This is how I think it'll go for the power crisis.
Septembers in Germany usually aren't that cool, and you marginally heat your apartment/house in the month.
So, you come to October. Most people will heat to some degree. This new strategy will be to marginally heat four to six hours a day with natural gas out of the furnace, and then arrive home at 5 PM....to lightly use a medium-wattage heater for the living room. A few blackouts will be reported around Germany for the month.
Then you will come to November. People will have two to three electrical heaters....maybe flipping them on for 30 minutes around 6 AM, and then for two hours in the evening. These blackouts will increase at this point....some for fewer than three minutes....some going to an hour.
December? Now, things will get serious. You probably will have two big-watt heaters in the house to flip on at 6 AM....triggering early AM blackouts, and repeat later at 6 PM.
January and February will probably see a hundred blackouts per day....with people trying to manage a 50-percent use of their natural gas furnace.
Spring will arrive by mid-March, and the blackouts rapidly decrease.
Success? Some big speech by the Chancellor will occur, with everyone getting a pat on the back.
The Putin-analysts? They guessed wrong that Germany would fold, and missed out on tons of natural gas sales. The Russian recession.....as bad, if not worse, than the German one.
Finding restaurants and bars with marginal heat? I think most will heat to barely 15 C (59 F). Some will have a sitting fee of 3 to 5 Euro added....to cover the heat cost.
The concert situation? Most are cancelled by mid-December because of heating cost.
The fracking business? I think the public will demand fracking be allowed in Germany, and massive anger will build with the environmentalists hyped-up to prevent it.
All of this leading to a mess in the Schleswig-Holstein state election? Yeah....I think both the SPD and Green parties will lose support in the May election.
But here's the thing.....whatever occurred over this winter, will likely repeat for the winter approaching in 2023.
3 comments:
I have a small house in the states. I think it might be time to winter there.
I did the math a week ago, with the going rate at 5 times what it was in spring of 2022...for me. It would make sense to set the house here at 8 C (46 F), and take a 100 day trip to Turkey (4-star all-inclusive deal) with the flight/hotel, and spend the savings there (plenty of hotel heat).
I kinda believe by Thanksgiving, the US military in Germany will probably offer return flights for dependents because of the blackout potential here.
I still don't believe the blackouts will add up to more than 30 total hours per month...it'd really have to be crappy planning to go beyond that. Heat-wise? Different story...might not be able to heat more than 12 hours a day...after January.
We have a newly built house with great insulation, a wood burning fireplace and a natural gas heating system with solar heating attached. We will keep the house temp to a min and use the wood heater, plus I recently bought a 3kw generator and lots of potatoes. Guess we will try and weather the storm.
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