crisis that our species has inflicted upon the planet.
But why is that a problem? I do not disagree with you about the crisis (at all!), but the only reason we care is because we're human beings - because we defined this to immoral and also because it endangers human (and other) beings lives. IMO, I find it makes very little logical (and frankly also moral) sense to say as a human being that wildlife conservation is more important than the lives of other human beings.
I know you're not saying quite the same, but this reminds me a bit of an "unpopular opinion" I came across once, which stated that people must die because there are too many people living on earth...
In this scenario, the choice seems obvious. Humans can make informed decisions regarding their safety and apply measures to mitigate dangers, while wildlife affected by those lights can't.
My city banned billboard advertising once. All of them digital and non-digital. It was fabulous and finally felt like a place to live. Sadly it did not last long and their revival only reinforced how refreshing their absence was. I think we do not realize the value of visual space and pay a heavy price when we decide to monetize it.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate.
> They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I think similarly, I think advertisement is mass poisoning that we happen to allow, because it makes a lot of money go around. One of the cities that did away with billboards is Sao Paulo - really interesting case.
The headline is a bit confusing. Looking at the article, the regulation was written in Germany but is passed by the EU (suggesting this will not only affect Germany but also other EU member countries that implement it?) and it is not just about "digital signage" but all illuminted displays in public spaces that aren't necessary for regulating traffic. So this would likely also affect neon signs and illuminated non-digital billboards.
The part about there being confusion in whether this applies to shop windows likely also is more about whether this applies to LED displays and showcases in shop windows because they're technically not "in a public space" due to being in the shop but would clearly be affected if they weren't.
The headline had me wonder why shops would have to turn off the e-ink displays on shelves indicating the prices of items after 10pm given that most shops that have them (e.g. supermarkets) are closed by that time anyway. The massive LED walls you see in big cities like New York are so rare in most of Germany I didn't think of them when I read "digital signage".
e-ink displays are electronically controlled passive displays that use zero power to retain an image. Refreshing them to blank every night and back to the price tag every morning would, in fact, be a waste of power. That's why these price tags are able to be powered by single coin cells.
This is going to be interesting to watch, as many low-end digital signage solutions do not have the ability to fully shut off the displays they’re attached to (and I suspect some high-end billboards will have displays fully decoupled from media players, etc.)
Don't these have some kind of basic "oh, I've had no signal for 10 minutes, guess I'll turn off"?
I have two such displays in the office (Nec something) that have input sensing and a shut-down timer. They're pretty old, too (they were already there when I joined 7 years ago).
Yeah, I'm trying to think how a lot of these are going to work, myself.
When I built a low-cost signage platform, a lot of the devices we deployed to were Android 4.4/5.0 (yes, even in 2020+), which doesn't have auto on/off that Nougat introduced in Android 7.0.
Probably some poor sap's job is to Teamviewer in and install a third-party app to control the shutdown and startup.
I mean I guess this has energy-saving potential, but isn’t it just nice to have some darkness for the environment’s sake? It’s pretty awful living in such brightly lit places that have psychological effects on humans and animals alike. For example in humans light pollution alters our melatonin hormonal levels, so sleep is impacted. It can also thwart animal migration.
Here in Brazil, as everywhere, there are some ultra bright signs now - even gas prices - that are as annoying to me as hearing loud music in a otherwise calm place. Yet no one gives a f* about this.
I consider the annoyance of lighted digital signage a good enough reason to turn them off, and the offense of billboards a sufficient reason to ban them as San Paolo has. I say that for context.
The piecemeal approach to energy regulation is arbitrary and unfair. It introduces political friction with no evidence that it reduces emissions.
Why might it not reduce emissions? Because energy which is produced is consumed. Banning a source of consumption causes marginal affordability.
If the goal is to limit atmospheric carbon, which is laudable: tax carbon. Be sure to apply the proceeds generously to decarbonizing industry, because this will be expensive.
If the goal is to allocate electricity which is scarce due to crisis: tax electricity use progressively. Make businesses which aren't manufacturing submit paperwork for an exemption. They'll turn the lights out at night on their own.
Be sure to apply the proceeds to energy security, because no one is going to like what happens if you don't.
I'd be glad to get less light pollution in Berlin (where I live) but I don't see that many signs anyway, so any benefits would be tiny. I also kind of like them at night (given that they are not ubiquitous), it makes a city feel much livelier than dark streets.
Interesting to see most of Western Europe go where we, Romania, were back in the 1980s under Ceausescu.
Just today I was thinking about how one of my fondest memories as a kid (because it involves me, my parents and our home from back then) is of my dad teaching 5 or 6-year old me how many stairs there were in our block of apartments between two consecutive flors, so that I could use them even after the sun was down, cause said staircase wasn't lit. And then how proud I felt when I was managing to go up and down on those stairs (we were living on the last floor, the 4th) at night, only by "feeling" and counting the stairs in my head (at some point the counting became an "instinct", I was not even actively doing the counting anymore). This was all happening in the second part of the '80s.
With all that said, I'm honestly not that sure that today's Western Europeans are mentally prepared to go through what we, Romanians, went through back then.
Kind of an odd question, but out of curiosity, did the first set of stairs, the one on the ground floor going up, have an "even" or "odd" number of steps? Did the following sets of stairs on higher levels have the same number as the ground floor set or a different amount? Assume "odd" means that when starting on the ground floor, if you were to go up two stairs at a time, you would have to akwardly go up one stair on the final stair, whereas an even number of stairs would allow you to take 2 stair increments at a time without problem.
That’s a good question, because now that you asked it I remembered that there were some buildings that did indeed have that odd number of steps you mention, on the ground floor going up to the first floor, that is. I remember that I was finding that strange.
Each block of apartments had 16 steps between two floors. The building we were living in had those 16 steps “split” in two, that is you were climbing 8 steps from a given floor, there was a small “platform” of 3-4 meters, and then you’d climb another 8 steps until the next floor itself, after a change of direction “architected” through that platform I mentioned. And then there were the bulldings where you’d climb 16 steps straight. I liked the 8+8 version better, imo it gave the architect the chance to add more and larger windows to the staircase, and hence more light, the 16 steps straight staircases seemed to have smaller windows, hence less light.
Back to the odd number of steps on the ground floor, I think there were 15 or 17, can’t remember exactly how many.
Interesting discussion, I have to admit, I sometime compare the staircases from today’s buildings to those I knew as a kid, and it seems that today they don’t care about light coming in or “ergonomy” or anything like that (there’s also the very interesting discussion of the “perfect” height for a given step).
I know exactly what you mean by 16 steps split in 8 going two different directions, with the window platform between them. The current block I am living in has this setup in Sofia. Built in the 60s with the first steps on the ground floor being 7 instead of 8.
How old are you if I may ask? I am fairly young and have no memory of when anything was built. But I often walk around and try to think of what they were going for and the purpose behind many things. There seems to have been a lot of logic to simple things, like you mentioned with light and ergonomy, it gives a sense of careful design and forethought.
Also I will add, the block started with 3 floors, and then a fourth was added on top of it afterwards, not sure if that was an anomaly or the norm.
