Sure was expensive. Prices for gas are coming down luckily. We put our thermostat at 17°C and wore an extra sweater, had a fluffy blanket during WFH.
After a year long wait, we finally got the heat pump installed last week.
Too late to help with the winter and to take the worst of the gas prices, but better overall.
Can't self-generate gas, electricity at least a bit even in winter.
Still is? The going rate for electricity here is 70.10 €/MWh and the peak figure for today was 118.10 €/MWh. So that's 7-12 cents per kWh. That's not what I'd consider "very expensive".
Yes, still is. Prices for individuals have not decreased yet here in the UK, probably because they were capped to start with, and the government's direct subsidies have just ended.
I have just paid my monthly bill to the end of March and it still came to £230 for electricity + gas. That's for a period when use of heating had started to drop because of spring in addition to our self-imposed restrictions because of high prices.
Interesting to see The Economist doing modeling. Curious that they see no problem in it being utterly unauditable. Unlike a research paper that would cite specific datasets and model parameters, this is just "here are some numbers we're taking as true because model". They don't even appear to have done any validation on their model (holding back a few years from the training set to see how well it predicted them).
> We trained our model to predict the daily average gas demand per person for 26 countries (Britain and all EU member states except Malta and Cyprus, which use little or no gas), for each winter month between January 2013 and February 2022. After the model had learned the relationship between temperatures and gas demand, we gave it real temperatures from this winter and asked it to predict how gas usage might have played out had Russia not sparked an energy crisis.
Welcome to the majority of "journalism". All it takes is a look one or two levels down into the "facts" presented to realize they're wildly and poorly extrapolated to fit a narrative by whoever is paying the bills.
tuning a model to a statistical sample of the past doesn't give as much assurance about it's predictive power as people think.
then, only in the future do we find that the model failed to predict, by which time they tell us, "yeah, but we have a new model", to which the only appropriate answer is "yeah, but you had the same certainty about your old model that did not work"
I'm not saying that there's no point in modelling: you learn a lot about the dynamics of the system when you are working on the model; but that's not what the resultant model conveys.
This is less insightful then you might think, as it's not limited to modeling. We just have a tendency to use previous observations as truth for future endeavors. Mainly because it's usually fine and works fine.
You can see it in every second discussion about any topic that's currently being researched:
I.e. there is nothing guaranteeing we won't have a super viral virus with 90%+ chance of death. It could happen...
There is nothing guaranteeing that LLMs ability to output relevant data will get better, even if it's been tremendously improved within the last year alone.
You can basically see this in action whenever someone is making a prediction. The likelihood of it coming true might be good enough to work with it, but you can always have something go amiss, or a meteor out of currently unknown materials hits the sun causing a chain reaction which causes it to go supernova...
It usually isn't. John Kay and Mervyn King wrote a good book on this issue. They talk about events in three categories. Deterministic predictions, say where is the earth in five years in the solar system, probabilistic predictions based on past data, i.e. how likely is it that the volcano will explode in the next five years, and the most important one which they call 'radically uncertain' events.
Complex human events are almost always in the last category. Using the language from the first or second class of events to make predictions about completely dynamic systems that are entirely dependent on human intervention that have no clear relationship to the past makes no sense. Using quantitative language in that case is actively misleading because it creates the impression you have any notion of the total space of possible events at all. "X has a 80% of going to war in Y years" is an example. What they really mean to say is "I believe it is likely that..", but that 80% number is completely made up.
Or as Frank Knight put it: “A measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.”
But modeling is always a thing of probabilities, with a low confidence rating for getting it entirely right.
What you seems to have an issue with is how it's often reported on or used in politics... But the people actually creating the models are in my experience always aware that the results are never proving anything by themselves... And blaming the act of modeling for the actions of politicians and reporters is misguided, as they're just using whatever is convenient. If it wasn't a specific model, they'd find something else to validate whatever asinine bullshit they're peddling.
Interesting indeed. Isn’t a machine learning model kind of an overkill for this kind of data analysis? Wouldn’t linear regressions suffice in this instance? Don’t you risk introducing unknown biases or even overfitting by using such a powerful technique when a simpler one is available?
This kind of reminds me of when some journalist on twitter used machine learning to find hate-speech against British politician. Of course the journalist found exactly what they were looking for. There was more hate speech against conservatives... Of course, the journalist was only an amateur in statistics, and used a flawed model, that could have yielded anything they wanted
disclaimer: I didn’t read the article because paywall, and waiting for an archive to be posted.
Basically the model was developed at google to find “toxic speech”, but the researchers had a very biased definition on what constituted as “toxic”. Racist speech didn’t count, while angry shouts did.
I would expect there is more racist speech against white people than anyone else. Regardless, race doesn’t put someone in a particular political group so I don’t see how it debunks anything. Did the critics measure racist speech?
Short answer: Yes, they tested the model with racist speech, and it failed.
> I entered a selection of racist tweets I’d received in the past year into Perspective’s API, of varying lengths and sentence complexity. Just to make it easy for the machine, I deliberately chose one which included a common racial slur against South Asians.
> None of these were registered as potentially toxic at all by the AI – but, “You’re a fucking G”, a compliment, popped up with a 90.29% likelihood of being toxic.
Your hypotheses that white MPs experience more racist speech than non-white MPs, is testable. I have a pretty strong feeling that you are wrong, but I haven’t seen any data to support either (only anecdotes; and this deeply flawed analysis). What you can do to test your hypotheses is find all British MPs on twitter, scrape all tweets directed at them, and measure the proportion of racist speech against them. However, I advice you to do a more traditional cluster analysis, rather than a training model, the latter is very likely to yield a flawed model just like the journalist’s “8 month labor of love”.
You can’t write an article about just scrolling through twitter, but if you pile up enough linear algebra it becomes an Officially Interesting Thing to report on.
Looks like they are effusively talking about a linear regression "model". We did those in high school. You can basically look at the graph or points and fit line to audit it.
Russia did slow down and then stop gas through Nord Stream 1 in 2022. For example here’s an article about it resuming at a reduced rate in July [0], and here’s one about it stopping in August [1]. Gazprom blamed Western sanctions for poor maintenance on the pipeline but didn’t deny reducing and then stopping the gas.
As for who blew up Nord Stream, I don’t think any of us know for sure. Last I heard the US were blaming a pro-Ukrainian group though. I haven’t heard anything about Norway, but haven’t looked into it a lot.
As you say, Russia played overt stop-blackmail-start-repeat games with Nordstream in 2022, but they started reducing gas deliveries to the EU already in 2021. Myopic market "analysts" interpreted it as a trade tactic [1], but to those who were paying attention to the troop buildup around Ukraine and the increasingly frantic "diplomacy" (it's not often you see a CIA director travel to Moscow [2]), it was another ominous sign. In hindsight, it's obvious they wanted to "soften up" Europe by making it go into winter 2021-2022 with lower gas storage levels than normal.
They also failed to grasp that outside temperature might not be the only factor affecting power consumed for heating, assuming we want to keep constant inside temperature. The most obvious is sunlight - when it's 0C outside, my home requires much less energy when the sun is shining through the windows and on the roof.
Not to brag but this winter I didn't turn on radiator once. The temperature never dropped below 20°C inside (I live in a flat that few years ago had 10cm of isolation added to it). Yes I know, some of the heat was probably from neighbors but I can't do anything about that. I also shortened hot showers to minimum and wore warm underwear and sweater. The winter was quite warm [1], coldest was around -5°C
Similar case here. New, well insulated apartment. I think we did turn it on when older, temperature sensitive guests came over. We also clearly benefited from neighbors who (probably) still had heating on. But a good insulation is indeed a game changer.
Not some of the heat, all of the heat save for what your body generates and such was from neighbors. In most reasonably managed apartment buildings what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you. In total it rarely ends up being an energy save because the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.
What you call a reasonably managed apartment, I call an apartment woefully built without reasonable insulation between dwellings. If I leave for the winter, why should I pay to heat a space I won't be in?
So people in the UK aren’t allowed to lower their temps when they leave for vacation? Am I really supposed to believe this? I guess you’ll tell me you need a license to watch TV next.
But if you think logically, there are some things you can't do in apartment, e.g. listen to loud music at night, or drill holes when others might be sleeping.
Turning down heating to zero is one of them. AFAIR in some places there is a limit of how low your heating should be and if it is lower then you still pay a given set price - this is to discourage cheaters.
It can't be both ways. Either the home is sucking up enough heat from the neighboring units to be significant, and so it warrants insulation, or it's not, in which case why would management care about something so tiny?
Insulation is the first thing you do to improve the thermal characteristics of a home. It's not expensive.
> In total it rarely ends up being an energy save because the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.
Really? GP is effectively acting as an apartment-size layer of insulation between neighbors and the outside. Put another way, if everyone did what GP did (for instance, lower thermostat to 20C) the entire building would be cooler and use less energy. Perhaps GP’s behavior even encouraged others to lower their thermostat because of higher electric bills!
Is that considered a low temp for heating your house? I think that's about a perfect daytime temp summer or winter. At night that would be too warm honestly.
Apples and oranges, depending on where you live it can be anywhere between insanely expensive and practically free to keep your house at that temperature.
I generally have my heating at 18, anything more I am opening windows or taking off my jumper. 20 degrees would be too hot for me, if I lived in an apartment that mandated 20 degress heating at all time I wouldn't be happy about it.
