That’s a pointless title. The truth is that 5.5 people claim they didn’t heat sufficiently. Whether it was objectively sufficient is a completely different question and going by the actual numbers for usage, households Germans barely reduced their heating. Almost all savings were done by the industry. The the average person in Germany still heats their living room above 20°C.
If you’re healthy then going with 17°C indoors isn’t actually a problem (I tested that myself last year). Having to wear a second sweater or using a blanket isn’t something you should get to complain about when the alternative literally kills people.
“could not”… it’s past tense, in 2022. (also in past tense in the article linked.) I expect that as the first panic around energy vs. ru-ua war settled at the end of 2022 / beg. 2023, prices went back to a normal, although probably not pre-war, levels. (at least that’s what happened in the netherlands.)
Welt has a right wing bias, but it’s fairly reliable with facts. So on direct reports on surveys you can use them as source (just like you can use TAZ for example, just with a left-wing bias).
I’m not talking about “Bild” here. They’re obviously not reliable. Welt however isn’t nearly as polemic. I disagree with a lot they write, but I don’t think they do “hate campaigns” either.
I mean if course they tone it down for the Intellectuals because this type of person is usually more complex and stuff, but they still spread the same narrative
Yeah, they’re conservative. But that doesn’t make them liars. I’m not saying “Welt” is great if you want a balanced viewpoint and they most certainly pick and chose in what they mention, but you can find that on the other side of the political spectrum as well. It’s Bild that doesn’t really have a counterpart.
That’s exactly the point. Unfortunately some people don’t think very far. Maybe his intentions aren’t even bad, he’s just beyond sloppy and shouldn’t live unsupervised.
Surely it is your landlord that doesn't include the heating in the cost of rent who should get fucked, not your neighbour, a fellow renter who for whatever reason just managed to get a better deal than you did? Perhaps they are abusing it slightly, perhaps they have good reason, like an illness, that justifies them opening their window? Either way, only one of them has any impact on you, so why are you angry at the one that has none?
I’m not sure how a personal budget app can help you keep track of a Heizkostenverteiler/heating cost allocator. There’s many unknowns during the operation time and even the landlord is given a year to crunch the numbers before they bill the tenants.
What is progress is that people on district heating now get their kWh consumption readings every few months.
One year, wow. And I thought having the district heating bills lag by 2-3 months due to bureaucracy was bad. 😆 Although in a way I guess it’s more intuitive, if you pay for January of previous year in January. Here we pay for January in March and it’s a bit weird to get a large heating bill when it’s getting warm out.
In Germany you pay “in advance” and then at the end of the year they calculate how much you actually used and give you a bill stating how much you still owe or how much they’ll have to refund.
Thanks Merkel for keeping us dependent on russian gas.
And thanks all the peoplethat voted against efforts to move to renewables, continue to block themand opposed a law that would transition us away from fossil heating.
Also the sale of Oil and Gas heating skyrocketed this year, because of panics that it might be banned soon to install new ones under the new law. The law specified something like 2027, but the German idiot never lets facts get in the way of his Angst and panic pushed by right wing media and politics.
The issue is that the progressive side warned that this will happen and it will get worse as the prices of fossils have to increase. But the conservative majority in Germany wants to get fucked, as long as they can continue fucking the planet, because that is what they always did and identify with.
This artificial panic is for once not about cars, it’s about heating. Too many germans think and or have been conditioned to think that the Greens and other environmentalists want them to just shut off their heating and freeze. The network of gas industry lobbyists is strong in germany and successfully installed a “clean-gas”-campaign in the former government and now convinces even a Green industrial minister to install new and very oversized LNG terminals, in part because of the Green-cold scare.
And thanks all the people that voted against efforts to move to renewables, continue to block them and opposed a law that would transition us away from fossil heating.
I believe those people are called “conservatives”.
Peter Altmaier speaks in the Bundestag for the first time as Environment Minister. He sees the slump in the expansion of photovoltaics as a success. At the same time he is committed to the energy transition. The opposition is sceptical: Black/Yellow coalition government is making a mess of the energy transition. This cannot be “twittered away”.
