Europe drastically cut its energy consumption this winter
economist.com
economist.com
The world has a lot of potential to be more efficient. Look no further than energy consumption per capita in the US. It's drastically higher than in other developed countries.
America is just a vast, sparsely populated country with minimal environmental protection laws so they can afford not to care.
This winter wasn’t “efficient” it was cold as hell because we all turned the heating as low as it could go without causing building damage[1] because the price of natural gas more than 10x’ed.
It’s not an example of a sustainable reduction in consumption.
[1] though a lot of people didn’t think things through and set the temperature too low or even turned off the gas and now have mold and other problems in their basements.
And those corners will get moldy.
Oh and I don't have a house, nor a mold problem, but know enough people who do have, even though they do ventilate reasonable. Houses were build with the assumption, that they are heated.
Now you can build new houses that are better designed - but you cannot magically adjust all the existing houses.
Yes and no.
It depends on the country and areas within it and it applies mainly to houses built in the last 60-70 years or so, maybe a few more years back in cities (for heating with radiators) before that time many, many houses were (poorly) heated by fireplaces and/or stoves.
Besides, the permeability of the building materials was traditionally much better, and windows/doors were leaky, guaranteeing a much better ventilation.
At least here in Italy the heating was a luxury until well after World War II, particularly in the country and in small vilages, anecdotally my family used to have a house in a small village in central Italy where the heating until the '70's was based on the devices that can be seen here (Italian):
https://www.muet.it/storie/tutte-le-storie/item/il-riscaldam...
Particularly the kitchen and dining room was heated by the "stufa economica" that was also used to cook meals, the sitting room had a fireplace that heated also (a little) the bedroom behind it, and there was another large bedroom heated by a "stufa in terracotta", having a "prete" for each bed was needed.
The house was anyway very, very cold, particularly at night/early morning.
Well, obviously it does, but I would think most houses in europe do have to be heated and were build in the last 60-70 years and those I was refering to.
And before that, yes it was something like 2 bugs cancel each other out. Leaky windows prevents mold.
(And in general only rich people could afford to heat the whole house)
Your choice of spelling of "mold" is consistent with your apparent lack of experience living in high humidity parts of the world :-)
I reduced the indoor temperature this year to see how it was, and kept ~18'C. I think I'll keep it anyway - less energy used, and it's totally doable. When I have someone over for dinner, I bring it back to 20-21'C.
Btw, what's up with Nest? I want another V3 in my new house, but they are not available anymore??
Not yet anyway. It usually starts in e.g. bathrooms.
Right. That's why we have technology and other advanced things, to live like cavemen used to.
Not everybody lives at the right latitude to have 22 degrees Celsius indoors without additional heating in the winter.
That being said, as someone else said, controlling humidity is also a concern for the long-term viability of buildings.
17 at night, 19.5 during the day is as hot as our house has ever been in winter; though with a new baby I suspect that might change by 0.5 for a while.
I'm currently happy at 18, it's pretty nice if you're a bit active.
Where did i say or imply any of that?
Put on a jumper. Or even, let your body adjust. There's plenty of evidence that keeping your body working to stay warm when you are healthy is very good forblood sugar control, which has additional benefits.
My house is extremely well insulated (BER A2), dunno if it qualifies as a passivhouse.
Also I'm exporting more than a megawatt per year back to grid for free, so you (as a society) may be happy.
So, I don't think I'm being unethical.
Do you take into account the energy needed to grow and transport the food you eat? To extract the material needed for objects you own? To build your car? To maintain the roads you use? I guess you obviously don't use fossil fuels at all and instead rely exclusively on the clean energy you produce?
Because if you don't, then you are still overall a consumer of energy.
But even if you were a net producer of clean energy, we as a society have a big problem of consuming too much overall. We will have to reduce that at some point (whether we want it or not). So it would be great if people started thinking about not eating meat for every meal, taking a plane every second week-end, and living in a sauna.
We as a society need to consume less energy (because we depend on fossil fuels that emit CO2), and anyway we will have less energy in the future (because... peak production of fossil fuels).
There is no price on that: we need to do less with less.
At this point I see zero reasons to conserve damn solar energy while half of the country still uses OFCH.
One way is to say "well I don't care, I won't do anything until I don't get a choice, and probably at that point it will hurt a lot".
Another is to face it, start doing things, and pushing your politicians to enforce very big plans. One problem I see is that everyone says "I would be ready to do a lot more if I knew everyone else did", but when it's time to vote, they don't.
Not being ready to go lower than 24.5 degrees (doesn't have to be 19 if that's not bearable for you) in winter does not sound like you are ready to do much, though.
As I said before, I'm living in a house insulated up to the highest standard, I have a heat pump and a solar PV, the largest PV array in the estate. I think this is something reasonable. I work remotely, I don't drive much and I drive with very good MPG, I've figured out that my car has the best MPG at 90 kmph so I drive about 90 kmph, I don't travel often, I'm carefully sorting my waste (most people throw everything into the black bin), I'm trying to buy things which last and I'm trying to repair and sell, I think if everyone does that it would make some reasonable impact.
Though I don't think that 19 or whatever degrees is something of your business.
> you are ready to do much
I'm not ready to do unreasonable (or idiotic) things. Why 24.5? Because I've figured out that it's the most optimal temperature for me.
> I'm not ready to do unreasonable (or idiotic) things. Why 24.5? Because I've figured out that it's the most optimal temperature for me.
Let's say that your case is extremely special and for you it does not make sense to not overheat, it does not make it unreasonable (or idiotic) to say that the vast majority of people should not overheat, does it?
Unrelated: Does your solar pv really do anything for your heatpump? What's your kwh/kwp for december-february? I don't think it'll be anywhere close to the heatpump consumtion.
> I couldn't live with that temperature in winter, where I am wearing thick pullovers and jeans.
Are you really wearing those indoors?
However, I find it SUPER SAD that... in developed countries people are living less comfortably during the winter than the middle class in Romania, a developing country.
It makes no sense. In Romania, everyone who's at least middle class sets the thermostat to 22-23 degrees and basically only wears t-shirts and shorts indoors.
So a German making €40k net per year lives worse from this point of view compared to a Romanian making €20k net per year.
In the US, and I assume elsewhere, the single greatest reduction is carbon emissions was achieved by switching from coal plants to natural gas plants. Thats a win in my book. No fossil fuels at any cost is a losing proposition. Incremental progress to sustainable energy is how we get to sustainability.
But I don't see them as the end goal; that's still 100% renewable to me.
But for the short term, I think that's preferable to the much bigger disaster of global warming and climate change.
I'd happily wear a jacket, if that can help with shutting down a coal power plant
Apart from that, Romania's energy consumption comes 75% from coal, oil and gas. THAT is something that does not makes sense and something that is SUPER SAD. And to walk around in shorts and t-shirt in the winter when you are heating with those sources is just plain stupid.
