I still don't see this as being a valid reason for disavantaging the planet. Like they did in the EU when the Belgiam politicial managed to get a tax imposed to make solar panels more expensive from Chain. One would expect Germanies business to be thriving now.
But to make solar panels artificially more expensive for any reason at all is extreme folly for the planet if anyone cares about that.
It's rather silly if you ask me how protectionist most capitalist market pro countries are. Any solar panel worth buying at the moment comes from China. Yet we have insane tariffs on imported them into Canada or USA. But if you go down to Joe's Solar and ask for a quote, you're getting a quote on imported Chinese solar panels.
So all they are doing is artificially raising the price of every single solar installation while offering a rebate, the local manufacturer if they even exist does not make panels that produce enough energy to compete and still cost more then importing at 150% tariff.
Protectionism isn't generally regarded as pro-market. Command and control economies where states subsidize auto industries, put up grants for chip fabs or nationalize entire sectors are vaguely oriented towards market pricing at best.
And the "better for the planet if sourced locally" would be easier to handle if there was a carbon tax to account for it in the first place, and letting the market handle it.
I am in Lithuania (EU) and when I had solar panels installed on my house, I got them installed and manufactured by a local company - whose factory is less than 10 miles from my house. I got quotes from a few companies, and this was was more expensive, but it was only around €1000 (10%) more than the cheapest company which offered Chinese panels. I figured if I need to make a warranty claim in 20 years time, this company is likely to still be around, plus I'm supporting the local economy.
Its not just assembly of panels, the solar cells are also made in Lithuania (this company started out creating optical parts). Last year they branched out and launched their own line of residential batteries (not sure if the cells are made in-house) and they announced plans to build a new PV factory in Italy.
Admitidely our labour is a bit cheaper than Germany, but it's not much, and the cost of doing business here in general is higher. If it can be done here, I don't see why it can't be done in Germany.
Glad to hear it. On a home installation the solar module cost is a smaller percentage of the total bill right? So wasn’t the premium paid for the modules more percentage wise than 10% of the total bill? Separately people pay ~3-5x more for modules in the retail market than at utility scale so paying say 55c/w vs say 50c/w retail isn’t a huge deal, but for utility scale projects where Chinese modules are 20-30c/w paying 50c/w is totally untenable.
What if higher energy prices in Germany lead to increased outsourcing to countries with fewer environmental regulations, causing a net negative environmental impact?
Because the 'just buy everything from china' strategy is risky and shortsighted. If you have zero local manufacturing capability you are under china's power.
Germany's energy production is below 1970s levels and their per capita figures are in a grim state [0]. As with much of Europe, it makes for worrying reading. It would be extremely impressive if they can remain a manufacturing leader through this. If there is less energy, someone will have to use less energy. As far as I can tell that means either compromising living standards or giving up some heavy manufacturing. I'm assuming that this is an expression of that dynamic unless it is proven otherwise.
German politicians should have taken their energy security more seriously back in the 2010s. My main hope is maybe the rest of us can learn from these energy starved European powers and do things differently.
Do you happen to know what "Total Manufacturing" means in practice? I can't figure out what that series is measuring. It seems to be OECD data of some sort, but it doesn't have enough context to interpret.
One of the problems with US manufacturing is that it can be equal by, say, amount of money spent but get much worse productivity than Asia. And I'd believe it is a sophisticated method that accounts for that somehow, but I want to check it.
Without speaking to whether or not it's valid conjecture, it's become necessary to treat any Germany is dying material with a little extra skepticism due to it being used as a polemic talking point about what happens when you go all in on renewables, etc.
It’s also probable per capita energy usage will decline no matter what we do because affordable fossil fuel stocks are due to collapse before the population does. Increasing per capita energy usage as a policy goal seems profoundly unwise to me, even without accounting for global warming, and if we do it becomes even less wise.
I don't know how much, in Germany's case, but some fraction of energy usage is wasted.
We saw European customers start paying attention to wasted consumption almost overnight when electricity prices hit the news and some of those changes have persisted for now.