Federal Environment Minister Peter Altmaier sees initial successes in the attempt to avoid additional costs by expanding renewable energies too quickly. In July, the construction of new solar plants had reached an output of 540 megawatts in July and 320 megawatts in August, said the CDU politician when discussing his ministry’s budget in the Bundestag. In June it was still around 1800 and at the almost 4400 megawatts in the first half of the year. The boom in the first half of the year was also triggered by the announcement of the cuts. The subsidy payments factored into the price of electricity had been cut before the summer break in order to contain costs somewhat. “This shows that our joint law is starting to take effect, working,” said Altmaier.
Altmaier defended his demand that that the expansion of renewable energies cannot continue unabated. For example, nobody could be interested in solar roofs and wind turbines without electricity grids. “A lot has been neglected in the past.”
FDP wants full stop
The generation of electricity from wind, biomass or solar energy is growing significantly faster than planned by the government. As a result, subsidies are also increasing, there are growing calls within the coalition to reorganise subsidies and and put the brakes on expansion. While the FDP and the Ministry of Economic Affairs want to push through new regulations before the federal election in the autumn of 2013, Altmaier has described this as unrealistic. However, Altmaier has also called a revision of the subsidisation necessary. “It is not only important that the energy transition succeeds, it also depends on how it succeeds,” he said.
“You can’t tweet that away”
SPD environmental politician Matthias Miersch criticised Altmaier’s comments, saying that he was doing the business of the opponents of the energy transition in the coalition. This would drive up electricity costs for SMEs and consumers, as the government had tripled the number of companies exempted from the costs of subsidising green electricity. This means that households and small businesses have to pay all the more, said Miersch. In addition, the prices for electricity on the exchanges had fallen due to the increase in green electricity. However, the large suppliers were not passing this on to consumers. Sven-Christian Kindler from the Greens criticised that Altmaier should stand up for renewable energies and put the brakes on their opponents in his own ranks. The FDP is even talking about a moratorium on expansion. “The energy turnaround with Black-Yellow means: this is the turnaround against renewable energies,” he said. He added that the black/yellow coalition was making a mess of the energy transition. “You, Minister Altmaier, can’t witter that away either,” said Kindler. The accusation led to a brief exchange of blows on Twitter. Altmaier wrote about and to Kindler: “I suspect he’s somehow jealous! ;-)” And Kindler replied: “Nope. Good Twitter performance is no substitute for bad environmental policy. You can’t tweet failure in the energy transition beautifully”.
In the Bundestag, Altmaier emphasised that the energy transition is a key project. “If we can show that we are economically successful with a new energy policy, this will be emulated in other countries.” Oil, gas and coal would then be increasingly replaced by renewable energies and climate protection would be advanced accordingly.
Its true of course that this was merkels fault, but lets be honest, its not like the ampel-coalition would have done anything against it, were it not for the war in ukraine
That’s not true. The greens have always pushed for more renewables. The Ukraine war didn’t change that, if anything it forced the ampel to build LNG terminals and subsidize gas.
Unfortunately, the people were neither given nor asked for the “sufficient” temperature. While I don’t appeciate that climate measures are forced on the poor only, there’s many people that waste a lot of energy on heating in the winter. I don’t think 22°C+ should be the norm. If you put on some warm clothes, 18°C are absolutely fine. Personally, I like colder temps indoor and I go for 16°C in the winter as long as there’s no mold issues.
That assumes everyone experiences heat and coldness the same which isn’t the case. I for example need around 20 degrees to feel alright in warm clothing. But on the other hand I am fine in around 43 degrees in the summer and wouldn’t use any AC below that.
Also young kids and older people have different needs as well.
If you wanted to regulate this, the time and money needed to care for everyone who get an exception from this rule could likely be used instead to heat everyone’s home.
I don’t want to regulate heating. I just find it unfortunate that the survey doesn’t mention the target temperature that people couldn’t afford. If someone says “it’s too expensive nowadays to heat my flat to 25°C” it’s a completely different story to “I had to live in constant fear of my water pipes bursting from frost”.
We have an ongoing climate crisis and at the same time there’s an energy crisis due to the war in Russia. I think keeping that in mind, it should be obvious that we have to cut back a bit in terms of comfort.