My apartment mandates 23C in most rooms, 25C in one. Also, once you hit 16C, you get rapidly growing mold everywhere due to increase in humidity compensating lower temperature.
That can lead to water condensing on other surfaces which on the right surface can start mold growth. Wallpaper, exposed wood, stucco walls and some painted surfaces are all subject to this.
That is really cold, but the temperature I would keep an unused house at. If I tried to do that in our current place, my family would be extremely angry - we have it at 20 and even then I get complaints.
Your apartment mandates rooms stay at least 73.4 degrees F? 77 in another? I'd be wearing a tanktop indoors at all times. I'm having a very hard time believing this is true.
Well my landlord was repeatedly explicitly pointing out these in the contract. I guess he doesn't want this luxurious apartment to degrade and lose value.
If it were my apartment, I just wouldn't do it. If the heating were centrally controlled, I'd open up the windows. 77F is simply way, way too hot inside, unless it's the summertime (and even then I'd be wearing shorts). That's insanely hot, and the idea of wasting all that energy to maintain a literal sauna inside your apartment is insane.
It's a common clause in rental agreements so that any mold problem can be blamed on the tenant because obviously they didn't heat their rooms to some ludicrous temperature while also opening the windows ten times a day.
because of what the other comment said and because this argument makes no sense
> what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you
if you don't turn up your heater, your neighbors don't have to heat more, the air in an insulator, some heat will leak in your apartment, but will also leak back to theirs, it will soon reach an equilibrium, unless you keep the windows open to cool down your apartment or turn on the AC.
Anyway most of the heat that leaks is through the heating pipes in the walls, it would leak anyway, the temperature of the wall is always gonna be lower than the water in the pipes. So you are heating up your neighbors walls even if your neighbors are keeping the heating on.
That's why in a lot of apartment buildings the heating bills are actually averaged between flats - so one person using nothing will not make their bill drop to zero.
It’s usually because the hassle and account fees from submetering doesn’t make up for the conservation it encourages.
It’s a huge waste of money in smaller residential units where people don’t have a garden or car to wash. And sometimes not even responsible for their plumbing or appliance choice/efficiency/maintenance.
Paying $x/month in account fees and meter reading means someone else burns some other resource while you work to conserve (if one even bothers).
For whatever reason, I’m in the same situation, but in a relatively modern building where the hallways are warmed and slightly positively-pressurized for fire/smoke mitigation, so there’s a constant slight heat source coming in from the hallways. Combine that with good insulation, some base loads and southern exposure and we go all winter running the hvac for just a few hours.
It would be too hot if we ran the heat.
This is in Toronto where it’ll average a bit colder than continental Europe.
I used to live in a flat where we never turned the heating on at all. It got so warm we had to open windows even in winter. If my neighbors were responsible, I wish they would have turned their heating down!
can someone explain to me how this would not save energy? I have a very basic model in my head of "energy in/energy out" and it feels like if in the end one person is taking advantage of leakage (but probably not enough to actually get to the same temperature as people around them), then there would be less energy used, but are there non-linear forces at play or something?
I don't believe the energy consumption would be higher, but a plausible mechanism is this: When your neighbor heats their apartment only, their radiators need to produce more power than if all apartments are heated. To generate more power, the radiators need hotter water. Producing hotter water lowers the efficiency of the heating system. So there is a tradeoff curve between higher heat loss (because more parts of the building are warm) and heating efficiency. There might be a point where it makes sense to heat more of the building, but I doubt that somehow.
>In most reasonably managed apartment buildings what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you.
In your idea of "reasonably managed" buildings, everyone is forced to keep the heat on way too high, so a bunch of people open their windows wide open to bring in cool air, resulting in a massive and ridiculous waste of energy. The problem is that some moron in charge of the thermostat wants it much hotter (in the winter) or colder (in the summer) than ecologically- and economically-minded people who prefer to save energy. There's never any kind of democratic system for setting the thermostat, plus different people have different comfort levels.
If the neighbors don't like high utility bills, then they should stop using so much energy. There's nothing requiring them to keep it as warm as they do: it's not hard to put on some warm underwear.
I have been a renter for most of my adult life and I own several apartments that I would argue are "reasonably managed" and I am not aware that a landlord (in Germany) can prevent tenants from "leeching" heat from neighboring apartments. A renter usually has to guarantee a reasonable minimum temperature in the apartment, as well as regular fresh air, both to prevent mold. But the level of heating required for this is way below 20°C.
Also: I'm pretty sure that in most reasonable scenarios not heating one apartment in a house that has a decent outer layer of insulation would overall reduce energy input, because the overall average temperature would decline and heat would propagate more efficiently between apartments than to the outside. But I'm no expert so what do I know.
Where I am, the heating costs include a shared portion for this reason... you can turn your heating completely off and still pay 1/3 or 2/3 of a regular bill (don't remember) as the building's "shared" heating costs.
That also means if you turn on your heating, you add to both your bill and some of the shared costs others pay.
I live in a modern, well insulated building as the grandparent comment. I haven't run the heat for years, we need to occasionally open the windows cos it gets too warm and stale obviously, i don't think it makes sense to force me to turn on the heat even more and open the window even more.
edit: this was more a mix of reply to the parent comment and a bit to yours, sorry got it in the wrong spot.
> the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.
Pretty sure this is incorrect. Conductive heat flow goes with the temperature difference. The higher the temperature difference, the more heat flow. If you kept your room cold versus everyone else, then your room would be leaking heat to the outside less than everyone else's, assuming everything else equal.
This is so demonstrably false it needs calling out. The overall losses will be lower, which is easy to note by considering the heat flow across the outer envelope which scales monotonically with the internal temperature. If one apartment is at a lower temperature for whatever reason, the total loss to the outside will be lower. Yes, one apartment might need to produce more heat to compensate for a neighbour being cooler, but that would be more than compensated for by the savings of that cooler apartment. This is absolutely just insulation.
Yes, from the neighbours and internal generation. That's not disputed. What I was challenging was the idea that all the apartments being at the same temperature is a net saving (presumably over some of them being cooler as described in the GP).
This doesn't add up with the way thermal mass or thermostats work..
the unheated unit wall will have less heat, but the thermostat is checking the air, which is protected by wall.
The above poster didn't have his neighbors turn up the heat for them to be comfortable.
I used to live on the 3rd story interior apartment; had to turn the ac on early in mild winters (southeast us) because one of my neighbors must have enjoyed living in a tropical house.
I never turned the heating on either, though sadly I'm in a drafty Victorian London flat so the temperature dropped to 9°C at one point. The dehumidifier likely saved the day.
You were basically freeloading on your neighbors; there is no way you'd keep 20C inside without any heating source. Without your neighbors footing the bill you'd have ended up with massive hard-to-get-rid-of mold patches near windows by spring.
Modern insulation is very effective. I could see 10cm of insulation preventing basically all heat loss if there are few windows and those they have are triple-pane low-E coated. They get radiant heating from the sun as well, so if you're losing almost no energy then you're basically a greenhouse.
If he shut off his heat counting on neighbor heat to keep him warm, then maybe it would be freeloading.
But if his heating system was on and he set the thermostat to 20℃, which is in the normal indoor temperature range according to most sources I've seen, and it just happened to never turn on because his neighbors set theirs to higher I wouldn't consider that to be freeloading.
If he lives in typical block of flats in Slovakia, he pays part of the heat of the neighbors. Typically, part of the heat cost is based on your consumption and part is based on total consumption of the whole block divided between flats.
We managed to travel to Berlin, west London suburbs, and Strasbourg in early-mid December. The temperature was never more than a few degrees above freezing, and often well below, in each of those places, for just shy of 2 solid weeks. It was pretty amusing to go through that and then be hearing reports all winter about what a warm winter Europe was having :)
Equally shocking was seeing the gas meter showing GBP15+ per day to heat a rowhouse to what was still an incredibly cold indoor temperature (14-15C) and drafty).
> We managed to travel to Berlin, west London suburbs, and Strasbourg in early-mid December. The temperature was never more than a few degrees above freezing, and often well below, in each of those places, for just shy of 2 solid weeks. It was pretty amusing to go through that and then be hearing reports all winter about what a warm winter Europe was having :)
We used to have winters with permanent snow on the streets for months.
Well done! As someone in an appartement I also only used about a third of the heating in 2022 that I used in 2021. I only say this because SAVING energy (and thus CO2) can be quite significant and this has to be known and published more. IMO we have to do it to save the planet (harsh words but imo true).
For the ones who say that this is freeloading on the neighbors: not so much since at least in Germany one pays his own but also proportionally for the whole building (e.g. 50/50 or 70/30).
Ahoj sousede! Sounds like you have a well insulated home. Here in Prague I had to use heating in the evenings for most of December and January and part of February, because without it my apartment was getting down to 15°C.
Which would be fine if it was just me as it could be solved with a hoodie, but I was worried about moisture damaging electronics and causing mould, as well as the comfort of my dog.
I haven't calculated it but I would estimate that I at least halved my usage from previous years.
I live in the Netherlands. My own gas usage was 25% lower in 2022 compared to the average over 2019-2021. We didn't do anything drastic to reduce gas usage. The first 3 months of 2023 were somewhat colder with gas usage is much closer to Spring 2021 and nowhere near as low as Spring 2022. I wonder how accurate the model used in this article is. The article isn't very clear on what kind of temperature values are used as input to this model. Is it daily mean? Hourly? I can imagine that you want to somehow factor in the diurnal cycle which would be obscured by daily means.