That's without considering efficiency improvements. Both would drive down per capita without implying reduced output
Throughout human history, increases in per capita energy consumption have been directly coupled with increases in living standards. Perhaps we will see some decoupling between those metrics, but I doubt it.
And while there are good environmental reasons to reduce fossil fuel use we are in no danger of running out of affordable stocks. Alarmists have been predicting "peak oil" for decades but the extraction industry keeps improving their technology.
I think if the future of affordable oil relies on us continuously inventing ourselves out of the problem, that implies a great deal of danger.
Just because the shale revolution embarrassed the peak oil crowd doesn’t guarantee shale revolutions happening over and over. If you ignore shale and look at conventional oil reserves several of the peak oil alarmists were essentially correct in their timing. Now shale production is seemingly plateauing.
Maybe we’ll end up with a bitumen or natural gas revolution next but I’m sceptical. I think we’re kind of fucked honestly and only attacking this on the demand side will save us, I don’t see green energy as saving us or nuclear either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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:
Primary energy consumption isn't a good indicator for this, as it also includes lost energy.
If you replace a 50% efficiency coal power plant with wind or solar you'd reduce the primary energy by half but could still get the same amount of used electricity.
> German politicians should have taken their energy security more seriously back in the 2010s.
Energy security AND national security. It was insane to build an economy on natural gas from a country with a long history of imperialism and autocracy, but Germans did it anyways. To be fair, the US did much the same with China with regards to manufacturing.
The US was begging its NATO allies across the Atlantic to have a more skeptical view of Russia for most of the 90s and 00s, not just 10s, and concerns were brushed off as the ramblings of unsophisticated cowboys. I remember talking to Germans in January 2022 who still thought that the Russians wouldn't invade Ukraine.
To be even more fair, US is still buying uranium from Russia...
Anyway, that's how it is. The german economy profited quite well from the cheap gas. It was actually a strong decision to drop it, as the economy has a lot of heavy industry that apparently requires gas/oil. We will see how it goes in the next 5-10 years.
The USA is not in a position to criticize… All of the computers are made abroad. I doubt banning Huawei will solve anything, if a foreign power has decided to inject malicious instructions into the hardware.
China spent the first 15 years it had with significant computing resources in-country using them to hack the rest of the world. Once you do that, there is no restoring trust, no matter how hard you try.
There's at least some incentive for China to not place snooping gear in products made in their country by other nations' companies.
Let's say the factories that make MacBooks get infiltrated by Chinese intelligence and they somehow managed to put some sort of technology in the product that allowed for them to compromise it. Sooner or later US intelligence is going to find out, at which point someone in the US government is going to have a very stern talk with Tim Cook about terminating any and all business with their Chinese suppliers now.
This causes ripple effects as other countries drop Chinese suppliers, causing economic problems for the country. The CCP, for all of its faults, knows that it can't continue to piss on the basic rights of Chinese citizens if the economy goes south there. It's a careful balancing act of bread, circuses, and brutally repressive totalitarian single-party politics.
If you start buying Huawei infrastructure en masse, you lose that leverage over the Chinese to keep their snooping gear out of the stuff you buy from them.
Again, when the mainland Chinese developed any real computer-based telecommunications in their country between 2000 and 2010, the first thing they decided to do with it was start tearing into other countries' networks and infrastructure. They did this before even creating recognizable Chinese brand names for consumer devices. They used their chance at a first impression to brand themselves as state-backed black hats, and they're going to suffer from that until there's major reforms in the Chinese government.
> Energy security AND national security. It was insane to build an economy on natural gas from a country with a long history of imperialism and autocracy, but Germans did it anyways
This is hilarious because absolutely the same argument could be applied to most of Europe getting closely integrated economically with Germany through organisations such as the European Coal and Steel Community, European Economic Area, European Union. Germany is a nation with a long history of imperialism and autocracy, why did they do it? Was France stupid to risk depending on a country that invaded them thrice in the last century?
The general hope was that economic integration will lead to closer relations and liberalisation in Russia (like it did in most of Eastern Europe). It sadly didn't happen, but it wasn't that out of the question.
