It somehow seems to be your topic already.
And many others are now worried because they don’t understand the connections and get the feeling that something is being taken away from them.
Not just my topic, it concerns all of us, doesn’t it?
I’m happy to have the connections explained to me; after all, learning is a lifelong process that I certainly don’t want to shut myself off from.
How do you come to the conclusion that I feel like something is being taken away from me? I just simply don’t like being patronized. But who does?
I once tried to find statistics on satisfaction with the government's work.
Not so easy at all, but most show a positive trend. How do you come to the assumption that we are currently at a low point?
I took some time responding to your post to look at a few studies. As you have probably recognized yourself, the results of any given study depend largely on who commissioned it, when it was commissioned (association with current political activities), and how exactly the question was formulated in the study. So, in summary one can say: the studies are moderately to poorly informative on this topic. There are studies that lean “pro” and studies that show a strong “contra”.
What does stand out, and what my statement mainly relies on, is the drive to regulate by our current government, but that was announced. I’m more the type who relies on a reward system rather than a “punishment system,” and that probably also shapes my attitude towards how the current government deals with the population, which I also belong to. I’m generally the “I’d rather do something voluntarily” than “be led into it” type.
I explained that exactly before.
The grids and power plants don’t have to be designed for the peaks if we manage to reduce the peaks.
By the way, that was already the case "before the energy transition." That’s why there were/are night tariffs and such.
On Energy-Charts you can see how consumption strongly fluctuates due to working hours, cooking, etc.
It moves between 40 and 80 MW throughout the day.
If you now simply reduce car charging and heating a bit while cooking, or in the future also when a cloud covers the photovoltaics, that saves a lot of grid and generator peak capacity.
If only the word “if” weren’t there. During my school years, I did meter readings for the municipal utilities for 5 years every September. Of the roughly 500 households I visited each year, about 10 had a high-tariff and additionally a night-tariff meter. Which shows that people simply don’t like getting up at night to cook, iron, or do anything else. So “lack of willingness” isn’t addressed by further incentive systems to ensure grid stability, but rather by more regulation.
I just dare to doubt that once the last coal power plant, the last gas power plant, and other fossil energy suppliers are off the grid, it will be enough to keep the grid stable by temporarily disconnecting the car and the heat pump—assuming we continue to expand renewables at the pace we’re used to or not at all.
That is of course fundamentally correct; however, the arguments above remain fully valid.
The better and more clever the control, the less the expansion costs us all.
If you understand how important it is to emit no more CO2, it should be clear that it’s the smallest problem if the heat pump doesn’t run for two hours and the room temperature fluctuates by maybe 0.1 degrees.
Then let’s just turn it off 24/7 :) Joking aside...
As the builder of a passive house, we agree that the best energy is the energy you don’t need in the first place. But what use is it to stubbornly focus only on our CO2 emissions if nearly the rest of the world doesn’t care and produces even more every year? I don’t understand this bitter, isolated German debate about it.
In summary, we agree on most points; only the way it’s implemented is something to argue about.