It's unfortunately these kind of attitudes which will make it hard to reduce climate change.
2. That's just dumb. Romania reduced its energy usage a ton since 1989 plus its per capita usage is super low, if someone needs to look in the mirror it's the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, China (China for the industrial pollution primarily), etc.
I even doubt that anything would change if everyone in the developed world switches to this extreme economy. E.g. Russia burns coal and wastes hundreds of gigawatt hours to heat the atmosphere because of how their heating systems are designed. But of course it's lot easier to force me, a person who works from home, drives a hybrid car with 52MPG on average (and I rarely do more than a couple of hundreds km per month), travels couple of times per year and who installed a heat pump and a solar PV, to live with 19 degrees than to deal with Russia. It's equally easier to force me going full vegan instead of applying seemingly working solutions to reduce meat industry emissions (toilet training, seaweed diet, artificial meat in the end).
For the same reason that if you had two jobs with the exact same conditions, but one paid twice as much as the other, you would probably pick the one that pays more. Efficiency matters. Resources are limited. Oil is a resource. The capacity to take care of offenders is another.
The first thing when I come home is to change out of jeans and co and into more comfortable clothes.
There are few clothes more comfortable than a t-shirt and shorts.
In my country, we say that the bedroom should not be warmer than 19, because that's bad for sleeping :-). So it's really a choice. If I go to bed and the temperature is 24.5, I open the window.
Also I don't find it less comfortable to wear more clothes in the winter than in the summer. Ok, working from home on a computer at 19 degrees is a little bit cold, so I tend to use a warm water bottle. But honestly that's really fine.
Anyways I'm happy enough with my bills, even winter bills.
I live far to the north, in an apartment, and didn't notice anything this winter, wherever I went. But I heard someone in their villa here nearby actually moved elsewhere, over the winter, because of the high cost of heating
Edit: by villa we typically mean a house that is not adjacent to another house.
Also, the gas price of my dad increased from 4.8 cents per kWh to 14.2 cents per kWh as an existing customer. People who were moving at the time and were new customers had to sign contracts well above 20 cents per kWh.
So, you probably only didn't "notice any difference" if you have either deep pockets or your energy supplier has a very foresighted buying strategy for a period of more than 1.5 years. (Many utility providers don't do this because they are speculators at the same time. Few like to pay a premium for forward contracts in the far future).
I for one hope the consumer market will get an overcorrection and I can fix my contract for a few years, since I'm not convinced we've seen the last of energy price fluctuation.
Continental Europe's got much better housing than the bits of the US which I've visited. East coast more relevant here than the West, given exactly where I went, but Boston, Providence, etc., were awful build quality, the "middle class" places around there were even worse than the "working class" Victorian terraces and post-War council houses in the UK.
My current house in Virginia is over 100 years old, and isn’t terribly well insulated and has single pane windows (although we have storm windows which help… also it’s small and is a duplex which helps).
So the places you visited (on East Coast, big old cities) are not necessarily very representative. Any place with newer housing will have better insulation. (And yes, I realize that a lot of people think newer houses are cheap crap, but overall I think building codes have improved average quality significantly, and the reason you don’t see it in some old houses is because the crap old houses were already torn down, ie sample bias.)
My personal gas+electricity bill went from €180 a month to almost €600. I really think the price of energy is a huge influence in the reduction of usage.
Of course, according to propaganda, it's all "efficiency" and "saving" and definitely not US effectively killing EU industry.
Another manufacturer of food-related products closed, too: https://www.europe1.fr/economie/le-groupe-cofigeo-william-sa...
A quick search brings up others, but in French.
Fair point about moving to the US, though.
---
Edit regarding the US specifically (unfortunately, French only):
Here's Safran suspending a factory project near Lyon and increasing production in the US and Malaysia: https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/air-defense/safra...
Also, BASF announcing a "cost-cutting" plan in Europe and increasing production in the US: https://www.europe1.fr/economie/prix-de-lenergie-delocalisat...
I think the reason is twofold:
1. Industries can probably not afford to cut production immediately
2. At least in France, there were worries about gas availability for the winter. The government tried to have industries lower their consumption to not run out of the reserves during the winter.
https://www.grtgaz.com/en/en/our-actions/continuity-of-gas-t...
I haven't found a similar source for electricity, though articles I've seen talk of reductions, too.
The part of the claim you have taken upon yourself to substantiate is that the reduction is mainly (or even mostly) due to industry getting closed down completely or relocated specifically to the US.
I think the reason is the same as for the lower then expected impact of the sanctions on Russia. People are quite resourceful when facing an acute crisis. When millions of people have an actual motivation to find better ways of doing things, they tend to find solutions they would have never considered under normal circumstances.
The real question is whether there was a statistically significant difference compared to previous years ceteris paribus (same location, same time of year, etc.).
Also the influx of various refugees over the years should be taken into account.
Anecdotal evidence that there is homelessness does not automatically mean doom and gloom for a country.
I visited Frankfurt just 1 month ago and was shocked to see the situation being even worse.
I believe a lot of it is a post-effect of covid where some people fell through the craks and now are just lost to drugs or other addictions.
You might easily find that a "recession" is less damaging to people than a period of drastically cut energy consumption. People unable to heat themselves in winter undermines the idea of a growing economy - the metrics aren't supposed to be a shell game of excuses where some drops are papered over because it is politically inconvenient.
I mean, how are people supposed to be better off if we're seeing these types of sharp drops in energy use? It strains credulity that someone in the Netherlands can cut their gas use by 24% in a year and claim that their material living standard didn't decline. There'd have to be something mighty positive happening - what is it? They haven't had time to build up capital to keep themselves comfortable.
Stage-1) Politicians should be the first and their energy expenditures should be cut by law to half of the median with some painful consequences for breaking it.
Stage-2) After a couple of years same goes for top 1% and government offices.
Stage-3) After another couple of years do this for top 10%
Stage-4) The rest of us.
20 years later we had cars using up half the gasoline and with 2x the horsepower.
Humans need a solid kick in the behind sometimes.
The fact that so many in the EU don’t realise this just points out how amazing American propaganda is
Asking as a fellow European (HU)
Basically Germany's entire foreign policy is economic suicide and very much driven by a US stooge (Baerbock). The total penetration of the German Green Party (formerly pacifist) is an excellent example of American influence.
Sanctions on Russian energy are a response to invasion. Apart from moral reasons, they also are meant to cripple russia so we don't have to fight them later in the baltics, in poland or romania.
So it's pretty much EU self interest here.
I might get downvoted for this, but the duty of every head of state is to ensure its country's economic and citizens well being is above anything else.
And what the EU as a whole did was exactly the opposite with the sanctions.