> The US was begging its NATO allies across the Atlantic to have a more skeptical view of Russia for most of the 90s and 00s, not just 10s, and concerns were brushed off as the ramblings of unsophisticated cowboys
Yes, because the US was doing this even when Russia was on its best behaviour, so it really really looked like nobody in the US had remembered to update the "who to be scared of" instructions. Now they have and they won't fucking shut up about China, which is annoying, same as it was back when it was about Russia.
Because it's generic CHINA BAD FUD without much substance. GCHQ, the UK's equivalent to the NSA, did a review of Huawei networking hardware and found it is's as insecure as equivalents from Cisco and Juniper. Yet there was a whole media FUD campaign to claim Huawei have backdoors, and the USA pushed every ally to ban Huawei equipment over those security "fears" that were completely and totally unfounded.
Instead of focusing on the actual stuff like the concentration camps or abusive work practices or neoimperialism.
> This is hilarious because absolutely the same argument could be applied to most of Europe getting closely integrated economically with Germany through organisations such as the European Coal and Steel Community, European Economic Area, European Union. Germany is a nation with a long history of imperialism and autocracy, why did they do it? Was France stupid to risk depending on a country that invaded them thrice in the last century?
There's a major, major difference between postwar (West) Germany and post-USSR Russia: France, the UK, and US all had troops stationed in Germany with enough manpower to crush any aggression on the part of the Germans. Obviously there were never troops of another country stationed in Russia to keep them down and reform the country's government, so the autocracy, oligarchy and imperialism continued.
> The general hope was that economic integration will lead to closer relations and liberalisation in Russia (like it did in most of Eastern Europe). It sadly didn't happen, but it wasn't that out of the question.
That's the line we're typically fed but that was only going to happen in minor/middle power countries. I think they knew this at the time but didn't have any real way to do anything else with regards to Russia and China, and of course, the market demanded an unending flow of cheap natural gas and electronics, and who is the post-WWII world order to deny the shareholders?
> Yes, because the US was doing this even when Russia was on its best behaviour, so it really really looked like nobody in the US had remembered to update the "who to be scared of" instructions. Now they have and they won't fucking shut up about China, which is annoying, same as it was back when it was about Russia.
Russia was never on its best behavior. It was flattening Grozny with artillery fire in the 90s. Oligarchs had subverted the transfer to the market economic system through voucher dilution/theft. Government openly collaborated with the Bratva. Corruption was rampant. Former KGB agents responsible for being the iron fist of single-party totalitarianism through imprisonment and murder were free to place themselves in the halls of power and undermine budding democratic traditions through false flag attacks and violations of human rights in the open.
And now, we see this with China. People look at a country that spent the first decade-and-a-half of its digital transformation hacking international targets and wonder why no one wants Huawei telecoms infrastructure or TikTok installed on half of the phones in the country.
The energy use per capita can also indicate that people use less energy because of more careful consumption, modern appliances etc. I wouldn't see it as "wow, there is no electricity in Germany!!!".
There are some policies applied here since years such as the mandatory use of LED lights ( do they still sell non-led? Can't remember to be honest), etc. In the last 2 years alone it was crazy the amount of renovations in terms of eco-friendly measurements in terms of electricity/gas (things like deutsche bahn changing the bulbs to use LEDs, not a small company I mean). Etc.
On the contrary, I see it as a positive thing: you can have a good modern lifestyle with less energy consumption.
It's not just energy, but availability of cheap natural gas as a feedstock for the chemicals industry. That had been a key input for a large fraction of German heavy industry. Those sectors are now shrinking in Germany and expanding in other countries which have more gas.
A country’s energy production is driven mostly by demand. Your argument is “Germans use less energy, therefore it’s going badly”. I think this is a very outdated worldview, equating energy consumption with growth.
There’s been lots of technology development across the board that lets people have the same comfort, or businesses the same production, with lower energy consumption. I don't think you can just assume that those are a rounding error.
Has anyone figured out how to reduce the energy demand for refining aluminum or manufacturing ammonium nitrate? Efficiency gains in things like lighting, heating, and ground transport are nice but those only go so far. Heavy industry will always require enormous energy inputs.