Early 40s, I now live in Bucharest but I grew up in a town besides the Danube, Bulgaria was on the other side.
> But I often walk around and try to think of what they were going for and the purpose behind many things
There was definitely a "purpose" behind most of the stuff they built back then, especially in the '60s and the '70s (in the '80s things were already getting tougher from an economic pov, so at some point they started cramming apartments building close to apartments building in the name of better use of the land, or something like that).
> Also I will add, the block started with 3 floors, and then a fourth was added on top of it afterwards
The norm here was ground floor + 4 floors in the small and medium towns, plus in some neighbourhoods of the big cities, including Bucharest, or ground floor + 10 floors in the bigger cities and in Bucharest. There are also buildings with ground floor + 8 floors (I now live in one, on the 8th floor), but they were not the norm.
A while ago I had an idea for a device that has a light sensor on it. The device has in/out for the data cable. It basically overlays a dark image over the feed.
In dark conditions the device darkens the LED output and vice-a-versa for light conditions.
Too many signs are too bright to comfortably look at night.
I realise your comment isn't directly related, but the article directly states "showing a black image" is not an acceptable solution (it wouldn't save any power). I'd like to see your idea done for backlight/brightness control though!
I want to do 2 things here where i live in San Francisco, anyone have advice for me on where to start?
1 - I want to start or join a coalition of folks looking to get this implemented in California
2 - I want to contact the city/owner of the specific digital signs right outside my window of my apartment that are on 24/7, loud, and have their glass broken monthly and then wait for the glass to be replaced for weeks. It's a public hazard.
I don’t know if you’ll have any impact at all though regarding your situation. You’re in a big city where this kind of stuff is part of life. Your best option is probably to move.
> But the ban will not apply if the light emitted by displays is required to maintain traffic safety or ward off other hazards, and it cannot be replaced by other measures at short notice.
So even the signs indicating what time the next bus comes would not be allowed?
How much electricity can plausibly be saved this way? And how does that compare to the energy required to reprogram and possibly renew all these signs?
According to the source linked in the top comment, we are looking at a total consumption of 113.000 MWh per year for those displays. One third of that is at least around 30.000 MWh of saved energy.
Well, in that case we shouldn't improve anything as long as children are starving to death in this world. That should be our only and biggest "bug" to fix. Feel free to recommend another one, but we'll pause all other improvements meanwhile. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Digital billboards use thousands of watts, overall, that's several times the energy consumption of a typical household, the power bill is thousands of euros a year.
So I guess that's worth it, even if some additional hardware is required.
This is an affective rationing of electricity at night when demand is lower. So this is a worrying development and feels like managed decline and a testament to the catastrophe that is the German energy policy...
Because it's done in the name of energy savings and the only reason that we all have to save energy is so the political elites of the West can play Risk against Russia.
Saving energy means stopping growth. The West stopping growth while China, India, etc. grow uncontrollably because they don't give a crap about the stupid climate plight will be our downfall.
India? Average Indian emits 1/10th of what an average american does!
This is hypocracy, ignorance, and whataboutism
China is on track to meet it's climate goals, 90% of electric busses in the world operate there, they have been top investor in renewables for many years. And they are still growing.
Why do you never mention gulf states that emit 10 times more than an average french person does.
Meanwhile UK has refused planning permissin for 24 privately funded and paid for solar farms because they look ugly, banned onshore wind because it looks ugly and getting applorval for simplest construction project takes 4 years.
No problem if china or india gives a crap about the climate... the climate very much too gives a crap about them so they will HAVE to do something if enough people starve and enough infrastructure is destroyed by catastrophes
Who cares about India or China or whatever. They're all gonna die if they don't change their ways.
The climate plight will be our downfall, but not because of silly squabbles like you describe, but because the mindset you have is inherently extinctionist.
Uncontrollable growth is a characteristic of cancer, not something to aspire to.
It is definitely the West's fault for engineering the 2014 Euromaidan coup, which began a campaign of terror and death against trade unionists and the people of the Donbas region, which continues to this day.
It is also Putin's fault for invading further, instead of merely protecting the Donbas republics as they asked.
The earth is going to normalize "poverty" (aka not being able to drink 3 dead dinosaurs a day) one way or another. I'd rather live in a place where people are already living sustainably, than a place that constantly overshoots and then collapses when the resources suddenly run out.
The electricity you don't spend is electricity you don't need to produce. We don't really need electricity, we need to do useful stuff with it. Doing laundry with electricity is useful, as is having a computer network. Are massive glowing screens in the middle of the night useful? That would be a very long discussion, but I say no because any local usefulness is outweighed by their negative impact overall.
Saving electricity is just as useful as adding new capacity, and it's faster, cheaper and easier. As a comparison, the US spends about twice as much electricity as Germany per capita [1].
No, only if your grid is composed of "slow" power plants, you have to. That is why for a long time, all night-time energy usage was encouraged, to raise the base load. Ironically the outcome is used as an argument against renewables as it "but what about the base load"? :p
And if not completely dominated by slow power plants, there is always enough load on the grid to keep it stable. Especially in a day and age where there is a lot of storage, which can absorb some excess power production.
Bigger problems in Germany are the lack of big power lines between the North and South and of course the reluctance to build more wind energy. Especially Bavaria has been shooting its own feet several times, even built a gas power station a few years back and now it's in a bit of a panic...
No, but you can power something like 70% of a country with wind power alone. Add in some solar and a few hours worth of storage and you can go 90+%. Add a few days of storage and you reach two nines. A few weeks for more nines.
Building enough nuclear power plants to power a country also takes decades and is very non-trivial. The quicker we reach 90% carbon-free, the more carbon budget we have left to figure out the remaining 10%. Renewables are the quickest, cheapest way to do that.
But if we look at actual nuclear projects in finland and france, they are expensive and mostly failing and take far too long (think decades, not years). End storage of fuel rods is also not a solved problem of nuclear power, esp. in germany.
So I would rather take the fast-to-build solar and wind plants and research "large scale" energy storage alongside. Storage also does not have to be large-scale, you can just subsidise a lot of decentralized storage and invest in more flexible energy consumers (aka wash your clothes when the sun is shining).
If I have this right, Ammonia is 2x more expensive than petrol per tonne, and has half the energy density of petrol, so it seems to be 4x more expensive?
I am not sure how to compare with hydrogen, as you say costs for it are in storage and transportation
Right now there is little demand for storage because we don't have sufficient renewable generation capacity. It is no surprise that storage technology hasn't been deployed at large scale and is still relatively expensive. But since we know how to build MW scale electrolyzers it's really just a matter of building more of them.
>Building enough nuclear power plants to power a country also takes decades
People in Germany said these things 10 years ago too.
If Germany had started building nuclear in quantity 10 years ago then they would be coming online now and would get cheaper with each new plant. Instead you will have crippling and deindustrializing power prices for years to come.
Breeder reactors and seawater mining are current tech.
Also, this seems like an extreme luddite attitude. Imagine refusing to use a steam engine because nobody has demonstrated infinite coal reserves exist.