If it’s indeed more than a third of Germany sitting in their flats freezing that’d be dramatic. But my feeling here it’s at least partly people whining around about their horrible fate.
Headlines like this are perfect propaganda for pro Russian politics and in a second step may harm the people in Ukraine - which in many places are REALLY suffering from cold temperatures. Because they are cut off the grid and/or because their flats were damaged in battle.
Maybe my gut feeling ist wrong and we indeed have a significant number of people living at dangerous temperatures. But from my perspective the entire statistic is useless if we don’t have more information. I just tried to find statistics with groups of the household incomes along with the number of households in that group. If we knew the average household income of someone who is +/- in the 38th percentile of people in Germany, that might be a starting point. However that would still contain many simplifications (How modern is the flat in terms of isolation? What’s the primary energy source etc.? How big is the flat? How many people live in the household?).
It is very difficult to judge on a total number of a statistic unless you know the assumptions and methodologies behind it. In this case they apparantly didn’t even try to work with scientific evidence. They just wanted to create a clickbaity article and thus made the question as broad as possible so as many people as possible will anwer with “yes, I’m affected”.
By the way: wasn’t this thread originally liked to an article from the newspaper “Die Welt” rather than DeStatis? DeStatis from my perspective is much more reliable souce than “Die Welt”. Also the original post reported 38% of people freezing while DeStatis writes about 5.5 million people. 5.5 million would be around 7% which is a HUGE difference and sounds far more realistic.
I personally think it primarily matters if you feel too cold. You are factually not being able to bring your environment to a temperature that feels comfortable for you.
When it's about Germany and from personal experience I would say 90%. Everyone reasonable just put the thermostate down to 17-18°C because they don't need a constant t-shirt temperature inside, even less in the whole house/flat. But the ones complaining... I couldn't enter their homes without starting to sweat. In fact I did not heat at all last year. Even with minus double digits outside (the winter on average wasn't that cold but the first half of December was brutally cold) my rooms would never sink below ~18,5°C as everyone araound me seems to need to live in tropical conditions.
Actually all those ancient looking thingies on heaters are thermostates, with 1 being 12°C, 2 being 16°C and so on up to 5 being really tropical (=28°C) and 3 markings between the numbers one for each degree (plus a star symbol for anti-freezing starting up above 5°C). They may sometimes not be that precisely calibrated after decades but they are still starting up and stopping exactly at a set temperature.
Oh if you have those and they still work then yes. All except one flat I used to live in here in Germany had either one that didn’t work anymore or one that basically just had anti freeze, slightly warm and tropical, no numbers or anything.
If it doesn’t work, you can (should) ask your landlord to replace it. Or spend a few euros and get an electronic one, preferrably with a remote sensor (because I care more about the temperature near my desk or sofa than the one next to the radiator)
You believe 90 % of people in Germany heat their apartments to tropical warmth? Or that 90 % of people saying they couldn’t pay their heating are lying because they want tropical warmth? Just want to confirm if I understand you correctly.
I'm saying that a lot of people in Germany are brain-washed morons. And the overlap between those and the loud ones feeling a need to voice their complains is big.
That doesn't mean that there aren't low-income people that suffer from higher energy prices, but that's more a question of not having enough money to easily handle any unexpected costs. Those are however not typical the people talking loudly about their financial problems in general.
But then Germans just installed a record number of new gas-heaters. Because they are brain-washed by right-wing media with stories of how the evil Greens in government are trying to ban heating and forcing everyone to install those crappy heat-pumps that don't actually work and are just a scam, because obviously physics works differently in the Pensioneer Republic of Germany somehow. As I said I haven't heated for years as I live surrounded by average Germans and they will do a lot of complaining about their required supplementary payments up to a low 4-digit number (the usual renting contracts in Germany include a pre-payment per month for heating calculated based on expected costs per year) instead of smarten up and maybe not heat their mediocre-insulated flats to 24+°C...