Energy prices over winter were high enough that I started reducing room temperature to 15 degree Celsius whenever I expected not to be home (or using a particular room) for at least two days.
I also mostly showered in gyms, like 4 out of 5 occassions.
If you don't heat your home for a while, and it's cold enough, the pipes can freeze, break, and flood your home. It's happened to more than a couple of people I know and they're in the UK - so it doesn't need to get very cold for it to happen.
This, plus I don't want to return to a completely cold house that takes about three days to heat up to 20 degrees Celsius again. The building is built of bricks, it has a certain thermal mass and the floor heating isn't very powerful. Letting the inner temperature to drop close to zero would mean a very uncomfortable period after return.
I was never absent for more than 5 days anyway, so...
Letting it get too cold could lead to plumbing damage if you parts of your house get below freezing. 15C is probably higher than I'd leave it if it were vacant, but you do want to leave the heat on and a decent buffer to account for temperature variations in other parts of the house.
I discussed the temperature with the guy who oversaw the construction and he told me that, given that the house is still pretty fresh and moist (it was finished in November '22), lower temperatures would mean a risk of mould developing. 15-16 is the sweet spot according to him.
In addition to other replies, in hot and humid climates, you still want the A/C running for de-humidification purposes. So you set it high instead of turning it off completely.
In addition to other replies you want to keep the relative humidity <60% otherwise you get condensation (your 20C air, 40% relative humidity gets cooled to 15C and that becomes 55% relative humidity, cool it to 10C and it becomes 75%). Condensation can cause mold, short circuits and all kinds of other expensive problems.
Getting humidity under 50 per cent in a freshly built house over the winter ... turned out just impossible.
We fought hard to keep it at least under 60 per cent, as you say. If it froze outside, windows in the bedroom would be covered with water droplets in the morning.
(Actually, it froze last night, quite late in the season, and the windows were wet again.)
Keeping humidity low is all about making sure the air doesn't cool too much, or if it does, replacing it with drier (colder) air from outside. There is a certain amount of water in air and when it cools this water will condense. Good insulation (keeping inner temp constant) is key.
Yeah it's a bit counter productive - you build a house with great insulation so that there is almost no heat escaping outside. And then you have to install ventilation that literally creates vacuum in your house to suck cold dry (absolutely speaking) air in to keep the humidity in check. And then you sit in the living room wondering why is there such a draft. At least new houses are built with heat recovery to solve this
The sanctions were a reaction to the Russia’s genocidal war. Late reaction, as it should have happened in 2014 or even in 1999, but it’s better than nothing.
So, yes, the putin’s war has wrecked the energy markets in Europe. And many many peoples lives as well unfortunately.
Another way of achieving that moniker is raping and murdering your way across a country, taking the children and killing the rest while erasing cultural symbols and monuments.
No, Russia did not remain a stable producer and it wasn't the West's "sanctions and sabotage" that did the real damage. Russia turned off the taps, plain and simple - in fact they started turning down exports and draining Europe's gas storage the autumn before. In some cases they may have made excuses about how sanctions meant they couldn't get the parts to operate their gas pipelines, but those excuses were bullshit, loosening the sanctions to give them what they supposedly needed just caused them to give more and increasingly bogus reasons for not supplying gas, and often they didn't even bother with that.
Because Russia saw what was coming and Europe's efforts to mitigate sanctions that were coming but not yet in effect. Europe was trying to buy as much gas as they could before the sanctions went into place, so by stopping early Russia had a better change of the sanctions hurting Europe enough that they stopped them.
Between the warm winter and the other mitigations Europe did there was no problem and Europe didn't hurt too much, but that was the goal.
>Pipeline deliveries from Russia declined by 25% year-on-year in Q4 2021. This decrease in Russian pipeline supply to the EU became more pronounced in the first seven weeks of 2022, falling by 37% year-on-year. The last pipeline deliveries to Germany via the YAMAL pipeline (which goes through Belarus) were on 20 December 2021. Gas flows via Ukraine to Slovakia have fallen from an average of over 80 mcm/d in December to just 36 mcm/d in the first seven weeks of 2022.
This is an absurd nitpick. First, nobody would read the claim as a literal one that Putin blew up the relevant gas infrastructure, especially since the background assumptions to the Western reaction include one that Putin would be willing to continue selling. If he weren’t there’d be no debate on energy sanctions. Also gas continues to flow through Ukraine as any fule kno.
Second, a further ‘important technicality’ is that even if the West (quite correctly) blew up Nord Stream II, it wasn’t in use, so its destruction didn’t disturb energy flows.
Third, Western interventions would also be described as ‘wreaking havoc’, so this isn’t the gotcha proving Western hypocrisy you think it is. And even if it were, the answer is to consistently oppose, not acquiesce, to imperialist aggression; many people are capable of opposing more than one thing.
> It was the Western reaction, i.e. sanctions & sabotage, that did the real damage.
There is an actual death toll and very real crimes have been committed. Your ‘comparing and contrasting’ needs a bit more thought if you think the consequences equal.
Russia's economy is in very bad shape. They can pretend otherwise, but the west is hurting them. It isn't as obvious as the results of military action, but it still hurts.
> Russia is primarily responsible for causing death in Ukraine, closely followed by the other material participants, due to its choice to destroy Ukraine's military.
That isn’t the aim though, why are so many attacks targeted at civilians and civilian infrastructure? This isn’t about destroying their military, it’s about destroying Ukrainians and their country.
> why are so many attacks targeted at civilians and civilian infrastructure?
This simply isn't happening. The better question is why didn't Putin flatten Kiev on day 1, or any day hence, since his goal is "obviously" to kill as many Ukrainians as possible? Washington showed it was possible in Baghdad.
>Russia remained a stable producer. It was the Western reaction, i.e. sanctions & sabotage, that did the real damage.
What sanctions? Russian gas was basically the only thing the EU wouldn't touch. Gazprom was the one that pulled the plug. The closest we got was refusing to insure oil tankers if Russia sells over $40/bbl, and that was months after Russia cut off European gas.
You're being downvoted, I can understand why, but there's some truth that must be addressed before deeming your comment completely bogus.
Gerhard Schröder, former German chancellor, was a big advocate for the Nord Stream pipeline and then was appointed in the board of Gazprom, the sole (Russian) shareholder of the aforementioned stream.
Germany paid the highest price when Russian gas was cut off and the government, led by a coalition that includes the Green party (die Grüne), had to open new coal mines.
Something was obviously wrong in our (the EU) energy policies.
What is "wrong" about Germany buying cheap energy from a willing local producer, and profiting enormously from it?
In Washington's fever dream, where it is "right" that Germany should instead buy expensive energy that is shipped across the Atlantic and lose its industrial advantage as as result.
It is totally, comically absurd. Untethered from reality.
EU has problems because of massive foreign influence (mainly Washington), not because individual participant states promote their own interests, as they should.
It's hard enough to maintain a federation of neighbor states. It's impossible to do that while also catering to the whims of a distant superpower.
Could be, not wanna open that discussion, but teaming with Putin (Gazprom equals Putin) it's not the smartest of moves, especially if you are a former influential European politician.
Let's put it this way: there were (are) plans on every desk of every Prime Minister or President in Europe that say "we could let Putin take Ukraine and avoid a conflict that could harm us all".
I fail to see what is wrong about maintaining the spirit of the Budapest Memorandum. Since the events of 2014, it can't be totally restored, but the spirit can be reimplemented (by Minsk, etc). It seems that many thoughtful EU statesmen, like Schröder, believe that.
> I fail to see what is wrong about maintaining the spirit of the Budapest Memorandum.
> It seems that many thoughtful EU statesmen, like Schröder, believe that
I believe one doesn't maintain the spirit of the Budapest memorandum by entering the board of directors of the largest Russian gas supplier and becoming director of the board of Rosneft, largest Russian oil producer, years after Russia invaded Crimea. Don't you think?
But I concede Schroeder that he might have truly believed that he could keep Russia from invading Ukraine. Nonetheless mixing politics and business was a bad mistake on his part.
Because we now have 20/20 hindsight that Russia is an evil actor and would not reform. Therefore Germany should have spent the previous 10 years getting off Russian gas (leave nuclear power plants open is one obvious example)
If your geopolitical thesis includes the word "evil" you need to work harder on it. That word is meant for children's books. The real world is complex.
> Self-interest also implies that it works for Russia.
define "works".
there's a big divide in the World on this war, it could be considered a victory for Putin, he made friends fight over it, turned allies into adversaries and made enemies even more suspicious of each other. We are at a peak high level of conflict, like we haven't seen in decades.
Germany's gas storage were half-empty in 2021 and prices in Europe were high. Russia had brought a large share of those gas storage facilities under its control. Gas deliveries were lower than usual. In the winter Putin than started the war against the Ukraine. Putin had prepared for the situation - sanctions against Putin were supposed to create energy shortages and fear among European citizens, give how much Europe's energy supply (gas, oil, and not to forget nuclear) depended on Russia. Sanctions were supposed to damage Europes economies, too. And they did, prices went up.