Elon promised "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free." And then had the entire thing connected and powering the South Australian power grid in just 63 days:
1 day of Germany electricity consumption is on the order of 1,400,000 MWh, something like 7,000x larger. A "few days" of electricity storage would take orders of magnitude longer to build and deploy, even if we worked on Elon's most optimistic timeline.
The best time to build storage would have been fifty years ago. The next best time is now.
We need power supply now, yes, but we will still need storage decades from now. So building them now is vital. Yet we aren't doing that. That's a problem.
We literally have no time left, yet at the current course we'll be in the same situation in 2030 or 2050 as we are today and we'll keep making the same excuses.
If you build enough renewables, then there comes a point when at times you're generating more than is needed immediately. That surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen gas by electrolysing water. The gas can be stored indefinitely and burned to generate electricity when needed. So with enough renewables, no fossil fuels are needed.
In theory, yes, it's possible to store renewable energy for later consumption, but this is not the case right now and rollout of any storage technology might take years without certainty that it will work well. In the current situation, it's either blackouts, or gas/coal, or nuclear when there's no sun and wind.
On the other hand, I can understand why the current situation is like this: Germany boldly betted big time on renewables getting cheap enough, they made it work with backfill options available at the time. I just wish energy storage was tackled sooner as well.
This is not false, but the economics are not good for the full round trip. There are efficiency losses in the conversion both ways and hydrogen storage is not fun as it is very low density and due to small molecule size, prone to leaking through almost anything. Probably a lot of hydrogen will be produced this way during renewable peaks, but mainly it would be for industrial processes that need it.
this "around the corner" argument is getting tiresome. We have a climate emergency NOW. We are actively hurting our future by continuing to emit carbon NOW. We already have a solution to that problem in the shape of nuclear power.
Instead, we wait on renewables and storage to run the grid at some indeterminate point in the future.
The debate on this issue really is toxic and frustrating. We need all solutions working NOW, not tomorrow, and one of those solutions is widespread nuclear power.
That's false. You can't power a country with one source of wind power in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Which is the same justification for so many bad things throughout history, be it wars for resources, to making battery-farmed workers pee in bottles because Jeffrey couldn't bear to have one fewer personal yacht.
If people had grown up with variable supply of electricity, they would have no problem with it today. It's only the transition from something better to something worse that causes riots.
The German Green Party was basically founded on anti-nuclear sentiment. The older members see it as their absolute life goal to stop nuclear power. They would rather see everything burn to the ground than change their mind.
As long as they are in government any compromise will be difficult.
Also, the situation in Germany is much worse than people from the outside think. Our best-case scenarios actually plan for pretty brutal energy saving cuts. People will be fully expected to wear multiple layers of clothing in their own homes because apparently having a warm home is now considered a luxury.
Other than hoping for a early peace in Ukraine I don't really anything that could solve the issues. I guess we will just have to tough it out.
> Other than hoping for a early peace in Ukraine I don't really anything that could solve the issues. I guess we will just have to tough it out.
Don't worry. The government is setting up all the right parameters for a revolution to replace them. Large parts of Germany, especially in the already government-critical east, are dependant on gas. Let October be the first cold month that hits us ... and the first grandma who decides she can't afford heating and freezes to death at night will make a splendid spark that will topple our pro-Ukrainian resolve.
Actually, Russia has a track record of being a reliable provider of gas in worse situations than we are in today, reaching back to times when the Cold War was at its hottest. Outside of big media and some very ideologically-kosher circles, public opinion seems to be 'leave us our peace about that whole war business, make sure energy prices are sinking to an acceptable level again', with the mood becoming more explosive with every news article that tries to get us into the NATO party line.
Ok but what about Poland? Germany is obligated to defend Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, etc. You honestly think Russia will not invade them? Or that Germany will not be obligated to spill blood in their defense?
Given how deeply ungrateful the Polish government has been towards the rest of Europe, especially Germany, in the last twenty years or so, pulling the evil German Nazi card whenever their will was not completely fulfilled while at the same time leeching off mostly Germany-originated monies, they can go suck it for all I care.
> Germany is obligated to defend Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, etc.
Nope. Read the relevant contracts. Nowhere in it it says that we need to "defend" anyone. NATO Article 5 states that an attack on one of the member states would be considered an attack against them all - and countries have endured attacks without retaliating (See: USS Liberty incident).
> You honestly think Russia will not invade them?
Not in the immediate future. Russia is overextended as it stands, they are obviously unable to stage another war for quite some time.
> Or that Germany will not be obligated to spill blood in their defense?
Also, we are not obligated to spill blood in defence. NATO Article 5 just states that we must take an action that we consider necessary - and not to aid the affected party member - but to restore peace and stability in Europe. If an aggressor blitzkrieged say Estonia, the whole thing was over in 24 hours, and everyone remaining was convinced that that's the end of it, peace and stability would return without any action necessary. Also, actions can be very little., they could be a strongly worded WhatsApp message to the aggressor.
This ambiguous meaning has been put in by the US, by the way, supposedly because they themselves thought it was not a good idea to sacrifice New York for Paris.
And Article 42(7) TEU only talks about "mutual aid" in case of armed conflict, which can be as little as sending some rice crackers.
You make it sound like it's just the greens. In reality, it was a conservative Christian Democrat lead government that decided to get rid of nuclear power. Together with SPD, the socialists. Both are moderate parties and quite representative of the German attitude towards nuclear. There hasn't been a government without either SPD or CDU leading it. No other party has ever supplied a chancellor in post war Germany. And you'd be wrong to assume FDP is very pro-nuclear.
The current government features SPD (labour), the Greens, and the FDP (conservative). They have their work cut out but it's not an impossible job.
Nuclear might get a temporary and short extension of life in Germany but that 8GW is not going to matter a whole lot relative to the tens of GW of gas that are used for electricity and the many GW more that are being used for heating. The numbers just don't add up. Short term it helps as a stop gap solution but long term there's a need for many tens of GW of additional capacity. Most of that inevitably is going to be wind and solar. Gas is a complete non starter at this point. And coal is quite expensive and coal supplies also are a bit tricky as most of that actually also came from Russia.
The Ukrainian crisis is basically succeeding in making the Germans go cold turkey on gas and coal in a hurry. It's going to be disruptive and expensive but they are going to get it done much earlier than they were originally planning even a year ago. The disruption will be mainly to industry which will suffer most of the consequences of high prices and limited availability of gas. However, that will cause industry to respond by investing in reducing their dependency on those energy sources. Once that takes effect, the transition is permanent. Probably, ten years from now, most coal production in Germany will be gone; most gas heating and electricity will be gone and what little remains will be powered using expensive imports. Some of which might still come from Russia.
> Most of that inevitably is going to be wind and solar. Gas is a complete non starter at this point. And coal is quite expensive and coal supplies also are a bit tricky as most of that actually also came from Russia.
Wind and Solar have the drawback of not being a constant or reliable source of energy. Yes, they provide cheap and clean energy but not always when you need it.
Yes, the solution would be to save the energy when you need it BUT we don't have that, yet. I really hope we will figure something out but we need not face reality: The tech is not there yet. It might take decades that we don't have.
