And due to how the market was built, Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas affected everyone for a good while.
On the other hand I've been enjoying pretty much free electricity for about 6 months now. A few rare spikes up to 40c/kWh, but it's mostly been under 1c/kWh.
The cheapest rate I can get in NL is ~30c/kwh, and that’s with a dynamic price contract.
The government has applied an artificial limit of 40c/kwh for 2023, after energy companies here fleeced everyone last year. Unfortunately, it expires by 2024.
The worst part is that NL privatized the energy market long ago, to give people “choice” - which has only led to coordinated exorbitant pricing.
Last winter, we kept the heat on to a minimum and tried to keep the lights off. Really, the killer was the price of gas for heating (in-floor) and hot water. But even by comparison, my 20 minute hot shower once every 2-3 days wasn't really the issue. Our "usage" for January was over €550. Luckily, I used basically nothing the first two months I lived here so it averaged out so I didn't need to pay anything. Had I known what I know now, I would have purchased electric space heaters and ran them 24/7... it probably would have been cheaper and I could have walked around my apartment naked while it was -2 outside.
I've switched to Tibber (Swedish company I think?) on a variable rate plan and have been much happier. It would be one thing if I could have locked in a rate at Vattenfall, but even that wasn't possible. You still pay out the ass for all of your usage, so I might as well not overpay when it's cheaper to produce. In the meantime, I'm saving some money each month for winter and will still likely invest in a couple of space heaters since the price of natural gas is still pretty high.
Now we've seen what some families have had to deal with paying their year-end balances and that is/should be criminal. I've seen people receiving bills for thousands of Euros. Their only crime was living in an older home with 2 kids. Got forbid you want your family to be clean and warm! I understand there is some personal responsibility to be taken, but obviously something went very very wrong.
(also, there's the whole invasion of Ukraine going on, which has caused a massive disruption to the market)
It's basically impossible to see anything in the sky other than Jupiter here, because of the insane light pollution.
That said, modern LED-lighting doesn't really use that much electricity, all lights in my apartment use a total of 100Wh, or 75kWh per month. I could turn off all lights in my apartment for a year and it still wouldn't be close to the energy needed for a single transaction on the bitcoin blockchain. But clearly some speculative investment has more utility than me not stumping my toe when going to the bathroom at night.
Source? I only know that people in isolated villa use electrical heating. Most apartments get hot water from a nearby garbage incinerator owned by the city.
> But clearly some speculative investment has more utility than me not stumping my toe when going to the bathroom at night.
We were talking about office buildings being fully lit 24h a day. Where nobody sleeps. Nobody is saying people should go to bed at 2pm in the winter.
I'm not going to pretend that these office buildings don't exist, but usually they're not really empty. I've yet to be in an office without obnoxious motion sensors that don't work properly so you end up sitting in the darkness when working either early in the morning or late in the evening.
All that said, light pollution is a huge problem here. When I'm out hiking I don't really need a compass or anything to know the direction of Oslo, I can just look at the sky. I think the point I was trying to make is that lighting is a very small percentage of electricity usage, especially now with LED-lighting. In the winter I use the equivalent of 2000kWh/month for heating and hot water. Lighting would be 75kWh if I left all light on, all day, all night.
[0] https://www.ssb.no/energi-og-industri/statistikker/husenergi....
Nothing against Germany.