The war was supposed to last only a few days and then Russia would control the Ukraine - Putin would have the Ukraine, the Pipelines, the energy. But that was not what happened.
Putin miscalculated the situation and the reaction. Instead, the Ukraine government survived the first Russian attack, the war is now more than a year old, several stages of sanctions were brought into place, Europe&US delivers support for the Ukraine, Russia's energy industry is now largely decoupled from Europe, Russia is a political paria, and there were hundreds of thousands war victims and millions of refuges, due to Russias war on the Ukraine. Russia has yet failed to react to the political & military pressure against it with any signs of willing to end the war.
I know this is hyperbole, but at least in Britain's case, the fact that so many people had to choose between heating their homes or feeding their kids really isn't something to celebrate. Let's not pretend this was some kind of collective decision or green victory.
For every percent that utility prices go up (or really: non-optional bills), A larger and larger slice of people simply cannot make it work and have to sacrifice something.
There's an important point: how much of this was non-optional vs. luxury? I keep my home at 22, but if I had to, I could probably set it to 19 and tell everyone to wear a sweater in the winter. So not everyone, but definitely some slice of the population probably went from 19 to 16 or lower.
In Canada this can be a serious issue. My gas bill literally doubled for the same volume compared to last winter. This can be a sudden $100-200 extra monthly expense. Luckily it's illegal to ever cut anyone off from gas in the winter... but that doesn't fix the financial catastrophe.
Wait, you are not wearing a sweater inside during winter?
19 is like, the temperature we set during off-peak hours, otherwise it's more like 18 (and we let it coast down during the evening).
Admittedly, it's quite cold when not moving around, so I spent most of the winter with at least 3 sweaters, a hot water bottle, and a blanket (and 2 layers of pants, usually).
When moving around, 17-18 is quite comfortable though, a long sleeved shirt or light sweater is usually enough.
Electricity prices have literally tripled or quadrupled for some people - and for poor people the effect was even worse because the poorest groups are on prepayment meters which are on the most expensive tariffs of all.
So yes, there were people for whom the choice was "well I have £5 for today, either it's going in the meter so I can put heating on for a few hours and stay warm, or I need to use it to buy food to feed my family". This isn't some theoretical edge case scenario - this was a dilemma that many British families were faced with this winter.
What’s worse is they still get charged the standing charge so if the meter has been empty for days, then adding credit to it may just get swallowed up by paying the standing charge due for those days
> Let's not pretend this was some kind of collective decision or green victory.
It wasn't just that, but there definitely was a collective shift toward energy saving, also among those who could've afforded the high energy prices. (at least here in NL)
I agree we shouldn't celebrate the decision of the poor to be energy-frugal, they had no choice in most cases. But those wo had a choice, still chose to conserve energy, often structurally. We should celebrate that for the environmental win it is.
* I tried to find a contractor for some work on my house. Very few were available, none were available short-term. Most told me this is due to extreme demand for isolation measures.
* Lead times on heat pumps rose to half a year, presumably also due to demand.
* People dressed warmer.
* The most common thermostat temperature for people around me temperature dropped from 20c to 19c.
* "How to isolate" was a very common topic in most Dutch media, far more than in previous winters.
It was a fun game for the well off green voters indeed. LARPing that they are saving the planet by reacting to a higher energy bill. Tracking it all with their fun home assistant gadgets and showing off at work how much they are saving. It had no real impact on them, and most would go fly around the world to celebrate the holiday as soon as they had the chance.
For the working class however, the people really affected by the green policies, it was a matter of choosing between heat and groceries.
For the environment it doesn't matter one bit as China is using more energy than the whole western world combined. It's telling that only the people that can still easily pay the bills see this as something to be celebrated.
Well, in a weird way it does make sense though. As a different example, if you want to cut fuel consumption nationally just double the prices - you will see how much less fuel people will use because they will just drive less. Will it impact poor people disproportionately? Ensure that some people won't be able to go shopping or to see a doctor? You bet. But the overall green goal will be achieved - the problem isn't the increase in prices(as such), it's the fact that the social safety net wasn't there to help those truly in need. No one in this country should have been choosing between heating or feeding their families - but I know people were.
> Will it impact poor people disproportionately? You bet.
Sane countries roll out a mini-UBI to account for this.
Canada has a system of quarterly payments for every tax payer to make carbon taxes revenue-neutral (in theory). The belly-aching whining is truly extraordinary.
Now, if we could convince the government that cutting labour taxes would increase supply of labour during a “labour shortage”, we might be getting somewhere.
It isn't UBI and it isn't revenue neutral. It's a revenue-generating tax that makes most families poorer.
> "When both fiscal and economic impacts of the federal fuel charge are considered, we estimate that most households will see a net loss,” PBO Yves Giroux said in a statement following release of the report. “Based on our analysis, most households will pay more in fuel charges and GST—as well as receiving slightly lower incomes—than they will receive in Climate Action Incentive payments.”
Which means the grants should be increased. But for some reason you’ll mostly hear from the anti-carbon-tax lobby.
But if you want to see who’s truly a net winner or loser, if the rich lose more than the poor lose, the poor are still be better off if they’re net recipients of government services.
Your quote is referring to modelling from 2030 when the carbon tax rises to $170/tCO2e. That's a reasonably high carbon tax and I'm not surprised that it would be costing households on average. It would be much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels unabated, but only if your modelling doesn't include a dollar figure on the negative externalities of CO2 emissions.
Britain is a special case unfortunately. While energy costs going up will have an impact on everyones bottom line, if they are already so close to the edge then any price increase in anything essential is going to force people into those positions. People are already cutting all non-essentials, there is no more financial slack and it doesn't matter which essential thing is going up: housing, food or energy.
The only reason I would even suggest that higher energy prices are good for ecology would be that businesses started genuinely doing things to cut consumption, like turning off lit advertising and office lights.
That people are essentially priced out of living healthy is nothing to be celebrated of course, but there is a small silver lining and it should be discussed.
that people cant afford to live is a pretty massive failing of the UK and its policies. That’s been talked to death though.
Yeah, nice try.. inflation was a factor but as a dual national Brit/Swede it is at least twice as bad if not more in the UK.
The financial assistance offered to Swedes for the power consumption is contentious as most people didn’t expect anything to be paid back and it was taken from the energy companies profits too.
It’s not even remotely the same, even though the Murdoch media would like to make you think so.
You’re counting only the last year, I suppose, but even then you’re not really telling the truth because they’re comparable over the last year, and only if you take one year into account.
If your food inflation was 10% year 1 and 18% year 2 then your total inflation over two years is 35.7%.
If your food inflation on year 1 is 5% and year 2 is 20% then your total inflation over two years is 26%
You might look at the year two value and claim that inflation is higher, but food prices in the UK relative to income are definitely higher due to inflation (which is seemingly being underreported) over the last 5 years.
To be fair, the lines look quite comparable, but when I compare the monthly shop I do to what my friends and family do, and I factor in salary- it doesn’t nearly paint the picture that Sweden and the UK are comparable.
“Cost of living crisis” is decidedly not a thing in Sweden, not to the same scale, even if there are a contingent of people who struggle a little. Choosing between heating and eating is uniquely a British position in this regard. Similar to gun crime in the US, it seems like the Brit’s are pointing to all other countries as if they have the same issues and of course they do not.
Same in the Netherlands. There's quite a bit of energy poverty with people no longer being able to afford to properly heat their homes. That's especially an issue for people living in older, poorly insulated apartments on low incomes.
Lots of people that just sit on the couch under a blanket to stay warm. Apparently, hypothermia with elderly people has been a thing. That also increases the likelihood of strokes and other issues. Especially people with poor circulation. Other issues include respiratory issues due to cold and increased humidity in the apartments.
The goal should not be to make grandmas bundle up and be cold in their houses. That’s a reduction in standard of living. We need to decrease the cost of energy while making more of it. Cheering that less energy was used is like cheering that we went backwards in human development - some people wish we go back to living in huts, but I’m not one of them.
That is efficiency gains. But merely cheering that less energy is generated is incorrect. Standard of living heavily correlated to total power generated. We should generate more energy, cleaner for sure, but having to bundle up is terrible. We should all be warm and comfortable - that is called “standard of living”.
On the contrary, maybe it's time to acknowledge that some economies may have over-extended in their promises about what standards of living we can come to expect.
Rich western countries still depend heavily on other parts of the world being cheap. The last 100 years were the result of the riches extracted from previous centuries of plunder and occupation, and the rush to modernize after the largest government spending projects in history (WWs I and II) induced an unsustainable march toward technological "progress" that could not continue without some later shock and consequent regression due to the inevitabilities (some refer to them merely as externalities) borne of dependence on finite resources. We are currently living through that shock.
No, that's the nocive and ridiculous ideology that is destroying Europe.
The issues the continent has been facing are purely due to inept policy. There is no problem with producing enough low emission/zero emission energy to maintain living standards.
Now, globally living standards have to drastically increase to get rid of poverty. That means drastic increase in consumption as well. The problem that noone is keen to acknowledge is the global population level.
Hardly, we should be investing in nuclear power and renewable energy to become energy independent as a priority. And throwing everything we can at nuclear fusion research.
We can achieve energy that is "too cheap to meter".
