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Comment by dependsontheq | Hacker News Reader

It really makes no sense to look at per capita figures this way. I am driving an electric car in Germany now and I built a new home with better insulation and I have LED lights. My per capita figures went way down, I am also taking my cargo bike in the city everywhere, so my per capita figures went down again.

There's a very relevant question about the viability of energy intensive industries in Germany, but even that is dependent on energy source. A lot of industries are switching to electric heating that will also lead to lower per capita energy use.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity?tab=char...

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I think i saw a energy usage breakdown of the Netherlands supplied by our CBS central statistics bureau. Citizens living energy usage was around 14% of total energy usage of our country. Industry is by far the biggest energy user that is why people are talking about the deindustrialisation of Germany. Once companies germans could be proud of are moving to the US or China or getting closed off.

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

Of the many electronics we build at my job, one of them is a shoe box sized 5kW power supply that we sell to the railroads. Testing 10 of these units in one afternoon, by one tech in a closet sized room, uses more energy than my house uses in a month (yes, it can get very hot in that room, hah)

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

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

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

That puts a great perspective, though please correct if I am wrong - if you are testing power supplies - you need to dump that power somewhere?

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

Or just don't draw it from the grid to begin with. Test enough really big power supplies, and the cost of a big set of batteries & inverters starts to look like a good investment vs paying the electric utility for it.

The same thing happens with recycling as well. I forgot the exact number, but if all US households recycled perfectly it would amount to something ridiculous like <1% of total recycle waste, because of the gargantuan industry waste.

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

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

Companies that survived both world wars did so because of central and international planning. If they’re failing now, the causative forces are the same.

It's not just you and your electric car - Germany has been the world leader in increasing energy efficiency for several decades - 35% reduction in housing and 12% in industry since 2000. I think the national target is a further 30% reduction by 2030.

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

Isn’t that because they lagged horribly behind everyone?

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

What could Germany have accomplished otherwise if they had not focused on increasing efficiency?

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

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

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

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

Did it focus on it? Most efficiency measures are cash positive after a few years. My LED bulbs paid for themselves 3 times over at least by now. That’s before you even get to the positive externalities.

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

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

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

> I am driving an electric car in Germany now and I built a new home

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

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

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

Even older homes, compared to the average US home is highly insulated.

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

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

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

>Even older homes, compared to the average US home is highly insulated.

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

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

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

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

There's apparently nothing worth comparing Germany to? They were reducing energy waste even when they had cheap gas, that makes them less part of the energy waste correlates to prosperity argument than the US and hence less about per capita energy use being a good thing.

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

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

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

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

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

Also, what's your point?

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

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

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

One of my friend who work at a call center (clearly not wealthy) changed her main transportation vehicle to an electric bike ~6 month ago (just before winter, she's crazy), andshe told me last weekend that this was a net positive in every aspect, on her mood, on her routine (she has to be mindful of the weather), on her money, and on her fitness. She also go out more, since she go through the city center/harbor when biking to her job, and it's easier to stop at our bar (weirdly the bike parking infrastructure is way behind the bike lane infrastructure in our city, which makes parking with bike almost as bad as parking with a car nowadays).

But a car is one area where “trickle down” actually works. If you want to get affordable second hand energy efficient EVs into the market.. someone has to buy new EVs. Now. Preferably as many as possible.

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

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

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

80% of new cars are bought by companies or in leasing agreements in Sweden, most people buy used cars. Doesn't matter that much for you point, but it does affect what people can buy.

> Most people in Germany can't afford to buy an apartment

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

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

Owning gives you the advantage of not flushing away a third of your income down the drain and instead owning something that's yours by the time you retire instead of paying your landlord's lease and then retiring in poverty as you won't be able to afford rent on your pension.

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

Living in a flat while also owning it might have been a viable option in the past but that ship has sailed quite a while ago. In major cities - which is where the good joobs are - you're looking at down-payments of 200-300k to arrive at your current rent and even then you'd pay the mortgage for 30 years.

You can make 8-9K a year investing 200K in diversified basket of government bonds. It would pay almost the entirety of my brother’s rent.

A flat that cost 500-600K in Berlin would be rented out at 1000€ a month, that can’t increase more than the rent control allows. A mortgage would cost 3 times as much.

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

Are you sure about these numbers? As ROI doesn't make any sense to me in context of the new investments built solely for rent. How does it work?

If landlords are forced to follow all regulations, the ROI on renting doesn’t work anywhere. In the UK it may still be profitable because you can evict tenants for the lulz, so they have to accept that properties are not maintained and that children may die of mould.