Those are things that will be done where energy is cheaper. For example, making ammonia in Europe makes little sense when natural gas is so much more expensive there than in the US or the Mideast.
In addition to things mentioned by other users, electricity production is also misleading there because Germany's grid isn't a closed system. It's strongly coupled to the wider european power grid. Germany's international grid connections are so wide that it's not even that abnormal for Germany to import or export more than a third of their total load from neighbouring countries.
A better metric would be to look at the total load on the German electrical grid, and if you look at that, you'll see that load has decreased a little over the past couple of years, reflecting the real economic downturn, but the dip is quite small compared to how much electricity generation has decreased.
Germany is simply exporting less electricity, and also importing more of it.
> Germany's energy production is below 1970s levels and their per capita figures are in a grim state [0].
Usage and harvesting has become significant more efficient in the last decades. And the changing climate demands for less consumption in certain areas. Outsourcing of lower levels of production has likely removed a significant amount of consumption too.
- and it's by now economic-wise at position #3 of the world ranking, now even before Japan (which has twice the amount of inhabitants). If you look up Germany on a real globe, you'll notice how tiny it actually is
- the unemployment rate is quite low (especially given that people like you call the econimic sitation a "grim state") https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1224/umfrage/... --- it's actually lower than in the years then people Germany "the locomotive of europe"
So really, the worrying thing here is that people tend to think binary. Either Germany is super-strong, even too strong for it's neighbors. Or it is too weak, so that people actually worry. In my book, both views are extreme and don't replicate reality.
> It would be extremely impressive if they can remain a manufacturing leader through this
For the solar industry, I identify two reasons of the decline:
- first, the "high" of the german solar industry was based on subsidies. That meant that the companies build plants ... but they didn't really optimize the costs. Once this large scale subsidies were reduced, the industry wasn't competitive
- second, the EU is blind on subsidies done in China. Over there, they have a weird conglomerate of socialism and capitalism. Basically the companies, even when privately owned, are still under control of the chines communist party. And the party decides that "this industry is vital, we push it so squelch abroad competition". They do this e.g. by heavy state investments. The EU turns a blind eye here, they don't ask for tariffs that equalize the market situation for the various competitors. Similarly, market access is asynchronous. If an abroad company wants to make a plant there, they have to accept a Chinese partner --- which will do industry espionage. Whereas Chinese companies buying or making plants in Europe (or USA etc) aren't required to have a local partner.
> German politicians should have taken their energy security more seriously back in the 2010s
Well, any country.
Did you know that Poland imported most of their fossil fuels from Russia also?
Or, that today, Bulgaria still imports all (that is, 100% !!!) oil from Russia?
People like to blame Germany, and they point to North Stream. Few people looked at a map of oil and gas pipelines of Europe ... noticing that MOST of them are in eastern- and southern europe. All of europe depended on cheap russian fossil energy, not just Germany.
Map of oil & gas pipelines, centered on central and western europe:
Only gas pipelines, but showing eastern europe much better. Note that the amount of pipelines in Germany seems to be higher ... but also notice that a good part of them run from the northsea towards the industrial areas. The pipeline system was never designed to be run solely by Russian fossil fuel, unlike the ones in eastern europe countries.
Poland was legally obligated to purchase Russian gas based on an agreement signed in the early 90s.
The writing was on the wall for years. The difference is that Poland started constructing an alternative pipeline to Norway. Poland also appealed to an arbitration panel to have the Russian gas contract right to renewal clause removed (which it was successful in doing).
Germany meanwhile doubled down on Russian gas and built Nordstream 1 & 2.
To add to what others already commented. The EU has been setting energy efficiency targets for itself for several decades now.
In the most recent update to that target "EU countries will be required to achieve an average annual energy savings rate of 1.49% from 2024 to 2030" [0].
So it's not that surprising, that Germany's energy production is sinking, it is required to do so.
The 1970s had several energy crises and Western countries went from wasteful energy consumption to energy conservation in an effort to strengthen their energy security.