This is so frustrating to argue with people. Like, I really like your optimism but we don't have a saving solution. We have some ideas but scaling them up towards the scope that we actually need is not easily done.
I really wish you were right but the facts don't add add.
> However, that will cause industry to respond by investing in reducing their dependency on those energy sources.
Since when do they know that they should be transitioning to other sources? Decades? What have the done? Nothing.
As long there are other countries with cheap gas I am not so optimistic. Yes, some will make the transitions, other will move production to other countries and lot's of them we will simply lose. The next years will be brutal.
Only when the international community actually starts to take climate change and dependence on gas more serious will we see some change.
> The German Green Party was basically founded on anti-nuclear sentiment.
As an American it is not hard to see how these hardened anti-nuclear activists in Germany benefit Russia. It is also not hard to see the close political and historic proximity between the Soviet Union and the Green party.
It seems that average Germans do not make that connection. Why?
This is revisionist history and your completely false accusations put it near Russian propaganda territory. I challenge you to find even a single proof for what you wrote.
The Greens were the only party calling for embargoes against Russia to stop importing Russian gas all together in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. They also opposed Nord Stream 2 from the beginning. They inherited the clusterfuck the conservatives left them when they got elected in 2021 and now have to deal with what they have.
The conservatives killed the German solar industry (world leader at the time in the 2000s) and also killed the wind turbine industry shortly after. Reason? China was cheaper.
The Greens were also the first to call for weapons for Ukraine while other parties struggled to even make statements.
Your "proof" is not supporting anything. Environmentalists can be anybody.
Russia didn't want Germany to utilize fracking gas because this would mean that Germany doesn't need Russia anymore. The Green party opposes any gas where possible. Just because Russia financed a few fringe groups doesn't mean that the Green party is in bed with Russia.
This clearly proves that in June 2021 the Greens already predicted what would happen in 2022 and opposed the opening of Nord Stream 2 because of geopolitical and security risks.
I'm sorry, but this is hearfelt: the German greens are climate criminals. And they were fully warned of exactly this situation decades ago, so no, they have zero "circumstances forced our hand" defence.
> I'm sorry, but this is hearfelt: the German greens are climate criminals. And they were fully warned of exactly this situation decades ago, so no, they have zero "circumstances forced our hand" defence.
The Greens have not been in government for the last sixteen years. It was the conservative governments under Merkel and particularly the environment and later economy minister Altmaier who openly celebrated reducing buildout of solar power [1].
As for nuclear power: any talk about lengthening their operation is utter madness. There are no fuel rods and the reactors haven't had their security checkups because they were scheduled to be shut down - and just look at France just how catastrophic nuclear power actually is (ETA: I substantially detailed that in a daughter comment, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605337).
The government has little other choice than to keep the coal burners running at this point, as the Merkel governments have done everything in their power to hinder renewable energy buildout, and the Bavarian CSU has sabotaged cross-country high voltage power transmission lines.
> The Greens have not been in government for the last sixteen years.
While this is true, they have always been in favour of shutting down nuclear power plants and now they would have the opportunity to reverse this course, but they don't.
The Greens have been founded as an anti-nuclear party. In the 80s, they even demanded to replace nuclear power with coal (https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/143529774448733801...). Shutting down nuclear power plants is obviously more important to them than the climate.
> and just look at France just how catastrophic nuclear power actually is.
What's so catastrophic about France? Despite all the troubles they currently have, their CO2 emissions per kW are still a fraction of Germany's.
> While this is true, they have always been in favour of shutting down nuclear power plants and now they would have the opportunity to reverse this course, but they don't.
Because nuclear does not make sense. The financial risk of accidents at a Fukushima or Chernobyl scale is too high (as no insurer will take on that risk, the taxpayers will have to pay for it, and as the Ukraine invasion and the fighting around Chernobyl shows, disaster plants are a danger for decades!), a lot of the uranium comes from questionable sources (Russia and Khazakhstan [1]), and Europe does not have permanent storage solutions for the nuclear waste [2].
Renewable energies already make up 41% of our electricity generation, it could be 100%.
> What's so catastrophic about France? Despite all the troubles they currently have, their CO2 emissions per kW are still a fraction of Germany's.
As for the CO2 emissions: yeah because the CO2 everyone else in Europe generates to compensate their nuclear issues is not counted in their CO2 budget but ours.
I would of course not be in favor of nuclear power. A new nuclear plant takes well over a decade to build - it makes way more economical sense to build renewable power plants because they can be ready far faster and pose less danger and waste to our children.
> I would of course not be in favor of nuclear power.
Ok, let's say I could convince you that it is possible to store nuclear waste safely, and show you that building up wind power takes at least as long. Could I convince you then?
No, because of the financial risks involved in constructing, operating and getting rid of them. The costs associated with Fukushima are estimated to be at least 200 billion dollars [1], Chernobyl 235 billion dollars [2].
Even leaving out disaster scenarios: A modern EPR nuclear power plant is at ~1.6 GW [3] at a cost of 11 billion euros, taking a decade or more to build, and about a billion dollars to tear down [4]. A wind park half the size costs two billion dollars in two to five years [5], has less risks in construction, no risk at all of a catastrophic failure, and assuming 80€/kWh in teardown costs [6] 16 million € for the teardown.
That means wind power at a capacity factor of 0.4-0.5 [7] (meaning, you need two of them to achieve the same available capacity to the grid on average) is half as expensive as a nuclear power plant even when ignoring the efficiencies that building at scale brings with it and has virtually no risks attached. Financially, it's absolute irresponsibility to go nuclear.
You can't compare the price of a wind park with the price of a nuclear power plant, because the wind park does not offer base load. A wind park without base load is pretty useless. Base load is far more valuable. So if you say a power plant costs 12 billions, it is a steal compared to a two billion wind park. Most people will rather have electricity 24/7 than occasional electricity for 1/6th the price.
Beside that, in another comment you had a long list of things you say is required to make EE feasible. You need to include the price of all these things in your calculation.
> You can't compare the price of a wind park with the price of a nuclear power plant, because the wind park does not offer base load.
Agreed that base load is valuable... but why not go and reduce the amount of base load by both directly saving on load (e.g. by insulating houses or getting rid of advertising) and by making the base load that absolutely remains more flexible (e.g. by upgrading to a truly smart grid that can dynamically regulate consumption of loads)?
And for what it's worth, you can additionally also go and build even more wind energy. In times of ample wind, the now infinitely cheap electricity can be used in electrolysis to generate hydrogen as a base chemical for the industry and fuel for those very few applications that definitely need a combustion process (e.g. glass and metal foundries).
The only people who are more "trust us, it's just around the corner" than fusion folks are the renewables only folks and their hair brained schemes to avoid the base load question.
Complicating the grid with smarts, given how well that's gone with IoT?
We've thrown a low carbon option under the bus because of sloppy Soviet engineering.
The coal and gas we are stuck with due to "greens" no nuclear stance has caused more harm to humanity than our sum total nuclear incidents, even counting non power incidents such as orphaned radiotherapy sources or ignoring procedures at irradiation facilities.
