It triggers me that there's an obvious typo in 'Oxford' right under the author's name. I wonder if it was originally published like that since 1997 and never caught or changed with all the updates.
I wanted to say the exact same thing! No matter the subject, if you write the name of your own institute with "Oxfrord", I have a hard time taking it seriously.
Geretsried (the town) apparently sits in an ideal location for geothermal power and heat plants, in the same basin as Munich and other surrounding municipalities who have been leveraging geothermal energy to great effect.
For more details what already exists, there is a map of deep geothermal power plants in the "Energie-Atlas Bayern" (in German) published by the government of Bavaria:
> The cause for this geological change has been identified as a drilling operation conducted in the summer and autumn of 2007 to provide geothermal heating to the city hall.
That project was about transferring heat. Perhaps for geothermal electricity production which can happen away from population centres this is less of an issue?
There is a huge difference between "Geothermal Energy" technologies.
The project in Staufen seems to be about a heat pump, which is a really simple technology that can be used pretty much everywhere. The problem seems to be that the drilling hole hit a gypsum layer that started swelling. But this should be pretty easy to know if it is in an area at risk.
Lots of houses here in Sweden has this technology, my house has, and it is a 2 day project to drill a 150m hole for a standalone house and install the heat pump, maybe $20-30k investment.
Wikipedia claims Sweden is #2 in the world for geothermal energy, but it is because of these simple heat pumps.
Why would I ever do a geothermal heat pump for $20-30k when you can get a proper central air heat pump and air handler for less than half? The split unit heat pumps a good portion of the world like would be even cheaper. Not sure how much those would cost.
Geothermal heat pumps are more efficient. They also ignore air temp so they keep working efficiently when cold outside.
The downside is that geothermal is expensive and hard to retrofit. They make the most sense in new construction in cold climates or adding to large properties.
Geothermal heat pumps can work great in retrofitting old system with a water heater. My family house is over 100 year old and the original water heater used coal in 1920, then it was changed to electrical around 1980s, and is now fitted with geothermal heat pumps. Geothermal was installed as a cost saving measure and cut down the heating bill by more than half. All the old cast iron radiators are still the original ones.
Yeah, best deal if you already have water based central heating and radiators. Which is pretty common here in Sweden since don't really have air/gas heating systems, so our houses are not built with air ducts.
Better efficiency (you use maybe 30% of the electricity), connects to the central heating so it supports the entire house.
I installed mine for $15k but that was 20 years ago and included subsidies.
Some projects are a mix of private and public investments. A freeze on the public portion affects the risk/trade-offs of the private investment portion and therefore on the overall project.
Thanks for posting this. I was not inclined to respond after already providing information that he could have viewed when time afforded him. Here's hoping he has time to read a Wikipedia article instead of having people do the work for him.
2-3x more energy efficient + the same performance (if not better) than other (Intel) chips ~2 times more expensive. I don't think there's been another leap like that in the last 20-25 years.
I think it's only a matter of time until the US and Germany stop buying gas from Russia. It's going to cause a lot of pain, especially for us in Germany where nearly a third of gas is imported from Russia. But that's the point, there are no more easy ways to put pressure on Putin. We are all going to feel a lot of pain before things get better.
What is happening to the Russian people is tragic, but it pales in comparison to what the average Ukrainian is experiencing (shortages of food, medicine, water and basic shelter, psychological terror, maimings, deaths).
We have no other means to put pressure on Putin save arming Ukraine or attacking Russia.
> I think it's only a matter of time until the US and Germany stop buying gas from Russia. It's going to cause a lot of pain, especially for us in Germany where nearly a third of gas is imported from Russia.
We are going to feel a lot of pain anyway and more the longer that this goes on. Gas prices are already through the roof. Ukraine and Russia are both major grain exporters, meaning this war will have a devastating impact around the world this year. We should be doing everything we can to make sure it stops sooner rather than later even if it means more pain now.
Sure we do. Currently we are giving Putin up to a Billion USD per day to buy his oil and gas.
If we cut off this market it would cripple Putin’s war in Ukraine much more effectively than arming Ukrainians on the ground.
Add in energy subsidies to affected customers in need of economic support to offset the inevitable increase in oil/gas prices in the short-term and we can blunt the worst of the pain on regular Europeans.
Why is this proposal not even worth considering? Broad economic sanctions are most definitely not the only option to pressure Putin.
Thank you for making my point about dis-information in a time of war. This is fake news by CNN. It is easy to disprove and it isn’t the only example from western media.
For example 6 days ago The NY Times reported that Shell had stopped buying oil from Russia [0] but that was also fake news.
Shell is now defending their decision to buy 100 metric tons of aural crude from Russia according to multiple reports in the past 24 hours. [1]
Nothing changed, It was all just PR spin to manipulate public opinion. It looks like it worked.
The other points are fine, but a 3 or 4-year old does not understand nuance or personal responsibility. I think that in general German society encourages a strong sense of personality responsibility as part of developing healthy children and adults, so kind of a weird thing to pick on.
Personally I jaywalk when it's safe and no kids are around.
Is it jaywalking when you're not stepping in front of a car?
When I hear the word, I tend to think of people who take for granted that a car will stop for them and probably even conspicuously turn away from it.
I don't think of it as meaning "crossing the street where there is no marked crosswalk" absent traffic, or "crossing the street at an intersection" even if there is no marking and someone who wants to make a turn.