And no, no one would have had to fight anywhere else in Europe.
They are doing that by ensuring future conflict is much more unlikely.
If these measures were done earlier perhaps russia would not have started current invasion and we'd be much better off.
So perhaps politicians failed by being compliant up to now.
Try telling the baltics, poland, romania that they should not fear russia and continue trading... Same countries russia constantly threatens and are part of EU and NATO.
Imagine germany's position if Poland is conquered by russia.
> And no, no one would have had to fight anywhere else in Europe.
That's a bold statement considering russia's posturing, threats, history and leaked initial plans.
I’m very proud of that and I think cutting dependency on Russian gas – while we might not have necessarily wished for it to go this fast – is just plain good policy, making Germany more resilient in the future. Obviously there have been some short term bad consequences, that‘s pretty much unavoidable with any such drastic shift. But consequences have been far from catastrophic or existential for us. Germans and Europeans are going through some times that are a bit tougher – the people suffering, however, are in Ukraine.
I see Germany and Europe coming out of this more resilient and safer, especially if we make sure Putin cannot win this war.
https://www.reddit.com/r/latvia/comments/tdct34/russian_mili...
This article says the speaker is "Colonel Igor Korotchenko, formerly of the Russian General Staff and air force and currently a reserve officer".
https://www.thesun.ie/news/8513264/russian-state-tv-discusse...
This time we're tripping over ourselves to to make life harder for the Russians no matter the cost, seemingly lacking any self awareness.
Europe desperately needs its own army.
Ha! Do you not remember the Time making Putin a person of the year? They encouraged it back in 2009
And the worst part is they even fail at providing a good single market. You still can't work for a Spanish company from Germany (without being a freelancer), or pay your taxes in Spain with a French bank account. If you start a company, hiring across Europe means having local payroll offices to handle local taxes and labour laws in local languages in every single country (and possibly more internal autonomous regions). Trade unions differ in every country so there's no central negotiations.
Residence registration and ID is done independently in every single country, so you might be delayed by months when moving for work.
This is what we have in the EU at the moment - VDL as a "compromise" between Center-Right, Center-Left, Center, "South-bloc" and "North-bloc", coming from the party that won the election.
None of the other major party candidates would have been able to form a commission (maybe Margarethe Vestager, but then the party arriving third would have won, which would have been weird and undemocratic to some.)
I know some people would rather have the head of the commission elected directly - but, seing the crazyness of French system, completely centered on the election of a single person, I'm starting to reconsider...
As for being a "puppet state", well... I guess we come back at the US by forcing people to implement GDPR popups ;) ?
Right now VdL has just failed upwards, being a terrible politician in Germany who was moved to the EU to get her out of domestic politics, and it seems she'll be NATO leader soon (again unelected).
The ePrivacy Directive is different from the GDPR btw. The GDPR is actually not so bad tbh - although a bit too over-reaching, but at least it's a step towards making some things like I mentioned in the previous comment a bit more uniform.
The Parliament is also very weak and can't propose laws, etc.
I guess Californians and Texans can both vote for local politicians under the same party, but nothing force the politicians to vote together once in Congress ?
Also, I think as a bloc, the EU is not entirely ready yet for, say, French people to directly vote for non French people. But who knows.
As for the balance of powers in the EU, it's far from perfect. But coming from France, who am I to judge ?
I'm not sure I get your point. The European Parlement Election _is_ held accross all EU contries "almost" at the same time. It's spread accross a few days to respect the voting tradition of each member state, but the campaign very much happen at the same time for everyone.
There were debates between the "heads", but there you hit the language barrier - we're not going to see a Spanish candidate arguing with a German one in English on French Television any time soon.
> Like have French, Spanish, Greek, Swedes, Germans, etc. all debating and voting - and people would actually know the background of who the President of the EU commission is!
To be honest, the 2019 elections were the first time it _did_ felt like the voting was occuring across the bloc. Each cross-european party had a few clear faces for candidates for the Commission, beforehand.
Had the PPE received a clear majority, we would be talking about the Webber Commission - except, no-one really won, and they had to pick a compromise candidate.
> Right now VdL has just failed upwards
She is the grand tradition of the parlementary leaders chosen because they were "the least worse alternative", and "bad enough to be acceptable by everyone."
Again, I don't know if it is structural, or just the result of an election without a clear majority.
I understand this is an issue because she was only known in Germany. Would it have been better to at least choose a "compromise candidate" that had previous EU-level experience ?
Ironically, you have to notice that the British People did not vote for Sunak either ;)
I don't know what's the structural way to avoid "an elected body not agreeing on a name chosen before the election". Do you stick to the name, until you reach gridlock ? Do you setup your elections to ensure a clear majority, artifically reducing the diversity of your electorate until you have a duopoly ?
But VdL is the head of the Commission not Parliament (which is also far too weak IMO). The equivalent would be the King in Britain, which is obviously even worse, same for the House of Lords, etc. but two wrongs don't make a right.
I think really the Parliament should be more powerful with PR voting for the European blocs directly rather than local parties with the lists, etc. and the President should also be directly elected.
Basically give the EU parliament more power in return for greater democracy.
https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/04/06/poland-overtakes-us-t...
Industry changes over time depending on the the conditions. Europeans are not fond with an aggressive gas station on their footstep, cut back on buying stuff from it and obviously see the negative impact from buying from a gas station further away. They also live less comfortably but it's far from doom and gloom, which many suspect might follow if that gas station expand its power.
Everybody knows its not ideal to spend more and everyone knows its not fun to consume less. Sometimes, you have no choice unless you are nihilistic.
The US really isn't the country to beat for manufacturing, we're a fair way in to the 21st century by now.
China: 75% of the same.
Now I know China is well known for their green credentials and the EU have been underinvesting in Green technology by policy... of wait, no it is the opposite of both those things. That is what failed EU industry looks like. The EU has been trying to set themselves up with batteries for a decade now and China is 5x-ing them by just knuckling down and producing stuff without worrying about political correctness.
The fact that the first market you thought of was one where the EU has been drubbed so badly should be a concern to everyone. Except maybe China.
Who knows, maybe we'll even get to see it growing through a nuclear winter at the rate the EU is going.
You couldnt buy artificially carbonated water for some time. Naturally carbonated water and cola (different suppliers?) was available.
Some energy intensive industries (e.g. steel) are down, but the industry overall is up, meaning many found ways to optimize.
Edit: a source, in italian https://twitter.com/emmevilla/status/1640628147845492736?t=Z...
What?
Our ministry of interior has even official guides how to promote this blaming of Putin in media.
https://www.mvcr.cz/soubor/krit-memo-putin-a-hlad-20221214-p...
Because all i can think of is exploiting Africa or cosying up to middle eastern despots.