All these things are not enough. In 2015, there was an hour when wind power only generated 0.2GW. Hydro and biomass will probably never exceed 10GW combined. Even if you radically reduce the electricity needs down to, let's say, 35GW, you would still have a gap of 25GW. You can't build enough wind power to get this on a day without wind. You need another power source.
80% of their power is generated by nuclear. Of their nuclear plants, way over half the fleet has been offline for months because of inspections and sometimes substantial damages from age-related corrosion issues [1], and the other half is severely limited or cut off as well because the rivers that they depend on for cooling can't keep up [2]. And since the entire continent is a single synced grid, someone has to cover the gap, and that's German gas peakers [3].
Unfortunately, European energy markets operate at the "merit order" principle [4] which means that the highest bidder on the spot market sets the price for everyone else - which means while gas peaker plants generate extremely expensive energy for France, the operators of any other type of plant get the exact same high price leading to billions of euros in excess profit for them [5].
France also has another problem, and that's the EPR design that has led to severe budget and time overruns. Not just generic issues, but massive design defects [6]. They bet on Flamanville replacing a bunch of the aged plants, the bet failed, and no one knows when that reactor will finally come online. Flamanville was projected to cost 3.3 billion euros and be ready in 2012 - current estimates are at 12.7 billion euros at the least and a start in Q2/23 [7], and other EPR projects are just as bad.
All those plants make the max price, so if you can think of a way to cheaply generate power when it is expensive you get paid the high gas price up until all gas is removed from the market.
Short term, if a war or embargo is driving up gas prices, it still makes sense to charge high prices, because that gives people an incentive to not use electricity and so saves on the restricted resource.
But, this will really hit the poor or businesses that use a lot of gas through no fault of their own.
Since we are all in this together, the people earning the extra money should get it redistributed to the people. But some rich and powerful people think that sets a bad precedent, so they'll try to make poor people suffer as much as they can before doing it.
> The big gas generators – even though they have 10 times more capacity than is required – have systematically rorted the situation, sometimes charging up to $7m a day for a service that normally comes at one-tenth of the price.
> (You can read reports on how they do it here, here and here, and for a more detailed explanation at the bottom of this story.)
> The difference in January was that there is a new player in the market: Tesla. The company’s big battery, officially known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve, bid into the market to ensure that prices stayed reasonable, as predicted last year.
> Rather than jumping up to prices of around $11,500 and $14,000/MW, the bidding of the Tesla big battery – and, in a major new development, the adjoining Hornsdale windfarm – helped (after an initial spike) to keep them at around $270/MW.
> This saved several million dollars in FCAS charges, which are paid by other generators and big energy users, in a single day.
> And that’s not the only impact. According to state government’s advisor, Frontier Economics, the average price of FCAS fell by around 75% in December from the same month the previous year. Market players are delighted, and consumers should be too, because they will ultimately benefit.
Of course, just decent regulatory oversight can stop this kind of thing too, but fossil fuel producers seem to be really against that kind of thing for some reason.
"look at France just how catastrophic nuclear power actually is"
I assume you are referring to power plants that has to shut down due to low water levels?
If the powerplant is designed with a source of eater in mind, it will have tp shut down when the water is gone. It does not matter if the plant is oil, coal or nuclear.
Plenty of nuclear powerplants use seawater for cooling, and none of them had to shutdown.
> I assume you are referring to power plants that has to shut down due to low water levels?
It goes way worse than the drought. For the sake of not spamming around the same text, I consolidated the list of issues here in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605337
> Plenty of nuclear powerplants use seawater for cooling, and none of them had to shutdown.
Plants at the seawater border are vulnerable to floods as a result of extreme weather conditions, we've seen the consequences of that in Fukushima. Additionally, being close to the sea means the plants are vulnerable to the rise of sea water, which is a risk for the future.
I'd say it's the fault of neoliberalism (which certainly has a foothold in parts of the CDU/CSU and all major parties really, not just the FDP) that most infrastructure projects of the past decades have been limited to a few failed prestige projects (powerlines just aren't as sexy as a massive airport nobody can use) but it's the fault of the Greens (not specifically the party but the general political movement it stems from) that we're at a point where we are stuck with coal because nuclear is no longer an option.
I'm not saying it's bad they protested nuclear. Nuclear needs to go, too. It's just bad that they hyperfixated on nuclear because it's easier to scare people about it and that they didn't ensure we get rid of coal first. Scaring people about nuclear was child's play after Chernobyl if the threat of the Cold War wasn't enough (as the public already conflated nuclear power and nuclear weapons). The coal industry's political power is much greater in Germany tho and taking it on would have meant finding a way to bridge the cultural gap between blue collar Kumpels and the more college educated Birkenstock crowd.
Hopefully FFF and XR are finally doing some of the work now but sadly the opposition has also gotten better at its game and that Kumpel at his Stammtisch beer will most likely make bad jokes about "Greta" despite not batting an eye if you ask him to sign a petition to shut down all nuclear plants.
I really believe Neoliberalism has kneecapped the West, our infrastructure is basically stuck in 1980's, which is when the ideology took hold.
In UK, since we privatised water companies, they have not built a single new reservoir, they are basically operating 30 year old infrastructure, dumping sewage in rivers and paying themselves dividends in the billiona
We don't need nuclear. Even with decades of conservative sabotage, we generate ~41% of our electricity needs [1] on a renewable basis. Imagine we had used the last sixteen years to go all-in on renewables - we wouldn't need to kowtow in front of any dictatorship. No Qatari gas, no Russian or other dictatorship uranium, nothing.
The amount of electricity generated over the course of a year is irrelevant without storage. We could generate 1000% of our energy needs and still not have enough, if we generate 2000% in summer and 0% in winter.
We need to generate 100% of our energy needs every single hour. Renewables are practically incapable of doing this on their own. They can reduce the use of fossil fuelds (or nuclear power), but not replace them.
> We need to generate 100% of our energy needs every single hour. Renewables are practically incapable of doing this on their own. They can reduce the use of fossil fuelds (or nuclear power), but not replace them.
Install enough windmills across the entire coastal areas of Europe, add thousands of kilometers long cross-continental UHVDC links like China does [1] and even winter won't be a problem.
Besides: using biomass / biogas fuel for conventional burner plants is climate neutral, and the supply is enough to cover half of the deliveries of Russia [2].
> Install enough windmills across the entire coastal areas of Europe,
That's completely unrealistic. There are times when in all of Europe there is little to no wind. Certainly not enough that one region can provide enough power for all of Europe. Maybe it's possible in China, I don't now their climate, but even they are planning to increase the number of nuclear power plants.
We need a complete transformation of our power usage in any case, both to save energy demand and to make the grid more flexible:
- insulate buildings so that they better retain heat. This one is massive - over a third of all energy consumption goes towards buildings [1]!
- promote heat pumps (either to air or ground) because these are far more energy efficient for air conditioning and hot water generation
- help poorer households to save energy - especially those who can't afford to replace their 20 years old fridge which consumes over double the power that a modern appliance needs [2].
