Live data from Hacker News

German digital signage ban prompts confusion

avinteractive.com

201–210 of 457 posts

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#201
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the problem with nuclear power in Germany is bigger than that the existing nuclear plants are being shut down. It's actually a good idea to shut them down eventually as they're old and inefficient. Calling them "fully functioning" is a bit of a rose tinted glasses type of situation. The bigger problem is that Germany doesn't have any more recent nuclear power plants due to public pressure and instead just…

> there is an almost patriotic attitude towards coal plants As a German, i'm wondering where you got that idea from... Because pretty much every poll i know of, is in support of turning off coal plants.

I think both can be true and it might be more region specific. My girlfriend was born in the Ruhrgebiet and a lot of her family and friends family worked in the coal industry and were well taken care of when the plants were shut down. While they're not pro-coal or wouldn't poll that way I think there probably is more of a sentimental connection to it than to nuclear which that generation tends to associate with Chernobyl.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#202
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average power usage for a 1 person household in Germany is 1300 kwh/year (roughly, numbers vary, but not to a degree that it matters). That's about 150W sustained. So 1500W for a large sign, that's like 150 high power LED light bulbs, I guess that checks out. Anything that reduces ads in the public sphere is fine by me.

Not sure where this number comes from. Statistisches Bundesamt says it's 1,958 kwh. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro... Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.

That's pretty crazy. We used to spend 1400 KWh as a family of three. Didn't check the latest numbers as a family of four, but I don't expect a lot more. We even cook / bake a lot. What on earth are people spending electricity on?

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need nuclear. Even with decades of conservative sabotage, we generate ~41% of our electricity needs [1] on a renewable basis. Imagine we had used the last sixteen years to go all-in on renewables - we wouldn't need to kowtow in front of any dictatorship. No Qatari gas, no Russian or other dictatorship uranium, nothing. [1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/klima-energie/erneuerb...

The amount of electricity generated over the course of a year is irrelevant without storage. We could generate 1000% of our energy needs and still not have enough, if we generate 2000% in summer and 0% in winter. We need to generate 100% of our energy needs every single hour. Renewables are practically incapable of doing this on their own. They can reduce the use of fossil fuelds (or nuclear power), but not replace t…

> We need to generate 100% of our energy needs every single hour. Renewables are practically incapable of doing this on their own. They can reduce the use of fossil fuelds (or nuclear power), but not replace them.

Install enough windmills across the entire coastal areas of Europe, add thousands of kilometers long cross-continental UHVDC links like China does [1] and even winter won't be a problem.

Besides: using biomass / biogas fuel for conventional burner plants is climate neutral, and the supply is enough to cover half of the deliveries of Russia [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/biogas-stat...

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#204
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where this number comes from. Statistisches Bundesamt says it's 1,958 kwh. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro... Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.

Your source includes "Electricity for heating, hot water". Maybe this includes households using heat pumps for heating, so this could explain the difference?

Not just heat pumps, but also electric water heaters, which are standard issue for older apartment buildings (those without central hot water).

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#205
Interesting to see most of Western Europe go where we, Romania, were back in the 1980s under Ceausescu.

Just today I was thinking about how one of my fondest memories as a kid (because it involves me, my parents and our home from back then) is of my dad teaching 5 or 6-year old me how many stairs there were in our block of apartments between two consecutive flors, so that I could use them even after the sun was down, cause said staircase wasn't lit. And then how proud I felt when I was managing to go up and down on those stairs (we were living on the last floor, the 4th) at night, only by "feeling" and counting the stairs in my head (at some point the counting became an "instinct", I was not even actively doing the counting anymore). This was all happening in the second part of the '80s.

With all that said, I'm honestly not that sure that today's Western Europeans are mentally prepared to go through what we, Romanians, went through back then.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#206
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1300 kwh/year this is extremely, extremely low. No heating, no cooling, no hot water, no car charging. A fridge alone tends to be over 400KW/h. Edit: polycaster listed close to 5kWh/year for 3+ household. 1person being 2k. So, extremely low estimate.

Heating is a separate cost, rarely electric. Cooling - did you know that Germans aren’t big fans of A/C? Hot water - same as heating. Besides, in Germany we don’t say “Car charging”, we say “eat healthy and ride your bike”.

With number 25 on cars per capita in the world and one of the biggest car industries and also obesity rates above average than EU.

'eat healthy and ride your bike' my ass

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#207
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average power usage for a 1 person household in Germany is 1300 kwh/year (roughly, numbers vary, but not to a degree that it matters). That's about 150W sustained. So 1500W for a large sign, that's like 150 high power LED light bulbs, I guess that checks out. Anything that reduces ads in the public sphere is fine by me.

Not sure where this number comes from. Statistisches Bundesamt says it's 1,958 kwh. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro... Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.

It definitely can scale much better, we are using around 1800 kWh (2 parents, 1 small child) and I think it’s safe to say going below 1300 for one of us would be hard, especially when working from home. But we live in a flat and there are many 2 or three persons households in a whole house, probably with several computers and may be even tvs and certainly more lights. May be you do save a bit on cooking and the fridge, but cleaning things should roughly scale linearily.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the problems with France? If I were in government in France I'd be thrilled with nuclear power as an investment right about now

> Can you elaborate on the problems with France? 80% of their power is generated by nuclear. Of their nuclear plants, way over half the fleet has been offline for months because of inspections and sometimes substantial damages from age-related corrosion issues [1], and the other half is severely limited or cut off as well because the rivers that they depend on for cooling can't keep up [2]. And since the entire conti…

Long term, the merit order makes sense.

All those plants make the max price, so if you can think of a way to cheaply generate power when it is expensive you get paid the high gas price up until all gas is removed from the market.

Short term, if a war or embargo is driving up gas prices, it still makes sense to charge high prices, because that gives people an incentive to not use electricity and so saves on the restricted resource.

But, this will really hit the poor or businesses that use a lot of gas through no fault of their own.

Since we are all in this together, the people earning the extra money should get it redistributed to the people. But some rich and powerful people think that sets a bad precedent, so they'll try to make poor people suffer as much as they can before doing it.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#209
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1300 kwh/year this is extremely, extremely low. No heating, no cooling, no hot water, no car charging. A fridge alone tends to be over 400KW/h. Edit: polycaster listed close to 5kWh/year for 3+ household. 1person being 2k. So, extremely low estimate.

As household made of 4 persons, with me permanently in Home-Office, have a consumption of roughly ~2300kWh/year, including heating, in Germany. Waschmaschine and Dryer are almost on a daily basis used (the dryer is used less during hot season) If you tend to buy energetic-efficient devices, your power bill is lower, in front of higher costs for the equipment.

I have major problems believing those numbers. Hot water alone eats up that much per year.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where this number comes from. Statistisches Bundesamt says it's 1,958 kwh. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro... Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.

That's pretty crazy. We used to spend 1400 KWh as a family of three. Didn't check the latest numbers as a family of four, but I don't expect a lot more. We even cook / bake a lot. What on earth are people spending electricity on?

How do you heat your appartmen/house? There might be quite some differences between oil, gas or heat-pump. I'm not sure whether these numbers include/exclude that part.
Post reply on HN