Done is done, but what I really can't forgive is that while pushing for this asinine conflict, there was literally no plan on how to deal with the consequences. Instead of diversifying our energy supply, we are now dependent on the US, which given its trajectory, will bite us in the arse 5 years down the line. Outside of France, there is literally 0 foreign policy competence left in the EU, and it is really showing with how helpless every crisis since 2008 has been handled.
And for Europe as a whole: Winter temperatures in 2022 were around 1°C above average, ranking amongst the ten warmest winters. [1]
As far as I understand, that's the top 10 out of the past 170 years.
[1] https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2022-was-year-clima...
However, it was neither fun, nor comfortable to live in cold.
Today I'm walking around in a T-Shirt when everyone has some kind of thin coats on, but when I sit and idle for an hour, or get hungry, I cool down considerably.
My wife is extremely resistant to heat, but this disadvantages her in normal and cold weather severely. Her baseline is 22-23 degrees C to live comfortably, with long sleeved warm clothes.
Also, temperature doesn't always indicate cold's penetration power. If the air is dry, -18 degrees C is survivable with a mid-thickness polar coat. If it's humid, try to survive 2-3 degrees C with a down / wind-resistant coat. It won't be easy.
The same goes for handling heat and humidity. I grew up with average temps of 35 degrees C in a dry climate. It was not a problem at all. 28 degrees in high humidity I find unbearable.
Also, feeling cold at night lowers my mood, and I don't want to do anything. However, I'm fine during the day when my body's running at its usual. I live with a t-shirt all year round, even.
Adult sleep quality benefits quite a bit from even cooler temperatures at night, ~18.5 degrees C. Use a heavier blanket.
Being tired, not being able to warm oneself after dinner at home because of a slowed down metabolism at 18 degrees C is not comfortable for me (yes, even with warmer clothes, socks, etc. Hot drinks helps, but temporarily).
You're describing something that is true of every human on Earth. Everyone gets cold when they don't move. Everyone's body cools down at night. You don't need 20C to sleep at night.
Since my body cools down at night, warmer clothes doesn’t help (since I generate way less heat). I need to get under a blanket, which hampers my mobility a lot.
In the day, I’m very resistant to cold.
I grew up in a household that would keep it at 60 during the day, and 52 degrees at night in order to save money. I then took on a job that had me doing service calls into people's homes and it was eye opening that even the most poor run down apartment I'd visit would have the heat blasting at 75+. Oftentimes with a window cracked to boot.
I don't think I have a single friend these days that keeps it lower than 70, usually in the 72-74 range. And yes, I find it extremely hot when visiting.
Let's hope the EU policy in the works[1] will fix some of this and not get gutted by the anti-green populist factions.
[1] https://www.eceee.org/all-news/news/news-2021/new-report-epb...
Well nobody really measured how capping the temperature at workplaces at 18.C affects productivity, nor long term effects in health, so the "more efficient" part has a lot of different caveats.
I mean with gas and electricity prices going up 200-500% for consumers, of course you'd see people trying to save as much as they can.
Still, if we can do it for that, can't we do it for climate change too? It's a more abstract problem though; not as concrete, immediate and urgent as a war. And frankly, I wouldn't mind being able to put my temperature back to 20 next winter. 19 doesn't sound like a big change, but it's still a bit chilly.
As a Dutch citizen I'm using up an entire African village worth of water every month because it costs almost nothing. There are probably people on this planet right now living like the Fremen.
But ignoring that, the chart at the end shows that coal, gas and solar increased their share in electricity production, whereas it was nuclear which showed the biggest decrease.
Per capita 42.1MWh for Germany vs 76.6MWh for USA in 2021 (before the war and any special energy savings) [1]. The living standard is comparable and the output per GDP is 0.98kWh for Germany vs 1.48kWh for the USA (in 2018) [2].
So it should be easy for the USA to reduce by 1/3 their energy consumption without affecting productivity and without even switching to other energy sources.
There is a lot of potential in energy efficiency also in Germany and other countries of course.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany?country=US...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany?country=US...
If you assume your conclusion, it’s easy to make convincing sounding arguments.
There are many ways that Germany is more pleasant than the US, and if you care a lot about those things you can construct arguments for why being in Germany is preferable.
But ability to consume goods and services is not one of those arguments. The US is MUCH richer than Germany.
How much of this is due to the extreme temperatures that the US population experience that are completely unheard of in Europe?
Source : lived in america for a decade and make decent money and my million dollar home has absolutely big standard heating and cooling. Underfloor heating is a luxury and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in a home in all my time here.
As an American, I can’t understand for the life of me where anyone would get the idea that either of these is a common thing. I mean, an AC running on diesel isn't completely unheard of, in that a house might have both AC and a diesel backup generator, but underfloor heating or anything in the home powered primarily by diesel are not even remotely common.
There are many reasons for this: - they are richer, so they can afford bigger houses and larger cars. You think Europeans wouldn't like to live in a larger house, or drive a larger car? This is not a choice, or efficiency improvements, this is just Europeans not being able to afford more. - they have more land, so they can afford to live in quiet suburbia, surrounded by trees and lawns rather than noisy, polluted neighborhoods. - they produce their own energy. Oil import-export is close to net zero and they export gas. Producing oil and gas is energy intensive. Europe on the other hand imports energy, and don't have to account for those emissions. - they live further south, and need constant AC in the summer.
There are inefficiencies in the US, for example houses are poorly insulated; but these inefficiencies are a little overblown, when compared to Europe. If Europeans would live at the same standards of living like the Americans, and produce their own energy, they would be close in energy consumption.
> We trained our model to predict the daily average gas demand per person for 26 countries (Britain and all EU member states except Malta and Cyprus, which use little or no gas), for each winter month between January 2013 and February 2022. After the model had learned the relationship between temperatures and gas demand, we gave it real temperatures from this winter and asked it to predict how gas usage might have played out had Russia not sparked an energy crisis.
They released some model around estimated covid deaths that was just completely wrong around China for the time.
welcome to the majority of "modeling".
tuning a model to a statistical sample of the past doesn't give as much assurance about it's predictive power as people think.
then, only in the future do we find that the model failed to predict, by which time they tell us, "yeah, but we have a new model", to which the only appropriate answer is "yeah, but you had the same certainty about your old model that did not work"
I'm not saying that there's no point in modelling: you learn a lot about the dynamics of the system when you are working on the model; but that's not what the resultant model conveys.
This is less insightful then you might think, as it's not limited to modeling. We just have a tendency to use previous observations as truth for future endeavors. Mainly because it's usually fine and works fine.
You can see it in every second discussion about any topic that's currently being researched:
I.e. there is nothing guaranteeing we won't have a super viral virus with 90%+ chance of death. It could happen...
There is nothing guaranteeing that LLMs ability to output relevant data will get better, even if it's been tremendously improved within the last year alone.