- resilient grids with photo-voltaic energy generation on every roof and distributed battery storage
- smart grids that can (dis)incentivize large loads like water heaters or electric vehicles automatically based on grid generation capacity
- more incentives for high-energy consuming industries to act as a dynamic power sink or to operate only in times where energy is plentiful
- shut down street lights at night or make them smart to only be alight when needed - lighting consumes about 0.7% of the total power consumption [0], but as it runs at night where solar power is offline by definition, its impact on base load is worse.
- completely ban advertisements using lighting at night
Ideally, we would have continuous renewable or at least climate neutral-ish generation power (geothermal, tidal, running water power, biogas and waste incineration and whatever is the sum of the lowest-ever-available-wind power) to cover the base load, and have consumers smartly adapt on current electricity prices.
- the things you list are insanely expensive (just keep that in mind next time you say that nuclear power is expensive... you also need to figure these costs in when comparing to EE, because you wouldn't need to do this with nuclear)
- PV with battery storage is great for autarky and reducing fossils, but won't reduce the need for base load after a week without sun in winter, when all the batteries are empty..
- things like heat pumps that replace fossils will increase electricity consumption. I think current estimates are that electricity consumption may increase 50-100%.
- there is just not a lot of potential for additional renewable base load in Germany. Bio gas, hydro, geothermal.. they are all pretty must at their limits. there is just no way around either burning fossils, using nuclear or having an insane amount of storage.
> - the things you list are insanely expensive (just keep that in mind next time you say that nuclear power is expensive... you also need to figure these costs in when comparing to EE, because you wouldn't need to do this with nuclear)
We absolutely need to do this anyway and fast, because there will not be any massive amount of new nuclear power going online - even if we were to start out a buildout offensive in nuclear plants, it would take ten to fifteen years at best, and we need to conserve as much energy as we can in the meantime.
> - PV with battery storage is great for autarky and reducing fossils, but won't reduce the need for base load after a week without sun in winter, when all the batteries are empty..
Which is why industry needs to be incentivized to shut down in such times. China does it by force, we can offer financial incentives.
> Bio gas, hydro, geothermal.. they are all pretty must at their limits. there is just no way around either burning fossils, using nuclear or having an insane amount of storage.
Biogas has a lot of potential, as well as geothermal. We just need to get going after 16 years of sabotage by the conservatives.
No. Only if we want to be the only major country in the civilised world that doesn't use nuclear power despite having not enough hydro power.
> would take ten to fifteen years at best,
This is extremely optimistic for wind power, and even more for rebuilding the electricity grid. Even if you can somehow shorten the planning processes: We are in the middle of a workers shortage and a supply-chain crisis. Who should build all these wind parks? And all the other things you listed, like building isolations and heat pumps. Shut down universities and require everybody to work in construction for a couple of years?
> we need to conserve as much energy as we can in the meantime.
Why? What's the outcome? Kill the economy? Who should pay for all these things?
> Biogas has a lot of potential, as well as geothermal.
Biogas needs agricultural land and thereby competes with food, and thus has other implications. Geothermal would be nice to have, and I think everybody agrees on that, but it's going nowhere. And as far I know not only in Germany, but everywhere.
Ban ads at night? Insulate our houses even more? Turn off the street lamps? All so we can run our civilization on literal windmills? When we have nuclear that is both safer and cleaner than this ancient technology? Incredible.
It’s like you’re not really pro-climate, but trying to accomplish the secret objective of limiting the scope of human existence. I am reminded of the anti-human religious folk who see humanity as a sinful scourge.
China's energy policy is indeed one of the few rational ones. But besides vast improvements in renewables, transmission and storage, China has also invested in new better nuclear designs.
Shutting down the German nuclear power plants does not help the situation obviously but right even turning them on now is not going to help us at all over the winter. First of all not enough energy gets generated from there in the grand scheme of things, secondly they would not be operational in time.
If you want to look for more nuclear to turn on, have a look at France where less than 50% of nuclear power plants are currently generating energy.
Yes, but if you can use less gas for electricity generation you have more for the other uses. Germany has other sources of gas besides Russia (e.g. Norway). The goal isn't to completely stop using gas at all, but rather to reduce dependence on Russia who only supplies 30% of German gas.
Problem is, without nuclear power, they will have to resort to generating power from natural gas instead of using that gas for heating, which will in turn have problems compound.
That may be true, but that's orthogonal to the entirely home-made problems Germany is facing right now. While not a complete solution, using the remaining nuclear plants is an obvious stopgap measure to at least alleviate those problems in the short term.
France's issues with nuclear are long lasting. They are running only 24 out of 56 power plants today and a lot of that outage is ongoing for many months. France is a net importer for almost a year I believe which is untypical for the country which normally exports cheap nuclear electricity.
If there's no gas, most homes can heat with electricity. Turn on your oven, your gaming console, your TV, open your fridge's door, etc. Also as I understand it, it's much easier to do rolling blackouts on electricity than on gas, so gas will be more likely to fail for a long time than electricity.
Most industrial processes can be stopped without endangering people.
If people need to start heating homes with electricity, half a dozen old nuclear plants won't save us. You underestimate how much electricity it takes to heat a homes with resistive heaters.
To be fair, the problem with nuclear power in Germany is bigger than that the existing nuclear plants are being shut down. It's actually a good idea to shut them down eventually as they're old and inefficient. Calling them "fully functioning" is a bit of a rose tinted glasses type of situation.
The bigger problem is that Germany doesn't have any more recent nuclear power plants due to public pressure and instead just extended the lifetimes of the existing ones for decades to compensate. We could have built better and SAFER nuclear power plants but because that would have lost voters we instead had to extend the lifetimes again and again.
All polluting industries have their own tactics to deflect public attention. In Germany coal succeeded at deflecting that attention towards nuclear. The Ruhr region has a romanticized nostalgia for its history of coal mining whereas most people associate nuclear power with Chernobyl (or more recently Fukushima, which really just culturally echoed the existing memories of Chernobyl), the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the threat of global thermonuclear war while being smack in the middle of the Iron Curtain (almost literally, with the Berlin Wall separating both sides of the conflict).
I don't know to what extent the coal industry is actually involved in this, but there is an almost patriotic attitude towards coal plants in contrast with the horrified panic surrounding nuclear. Meanwhile solar is mostly seen as a way to cut down on electric bills by installing pannels on your own roof and wind power is a "blight on the countryside" and "health risk" (because of noise pollution, strobing shadows and of course killing migratory birds). Some of this seems to be finally changing but the "man on the street" will likely still prefer coal over all other forms of energy for no good reason.
> The bigger problem is that Germany doesn't have any more recent nuclear power plants due to public pressure
France hasn't either and they don't have public pressure against it. The are still trying to build a single one, being a decade late and billions more expensive.
> or more recently Fukushima, which really just culturally echoed the existing memories of Chernobyl
Currently we think about the nuclear fleet in the Ukraine which is literally under fire from Russia.
We are not far away from a new Fukushima, but this time in Europe.
There _is_ public pressure against nuclear, but it's at 50/50 vs support for nuclear. It has become a mostly partisan topic.
> We are not far away from a new Fukushima, but this time in Europe.
Except we technically _already_ had "Fukushima in Europe" 40 years ago, and for most people, life just went on.