I cut my energy (electricity) consumption during this winter by about 40% compared to previous years with an investment of 4.5k EUR last summer including installation; I think I got a good deal. That got me:
- Two very efficient and quiet Mitsubishi Electric "nordic climate" version air-to-air heat pumps (MSZ-LN35 and MSZ-LN25) replacing 20 year old much less efficient equivalents - those couldn't really keep up, so additional resistive heating was necessary before the upgrade.
- One very affordable and relatively noisy Chinese noname air-to-air heat pump replacing resistive 10C maintenance heating in a side area.
I ended up having a higher indoor average temperature in the house than in previous years.
There is a general 30% tax deduction (up to a limit; coincidentally also about 4.5k EUR/yr/person) on craftsman work that takes place in a home that you own; this applies to the installation work. This deduction was about 500 EUR in total.
I would have paid 5k EUR without this tax deduction.
The installer handles the accounting/tax agency reporting - so the invoice was for 4.5k EUR, not 5k.
Yep, but you don't say how much (in EUR) is the 40% you saved.
IF (say) that 40% is 1,000 EUR you (and partially your state) payed in advance for five years heating.
And you were in a particular situation (already 20 years old heating that probably needed replaacement anyway), if you replaced that with new devices of the same type as the old ones you would have probably not spent so much less.
I just wanted to point out that you were in a particular situation (obsolete existing plant probably needing replacement anyway at a possibly not too different cost) + state incentives (even if only 30% of the man hours) and you had the money to invest.
Usually the break even point should be in the 5 or more years range (unless there are more substantial state incentives) for a "plain" replacement (i.e. with a working furnace + conditioner replaced by a heat pump).
Anecdotally, a couple of years ago (in a shop, not a house, but the reasoning should be the same) I replaced a gas furnace (that was to be replaced anyway) and an air conditioner (that also was likely to fail being old enough) with a new heat pump. Both had a heat exchanger and heated/refreshed water that circulated in a few fan-coils, so there was in practice no need of masonry or hydraulic work besides replacing the (external) units.
Replacing them with a new gas furnace + new conditioning unit was quoted around 4,000 Euro, whilst the new heat pump was quoted around 10,500 Euro, at the time it was possible to have 65% state incentive (directly credited by the supplier), so I paid only around 3,700 Euro, i.e. roughly the same as replacing the old units with the same ones instead of using the new technology.
Without this (very substantial) incentive I calculated that it would have taken a little less than 6 years to get even at a projected saving of around 1,100 Euro/year.
That's what you get when you do stuff like this [1]:
> Half of European ammonia production plant closed
> Spiralling gas prices have caused a decline in European ammonia production, thereby aggravating the shortage of fertilisers in Europe. CRU Group analysts estimate that around half of European ammonia production plant and 33% of nitrogen fertiliser plant has closed down as a result
All this will, of course, be reflected in even higher prices for basic food stuff further down the road.
The long term effects seem harder to judge. Fertilizer imports likely increased. Some farmers likely started using fertilizer more effectively because higher prices encourage investment in efficiency improvements (reduced waste).
Presumably at higher prices, otherwise the European plant fertiliser industry wouldn't have been in active the first place.
> higher prices encourage investment in efficiency improvements
As far as I can understand agribusiness is already highly efficient, not sure it can make up for a double-digit decrease in availability (or increase in prices) for one of its core inputs.
Also, guess who is one of the bigger fertilizer manufacturers? Russia & Belarus. For example Belaruskali. Wonder how much of re-badged fertilizer will make it into EU...
Looking at youtube farmers I follow... They reduced usage of fertilizer in exchange for lower yield. In the bottom line, they made as much profit due to higher prices and less expense. But for consumers it means raised prices. Food processing industry will have problems with sourcing raw material. Exports will drop and internal consumption will be more expensive for several years.
I find it interesting how all the sudden nobody bats an eye, whereas running up to autumn a lot of people were claiming Europe will freeze and there will be blackouts and rationing.
We are _still_ at 60+. We’ll absolutely be back at 90+% before next winter. And there will be a significant number of replaced heaters.
On the other hand. This winter was exceptionally mild.
But on balance. Next winter should be _significantly_ easier to deal with than last (or more likely: with less world-wide side effects)
Just rough numbers of the top of my head: heaters get replaced after around 20 years as is required by e.g. German law. Gas/heat pump has an around 50/50 split for new installations. That would be around 2.5 percent reduction in gas consumption per year.
Less affluent EU countries likely have lower numbers.
IIRC we (Germany) should be getting about heat pump installations of about 1% of the heater installation base in Germany this year [0]. Add to that the number of replacement units [1] and the switch in grid scale units (there are a number of waste heat to Fernwärme projects) I would expect a reduction of 5-10% in the reliance on gas compared to 2022.
It’s not going to change the game completely, but it makes the situation much simpler. Add to that the experience we gained this year, and I would be extremely surprised if we have to resort to “outbid everyone in August and September on the worldwide LNG market”, which is basically what we did last year (to the point of having ships idling of our coast because all storage capacity was full..).
I’m not saying that we don’t need to buy gas on the international markets, just that next winter will be easier to manage than this one. (And this one really wasn’t that hard either.) Which should be a good thing for the rest of the world market too
[0] well really between Nov 22 and Oct23, but that’s relevant for the difference in gas consumption in the next heating period
[1] though it’s entirely anecdotal, but a number of people have replaced their old gas unit this year already. Don’t think that’s overly smart as an idea. But replacing a 30 year old unit with a new one does decrease fuel consumption somewhat
60%+ might be due to industry going bankrupt/decreasing gas consumption as well. Many chemical plants basically stopped since gas prices exploded which will lead to pharma/fertilizer shortages. We'll see what the future holds soon.
It was reported that the total electricity consumption in Finland was 6% lower in 2022 when compared to 2021. December 2022 had 10% lower total electricity usage than December 2021.
What's the insulation and air sealing opportunity like in Europe? I wonder how much of a permanent reduction can be done with retrofits for places that haven't had them done yet.
There is a lot of opportunity, though I'm not sure how much is possible. Some old historical buildings are very hard to make better, and the law may not even allow the required renovations.
However Europe is a large place. Some places are much better than others. Some people live in a "passive house" already and so have no opportunity - or need - to do better, while others live in a house that may as well be a tent for as bad as it leaks. There are places where almost every house is well insulated and so people living there think all of Europe is in great shape, meanwhile the next country can be in terrible shape.
I am under the impression that a lot of people live in rented flats, and good luck having the landlords put some insulation and have the apartment unavailable for some time instead of just renting it to a new person.
Although it seems F and G flats will be illegal to rent soon in my city, so that could help.
Meanwhile, I've had single pane windows in most of my flats. Can't wait to move somewhere better insulated (I can hear the wind hissing through small gaps in the sliding windows right now). This is in a major city in France.
I'm in the UK and it's famously bad due to the age of the housing (lots of it predates WWII or was built cheaply just after WWII).
Multiple successive governments have started grants to share the cost of insulation, however these come with onerous paperwork requirements, complex financing schemes, accreditation schemes for contractors, and then are cancelled 18-24 months in due to low takeup. It's gotten to the point where the small companies that provide these services don't even try to join the schemes because they know it won't work out.
The article does not support the title; gas is only one slice of the whole energy consumption pie. Would have been interesting to see at least some analysis of total energy consumption so that we could have seen how much of this was now actual reductions vs shifting to other forms of energy
You’d have to amplify the effects since nat gas is usually where your marginal capacity comes from.
For electricity, it’s the last to get turned on and first to turn off.
And I don’t imagine a quick change to non-natgas building heating except for those that have existing dual-fuel (e.g. using the wood stove for once). Unsure if oil heat became cheaper than natgas but that’s unusual.
But the whole equation is even more complicated. Did Europe import more ammonium fertilizer instead of making it itself? Then that’s just pushing the energy consumption elsewhere. Same for glassmaking, aluminum smelting, etc.
> The article does not support the title; gas is only one slice of the whole energy consumption pie.
In Europe most homes are heated by natural gas for one. Secondly, there are a lot of combined cycles gas turbines that supply a large part of actual energy demand. And then there's the advantage that is way more cleaner than coal and provides more power per unit. And this is not counting the gas usage in the industry that powers a lot of other things.
If you put everything that relies on gas together you will be surprised about how much we actually rely on gas for.
There is lot of country-to-country variation here; while some countries like Netherlands are completely dependent on gas, others like Sweden barely use it at all. On aggregate level gas is biggest source, but that is driven by few big consumers like Germany and Italy while in most EU countries gas is actually a minority energy source for heating.
Interesting how important one degree is. In my home, if I set the thermostat to 23 degrees, I can comfortably stay in t-shirts, but at 22 degrees it is not comfortable. The cost/energy consumption between 22 and 23 is so small.
I know that this is a very personal preference and also dependent on the house you live in, but 23°C would feel uncomfortably warm for me, even in a t-shirt. We set the thermostat to 19°C this winter and mostly wore sweaters and were fine.
Turning down the heat by 1°C saves about 13% energy, which I wouldn't say is "small": https://cambridgeenergy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/CA... In the report they actually look at a temperature reduction from 19 to 18°C, so dropping from 23 to 22°C should result in an even larger saving.
No shit, my electricity bill doubled while my consumption decreased (Germany)
People can't afford to heat their home, small businesses can't afford to operate (bakers are a good exemple), so they just don't do it = lower energy consumption
Somehow I don't see this, I thought that here in Poland they would react by e.g. disabling lights in storefronts where these are closed, or turn of lights in places which are not visited at night, or just turn off billboard lights to save even tiniest bits of energy. Nope, none of that happened. Instead the electricity costs skyrocketed.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadToo late to help with the winter and to take the worst of the gas prices, but better overall.
