7 ms·

Not Even a Recession: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect [pdf]

49 points by cribbles 3y ago

propagandamach 3y ago
[flagged]
H8crilA 3y ago
The winter was exceptionally warm, and no one could really predict that. But putting that aside, this whole episode was making me uneasy. To this day so many people in Europe cannot engage in strategic thinking. I think they simply do not believe that bombs can ever land on their own roofs. The understanding of foreign governments and their real intentions is often at a comical level, even when applied to actors that pretty much lay out their own plans in public then execute on them, decade after decade. Effective international policy requires tools, but before that it requires an even basic understanding of the situation and courage/resolve. That means sacrificing something small (like a gas shortage) for something valuable (no major war in Europe).
- mperham 3y ago
  From the article: Moreover, the country did not simply get lucky with particularly mild winter temperatures, as often alleged. The average winter temperature in the 2022/23 winter of 2.9°C was actually slightly colder than the average temperature over the four previous winters.
  - sounds 3y ago
    It's possible to have a lower mean temperature and still use less total heat. Stats, right? E.g. if the temperature is warmer at night.
    - hrefgtd 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - nawgz 3y ago
      Unless there's some non-linear interactions that I'm unaware of, it seems like the mean temp is the only thing you'd need to know wrt how much energy you need to use to keep it roughly at some other temp thru the season
      - Retric 3y ago
        Heat loss is linear. Resistance heating is linear. Furnaces using slightly colder outside air are just a tiny bit less efficient, but it’s really close to linear. Heat pumps are non linear and do use electricity from natural gas.
        nawgz 3y ago
        So if I understand you, the only non-linear effect in play is that Heat Pumps are MORE efficient when the temperature differential is higher, is that correct?
        Retric 3y ago
        Heat pumps are LESS efficient when the temperature differential is higher. https://learnmetrics.com/heat-pump-efficiency-vs-temperature-graph/ https://learnmetrics.com/heat-pump-efficiency-vs-temperature...
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        IDK, extremes matter. -5 to +7 has the same average as -20 to +22, but the effects on energy use are widely different (e.g. the former may command a little heating for some time; the latter will command both extreme heating and possibly also cooling). It's the same as with climate talk in general. "Ooh, the average yearly temperature only rose this much, or even fell down relative to 5/10/20 years ago." - sure, but if the range of temperatures keeps growing, you can end up with both a nice average falling year over year, and uninhabitable land due to all useful vegetation freezing up or drying up.
        nawgz 3y ago
  - grt_thr 3y ago
    https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/09/climate-change-europe-emerges-from-second-warmest-winter-on-record https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/09/climate-change-eur... Not sure how the second warmest winters ever recorded can be cooler than the average of the next 4 warmest winters.
    - eric-hu 3y ago
      The paper is specific to Germany, and your linked article reported statistics about Europe. Apples to oranges.
      - grt_thr 3y ago
        There isn't a German expedition energy market, there is a European one.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  > To this day so many people in Europe cannot engage in strategic thinking. Much more troubling: Few people worldwide have the attention span and stamina to read a text of the length of an academic paper and engage its contents. That this thread is for the moment mostly hurried comments desperate to control the message shows as much. And it's tightly related to inability to do strategic thinking.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >Much more troubling: Few people worldwide have the attention span and stamina to read a text of the length off an academic paper and engage its contents. You don't need to read academic papers to know that Russia = evil. Eastern Europe has been parroting this for decades but Germany stuck its fingers in its ears and went "la-la-la-la, I can't hear you over the sound of my cheap gas brokered by our lord and savior, Gerhard Schröder, who's on the Kremlin's payroll". Even after Russia's invasion of Chechnya in 1994 and 1999, and Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, and Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, nobody could have seen Russia invading another neighboring country again in 2022, it was a total shock for European politicians. /s
    - it_citizen 3y ago
      This is very simplified. A lot of western countries, Germany first, believed that if we traded and opened up to those countries, they would naturally tend to adopt western values. It turned out to be incorrect. China being an even better example. But it was not a crazy assumption at the time, and coming after the fact is hindsight 20/20. Honestly, even knowing how things turned out, I am proud that the west tried.
      - Haga 3y ago
        [dead]
      - permo-w 3y ago
        did we really think that or was it just a rationalisation of the desire for profit?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nr2x 3y ago
  Eh, Germans and points west are delusional, Hungary is corrupt, but Poland and the Baltics know the score. The fact that Poland had to shame Germany into defending their *own interests* should be a national embarrassment.