You can basically see this in action whenever someone is making a prediction. The likelihood of it coming true might be good enough to work with it, but you can always have something go amiss, or a meteor out of currently unknown materials hits the sun causing a chain reaction which causes it to go supernova...
It usually isn't. John Kay and Mervyn King wrote a good book on this issue. They talk about events in three categories. Deterministic predictions, say where is the earth in five years in the solar system, probabilistic predictions based on past data, i.e. how likely is it that the volcano will explode in the next five years, and the most important one which they call 'radically uncertain' events.
Complex human events are almost always in the last category. Using the language from the first or second class of events to make predictions about completely dynamic systems that are entirely dependent on human intervention that have no clear relationship to the past makes no sense. Using quantitative language in that case is actively misleading because it creates the impression you have any notion of the total space of possible events at all. "X has a 80% of going to war in Y years" is an example. What they really mean to say is "I believe it is likely that..", but that 80% number is completely made up.
Or as Frank Knight put it: “A measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.”
What you seems to have an issue with is how it's often reported on or used in politics... But the people actually creating the models are in my experience always aware that the results are never proving anything by themselves... And blaming the act of modeling for the actions of politicians and reporters is misguided, as they're just using whatever is convenient. If it wasn't a specific model, they'd find something else to validate whatever asinine bullshit they're peddling.
This kind of reminds me of when some journalist on twitter used machine learning to find hate-speech against British politician. Of course the journalist found exactly what they were looking for. There was more hate speech against conservatives... Of course, the journalist was only an amateur in statistics, and used a flawed model, that could have yielded anything they wanted
disclaimer: I didn’t read the article because paywall, and waiting for an archive to be posted.
News source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63330885
Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/petesherlock79/status/159025317484515328...
And a response thread explaining the flaws in the methodology:
As news source: https://novaramedia.com/2022/11/09/the-bbcs-investigation-in...
And on twitter: https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1590403667974582272
Basically the model was developed at google to find “toxic speech”, but the researchers had a very biased definition on what constituted as “toxic”. Racist speech didn’t count, while angry shouts did.
> I entered a selection of racist tweets I’d received in the past year into Perspective’s API, of varying lengths and sentence complexity. Just to make it easy for the machine, I deliberately chose one which included a common racial slur against South Asians.
> None of these were registered as potentially toxic at all by the AI – but, “You’re a fucking G”, a compliment, popped up with a 90.29% likelihood of being toxic.
Your hypotheses that white MPs experience more racist speech than non-white MPs, is testable. I have a pretty strong feeling that you are wrong, but I haven’t seen any data to support either (only anecdotes; and this deeply flawed analysis). What you can do to test your hypotheses is find all British MPs on twitter, scrape all tweets directed at them, and measure the proportion of racist speech against them. However, I advice you to do a more traditional cluster analysis, rather than a training model, the latter is very likely to yield a flawed model just like the journalist’s “8 month labor of love”.
EDIT: Another data point would be total solar energy production in winter divided by installed power, per month, in comparison to previous winter.
[1] https://www.shmu.sk/sk/?page=1&id=klimat_operativneudaje1&id...
Having thick isolation between apartments is a waste of resources in most cases - better to put on the whole building.
But if you think logically, there are some things you can't do in apartment, e.g. listen to loud music at night, or drill holes when others might be sleeping.
Turning down heating to zero is one of them. AFAIR in some places there is a limit of how low your heating should be and if it is lower then you still pay a given set price - this is to discourage cheaters.
Insulation is the first thing you do to improve the thermal characteristics of a home. It's not expensive.
Also cooking, refrigeration, lighting, electronics..
Really? GP is effectively acting as an apartment-size layer of insulation between neighbors and the outside. Put another way, if everyone did what GP did (for instance, lower thermostat to 20C) the entire building would be cooler and use less energy. Perhaps GP’s behavior even encouraged others to lower their thermostat because of higher electric bills!
Is that considered a low temp for heating your house? I think that's about a perfect daytime temp summer or winter. At night that would be too warm honestly.
Wat. Do you honestly believe that other apartments are on the inner side of the building and his is on the outer side?
> Put another way, if everyone did what GP did
Everyone would be cold, and the building itself would be cold
I really don't see how that can be possible except for some rare cases
In law? Tenancy agreement?
We keep our heat at 16°C during the day, 15°C at night. We don't have any mold issues.
Furthermore, humidity drops with temperature, as cooler air can't hold as much moisture as warm air.
> humidity drops with temperature, as cooler air can't hold as much moisture as warm air.
This encourages mold
Why would you do this to yourself? I meaning living in such woeful conditions.
Whoops
I don't actually understand the "illegal" argument.
Illegal in what way?
> what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you
if you don't turn up your heater, your neighbors don't have to heat more, the air in an insulator, some heat will leak in your apartment, but will also leak back to theirs, it will soon reach an equilibrium, unless you keep the windows open to cool down your apartment or turn on the AC.
Anyway most of the heat that leaks is through the heating pipes in the walls, it would leak anyway, the temperature of the wall is always gonna be lower than the water in the pipes. So you are heating up your neighbors walls even if your neighbors are keeping the heating on.
It’s a huge waste of money in smaller residential units where people don’t have a garden or car to wash. And sometimes not even responsible for their plumbing or appliance choice/efficiency/maintenance.
Paying $x/month in account fees and meter reading means someone else burns some other resource while you work to conserve (if one even bothers).
It would be too hot if we ran the heat.
This is in Toronto where it’ll average a bit colder than continental Europe.
I used to live in a flat where we never turned the heating on at all. It got so warm we had to open windows even in winter. If my neighbors were responsible, I wish they would have turned their heating down!
* The total energy use would be lowered.
* The energy use of the neighbors would be somewhat higher.
In your idea of "reasonably managed" buildings, everyone is forced to keep the heat on way too high, so a bunch of people open their windows wide open to bring in cool air, resulting in a massive and ridiculous waste of energy. The problem is that some moron in charge of the thermostat wants it much hotter (in the winter) or colder (in the summer) than ecologically- and economically-minded people who prefer to save energy. There's never any kind of democratic system for setting the thermostat, plus different people have different comfort levels.
If the neighbors don't like high utility bills, then they should stop using so much energy. There's nothing requiring them to keep it as warm as they do: it's not hard to put on some warm underwear.
Also: I'm pretty sure that in most reasonable scenarios not heating one apartment in a house that has a decent outer layer of insulation would overall reduce energy input, because the overall average temperature would decline and heat would propagate more efficiently between apartments than to the outside. But I'm no expert so what do I know.
That also means if you turn on your heating, you add to both your bill and some of the shared costs others pay.