I agree that if anything goes bad a the Ukrainian plant (FSM forbids), the politicians who have been pro-nuclear in the past few years will have a hard time keeping face, and the sentiments would change, and the experts would spent some unconfortable interviews.
However, I can not blame government for being even more scared at Union-wide blackouts than at a local incident at a plant.
The latter is horrible, and puts you at the mercy of winds, but _has been managed in the past_.
The former gives me worst nightmares (than the other scenario that also gives me nightmares.)
Let's all remember it made _sense_ to live in Pompei in 79.
where is the pressure in France against nuclear? I can remember civil war like situations at construction sites in Germany years ago. A political movement that spawned a new party which now is, again, in a ruling coalition.
In the French version of the same party (EELV), as well as in at least one of its main "coalition" partner (LFI).
In the left-wing press in general (Liberation, Le Monde and Le Canard Enchaîné are _patently_ antinuke).
In the minds of french people, also, who are very ambivalent about the topic (as measured by... The nuclear industry itself [1])
In regular demonstrations against the Bure waste disposal project, and In general snarkiness about the nuclear plants producing exactly as much current during maintenance as solar panels during the night.
Now, to be fair, this split is more 30% against, 30% for, and 30 % "does not care and is happy to have relatively cheap electricity and no major incident for the last 60 years".
The side that is mostly against nuclear is also very good at _not_ winning elections.
Far right could very much have decided to go antinuke too, but for some reason they decided being anti wind was a better bet.
The rest of the country is in this weird middle stage were it's not popular to be pro nuke if you want to score with girls at parties, but you'll kinda be anyway.
> Currently we think about the nuclear fleet in the Ukraine which is literally under fire from Russia.
The 1938 Yellow River flood (Chinese: 花園口決隄事件, literally "Huayuankou embankment breach incident") was a flood created by the Nationalist Government in central China during the early stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War in an attempt to halt the rapid advance of Japanese forces. One million dead.
So by that logic you should be against hydroelectric dams, becauae they've been used in warfare for centuries.
One would think the chief problem in that equasion is war, not infrastructure
> Hasn't Zaporizhzhia been under Russian control for a while now? Why would they be shelling themselves? That doesn't even make sense.
Because the Russians are trying to disconnect the plant from the Ukrainian grid or cause a disaster they specifically said they could cause a disaster if they wanted to.
>Currently we think about the nuclear fleet in the Ukraine which is literally under fire from Russia.
It's hilarious how the Western politicians and mass media seriously blame Russia for shelling a nuclear plant which it controls for a number of months. And a lot of people either blindly trust this narrative, or intentionally spread misinformation with the sole goal to demonize Russia as much as possible. It reminds me how Donetsk rebels were blamed for shelling of civilians in territories which they control.
It clearly shows how far we are in the post-truth world. Even a tiny bit of critical thinking is enough to understand who truly does the shelling, but titles like "Ukrainian Army shells a nuclear plant" are too inconvenient for the current political climate.
As far as I know, the goal of shelling (which for the time being does not target the reactors or the spent fuel storage) is to discourage Russia from disconnecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant from the Ukrainian grid and connect it with the Russian grid instead.
> And a lot of people either blindly trust this narrative, or intentionally spread misinformation with the sole goal to demonize Russia as much as possible.
No one needs to demonise a country that commits genocide and has its military rape children, the Russians are plenty good at demonising themselves.
> As far as I know, the goal of shelling (which for the time being does not target the reactors or the spent fuel storage) is to discourage Russia from disconnecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant from the Ukrainian grid and connect it with the Russian grid instead.
The goal of the shelling _is_ to disconnect the power plant, the Russians are shelling the plant to try and cause issues with the connection to the Ukrainian grid which they successfully did in the past couple days.
Yeah, right. The woman spreading these accounts got finally fired.
"... also accuses her [Lyudmyla Denisova] of having focused too much on media work, and on describing sexually motivated crimes in gratuitous detail as well as the raping of children in occupied territories. However, some of these accounts, he said, had not been verified, which had harmed Ukraine's reputation and distracted media attention from other, proven crimes and problems." [0]
> Yeah, right. The woman spreading these accounts got finally fired.
You're speaking like the Russian army is some sort of pillar of society that would never do a thing.
We know that they regularly rape, torture and commit war crimes. In multiple cities in Ukraine. This isn't really disputable they even brag on camera about wanting to commit genocide and even castrate people on camera.
The wikipedia article you are referring to doesn't even mention rape of children.
It, however, contains this paragraph: "Lyudmyla Denisova, Ombudsman in Ukraine for human rights, "speculated" that sexual violence was being used as a weapon of war by Russian forces.[15][23] Denisova was fired from her position in the end of May, 2022. She later admitted to making "“exaggerated” reports of sexual crimes by Russian soldiers in order to get Ukraine more weaponry.[24]"
Its true that it doesn't mention child rape but it mentions rape and torture of plenty of others. The point I was making is that its not like Russia likes to abide by either the Geneva convention or sway away from committing war crimes.
No, you were trying to disprove "a lot of people ... intentionally spread misinformation with the sole goal to demonize Russia as much as possible" and were caught spreading misinformation.
> No, you were trying to disprove "a lot of people ... intentionally spread misinformation with the sole goal to demonize Russia as much as possible" and were caught spreading misinformation.
They rape, torture and commit genocide. Just because there was one instance of someone being fired doesn't make everything said after false, theres other accounts of child rape too.
Yeah, right, because Denisova was the only Ukrainian person who was lying to get Western help for Ukraine.
The only source this article cites is written answer of Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office and even it mentions only single anonymous case of coercion of 16 year old girl. Which is one too many if true.
Note, that's the same Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office that for eight years failed to investigate the death of 42 people burned alive by Ukrainian nationalists in Odessa [0].
Please read the wikipedia article on atrocity propaganda [1] and how it's been used for ages.
Having said that, I do believe that war crimes inevitably happen in all wars, even in ones waged by 'enlightened and civilized West' [2].
> Having said that, I do believe that war crimes inevitably happen in all wars, even in ones waged by 'enlightened and civilized West' [2].
The difference is for Russia the war crimes are a every day thing and expected of Russian soldiers, in the west it’s a big deal when they happen, investigations happen and people even sometimes get charged.
Russia commits genocide regularly in Ukraine and some of them even state it’s the purpose of the war.
> But why don't they just cut the connection at the plant. Agreed about demonizing themselves, they do.
This assumes Russia is a rational actor, they could want to do it and try and have leverage to blame the Ukrainians they could want to do it and try and cause a disaster and blame the Ukrainians.
>No one needs to demonise a country that commits genocide and has its military rape children,
"Genocide" became a meaningless word because it's used willy-nilly similarly to "terrorism". Even if we are to trust number of civilian deaths reported by Western and Ukrainian sources it's really far from being "genocide". IIRC in relative terms, the US invasion of Iraq with subsequent fight against ISIS is closer to "genocide" than the invasion of Ukraine.
And as for "rape children", it's yet another blatant demonization. The lies became so toxic, Zelensky even had to fire Denisova, the person responsible for distributing most of such claims without properly supporting them with evidence. Most of "Russian soldiers rape children" articles you read in the Western media were citing Denisova.
