51–60 of 457 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Power issues in Europe will be big enough going into the winter that the few German nuclear power plants will likely the least of our issues.
"We are going to have a severe lack of energy, so shutting down nuclear power plants is likely the least of our issues"? I'm afraid I don't follow the logic here.
So even the signs indicating what time the next bus comes would not be allowed?
Here in Germany, there was recently a leak in the news. It said that a single LED sign consumes as much energy as 10 single households[0]. Of course, the companies don't want to give any official information. That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion... [0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...
I'm quite sure brand advertisers will not concur.
We're in a crisis and they want to waste energy we might need for heating households to manipulate people into buying shit they don't need?
That's not exactly a position that'll get them a lot of sympathy.
Quoted post unavailable.
The bigger problem is that Germany doesn't have any more recent nuclear power plants due to public pressure and instead just extended the lifetimes of the existing ones for decades to compensate. We could have built better and SAFER nuclear power plants but because that would have lost voters we instead had to extend the lifetimes again and again.
All polluting industries have their own tactics to deflect public attention. In Germany coal succeeded at deflecting that attention towards nuclear. The Ruhr region has a romanticized nostalgia for its history of coal mining whereas most people associate nuclear power with Chernobyl (or more recently Fukushima, which really just culturally echoed the existing memories of Chernobyl), the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the threat of global thermonuclear war while being smack in the middle of the Iron Curtain (almost literally, with the Berlin Wall separating both sides of the conflict).
I don't know to what extent the coal industry is actually involved in this, but there is an almost patriotic attitude towards coal plants in contrast with the horrified panic surrounding nuclear. Meanwhile solar is mostly seen as a way to cut down on electric bills by installing pannels on your own roof and wind power is a "blight on the countryside" and "health risk" (because of noise pollution, strobing shadows and of course killing migratory birds). Some of this seems to be finally changing but the "man on the street" will likely still prefer coal over all other forms of energy for no good reason.
How much electricity can plausibly be saved this way? And how does that compare to the energy required to reprogram and possibly renew all these signs?
So I guess that's worth it, even if some additional hardware is required.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At first I loved LED street lights because I could see so much better by them (and I presume that they have an increased deterrent effect on crime though I have not checked this). These days I think disrupting wildlife is more important than human safety and I wish we could get rid of nearly all street lighting.
I wonder if the ubiquitousness of people carrying flashlights in the form of smartphones could be leveraged into doing away with street lights as an expected practice. I don't think I would actually support that, but I think that kind of shift in culture is a possibility right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bigger problems in Germany are the lack of big power lines between the North and South and of course the reluctance to build more wind energy. Especially Bavaria has been shooting its own feet several times, even built a gas power station a few years back and now it's in a bit of a panic...
You cannot power a country with wind power alone. Even if you want to build wind turbines, you need nuclear, gas, or coal to back them up.
You could even power the world just from renewables
https://innovationorigins.com/en/researchers-agree-the-world...
Here in Germany, there was recently a leak in the news. It said that a single LED sign consumes as much energy as 10 single households[0]. Of course, the companies don't want to give any official information. That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion... [0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...
I'm quite sure brand advertisers will not concur.
The normalisation of poverty in Europe would much funnier so watch if I didn't live here.
Here in Germany, there was recently a leak in the news. It said that a single LED sign consumes as much energy as 10 single households[0]. Of course, the companies don't want to give any official information. That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion... [0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...
I'm quite sure brand advertisers will not concur.