This reasoning is a too simple. It does not take the increase of energy effiency into account. On the contrary, these figures are proof of enormous success in this respect.
As of 2022, the German production industry (excl. construction) had a share of 23.5% of GDP[1]. For the US it was only 11% in 2023.[2] I would not argue that one is better than the other. It first of all demonstrates a remarkable difference between the two economies.
Another one is the legacy of the German reunification. If one wants to assess the performace of the German economy in the last 35 years, one should take into account that a lot of investments had been made by the German state to bring up the infrastructure of the Eastern part (about 25% of the population) to a Western European standard. Eastern Germany is in a much better shape now than any other Eastern European region. And this investment is just starting to generate returns.
> Germany's energy production is below 1970s levels and their per capita figures are in a grim state
Two thirds of energy from fossil fuels is wasted[1,2]. Renewables don't have wasted heat. Germany has been going green for a while, energy production does not give us a full picture.
From: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
"This is shown in the chart below. It plots global final energy demand today2 compared to a ‘post-transition’ energy system where suitable sectors are electrified, and the rest is fuelled by hydrogen.
Electricity demand does increase – from 110 to 189 EJ, but total energy demand drops from 416 to 247 exajoules (EJ)."
Exactly, Germany's economy has grown quite a bit since the 1970s. It's energy usage is indeed trending down. Which means they are doing more with less energy. Back in the nineteen seventies they had inefficient cars, trucks, electricity generation (mostly coal based), and industry. Now they have a bigger economy and are not using a lot more energy. That's progress.
Michael Liebreich [1] refers to this as the primary energy fallacy in his recent articles on why reaching net zero is both hard and easy. He traces back the origins of this fallacy to the nineteen seventies when people started tracking the notion of primary energy during the oil crisis. The issue is that this is based on the gross energy usage, not the net useful output of that energy. Which with fossil fuels is pretty terrible (<30%) and with clean energy typically a lot better (>90%).
The other problem is that to this day, people base their policies on reports that still center on primary energy by agencies such as the IEA. It's a fallacy because any policy or plan based on the notion primary energy is off by about 3x in terms of actually needed energy. So, any plan that assumes replacing dirty energy gw fo gw with clean energy is technically bullshit.
A good example is petrol which has about 9kwh of energy per liter. A typical car might have about 50 liters of petrol. So, that's about 450 kwh. Or nearly half a mwh. Comparable EVs tend to have more modestly sized batteries of maybe 60-70kwh. Does the petrol car go 7 times further? Not even close. Most of that is transformed into heat and noise rather than movement. Primary energy of nearly half mwh. Useful energy under 100kwh. That's a 5x difference. That's why EVs can be cleaner even if you do charge them using coal powered electricity plants. You simply get more km per kwh.
I thought that was the strongest point bought up so far, and the orders of magnitude do seem to check out. Although I'd note that Germany's electricity production has also drifted back to the 20th century and prices seem to be ~3x the USs and 5x China's so energy-related pressure still looks like a potential root cause to me.
> If there is less energy, someone will have to use less energy. As far as I can tell that means either compromising living standards or giving up some heavy manufacturing.
That's total nonsense, I guess you never heard the word "energy efficiency".
It is very bad doing analysis of Germany between 1950 - 1990 as there was no unified economic but just two states. The Eastern German communist economy was just very inefficient, very energy hungry (and thus it failed 1989). So this trend isnt not bad.
They really did by letting the French continue the nuclear and by making gaz deal with Russia... But Russian-Ukrainian conflict reminded them that they are still an occupied country with no sovereignty.
This is a classic story where Germans are amazing at doing the R&D on something but are squeezed so hard while scaling, that technologically less sophisticated competitors take over and dominate the market.
Imagine what German engineering could push into the market if it weren't for this self-flagellation. Maybe it is time again for German engineers and scientists to emigrate to greener pastures.
As a German observing the political debate in Germany, it appears to me that either the relevant politicians are literally unaware of the equity option, or they are ideologically opposed to it for some reason. The same applies to political journalists, so we don't get a clear answer that way either.