- gerdesj 3y ago
  I lived in West Germany off and on in the '70s-'90s. I am a Brit. If you recall, that period is referred to as the Cold War - Mum and Dad were both soldiers and we got posted abroad a lot. Nowadays I have a Pole as an employee, who lives in Poland. That would have been unthinkable back in the day. I pay Thomasz the same rate as my local employees. He deals with IT snags in Britain the same way I do - over the blower and with remote access tools, such as Mesh Central.
- redeeman 3y ago
  > That means sacrificing something small (like a gas shortage) okay.. tell that to the ones that simply cannot afford it > for something valuable (no major war in Europe). /me looks at Ukraine: there seems to be a war... /me looks at globe.. in... Europe. is the war lasting longer because the EU and US sends arms to Ukraine?
  - _kbh_ 3y ago
    > is the war lasting longer because the EU and US sends arms to Ukraine? The war is lasting longer because the Russians have decided that the number of dead Russians and recaptured positions that need to happen for the war to end is higher than what Ukraine has currently achieved. This war could be over tomorrow if Russia decided to leave, if anything western weapons and aid are making the war end faster by speeding up Russias defeat.
    - redeeman 3y ago
      im not saying anything about that, but answer my question, is the war lasting longer due to US/EU actions, or is it shorter? it seems ukraine cannot defeat russia even with all the aid we give them, might the war simply be prolonged by giving a false sense of hope? how many more are we making die?
      - H8crilA 3y ago
        You'd be right if not for what Russia plans to do next in the event of a victory in Ukraine. Ukraine is not the target, it's a target in the sequence of targets. A few months before the war broke out Putin issued a very clear ultimatum to the West: withdrawal of NATO forces and installations from every country east of Germany. He issued none to Ukraine because he wanted the entire country. The war will continue for as long as Russia is able to wage it, therefore we must destroy Russia as a political system that exists today. Or declaw it to the point of irrelevance. That is the way out of this war, unless you're willing to go back to USSR borders. And even then it's not clear they would stop. Russia is surprisingly open about its goals. Just read what serious people in the Kremlin say over the years (and definitely tune out the garbage that they spew on Rossiya 1 for the older generation homo-sovieticus, no one in the Kremlin cares about that shit). Thanks to the large influx of Russian-speaking immigration we have quite a lot of capable experts that understand it well. War, unlike marriage, only requires consent on one side. I.e. the "collective west" is in a war just because Russia wants that, and there's nothing "West" can do to exit the war. They can only win it.
cyberlurker 3y ago
I have not read the entire article, but one factor that helped was the moderate winter.
- marcod 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36051936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36051936
nhavlt 3y ago
[flagged]
nmklt 3y ago
[flagged]
Barrin92 3y ago
The entire debate here in Germany is also just heavily driven by industry interest to a comical extent. Not only has the gas price already fallen to pre-war levels after decades of everyone arguing that these kinds of changes aren't possible, and there is no economic crisis, energy prices are also really only very critical for a rather small amount of products in particular niches of industry. While that's not unimportant because industry is a substantial factor, the economy is also very diversified and just like with the car industry I'm kind of tired of the cronyism and giving in to every small industry bluff and demand for subsidies on the back of a crisis. As a side note it would help though if our American friends across the pond would not fall for similar demands and push through enormous subsidy packages. Just let companies compete. There's a lot of bad industrial policy being revived opportunistically.
tuukkah 3y ago
The German goverment went as far as nationalising Uniper, the big gas and energy company. Now, Russia has made an even more destructive move and seized Uniper's and Fortum's Russian subsidiaries. (Fortum lost billions in both cases.)
- lxm 3y ago
  Was there an alternative to Uniper’s nationalization? It was insolvent and forced into fixed price deliveries that it had to procure through suddenly expensive spot market.
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    The government could have relaxed the fixed prices, and perhaps they did that anyway?
    - lxm 3y ago
      They did > Germany sets the gas levy that would allow Uniper and its rivals to pass on 90% of spiralling gas prices to customers. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-russian-gas-crisis-took-toll-germanys-uniper-2022-08-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-russian-gas-cris...
Guthur 3y ago
Germany is buying Russian gas just at extortion rates via middle men.
rossdavidh 3y ago
While I agree that the worst envisioned outcomes did not come to pass, and certainly I do not think they would have been a moral (or even practical) justification for appeasement of military expansionism in any case, I am reminded somewhat of the Y2K debate. Was it never the threat it was imagined to be? Or was the great alarm in advance the reason why sufficient measures were taken to avoid catastrophe? Probably somewhere in between.