Can't self-generate gas, electricity at least a bit even in winter.
Oh, you can! But maybe only enough for cooking (when it’s warm enough in your reactor) not residential heating.
https://www.up-to-us.veolia.com/en/energy/produce-biogas-hom...
I have just paid my monthly bill to the end of March and it still came to £230 for electricity + gas. That's for a period when use of heating had started to drop because of spring in addition to our self-imposed restrictions because of high prices.
> We trained our model to predict the daily average gas demand per person for 26 countries (Britain and all EU member states except Malta and Cyprus, which use little or no gas), for each winter month between January 2013 and February 2022. After the model had learned the relationship between temperatures and gas demand, we gave it real temperatures from this winter and asked it to predict how gas usage might have played out had Russia not sparked an energy crisis.
They released some model around estimated covid deaths that was just completely wrong around China for the time.
welcome to the majority of "modeling".
tuning a model to a statistical sample of the past doesn't give as much assurance about it's predictive power as people think.
then, only in the future do we find that the model failed to predict, by which time they tell us, "yeah, but we have a new model", to which the only appropriate answer is "yeah, but you had the same certainty about your old model that did not work"
I'm not saying that there's no point in modelling: you learn a lot about the dynamics of the system when you are working on the model; but that's not what the resultant model conveys.
This is less insightful then you might think, as it's not limited to modeling. We just have a tendency to use previous observations as truth for future endeavors. Mainly because it's usually fine and works fine.
You can see it in every second discussion about any topic that's currently being researched:
I.e. there is nothing guaranteeing we won't have a super viral virus with 90%+ chance of death. It could happen...
There is nothing guaranteeing that LLMs ability to output relevant data will get better, even if it's been tremendously improved within the last year alone.
You can basically see this in action whenever someone is making a prediction. The likelihood of it coming true might be good enough to work with it, but you can always have something go amiss, or a meteor out of currently unknown materials hits the sun causing a chain reaction which causes it to go supernova...
It usually isn't. John Kay and Mervyn King wrote a good book on this issue. They talk about events in three categories. Deterministic predictions, say where is the earth in five years in the solar system, probabilistic predictions based on past data, i.e. how likely is it that the volcano will explode in the next five years, and the most important one which they call 'radically uncertain' events.
Complex human events are almost always in the last category. Using the language from the first or second class of events to make predictions about completely dynamic systems that are entirely dependent on human intervention that have no clear relationship to the past makes no sense. Using quantitative language in that case is actively misleading because it creates the impression you have any notion of the total space of possible events at all. "X has a 80% of going to war in Y years" is an example. What they really mean to say is "I believe it is likely that..", but that 80% number is completely made up.
Or as Frank Knight put it: “A measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.”
What you seems to have an issue with is how it's often reported on or used in politics... But the people actually creating the models are in my experience always aware that the results are never proving anything by themselves... And blaming the act of modeling for the actions of politicians and reporters is misguided, as they're just using whatever is convenient. If it wasn't a specific model, they'd find something else to validate whatever asinine bullshit they're peddling.
This kind of reminds me of when some journalist on twitter used machine learning to find hate-speech against British politician. Of course the journalist found exactly what they were looking for. There was more hate speech against conservatives... Of course, the journalist was only an amateur in statistics, and used a flawed model, that could have yielded anything they wanted
disclaimer: I didn’t read the article because paywall, and waiting for an archive to be posted.
News source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63330885
Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/petesherlock79/status/159025317484515328...
And a response thread explaining the flaws in the methodology:
As news source: https://novaramedia.com/2022/11/09/the-bbcs-investigation-in...
And on twitter: https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1590403667974582272
Basically the model was developed at google to find “toxic speech”, but the researchers had a very biased definition on what constituted as “toxic”. Racist speech didn’t count, while angry shouts did.
> I entered a selection of racist tweets I’d received in the past year into Perspective’s API, of varying lengths and sentence complexity. Just to make it easy for the machine, I deliberately chose one which included a common racial slur against South Asians.
> None of these were registered as potentially toxic at all by the AI – but, “You’re a fucking G”, a compliment, popped up with a 90.29% likelihood of being toxic.
Your hypotheses that white MPs experience more racist speech than non-white MPs, is testable. I have a pretty strong feeling that you are wrong, but I haven’t seen any data to support either (only anecdotes; and this deeply flawed analysis). What you can do to test your hypotheses is find all British MPs on twitter, scrape all tweets directed at them, and measure the proportion of racist speech against them. However, I advice you to do a more traditional cluster analysis, rather than a training model, the latter is very likely to yield a flawed model just like the journalist’s “8 month labor of love”.
As for who blew up Nord Stream, I don’t think any of us know for sure. Last I heard the US were blaming a pro-Ukrainian group though. I haven’t heard anything about Norway, but haven’t looked into it a lot.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nord-stream-1-gas-pi...
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/09/02/energy/nord-stream-1-pipe...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/energy-crisis-russia-opts-ag...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/05/politics/bill-burns-mosco...
I've checked your account's comments. Frankly, you should be banned from HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anticodon
You're basically a Russian propaganda bot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34643985
> Putin rules the largest country in the world. One of the most rich countries also (in real resources, not just printed money and inflated GDP).
LOL.
EDIT: Another data point would be total solar energy production in winter divided by installed power, per month, in comparison to previous winter.
[1] https://www.shmu.sk/sk/?page=1&id=klimat_operativneudaje1&id...
Having thick isolation between apartments is a waste of resources in most cases - better to put on the whole building.
But if you think logically, there are some things you can't do in apartment, e.g. listen to loud music at night, or drill holes when others might be sleeping.
Turning down heating to zero is one of them. AFAIR in some places there is a limit of how low your heating should be and if it is lower then you still pay a given set price - this is to discourage cheaters.
Insulation is the first thing you do to improve the thermal characteristics of a home. It's not expensive.
Also cooking, refrigeration, lighting, electronics..
Really? GP is effectively acting as an apartment-size layer of insulation between neighbors and the outside. Put another way, if everyone did what GP did (for instance, lower thermostat to 20C) the entire building would be cooler and use less energy. Perhaps GP’s behavior even encouraged others to lower their thermostat because of higher electric bills!
Is that considered a low temp for heating your house? I think that's about a perfect daytime temp summer or winter. At night that would be too warm honestly.
Wat. Do you honestly believe that other apartments are on the inner side of the building and his is on the outer side?
> Put another way, if everyone did what GP did
Everyone would be cold, and the building itself would be cold
I really don't see how that can be possible except for some rare cases
In law? Tenancy agreement?
We keep our heat at 16°C during the day, 15°C at night. We don't have any mold issues.
Furthermore, humidity drops with temperature, as cooler air can't hold as much moisture as warm air.
> humidity drops with temperature, as cooler air can't hold as much moisture as warm air.
This encourages mold
Why would you do this to yourself? I meaning living in such woeful conditions.
Whoops
I don't actually understand the "illegal" argument.
Illegal in what way?
> what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you
if you don't turn up your heater, your neighbors don't have to heat more, the air in an insulator, some heat will leak in your apartment, but will also leak back to theirs, it will soon reach an equilibrium, unless you keep the windows open to cool down your apartment or turn on the AC.
Anyway most of the heat that leaks is through the heating pipes in the walls, it would leak anyway, the temperature of the wall is always gonna be lower than the water in the pipes. So you are heating up your neighbors walls even if your neighbors are keeping the heating on.
It’s a huge waste of money in smaller residential units where people don’t have a garden or car to wash. And sometimes not even responsible for their plumbing or appliance choice/efficiency/maintenance.
Paying $x/month in account fees and meter reading means someone else burns some other resource while you work to conserve (if one even bothers).
It would be too hot if we ran the heat.
This is in Toronto where it’ll average a bit colder than continental Europe.
I used to live in a flat where we never turned the heating on at all. It got so warm we had to open windows even in winter. If my neighbors were responsible, I wish they would have turned their heating down!
* The total energy use would be lowered.
* The energy use of the neighbors would be somewhat higher.
In your idea of "reasonably managed" buildings, everyone is forced to keep the heat on way too high, so a bunch of people open their windows wide open to bring in cool air, resulting in a massive and ridiculous waste of energy. The problem is that some moron in charge of the thermostat wants it much hotter (in the winter) or colder (in the summer) than ecologically- and economically-minded people who prefer to save energy. There's never any kind of democratic system for setting the thermostat, plus different people have different comfort levels.
If the neighbors don't like high utility bills, then they should stop using so much energy. There's nothing requiring them to keep it as warm as they do: it's not hard to put on some warm underwear.
Also: I'm pretty sure that in most reasonable scenarios not heating one apartment in a house that has a decent outer layer of insulation would overall reduce energy input, because the overall average temperature would decline and heat would propagate more efficiently between apartments than to the outside. But I'm no expert so what do I know.
That also means if you turn on your heating, you add to both your bill and some of the shared costs others pay.
I live in a modern, well insulated building as the grandparent comment. I haven't run the heat for years, we need to occasionally open the windows cos it gets too warm and stale obviously, i don't think it makes sense to force me to turn on the heat even more and open the window even more.
edit: this was more a mix of reply to the parent comment and a bit to yours, sorry got it in the wrong spot.