(For reference there are my parents who also heat to a more reasonable 20°C. Yes they had to pay money last year -there was a short price-shock after all- but then their pre-payments increased by 20€/month and so they were covered when they got their yearly bill last month -for one year including last winter- that included an additional payment of about 5€ for their real heating costs. Yes, that's still money. No that's not budget breaking for the avergae loud complainer. Ohh and btw... the government implemented a price stop that they are letting run out early this winter as actual prices are down to far below that cap again.)
A lot of the complains are just Germans loving to complain, also fueled by the conservative opposiiton via public media they have big influence on -they were in power for 16 years before after all and for the majority of Germany's existence- telling horror stories about the total failure of government since the day they came into office, so they will get back to government soon for another decade or two of letting everything decay and sabotaging an energy transition that should be in the works for decades already.
You know, the same people that just today loudly announced how Germany's energy transition has failedand we need to go back to coal and nuclear... when that transition is actually a decades long plan and just from November 2022 to November 2023 in comparison the share of renewables -with most things needing years of construction- increased from ~48% to 77%.
EDIT/Addon: It's also very telling that we get the big stories doemstically and internationally how Germans couldn't heat their homes. Have you noticed how they again used total numbers without context? As barely anybody will read the text to see that it's 6,5% of the population, so far below the European average of more than 9%. That's also nothing new: We got the same "Oh, god! Germany is importing nearly 20% of Europeans share of Russian fossil fuels!"-stories last year... and no one could ever be bothered to compare that to share of population, share of industrial production or share of exports/GDP. All those numbers would have shown 20% +/- a few %, showing Germany was exactly on average. But that was not the stories that they wanted to tell.
Reporting badly about Germany sells: Internationally as people love to hear about Germans allegedly suffering and domestically as they do anything to get the failures back into office whose policies for decades lead to todays situation.
And sleeping is about 1/3 of the day, where your metabolism, circulation and breath behave quite differently than during awake times.
If someone feels more comfortable at lower temperatures while awake that is perfectly fine. If all of the population heats less though that will result in more colds.
For countries with temperate or colder climates, 18 °C has been proposed as a safe and well-balanced indoor temperature to protect the health of general populations during cold seasons.
I wish I could do that. Unfortunately my rented flat requires 23°C of heating to prevent mold thanks to bad windows that cannot be fixed due to the house community not wanting to pay for replacing them. And yes I’m practicing proper venting, supported with several devices for timing. I’m so glad I’ll be moving out soon.
I think there are also different mentalities. Just last winter, I had a similar discussion, where someone explained to me that the room heating is meant to fully offset the temperature, so he can walk summer and winter in shorts, t-shirt and barefoot. So it’s 23°C in winter.
While I’m used to wearing jogging pants and socks indoor during winter, so 18°C is fine for me.
Then again, you also have to adjust for personal preferences, different sex, different heating infrastructure etc. But 23°C to go shorts and barefoot in winter was an extreme reveal to me, that people do something like this as well.
You do understand that this is pretty much the same discussion that was made regarding showers in Germany? When we’ll paid politicians gave advice about personal hygiene with a damp cloth instead of taking regular showers?
I actually like colder temperatures, but I’ve noticed that due to the wall structure (or something) the outer walls ‘radiate’ a lot of coldness right onto my bed which is next to said wall. (Of course cold does not radiate, the opposite is true). To keep that within bounds, I’ve found it helpful to keep an awfully high room temp, around 24c.
That and there being serious building structure issues that cause a ton of mold in winter when not heating
No... the minimum requred temperature for everyone I know complaining about those "the evil government wants to ban heating!"-fairy tales wide spread in Germany is 23°-25°C at least or they will instantly start freezing to their deaths somehow.
There is no official proper indoor temperature, but the courts settled at > 20 °C in the day and > 18 °C in the night as “normal”. If it’s not possible to achieve this temperature, the tenant has the right to withhold part of the rent as long as the heating is not fixed. But tenants are allowed to have their appartment as cold as they like as long as they don’t grow mold.
You need to put on the heater in many homes because otherwise you will get mold. It depends on the house, of course. Doesn’t matter how much you cross ventilate. :(
Which is exactly what Putin aims to achieve, in an effort to weaken Western resolve. And be real: it is no coincidence that the politicians opposed to helping people heat their homes affordably are conservatives with questionable views on russia.
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