49 points by cribbles 3y ago

[flagged]

The winter was exceptionally warm, and no one could really predict that. But putting that aside, this whole episode was making me uneasy. To this day so many people in Europe cannot engage in strategic thinking. I think they simply do not believe that bombs can ever land on their own roofs. The understanding of foreign governments and their real intentions is often at a comical level, even when applied to actors that pretty much lay out their own plans in public then execute on them, decade after decade. Effective international policy requires tools, but before that it requires an even basic understanding of the situation and courage/resolve. That means sacrificing something small (like a gas shortage) for something valuable (no major war in Europe).

mperham 3y ago
From the article: Moreover, the country did not simply get lucky with particularly mild winter temperatures, as often alleged. The average winter temperature in the 2022/23 winter of 2.9°C was actually slightly colder than the average temperature over the four previous winters.
- sounds 3y ago
  It's possible to have a lower mean temperature and still use less total heat. Stats, right? E.g. if the temperature is warmer at night.
  - hrefgtd 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - nawgz 3y ago
    Unless there's some non-linear interactions that I'm unaware of, it seems like the mean temp is the only thing you'd need to know wrt how much energy you need to use to keep it roughly at some other temp thru the season
    - Retric 3y ago
      Heat loss is linear. Resistance heating is linear. Furnaces using slightly colder outside air are just a tiny bit less efficient, but it’s really close to linear. Heat pumps are non linear and do use electricity from natural gas.
      - nawgz 3y ago
        So if I understand you, the only non-linear effect in play is that Heat Pumps are MORE efficient when the temperature differential is higher, is that correct?
        Retric 3y ago
        Heat pumps are LESS efficient when the temperature differential is higher. https://learnmetrics.com/heat-pump-efficiency-vs-temperature-graph/ https://learnmetrics.com/heat-pump-efficiency-vs-temperature...
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      IDK, extremes matter. -5 to +7 has the same average as -20 to +22, but the effects on energy use are widely different (e.g. the former may command a little heating for some time; the latter will command both extreme heating and possibly also cooling). It's the same as with climate talk in general. "Ooh, the average yearly temperature only rose this much, or even fell down relative to 5/10/20 years ago." - sure, but if the range of temperatures keeps growing, you can end up with both a nice average falling year over year, and uninhabitable land due to all useful vegetation freezing up or drying up.
      - nawgz 3y ago
- grt_thr 3y ago
  https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/09/climate-change-europe-emerges-from-second-warmest-winter-on-record https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/09/climate-change-eur... Not sure how the second warmest winters ever recorded can be cooler than the average of the next 4 warmest winters.
  - eric-hu 3y ago
    The paper is specific to Germany, and your linked article reported statistics about Europe. Apples to oranges.
    - grt_thr 3y ago
      There isn't a German expedition energy market, there is a European one.
sho_hn 3y ago
> To this day so many people in Europe cannot engage in strategic thinking. Much more troubling: Few people worldwide have the attention span and stamina to read a text of the length of an academic paper and engage its contents. That this thread is for the moment mostly hurried comments desperate to control the message shows as much. And it's tightly related to inability to do strategic thinking.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Much more troubling: Few people worldwide have the attention span and stamina to read a text of the length off an academic paper and engage its contents. You don't need to read academic papers to know that Russia = evil. Eastern Europe has been parroting this for decades but Germany stuck its fingers in its ears and went "la-la-la-la, I can't hear you over the sound of my cheap gas brokered by our lord and savior, Gerhard Schröder, who's on the Kremlin's payroll". Even after Russia's invasion of Chechnya in 1994 and 1999, and Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, and Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, nobody could have seen Russia invading another neighboring country again in 2022, it was a total shock for European politicians. /s
  - it_citizen 3y ago
    This is very simplified. A lot of western countries, Germany first, believed that if we traded and opened up to those countries, they would naturally tend to adopt western values. It turned out to be incorrect. China being an even better example. But it was not a crazy assumption at the time, and coming after the fact is hindsight 20/20. Honestly, even knowing how things turned out, I am proud that the west tried.
    - Haga 3y ago
      [dead]
    - permo-w 3y ago
      did we really think that or was it just a rationalisation of the desire for profit?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nr2x 3y ago
Eh, Germans and points west are delusional, Hungary is corrupt, but Poland and the Baltics know the score. The fact that Poland had to shame Germany into defending their *own interests* should be a national embarrassment.
gerdesj 3y ago
I lived in West Germany off and on in the '70s-'90s. I am a Brit. If you recall, that period is referred to as the Cold War - Mum and Dad were both soldiers and we got posted abroad a lot. Nowadays I have a Pole as an employee, who lives in Poland. That would have been unthinkable back in the day. I pay Thomasz the same rate as my local employees. He deals with IT snags in Britain the same way I do - over the blower and with remote access tools, such as Mesh Central.
redeeman 3y ago
> That means sacrificing something small (like a gas shortage) okay.. tell that to the ones that simply cannot afford it > for something valuable (no major war in Europe). /me looks at Ukraine: there seems to be a war... /me looks at globe.. in... Europe. is the war lasting longer because the EU and US sends arms to Ukraine?
- _kbh_ 3y ago
  > is the war lasting longer because the EU and US sends arms to Ukraine? The war is lasting longer because the Russians have decided that the number of dead Russians and recaptured positions that need to happen for the war to end is higher than what Ukraine has currently achieved. This war could be over tomorrow if Russia decided to leave, if anything western weapons and aid are making the war end faster by speeding up Russias defeat.
  - redeeman 3y ago
    im not saying anything about that, but answer my question, is the war lasting longer due to US/EU actions, or is it shorter? it seems ukraine cannot defeat russia even with all the aid we give them, might the war simply be prolonged by giving a false sense of hope? how many more are we making die?
    - H8crilA 3y ago
      You'd be right if not for what Russia plans to do next in the event of a victory in Ukraine. Ukraine is not the target, it's a target in the sequence of targets. A few months before the war broke out Putin issued a very clear ultimatum to the West: withdrawal of NATO forces and installations from every country east of Germany. He issued none to Ukraine because he wanted the entire country. The war will continue for as long as Russia is able to wage it, therefore we must destroy Russia as a political system that exists today. Or declaw it to the point of irrelevance. That is the way out of this war, unless you're willing to go back to USSR borders. And even then it's not clear they would stop. Russia is surprisingly open about its goals. Just read what serious people in the Kremlin say over the years (and definitely tune out the garbage that they spew on Rossiya 1 for the older generation homo-sovieticus, no one in the Kremlin cares about that shit). Thanks to the large influx of Russian-speaking immigration we have quite a lot of capable experts that understand it well. War, unlike marriage, only requires consent on one side. I.e. the "collective west" is in a war just because Russia wants that, and there's nothing "West" can do to exit the war. They can only win it.