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

> If landlords are forced to follow all regulations, the ROI on renting doesn’t work anywhere.

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

I don’t know, maybe local authorities build them or probably new apartments are exempt from rent controls. But even in London, where my neighbour pays £3500K a month to rent a 65sqm flat, the landlord is earning much less than they would if they invested in the stock market. And they would be actually losing money if they carried out repairs, instead of having their tenant living like a rat.

average cost for an apartment in Berlin is apparently around 5.100/m2 and rent is around 11/m2, so back of the napkin math pretty much checks out

Yes, check Numbeo for Berlin, Frankfurt, etc. Then look at the tier 1 and 2 cities in China.

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

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

If I owned a flat free and clear with a low rental yield as in many German cities (like 2-3%), I would sell the place to someone and then rent it from that person, then invest the proceeds into stocks.

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

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

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

Anglo-Saxons are not obsessed with home ownership, they have to own their homes because renting in English speaking countries is hell. My neighbours change every other year, sometimes every 6 months, because the landlord increases their rent every year, evicts them when they ask for repairs (while expecting them to cook with a 10-15 year old oven that blows the power every time they set it to more than 180 degrees) and treats them like shit. I’m talking of people that pay in excess of 3K per month, normal people with normal salaries live like animals if they are renting.

It's super difficult to rent a flat in Western Germany. There are literally long queues for viewing a single flat in Berlin. It's slightly better in the rest of Germany, but still difficult.

It is extremely hard also in London, I know people that have been searching for months. Here tenants practically have no protections, it’s like renting on Airbnb, rents increase at random every year.

The rest of the country is a suburban wasteland

I think the main point was that it is bad that Germany produces less energy over the decades. And that manufacturing in Germany might disappear as a consequence, which would be bad for Germany.

> I think the main point was that it is bad that Germany produces less energy over the decades

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

The thing is, we got an european energy market...

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

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

You have the causation exactly backwards. Most of Germany's heavy industry disappeared or went offshore since the 1970s, and that's why we don't produce nearly as much energy.

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

The US deindustrialised more intensely than Germany (think of rust belt), yet it seems energy production almost doubled since then [0]. I think energy production is more a function of the economy than of industrialisation.

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

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

Congrats being an exemplary citizen but how does your electric car and cargo bike play role in Germany's manufacturing?

Presumably they were just giving an example. The huge spike in German energy costs absolutely did push manufacturers to find ways to be more energy efficient in a very similar way it pushed regular consumers to also be more conscious of their energy use.

Probably a bit, but there is only so much juice to be squeezed out of the efficiency stone and it's hard to squeeze. It takes time and money and wherever the math penciled out comfortably it already happened. If drops in energy consumption happen quickly, deeply, or on a budget then it's probably demand destruction, not efficiency gain.

Check the numbers. Germany's economic output didn't shrink nearly as much as its energy usage did. For highly energy-intensive, low-value-added sectors like producing fertilizer and other chemicals, yes I agree, but in a lot of other sectors there are huge efficiency gains to be made that were never pursued because it wasn't worth it.

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

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

> Germany's economic output didn't shrink nearly as much as its energy usage did.

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

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

This usually means closing shop and opening in a company where energy is cheaper and the government lets you pollute as much as you want.

That happens, but it's far from the whole picture. When energy is cheap you grow a lot of low hanging fruit savings not taken that suddenly become worthwhile when prices rise. Market economy is ruthless about optimisation, and when a change from a wasteful process to a less wasteful process is even the tiniest bit more expensive to perform than just paying for the extra energy, then market economy dictates that it's not done.

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

> "at one point in the future energy price will rise anyways"

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

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

Non-renewables are just that: not renewable. Discovering yet another deposit merely postpones the end, it does not change their finite nature. Will renewables eventually become cheaper than the last scraps of fossil fuel? Absolutely! Through both progress and supply quantities. But that's exactly what is happening here, "renewables before they were cool"

Categorizing sources into "renewable" and "non-renewable" doesn't change the math.

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

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

Hydrogen is a medium, not a source. In many ways it's closer to the copper in a wire than to the crude in a pipeline.

To the best of my knowledge, hydrogen fusion is the source of well over 99% of all energy generated both in our solar system and galaxy.

Per Capita is a lossy indicator, and you bring up a key point a lot of people on here seem to forget - you cannot analyze economic metrics in isolation.

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

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

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

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

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