I live in a modern, well insulated building as the grandparent comment. I haven't run the heat for years, we need to occasionally open the windows cos it gets too warm and stale obviously, i don't think it makes sense to force me to turn on the heat even more and open the window even more.
edit: this was more a mix of reply to the parent comment and a bit to yours, sorry got it in the wrong spot.
Pretty sure this is incorrect. Conductive heat flow goes with the temperature difference. The higher the temperature difference, the more heat flow. If you kept your room cold versus everyone else, then your room would be leaking heat to the outside less than everyone else's, assuming everything else equal.
the unheated unit wall will have less heat, but the thermostat is checking the air, which is protected by wall.
The above poster didn't have his neighbors turn up the heat for them to be comfortable.
I used to live on the 3rd story interior apartment; had to turn the ac on early in mild winters (southeast us) because one of my neighbors must have enjoyed living in a tropical house.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home...
If he shut off his heat counting on neighbor heat to keep him warm, then maybe it would be freeloading.
But if his heating system was on and he set the thermostat to 20℃, which is in the normal indoor temperature range according to most sources I've seen, and it just happened to never turn on because his neighbors set theirs to higher I wouldn't consider that to be freeloading.
Equally shocking was seeing the gas meter showing GBP15+ per day to heat a rowhouse to what was still an incredibly cold indoor temperature (14-15C) and drafty).
Next time we travel, we'll choose dates better.
We used to have winters with permanent snow on the streets for months.
For the ones who say that this is freeloading on the neighbors: not so much since at least in Germany one pays his own but also proportionally for the whole building (e.g. 50/50 or 70/30).
Which would be fine if it was just me as it could be solved with a hoodie, but I was worried about moisture damaging electronics and causing mould, as well as the comfort of my dog.
I haven't calculated it but I would estimate that I at least halved my usage from previous years.
* German electricity consumption (Netzlast) went down by only 4.1 %
* German electricity production (Energieerzeugung) went UP by 0.4 % (I guess the surprising difference w.r.t. consumption has to do with electricity exports to other countries)
* German electricity production by gas went UP by 2.1 %.
* German electricity production by lignite (Braunkohle) went UP by 5.4%
* German electricity production by coal (Schwarzkohle) went UP by 21.3%
https://www.energy-charts.info/index.html?l=de&c=DE
https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/444/209624
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2023/03...
Looks like we really got it figured out.
- Two very efficient and quiet Mitsubishi Electric "nordic climate" version air-to-air heat pumps (MSZ-LN35 and MSZ-LN25) replacing 20 year old much less efficient equivalents - those couldn't really keep up, so additional resistive heating was necessary before the upgrade.
- One very affordable and relatively noisy Chinese noname air-to-air heat pump replacing resistive 10C maintenance heating in a side area.
I ended up having a higher indoor average temperature in the house than in previous years.
(I'm in Sweden.)
I would have paid 5k EUR without this tax deduction.
The installer handles the accounting/tax agency reporting - so the invoice was for 4.5k EUR, not 5k.
IF (say) that 40% is 1,000 EUR you (and partially your state) payed in advance for five years heating.
And you were in a particular situation (already 20 years old heating that probably needed replaacement anyway), if you replaced that with new devices of the same type as the old ones you would have probably not spent so much less.
Usually the break even point should be in the 5 or more years range (unless there are more substantial state incentives) for a "plain" replacement (i.e. with a working furnace + conditioner replaced by a heat pump).
Anecdotally, a couple of years ago (in a shop, not a house, but the reasoning should be the same) I replaced a gas furnace (that was to be replaced anyway) and an air conditioner (that also was likely to fail being old enough) with a new heat pump. Both had a heat exchanger and heated/refreshed water that circulated in a few fan-coils, so there was in practice no need of masonry or hydraulic work besides replacing the (external) units.
Replacing them with a new gas furnace + new conditioning unit was quoted around 4,000 Euro, whilst the new heat pump was quoted around 10,500 Euro, at the time it was possible to have 65% state incentive (directly credited by the supplier), so I paid only around 3,700 Euro, i.e. roughly the same as replacing the old units with the same ones instead of using the new technology.
Without this (very substantial) incentive I calculated that it would have taken a little less than 6 years to get even at a projected saving of around 1,100 Euro/year.
> Much of this was because of rising costs. [..] Britain, Germany and the Netherlands were among the most affected.
Pricing of goods clearly has a strong relation with usage.
It turned out to not be such a huge deal. Check electricity price from the app before doing something that uses a lot of power (the biggest is if you have a sauna, we don't). Have shorter showers, maybe turn down the thermostat one degree. We got used to also checking the price when deciding to do laundry or making food in the oven. Often things can be moved a few days. More about principles than actual costs. The large amounts of installed wind power made it so that every now and then power was very cheap. Now that they got the massive nuclear plant online, it's always quite cheap that nobody's looking at the price anymore.
There were maybe two days which called for winter boots. Was supposed to get new ones when needed and so I didn't. Walked the whole winter in loafers or similarly low laced shoes which you don't have to take off at airports.
That ain't the winter I'm used to.
> Half of European ammonia production plant closed
> Spiralling gas prices have caused a decline in European ammonia production, thereby aggravating the shortage of fertilisers in Europe. CRU Group analysts estimate that around half of European ammonia production plant and 33% of nitrogen fertiliser plant has closed down as a result
All this will, of course, be reflected in even higher prices for basic food stuff further down the road.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00363...
Also, perhaps some factories will reopen.
Presumably at higher prices, otherwise the European plant fertiliser industry wouldn't have been in active the first place.
> higher prices encourage investment in efficiency improvements
As far as I can understand agribusiness is already highly efficient, not sure it can make up for a double-digit decrease in availability (or increase in prices) for one of its core inputs.
Our own statistics agency agrees with them: 25% lower gas usage by housholds of which 10% can be attributed to warmer weather. The rest is savings.
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2023/07/gasverbruik-nederlan...
It was unusually warm winter and alternative supplies were obtained. It was looking rough for a while there.
But on balance. Next winter should be _significantly_ easier to deal with than last (or more likely: with less world-wide side effects)
Will there? On a global level, how much can heat pump production output go up in 12 months?
Though I could see Europe bid up supply over others.
Wood stoves I could see a quicker boost in production capacity.
It’s not going to change the game completely, but it makes the situation much simpler. Add to that the experience we gained this year, and I would be extremely surprised if we have to resort to “outbid everyone in August and September on the worldwide LNG market”, which is basically what we did last year (to the point of having ships idling of our coast because all storage capacity was full..).
I’m not saying that we don’t need to buy gas on the international markets, just that next winter will be easier to manage than this one. (And this one really wasn’t that hard either.) Which should be a good thing for the rest of the world market too
[0] well really between Nov 22 and Oct23, but that’s relevant for the difference in gas consumption in the next heating period [1] though it’s entirely anecdotal, but a number of people have replaced their old gas unit this year already. Don’t think that’s overly smart as an idea. But replacing a 30 year old unit with a new one does decrease fuel consumption somewhat
Pretty sure most people could see trough the sensationalism but not sure.