>The goal of the shelling _is_ to disconnect the power plant
Oh wow... Are you incapable of critical thinking? Like at all? Russians can always physically cut wires in the territory they control.
If they wanted, they could've easily bombed every substation in Ukraine with its missiles. But because they do have some humanitarian considerations, they don't do it (unlike some other countries). As we can see, Russia has no techincal trouble bombing stationary objects as far as the westernmost Ukraine.
> "Genocide" became a meaningless word because it's used willy-nilly similarly to "terrorism". Even if we are to trust number of civilian deaths reported by Western and Ukrainian sources it's really far from being "genocide". IIRC in relative terms, the US invasion of Iraq with subsequent fight against ISIS is closer to "genocide" than the invasion of Ukraine.
Genocide has a definition and even basing our assertions of just what Russia is admitting that they are doing they meet the definition of genocide, its not meaningless it just has a broader definition then most people know.
You can read the definition of genocide from here.
>> In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
>> Killing members of the group;
>> Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>> Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
>> Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>> Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
You could argue about some of the points but Russia _proudly_ admits they are kidnapping Ukrainian children and forcibly relocating them to Russia. So they meet point 5 of the UN definition of genocide.
> And as for "rape children", it's yet another blatant demonization. The lies became so toxic, Zelensky even had to fire Denisova, the person responsible for distributing most of such claims without properly supporting them with evidence. Most of "Russian soldiers rape children" articles you read in the Western media were citing Denisova.
There are multiple counts of different atrocities that the Russians had committed if you want to discount the child rape go for it, but we plenty of evidence of Russia raping plenty of people in Ukraine.
> Oh wow... Are you incapable of critical thinking? Like at all? Russians can always physically cut wires in the territory they control.
> If they wanted, they could've easily bombed every substation in Ukraine with its missiles. But because they do have some humanitarian considerations, they don't do it (unlike some other countries). As we can see, Russia has no techincal trouble bombing stationary objects as far as the westernmost Ukraine.
Yes the country that is levelling cities, kidnapping and forcibly deporting children, and raping women (and allegedly children) has 'humanitarian considerations'.
Russia regularly uses civilian deaths as a part of its war machine they are trying to do it to Ukraine like they did it too Chechnya in Grozny. It's why they force civilians to stay in the cities they capture.
I think both can be true and it might be more region specific. My girlfriend was born in the Ruhrgebiet and a lot of her family and friends family worked in the coal industry and were well taken care of when the plants were shut down. While they're not pro-coal or wouldn't poll that way I think there probably is more of a sentimental connection to it than to nuclear which that generation tends to associate with Chernobyl.
That's not a contradiction though. Yes, there is broad popular support for renewables and until earlier this year gas probably also had a better reputation than it deserved, compared to coal.
But culturally, especially in the Ruhr region, coal has the benefit of nostalgia whereas nuclear has always been scary. Of course nowadays most "coal" is actually lignite and there is some resistance against lignite mining destroying large swathes of the landscape whereas the industrial architecture of "black coal" mining has become a national heritage. But lignite is still benefitting from some of that "black coal" nostalgia.
It's probably worth adding that these perceptions not only vary by region but also by socioeconomics and politics.
Those signage displays are creating lots of light pollution and consume lots of energy. It's a good thing to shut those down, no matter how much energy we have/create.
The ads angle, in my opinion, is the least important piece of this news.
What shocks me really is how Germany, one of the (if not THE) most advanced societies on Earth, came to a point where it can not produce enough energy to sustain it's needs.
Western civilization has a masochistic saviour complex, and will freeze to death in winter in the name of "saving the world". I, living in a 3rd world country, can only look and fear whats coming in the future.
If the germanies of the world decide to voluntarily fall, who will become the superpowers in the next decades/centuries? It's a bizarre stupidity contest.
Germany is well able to produce enough energy to sustain its needs. It actually had to produce quite a surplus this year so far to support the European grid as a lot of French nuclear power plants had to be shut down for unscheduled maintenance and due to the drought.
But of course, gas is scarce, as Russia is only supplying a fraction of its normal supply, so there is a lot of reason to be energy efficient. Also, as a consequence of the shortage, energy prices are quite up. If there was ever a time to get serious about saving energy, now would be it.
Depends on what you call "producing energy". Germany is generating enough electricity for its needs. Of course, that depends on importing fuels, like for most other countries, including the US. But it is already able to generate 50% of the electricity by renewables, which is rather high amongst the industrial nations.
Germany (and not only) is only wealthy by extracting vast amounts of wealth from other countries. This is done through unequal exchange, like poorly paid immigrants in Germany, ownership of factories in other countries with low wages, extracting resources at tiny prices from other countries, giving out loans at usury rates to countries who have been made to have no other choice, etc.
Germany is failing to generate enough energy because the system of exploitation it is based on is beginning to fail under its own internal contradictions.
German workers did all that, while they themselves are exploited by German capitalists. The same capitalists then extended their exploitation to other countries, where they could get away with even worse. I recommend you read Lenin's Imperialism.
I'm from a poor country, still exploited by Germany, Austria, France, Britain, Italy, Hungary, the US, etc. My country used to have collective control over resources and industry, but that was destroyed in 89 and we were forced to privatise, deregulate and be in debt again.
It was "destroyed" by whom really? I thought the collective control of "the means of production" was such an amazing thing that it could never lead to the "destruction" of a society that engages in it, who would have imagined.
I'm also from a poor country, but at least down here the powers that control everything weren't dumb enough to let this place become a collectivized wasteland.
Being poor is alright, at least here you can work hard and give a better life to your kids than your parents were able to give you.
Just like you know what, the cities that have a large population of german immigrants down here do. These cities have in general a GDP per capta that is 3 times larger than the average GDP in my country. It seems like those guys are just industrious, smart, and have a culture of hard work you know, who would have thought...
Most countries actually grew tremendously with collectivisation. My country got electrified, food production was vastly increased, industry was developed, large numbers of homes were built, etc. It's just that they started from very poor in the first place and developed in spite of foreign aggression by much richer countries.
Rich countries force poor countries to do things all the time. There's propaganda, coups, sanctions or even outright invasion. Some countries manage to resist, like Vietnam. Others don't, like Eastern Europe or Libya.
The problem isn't German workers. The problem is the economic system which subjugates workers in general and workers in poor countries in particular.
So who destroyed your country in 89? Maybe it was the economic system that subjugated the workers? I'm lost here. And I'm done, discussing politics/economics on the internet is the dumbest thing anyone can do, every 2 or 3 years I make this mistake. Have a nice life.
This is a cult. Government is implementing micromanaging measure which may reduce energy consumtion by 1%, but on the other hand they do not want to extend the lifetime of nuclear reactors for a few years to help transition, because those 3% that they contribute are not worth it.
That 1% would really matter a lot so that’s an argument in favor.
All the smaller things add up too.
Nuclear is back on the table in Germany afaik. Not sure if they really will backtrack, but even if they mess up the nuclear thing, this signage decision is 100% a good thing.
[0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...