Pretty sure this is incorrect. Conductive heat flow goes with the temperature difference. The higher the temperature difference, the more heat flow. If you kept your room cold versus everyone else, then your room would be leaking heat to the outside less than everyone else's, assuming everything else equal.
the unheated unit wall will have less heat, but the thermostat is checking the air, which is protected by wall.
The above poster didn't have his neighbors turn up the heat for them to be comfortable.
I used to live on the 3rd story interior apartment; had to turn the ac on early in mild winters (southeast us) because one of my neighbors must have enjoyed living in a tropical house.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home...
If he shut off his heat counting on neighbor heat to keep him warm, then maybe it would be freeloading.
But if his heating system was on and he set the thermostat to 20℃, which is in the normal indoor temperature range according to most sources I've seen, and it just happened to never turn on because his neighbors set theirs to higher I wouldn't consider that to be freeloading.
Equally shocking was seeing the gas meter showing GBP15+ per day to heat a rowhouse to what was still an incredibly cold indoor temperature (14-15C) and drafty).
Next time we travel, we'll choose dates better.
We used to have winters with permanent snow on the streets for months.
For the ones who say that this is freeloading on the neighbors: not so much since at least in Germany one pays his own but also proportionally for the whole building (e.g. 50/50 or 70/30).
Which would be fine if it was just me as it could be solved with a hoodie, but I was worried about moisture damaging electronics and causing mould, as well as the comfort of my dog.
I haven't calculated it but I would estimate that I at least halved my usage from previous years.
Our own statistics agency agrees with them: 25% lower gas usage by housholds of which 10% can be attributed to warmer weather. The rest is savings.
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2023/07/gasverbruik-nederlan...
I also mostly showered in gyms, like 4 out of 5 occassions.
I was never absent for more than 5 days anyway, so...
We fought hard to keep it at least under 60 per cent, as you say. If it froze outside, windows in the bedroom would be covered with water droplets in the morning.
(Actually, it froze last night, quite late in the season, and the windows were wet again.)
The falling number of people who actually notice or pay attention to that tone is just as tragic.
Not sure what I was shutting down. Where to now?
All round it’s an absolutely incredible waste.
Between the warm winter and the other mitigations Europe did there was no problem and Europe didn't hurt too much, but that was the goal.
https://www.iea.org/reports/russian-supplies-to-global-energ...
Second, a further ‘important technicality’ is that even if the West (quite correctly) blew up Nord Stream II, it wasn’t in use, so its destruction didn’t disturb energy flows.
Third, Western interventions would also be described as ‘wreaking havoc’, so this isn’t the gotcha proving Western hypocrisy you think it is. And even if it were, the answer is to consistently oppose, not acquiesce, to imperialist aggression; many people are capable of opposing more than one thing.
There is an actual death toll and very real crimes have been committed. Your ‘comparing and contrasting’ needs a bit more thought if you think the consequences equal.
That isn’t the aim though, why are so many attacks targeted at civilians and civilian infrastructure? This isn’t about destroying their military, it’s about destroying Ukrainians and their country.
This simply isn't happening. The better question is why didn't Putin flatten Kiev on day 1, or any day hence, since his goal is "obviously" to kill as many Ukrainians as possible? Washington showed it was possible in Baghdad.
It’s hard to believe you are arguing in good faith with claims like this, and it’s trivial to find examples of attacks on civilians.
The Putin regime would counter with something like ‘but genocide in the Donbas region’, as though that (dubious) claim would make it ok.
What sanctions? Russian gas was basically the only thing the EU wouldn't touch. Gazprom was the one that pulled the plug. The closest we got was refusing to insure oil tankers if Russia sells over $40/bbl, and that was months after Russia cut off European gas.
Gerhard Schröder, former German chancellor, was a big advocate for the Nord Stream pipeline and then was appointed in the board of Gazprom, the sole (Russian) shareholder of the aforementioned stream.
Germany paid the highest price when Russian gas was cut off and the government, led by a coalition that includes the Green party (die Grüne), had to open new coal mines.
Something was obviously wrong in our (the EU) energy policies.
In Washington's fever dream, where it is "right" that Germany should instead buy expensive energy that is shipped across the Atlantic and lose its industrial advantage as as result.
It is totally, comically absurd. Untethered from reality.
For example...
edit: I'm not claiming Washington is better than Germany, I'm from Italy, we are still paying the price for both.
My claim is that EU policies were wrong because each country was playing its own game.
It's hard enough to maintain a federation of neighbor states. It's impossible to do that while also catering to the whims of a distant superpower.
Let's put it this way: there were (are) plans on every desk of every Prime Minister or President in Europe that say "we could let Putin take Ukraine and avoid a conflict that could harm us all".
> It seems that many thoughtful EU statesmen, like Schröder, believe that
I believe one doesn't maintain the spirit of the Budapest memorandum by entering the board of directors of the largest Russian gas supplier and becoming director of the board of Rosneft, largest Russian oil producer, years after Russia invaded Crimea. Don't you think?
But I concede Schroeder that he might have truly believed that he could keep Russia from invading Ukraine. Nonetheless mixing politics and business was a bad mistake on his part.
Like every other (sovereign) state.
Self-interest also implies that it works for Russia. It very clearly hasn’t, and could undo the regime.
The level of violence and aggression is like some mid/late 20th century empire building BS.
It's the US that took out international law and beat it to death in sight of the entire world.
define "works".
there's a big divide in the World on this war, it could be considered a victory for Putin, he made friends fight over it, turned allies into adversaries and made enemies even more suspicious of each other. We are at a peak high level of conflict, like we haven't seen in decades.
An experienced politician should know better.
Germany's gas storage were half-empty in 2021 and prices in Europe were high. Russia had brought a large share of those gas storage facilities under its control. Gas deliveries were lower than usual. In the winter Putin than started the war against the Ukraine. Putin had prepared for the situation - sanctions against Putin were supposed to create energy shortages and fear among European citizens, give how much Europe's energy supply (gas, oil, and not to forget nuclear) depended on Russia. Sanctions were supposed to damage Europes economies, too. And they did, prices went up.
The war was supposed to last only a few days and then Russia would control the Ukraine - Putin would have the Ukraine, the Pipelines, the energy. But that was not what happened.
Putin miscalculated the situation and the reaction. Instead, the Ukraine government survived the first Russian attack, the war is now more than a year old, several stages of sanctions were brought into place, Europe&US delivers support for the Ukraine, Russia's energy industry is now largely decoupled from Europe, Russia is a political paria, and there were hundreds of thousands war victims and millions of refuges, due to Russias war on the Ukraine. Russia has yet failed to react to the political & military pressure against it with any signs of willing to end the war.
There's an important point: how much of this was non-optional vs. luxury? I keep my home at 22, but if I had to, I could probably set it to 19 and tell everyone to wear a sweater in the winter. So not everyone, but definitely some slice of the population probably went from 19 to 16 or lower.
In Canada this can be a serious issue. My gas bill literally doubled for the same volume compared to last winter. This can be a sudden $100-200 extra monthly expense. Luckily it's illegal to ever cut anyone off from gas in the winter... but that doesn't fix the financial catastrophe.
19 is like, the temperature we set during off-peak hours, otherwise it's more like 18 (and we let it coast down during the evening).
Admittedly, it's quite cold when not moving around, so I spent most of the winter with at least 3 sweaters, a hot water bottle, and a blanket (and 2 layers of pants, usually).
When moving around, 17-18 is quite comfortable though, a long sleeved shirt or light sweater is usually enough.
He's Canadian. Over there electricity costs 0.044 € / kWh
https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
Also my hydro is closer to 9 cents.
So yes, there were people for whom the choice was "well I have £5 for today, either it's going in the meter so I can put heating on for a few hours and stay warm, or I need to use it to buy food to feed my family". This isn't some theoretical edge case scenario - this was a dilemma that many British families were faced with this winter.
It wasn't just that, but there definitely was a collective shift toward energy saving, also among those who could've afforded the high energy prices. (at least here in NL)
I agree we shouldn't celebrate the decision of the poor to be energy-frugal, they had no choice in most cases. But those wo had a choice, still chose to conserve energy, often structurally. We should celebrate that for the environmental win it is.
This is interesting. Can you point to the data on this? Do you guys run some kind of tracker study?
My observations:
* I tried to find a contractor for some work on my house. Very few were available, none were available short-term. Most told me this is due to extreme demand for isolation measures.
* Lead times on heat pumps rose to half a year, presumably also due to demand.
* People dressed warmer.
* The most common thermostat temperature for people around me temperature dropped from 20c to 19c.
* "How to isolate" was a very common topic in most Dutch media, far more than in previous winters.
For the working class however, the people really affected by the green policies, it was a matter of choosing between heat and groceries.
For the environment it doesn't matter one bit as China is using more energy than the whole western world combined. It's telling that only the people that can still easily pay the bills see this as something to be celebrated.
And we won the battle.
Sane countries roll out a mini-UBI to account for this.
Canada has a system of quarterly payments for every tax payer to make carbon taxes revenue-neutral (in theory). The belly-aching whining is truly extraordinary.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/child-famil...
Now, if we could convince the government that cutting labour taxes would increase supply of labour during a “labour shortage”, we might be getting somewhere.