Personally I put a heater literally next to my office char, with a cover on top of it and me. This means I could work all day feeling warm without heating the whole flat.
So yes, we did cut energy consumption.
The PR around this was much better than the one around covid, one consistent clear message for month prior the event.
Turns out when the government does its job, people are not that dumb.
we have an apartment at the top of an old house that has old pipes, every winter we have every radiator on and we still freeze in the top of the house.
This winter we had basically half the radiators on.
The neighbor also noted a month ago that the heating for the whole house cost less this year than it normally does, and that the heating company had given money back.
If you're only looking at one energy source: Switching to another. For example, gas was scarce and expensive while oil was less affected, so some factories switched from gas to oil (some systems can be switched relatively easily).
I am done with government planning things for the masses. The pandemia has shown that they are definitely not capapble of doing so, and if they try, they end up becoming more totalitarian.
And yes, I agree with you, most of the savings come from a fairly mild winter. I saved some 20% heating by buying 10 EUR rubber bands to isolate the old windows and doors in my apartment. I guess some people have done something similarily simple...
There's an important point: how much of this was non-optional vs. luxury? I keep my home at 22, but if I had to, I could probably set it to 19 and tell everyone to wear a sweater in the winter. So not everyone, but definitely some slice of the population probably went from 19 to 16 or lower.
In Canada this can be a serious issue. My gas bill literally doubled for the same volume compared to last winter. This can be a sudden $100-200 extra monthly expense. Luckily it's illegal to ever cut anyone off from gas in the winter... but that doesn't fix the financial catastrophe.
19 is like, the temperature we set during off-peak hours, otherwise it's more like 18 (and we let it coast down during the evening).
Admittedly, it's quite cold when not moving around, so I spent most of the winter with at least 3 sweaters, a hot water bottle, and a blanket (and 2 layers of pants, usually).
When moving around, 17-18 is quite comfortable though, a long sleeved shirt or light sweater is usually enough.
He's Canadian. Over there electricity costs 0.044 € / kWh
https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
Also my hydro is closer to 9 cents.
So yes, there were people for whom the choice was "well I have £5 for today, either it's going in the meter so I can put heating on for a few hours and stay warm, or I need to use it to buy food to feed my family". This isn't some theoretical edge case scenario - this was a dilemma that many British families were faced with this winter.
It wasn't just that, but there definitely was a collective shift toward energy saving, also among those who could've afforded the high energy prices. (at least here in NL)
I agree we shouldn't celebrate the decision of the poor to be energy-frugal, they had no choice in most cases. But those wo had a choice, still chose to conserve energy, often structurally. We should celebrate that for the environmental win it is.
This is interesting. Can you point to the data on this? Do you guys run some kind of tracker study?
My observations:
* I tried to find a contractor for some work on my house. Very few were available, none were available short-term. Most told me this is due to extreme demand for isolation measures.
* Lead times on heat pumps rose to half a year, presumably also due to demand.
* People dressed warmer.
* The most common thermostat temperature for people around me temperature dropped from 20c to 19c.
* "How to isolate" was a very common topic in most Dutch media, far more than in previous winters.
For the working class however, the people really affected by the green policies, it was a matter of choosing between heat and groceries.
For the environment it doesn't matter one bit as China is using more energy than the whole western world combined. It's telling that only the people that can still easily pay the bills see this as something to be celebrated.
And we won the battle.
Sane countries roll out a mini-UBI to account for this.
Canada has a system of quarterly payments for every tax payer to make carbon taxes revenue-neutral (in theory). The belly-aching whining is truly extraordinary.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/child-famil...
Now, if we could convince the government that cutting labour taxes would increase supply of labour during a “labour shortage”, we might be getting somewhere.
> "When both fiscal and economic impacts of the federal fuel charge are considered, we estimate that most households will see a net loss,” PBO Yves Giroux said in a statement following release of the report. “Based on our analysis, most households will pay more in fuel charges and GST—as well as receiving slightly lower incomes—than they will receive in Climate Action Incentive payments.”
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/guilbeault-defends-carbon-pr...
> In provinces where the fee is levied, 90% of the revenues are returned to tax-payers.[4]
But if you want to see who’s truly a net winner or loser, if the rich lose more than the poor lose, the poor are still be better off if they’re net recipients of government services.
The only reason I would even suggest that higher energy prices are good for ecology would be that businesses started genuinely doing things to cut consumption, like turning off lit advertising and office lights.
That people are essentially priced out of living healthy is nothing to be celebrated of course, but there is a small silver lining and it should be discussed.
that people cant afford to live is a pretty massive failing of the UK and its policies. That’s been talked to death though.
The financial assistance offered to Swedes for the power consumption is contentious as most people didn’t expect anything to be paid back and it was taken from the energy companies profits too.
It’s not even remotely the same, even though the Murdoch media would like to make you think so.
I live in Sweden with family in the UK, both countries have suffered. It's not the "Murdoch media".
If your food inflation was 10% year 1 and 18% year 2 then your total inflation over two years is 35.7%.
If your food inflation on year 1 is 5% and year 2 is 20% then your total inflation over two years is 26%
You might look at the year two value and claim that inflation is higher, but food prices in the UK relative to income are definitely higher due to inflation (which is seemingly being underreported) over the last 5 years.
To be fair, the lines look quite comparable, but when I compare the monthly shop I do to what my friends and family do, and I factor in salary- it doesn’t nearly paint the picture that Sweden and the UK are comparable.
“Cost of living crisis” is decidedly not a thing in Sweden, not to the same scale, even if there are a contingent of people who struggle a little. Choosing between heating and eating is uniquely a British position in this regard. Similar to gun crime in the US, it seems like the Brit’s are pointing to all other countries as if they have the same issues and of course they do not.
https://news.sky.com/story/cost-of-living-utterly-shameful-t...
Lots of people that just sit on the couch under a blanket to stay warm. Apparently, hypothermia with elderly people has been a thing. That also increases the likelihood of strokes and other issues. Especially people with poor circulation. Other issues include respiratory issues due to cold and increased humidity in the apartments.
The issue is more that for competitive industry we really need cheap energy prices. Sure consumption was cut, but how much industry has moved to the USA now? (especially with the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies).
A lot of European manufacturing is so specialized that energy prices aren't a very large portion of their cost. The energy prices certainly are affecting the steel and chemical industries, but at least if the rest of the industrial economy is doing well they can afford to subsidize the less specialized industries that they decide are strategically important.
- turned down the thermostat by about 2 degrees compared to what i normally keep it at
- this winter was extremely mild
Still, my highest gas bill was 50% more than my highest gas bill ever.
