Average salaries for software engineering seem higher compared to other professions because the jobs are mostly in the most expensive to live cities. There's no swe jobs in smaller towns but they're jobs for e.g. accountants.
Actually the prices for new cars seem to be now lower than in 2022 where I live in Europe. Though this could be attributed as well to the competition from Chinese manufacturers.
All the ideas and regulations introduced by the European Union over the last 10 years regarding cars have been bad, they have done more harm than good and have unnecessarily increased car prices. We should return to the standards from 10 years ago, they were more reasonable and based on common sense. But I guess this is the consequence of politicians and bureucrats living in the ivory tower.
It's not only the price of gas but also the price of the co2 emissions. I'm really surprised the uk didn't get rid of it when they left the eu. It's one of the most stupid things possible. It only makes everything more expensive.
That would make British people less poor for once so they decided against it. Managed economic decline and mass immigration go hand in hand with globalism and ‘global warming’ extremists.
You can, and should, over the entirety of europe apart from the northern parts of the nordic countries electric heat pumps are now simply more efficient than gas powered furnaces. This is true even if powered by gas based electricity - but obviously makes it possible to power them via renewables as well.
People in Quebec (Canada), which is colder than just about all of Europe, have been providing heating in winter using renewables for decades (thanks to an excess of renewables).
There are a gazillion battery techs being developed right now (regular lithium ion - with variations like NMC, LFP, ...), solid state lithion ion, sodium ion.
You can over provision solar as someone said.
There's geothermal, tidal, etc.
Long distance high voltage electricity transmission at scale.
Electricity is a marvel and we're just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with it. Betting against it is like betting against electronics, a risky proposition.
For sure. Heat pumps aren't the best option everywhere (though modern heat pumps probably function acceptably at lower temperatures than most people realize), but if you need to do electric heating, they are the best option most places.
For "human" temperatures don't they just degrade back to the efficiency of resistive heating? Or are some places actually cold enough to push the factor below 1?
The way the EU forces the electricity market to operate makes them completely unprofitable. Renewables are always given priority in the market, which results in other power plants operating at a capacity factor of 30-40%. Since nuclear power plants are mostly capital expenditure-intensive, this makes the electricity they produce absurdly expensive.
Because the way how the EU electricity market operates first to supply electric power are the power plants with the lowest operating costs. This are usually renewables and nuclear power plants. Both are capital expensive and cheap in operating costs.
Usually the capacity factor of European nuclear reactors is higher than 60%.
That’s just a consequence of how they bid. The marginal cost for a renewable plant is zero. It’s non-zero for nuclear power.
But nuclear power don’t want to shut down since that both increases wear and tear and makes them unable to capture revenue when the prices become higher again.
So they bid negative expecting to eat the losses and let more flexible plant shut down first.
Hydropower and solar have much lower operating costs.
All thermal power plants experience wear and tear and have to be regularly repaired and maintained. Nuclear power plants can load-follow (within technical limits), but as the operating costs (maintance, repair, staffing, fuel) are much lower then capital costs it makes economic sense to run them at full power.
In some countries, it's common to register a sole proprietorship in addition to a limited liability company and bill the company from the sole proprietorship to avoid double taxation. However, I suppose this would not be allowed in Germany.
reply