> "When both fiscal and economic impacts of the federal fuel charge are considered, we estimate that most households will see a net loss,” PBO Yves Giroux said in a statement following release of the report. “Based on our analysis, most households will pay more in fuel charges and GST—as well as receiving slightly lower incomes—than they will receive in Climate Action Incentive payments.”
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/guilbeault-defends-carbon-pr...
> In provinces where the fee is levied, 90% of the revenues are returned to tax-payers.[4]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada
But if you want to see who’s truly a net winner or loser, if the rich lose more than the poor lose, the poor are still be better off if they’re net recipients of government services.
The only reason I would even suggest that higher energy prices are good for ecology would be that businesses started genuinely doing things to cut consumption, like turning off lit advertising and office lights.
That people are essentially priced out of living healthy is nothing to be celebrated of course, but there is a small silver lining and it should be discussed.
that people cant afford to live is a pretty massive failing of the UK and its policies. That’s been talked to death though.
The financial assistance offered to Swedes for the power consumption is contentious as most people didn’t expect anything to be paid back and it was taken from the energy companies profits too.
It’s not even remotely the same, even though the Murdoch media would like to make you think so.
I live in Sweden with family in the UK, both countries have suffered. It's not the "Murdoch media".
If your food inflation was 10% year 1 and 18% year 2 then your total inflation over two years is 35.7%.
If your food inflation on year 1 is 5% and year 2 is 20% then your total inflation over two years is 26%
You might look at the year two value and claim that inflation is higher, but food prices in the UK relative to income are definitely higher due to inflation (which is seemingly being underreported) over the last 5 years.
To be fair, the lines look quite comparable, but when I compare the monthly shop I do to what my friends and family do, and I factor in salary- it doesn’t nearly paint the picture that Sweden and the UK are comparable.
“Cost of living crisis” is decidedly not a thing in Sweden, not to the same scale, even if there are a contingent of people who struggle a little. Choosing between heating and eating is uniquely a British position in this regard. Similar to gun crime in the US, it seems like the Brit’s are pointing to all other countries as if they have the same issues and of course they do not.
https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/food-inflation
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/food-inflation
https://news.sky.com/story/cost-of-living-utterly-shameful-t...
Lots of people that just sit on the couch under a blanket to stay warm. Apparently, hypothermia with elderly people has been a thing. That also increases the likelihood of strokes and other issues. Especially people with poor circulation. Other issues include respiratory issues due to cold and increased humidity in the apartments.
Using more energy is a a pretty terrible goal.
Rich western countries still depend heavily on other parts of the world being cheap. The last 100 years were the result of the riches extracted from previous centuries of plunder and occupation, and the rush to modernize after the largest government spending projects in history (WWs I and II) induced an unsustainable march toward technological "progress" that could not continue without some later shock and consequent regression due to the inevitabilities (some refer to them merely as externalities) borne of dependence on finite resources. We are currently living through that shock.
The issues the continent has been facing are purely due to inept policy. There is no problem with producing enough low emission/zero emission energy to maintain living standards.
Now, globally living standards have to drastically increase to get rid of poverty. That means drastic increase in consumption as well. The problem that noone is keen to acknowledge is the global population level.
We can achieve energy that is "too cheap to meter".
- Two very efficient and quiet Mitsubishi Electric "nordic climate" version air-to-air heat pumps (MSZ-LN35 and MSZ-LN25) replacing 20 year old much less efficient equivalents - those couldn't really keep up, so additional resistive heating was necessary before the upgrade.
- One very affordable and relatively noisy Chinese noname air-to-air heat pump replacing resistive 10C maintenance heating in a side area.
I ended up having a higher indoor average temperature in the house than in previous years.
(I'm in Sweden.)
I would have paid 5k EUR without this tax deduction.
The installer handles the accounting/tax agency reporting - so the invoice was for 4.5k EUR, not 5k.
IF (say) that 40% is 1,000 EUR you (and partially your state) payed in advance for five years heating.
And you were in a particular situation (already 20 years old heating that probably needed replaacement anyway), if you replaced that with new devices of the same type as the old ones you would have probably not spent so much less.
Usually the break even point should be in the 5 or more years range (unless there are more substantial state incentives) for a "plain" replacement (i.e. with a working furnace + conditioner replaced by a heat pump).
Anecdotally, a couple of years ago (in a shop, not a house, but the reasoning should be the same) I replaced a gas furnace (that was to be replaced anyway) and an air conditioner (that also was likely to fail being old enough) with a new heat pump. Both had a heat exchanger and heated/refreshed water that circulated in a few fan-coils, so there was in practice no need of masonry or hydraulic work besides replacing the (external) units.
Replacing them with a new gas furnace + new conditioning unit was quoted around 4,000 Euro, whilst the new heat pump was quoted around 10,500 Euro, at the time it was possible to have 65% state incentive (directly credited by the supplier), so I paid only around 3,700 Euro, i.e. roughly the same as replacing the old units with the same ones instead of using the new technology.
Without this (very substantial) incentive I calculated that it would have taken a little less than 6 years to get even at a projected saving of around 1,100 Euro/year.
> Much of this was because of rising costs. [..] Britain, Germany and the Netherlands were among the most affected.
Pricing of goods clearly has a strong relation with usage.
> Half of European ammonia production plant closed
> Spiralling gas prices have caused a decline in European ammonia production, thereby aggravating the shortage of fertilisers in Europe. CRU Group analysts estimate that around half of European ammonia production plant and 33% of nitrogen fertiliser plant has closed down as a result
All this will, of course, be reflected in even higher prices for basic food stuff further down the road.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00363...
Also, perhaps some factories will reopen.
Presumably at higher prices, otherwise the European plant fertiliser industry wouldn't have been in active the first place.
> higher prices encourage investment in efficiency improvements
As far as I can understand agribusiness is already highly efficient, not sure it can make up for a double-digit decrease in availability (or increase in prices) for one of its core inputs.
It was unusually warm winter and alternative supplies were obtained. It was looking rough for a while there.
But on balance. Next winter should be _significantly_ easier to deal with than last (or more likely: with less world-wide side effects)
Will there? On a global level, how much can heat pump production output go up in 12 months?
Though I could see Europe bid up supply over others.
Wood stoves I could see a quicker boost in production capacity.
It’s not going to change the game completely, but it makes the situation much simpler. Add to that the experience we gained this year, and I would be extremely surprised if we have to resort to “outbid everyone in August and September on the worldwide LNG market”, which is basically what we did last year (to the point of having ships idling of our coast because all storage capacity was full..).
I’m not saying that we don’t need to buy gas on the international markets, just that next winter will be easier to manage than this one. (And this one really wasn’t that hard either.) Which should be a good thing for the rest of the world market too
[0] well really between Nov 22 and Oct23, but that’s relevant for the difference in gas consumption in the next heating period [1] though it’s entirely anecdotal, but a number of people have replaced their old gas unit this year already. Don’t think that’s overly smart as an idea. But replacing a 30 year old unit with a new one does decrease fuel consumption somewhat
Pretty sure most people could see trough the sensationalism but not sure.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20012582
However Europe is a large place. Some places are much better than others. Some people live in a "passive house" already and so have no opportunity - or need - to do better, while others live in a house that may as well be a tent for as bad as it leaks. There are places where almost every house is well insulated and so people living there think all of Europe is in great shape, meanwhile the next country can be in terrible shape.
Although it seems F and G flats will be illegal to rent soon in my city, so that could help.
Meanwhile, I've had single pane windows in most of my flats. Can't wait to move somewhere better insulated (I can hear the wind hissing through small gaps in the sliding windows right now). This is in a major city in France.
Multiple successive governments have started grants to share the cost of insulation, however these come with onerous paperwork requirements, complex financing schemes, accreditation schemes for contractors, and then are cancelled 18-24 months in due to low takeup. It's gotten to the point where the small companies that provide these services don't even try to join the schemes because they know it won't work out.
For electricity, it’s the last to get turned on and first to turn off.
And I don’t imagine a quick change to non-natgas building heating except for those that have existing dual-fuel (e.g. using the wood stove for once). Unsure if oil heat became cheaper than natgas but that’s unusual.
But the whole equation is even more complicated. Did Europe import more ammonium fertilizer instead of making it itself? Then that’s just pushing the energy consumption elsewhere. Same for glassmaking, aluminum smelting, etc.
In Europe most homes are heated by natural gas for one. Secondly, there are a lot of combined cycles gas turbines that supply a large part of actual energy demand. And then there's the advantage that is way more cleaner than coal and provides more power per unit. And this is not counting the gas usage in the industry that powers a lot of other things.
If you put everything that relies on gas together you will be surprised about how much we actually rely on gas for.
Warmest winter in a long time. Very lucky.
This "winter" was not really a winter. And nobody did any energy cut.
Why not do propaganda when you can.
https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/19/nearly-50-people-died-from-co...
"..was this a result of sound government planning, or good luck?" Jesus, what a question.
Turning down the heat by 1°C saves about 13% energy, which I wouldn't say is "small": https://cambridgeenergy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/CA... In the report they actually look at a temperature reduction from 19 to 18°C, so dropping from 23 to 22°C should result in an even larger saving.
People can't afford to heat their home, small businesses can't afford to operate (bakers are a good exemple), so they just don't do it = lower energy consumption