But then I noticed moisture buildup on the inside of the roof. Screws sticking through the roof had water dripping from them. I turned the radiators back to full and the thermostat up again.
I'm restructuring the house, so not everybody will see it so clearly as I do, but we have to watch out. Our houses, particularly old ones are constructed to only stay nice with a good heat source inside during winter, in every room. Hot air will transport moisture out and keep it from depositing. If things cool down, fungi and moisture are a big risk. Hot humid air you breath out will find a cold spot to deposit it's moisture. It may take years before you find out where that is, and from experience I can tell you it can get quite disgusting when you finally rip out some plating.
The answer is: good, vapor tight (at the hot side, cold side should be open to vapor, or completely waterproof/tight!) insulation combined with good ventilation. That last one is very important, I also heard from people that closed their ventilation ducts... until water was dripping down the windows, or moist spots appeared in their wooden floors. Btw, a CO2 monitor can provide a good proxy measurement for your ventilation, imo.
Watch out people, you can save a lot on gas, but invite a lot of new problems. Don't go too crazy.
Indeed, older houses rely on "gravity ventilation", as my architect described it: high-temp heating is used to move stale air around by induction, plenty of nooks and crannies together with the density gradient would suck in fresh air.
When you renovate partially, adding insulation layers and plugging holes, you need to open up the windows for about 5-10 minutes once or twice a day. Paradoxically, the heat loss is mitigated because the fresh air is typically drier, which heats up easier.
But I really spend a lot of time reading and thinking. I am insulating my roof, insulated the ceiling. But CO2 buildup is very rapid in the living room now, even though there are 2 large ducts in the wall leading directly outside (easily >1500 PPM while cooking and the 4 of us in the room). So I'm looking at installing stuff like this now: [0]. Imo such things are very necessary and I feel that many people "modernizing", insulation their own house are inviting a lot of issues.
[0]: https://blaubergventilatoren.de/en/series/vento-expert-a50-1...
For electricity, it’s the last to get turned on and first to turn off.
And I don’t imagine a quick change to non-natgas building heating except for those that have existing dual-fuel (e.g. using the wood stove for once). Unsure if oil heat became cheaper than natgas but that’s unusual.
But the whole equation is even more complicated. Did Europe import more ammonium fertilizer instead of making it itself? Then that’s just pushing the energy consumption elsewhere. Same for glassmaking, aluminum smelting, etc.
In Europe most homes are heated by natural gas for one. Secondly, there are a lot of combined cycles gas turbines that supply a large part of actual energy demand. And then there's the advantage that is way more cleaner than coal and provides more power per unit. And this is not counting the gas usage in the industry that powers a lot of other things.
If you put everything that relies on gas together you will be surprised about how much we actually rely on gas for.
Warmest winter in a long time. Very lucky.
https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/19/nearly-50-people-died-from-co...
"..was this a result of sound government planning, or good luck?" Jesus, what a question.
However Europe is a large place. Some places are much better than others. Some people live in a "passive house" already and so have no opportunity - or need - to do better, while others live in a house that may as well be a tent for as bad as it leaks. There are places where almost every house is well insulated and so people living there think all of Europe is in great shape, meanwhile the next country can be in terrible shape.
Although it seems F and G flats will be illegal to rent soon in my city, so that could help.
Meanwhile, I've had single pane windows in most of my flats. Can't wait to move somewhere better insulated (I can hear the wind hissing through small gaps in the sliding windows right now). This is in a major city in France.
Multiple successive governments have started grants to share the cost of insulation, however these come with onerous paperwork requirements, complex financing schemes, accreditation schemes for contractors, and then are cancelled 18-24 months in due to low takeup. It's gotten to the point where the small companies that provide these services don't even try to join the schemes because they know it won't work out.
And it's not like I have good insulation otherwise - the snow occasionally falls through the cracks on the edges of my windows. I would love to fix them but honestly - what's the point if central heating still overheats the house.
In Poland in early 90ies your story could sound likely. Since then most places using central heating will bill you for "calories" consumed.
Since then a lot of investment went into insulation and replacing windows. I barely know anyone who doesn't have "new" windows, even in less affluent household, window replacement and insulation is a highly prioritized expense.
Actually it has caused some problems with too much humidity in the buildings.
I would assume baltic states are mostly similar since you folks are not swimming in free energy afaik too. So your case sounds like a bit weird outlier.
For the first time in 8? years we struggled to get hold of logs - especially oaks. Nobody seemed to be able to get hold of anything.
I think people switched their method of heating
Might have helped contribute to using less gas for heating, but maybe not in a large way
People can't afford to heat their home, small businesses can't afford to operate (bakers are a good exemple), so they just don't do it = lower energy consumption
I also mostly showered in gyms, like 4 out of 5 occassions.
I was never absent for more than 5 days anyway, so...
We fought hard to keep it at least under 60 per cent, as you say. If it froze outside, windows in the bedroom would be covered with water droplets in the morning.
(Actually, it froze last night, quite late in the season, and the windows were wet again.)
Turning down the heat by 1°C saves about 13% energy, which I wouldn't say is "small": https://cambridgeenergy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/CA... In the report they actually look at a temperature reduction from 19 to 18°C, so dropping from 23 to 22°C should result in an even larger saving.
Just this change has resulted in over 10% savings on the yearly electricity bill.
Using more energy is a a pretty terrible goal.
Rich western countries still depend heavily on other parts of the world being cheap. The last 100 years were the result of the riches extracted from previous centuries of plunder and occupation, and the rush to modernize after the largest government spending projects in history (WWs I and II) induced an unsustainable march toward technological "progress" that could not continue without some later shock and consequent regression due to the inevitabilities (some refer to them merely as externalities) borne of dependence on finite resources. We are currently living through that shock.
The issues the continent has been facing are purely due to inept policy. There is no problem with producing enough low emission/zero emission energy to maintain living standards.
Now, globally living standards have to drastically increase to get rid of poverty. That means drastic increase in consumption as well. The problem that noone is keen to acknowledge is the global population level.
We can achieve energy that is "too cheap to meter".
Too late to help with the winter and to take the worst of the gas prices, but better overall.
Can't self-generate gas, electricity at least a bit even in winter.
Oh, you can! But maybe only enough for cooking (when it’s warm enough in your reactor) not residential heating.
https://www.up-to-us.veolia.com/en/energy/produce-biogas-hom...
I have just paid my monthly bill to the end of March and it still came to £230 for electricity + gas. That's for a period when use of heating had started to drop because of spring in addition to our self-imposed restrictions because of high prices.
Because warm weather is better than cold weather.
Naturally, with ridiculous prices you do whatever to reduce consumption. We switched from heating by gas to wood. Like many others.
This "winter" was not really a winter. And nobody did any energy cut.
Why not do propaganda when you can.