cyberlurker 3y ago

I have not read the entire article, but one factor that helped was the moderate winter.

marcod 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36051936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36051936

nhavlt 3y ago

[flagged]

nmklt 3y ago

[flagged]

Barrin92 3y ago

The entire debate here in Germany is also just heavily driven by industry interest to a comical extent. Not only has the gas price already fallen to pre-war levels after decades of everyone arguing that these kinds of changes aren't possible, and there is no economic crisis, energy prices are also really only very critical for a rather small amount of products in particular niches of industry. While that's not unimportant because industry is a substantial factor, the economy is also very diversified and just like with the car industry I'm kind of tired of the cronyism and giving in to every small industry bluff and demand for subsidies on the back of a crisis. As a side note it would help though if our American friends across the pond would not fall for similar demands and push through enormous subsidy packages. Just let companies compete. There's a lot of bad industrial policy being revived opportunistically.

tuukkah 3y ago

The German goverment went as far as nationalising Uniper, the big gas and energy company. Now, Russia has made an even more destructive move and seized Uniper's and Fortum's Russian subsidiaries. (Fortum lost billions in both cases.)

lxm 3y ago
Was there an alternative to Uniper’s nationalization? It was insolvent and forced into fixed price deliveries that it had to procure through suddenly expensive spot market.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  The government could have relaxed the fixed prices, and perhaps they did that anyway?
  - lxm 3y ago
    They did > Germany sets the gas levy that would allow Uniper and its rivals to pass on 90% of spiralling gas prices to customers. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-russian-gas-crisis-took-toll-germanys-uniper-2022-08-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-russian-gas-cris...

Guthur 3y ago

Germany is buying Russian gas just at extortion rates via middle men.

rossdavidh 3y ago

While I agree that the worst envisioned outcomes did not come to pass, and certainly I do not think they would have been a moral (or even practical) justification for appeasement of military expansionism in any case, I am reminded somewhat of the Y2K debate. Was it never the threat it was imagined to be? Or was the great alarm in advance the reason why sufficient measures were taken to avoid catastrophe? Probably somewhere in between.