To go into opinion, I'm heavily leaning towards the "ideology" explanation. The current libertarian finance minister is rather publicly operating on a platform of "the government handling money = bad".
> To go into opinion, I'm heavily leaning towards the "ideology" explanation
Yes, it's that. The usual slogan for that can be roughly translated "The government is not the better entrepreneur" ("Die Politik ist nicht der bessere Unternehmer"). It's usually trotted out by conservatives and libertarians in Germany if someone dares to suggest that the government could own some company or even only parts of it.
When EU was faced with insurmountable competition in the global food market they set up common agricultural policy and straight up fueled their agriculture with tax money since then making EU number one global exporter of food and beverages.
I wonder what obstacles there are for doing the exactly same in another key sector that is manufacturing means of energy production.
And chip manufacturing in the future probably.
If the obstacle to competitiveness is the high cost of labor due to European people being so rich it's only fair to alleviate the problem by using the tax money. It already worked for agriculture.
This makes total sense, up to a limit when it's about strategic resources. Food is certainly a strategic resource. But if you subsidize it so much that you export massively, that doesn't make sense.
Energy technology and chips certainly are also strategic resources.
The main obstacle is that the EU became deeply neoliberal in its thinking, judging state subsidies as worse than slave labour.
For example, when the US rolled out the cornucopia of state protectionism that is the IRA the EU has mainly responded by saying "actually, that's not very free marked of you USA".
The EU has its own subsidy programmes as well but it is a lot more complex. You need 27 governments to agree to make something happen, from 400.000 people Malta to 80.000.000 million people Germany. The small countries are terrified to be squashed by German and French power to give subsidies to their own national company, ruining the single market.
In fact you have the same issue in the US but the states have no direct say, and statistics are not done the same way - so you don't see the impact the same way and don't have discussions the same way.
To me, solar panels are very simplified stuffs compared to say cars, machinery etc. At its core, solar panels are Billions-and-Billions of repetitive patterns of very few basic ingredients. So, whoever is good at scaling the manufacturing will win. Even if the scaled-out panel has efficiency few % lower than state of art.
I'm not convinced that the US approach with heavy protectionism is a good idea in the specific case of solar panels. It's a pretty standardized product and if another country is willing to subsidize the European consumer with cheap panels - where's the harm? It's not an incredibly sophisticated product like chips manufacturing - where if we suddenly needed to manufacture entirely on our own we would be completely unable to for more than a decade. As some of the interviewed people in the article allude: We're probably better off investing the money saved on those solar panels into other parts of the economy.
If you're trading with an ally over secure routes then sure, that makes a lot of sense. But Pax Americana is breaking down and that threatens the stability of the whole global trading system. And China is growing increasingly expansionist as they attempt to secure their own sea lines of communication. A war over Taiwan isn't impossible within the next decade, and if that happens then all bulk trade between Germany and China could be cut off for years.
> Before China came to dominate the solar panel industry, Germany led the way. It was the world’s largest producer of solar panels, with several start-ups clustered in the former East Germany, until about a decade ago when China ramped up production and undercut just about everyone on price
It was also around a decade ago that the conservative government in Germany basically killed the solar industry.
I have seen comments that it was a German industry to export solar panel factories. Those technologies of course move forward and I assume nowadays China does its own development.
Is China really selling solar panels at below the cost of production? There seem to be a number of Germans making this claim, but the article never really tries to analyze whether this is true or not.
It seems like a big difference whether China can forever sell solar panels at current prices or cheaper, or whether they will eventually jack up the prices because this is unsustainable.
Below German cost of manufacturing for sure. I remember laughing at der8auer explaining how he must sell a bend piece of CNCed aluminum at ~20 euro because thats how much it costs to make in DE, while same piece of metal can be ordered from JLC for couple dollars including shipping manufactured in single quantities.
The impression I get is that China's solar panel industry is also continually getting outdated and replaced by new entrants in a near constant bloodbath of competition.
The only difference is the new entrants are also in China.
But to make solar panels artificially more expensive for any reason at all is extreme folly for the planet if anyone cares about that.
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