Everything is significantly more efficient these days. You can run 10-100 modern led lights on the electricity used by 1 conventional bulb, and heat pumps can be upwards of 400% efficient. All of those efficiencies really ad up.
but heat pumps aren’t replacingresistive heating. The vast majority of german houses are heated by oil or gas furnaces. I have lived here for 30+ years and have only ever been in 2 Houses heated by resistive heat. I just looked it up and the percentage was just 5.9% in 1998 and fell to 2.5% in 2025, while the percentage for heat pumps grew from 0.2% to 4.5% in that time. Last year 67.9% of new flats were equipped eith heat pumps. That combined with the imcrease in electric vehicle use should cause an increase in electricity used, and it’s weird that it doesn’t.
Guess cars are just a tiny puzzle piece. And there’s other factors. We’re insulating houses now. Industry and manufacturing got way more efficient. I believe they sometimes can make the same amount of profit with 40-60% less energy now, compared to 15years ago. Every shopping mall got upgrades, fridges in the supermarket have been replaced. All the lightbulbs. They tore down the telephone exchanges here which had been entire buildings with power-hungry tech and now it’s a few servers in the back of one room.
And I mean in the old days we also had our natural gas heating use two or three kilowatts of electricity each day because the water needs to circulate. And the shower and warm water might have been a resistive waterboiler and add some more kWh each day. Which is in fact now being replaced by heatpumps and more nuanced control.
A decent amount of people and farmers also put solar on their roofs to save on electricity and I’m not sure if that’s part of those numbers.
Seems it’s just enough savings to also afford additional EVs and heatpumps, and it’s still less total electricity.
Everything is significantly more efficient these days. You can run 10-100 modern led lights on the electricity used by 1 conventional bulb, and heat pumps can be upwards of 400% efficient. All of those efficiencies really ad up.
but heat pumps aren’t replacingresistive heating. The vast majority of german houses are heated by oil or gas furnaces. I have lived here for 30+ years and have only ever been in 2 Houses heated by resistive heat. I just looked it up and the percentage was just 5.9% in 1998 and fell to 2.5% in 2025, while the percentage for heat pumps grew from 0.2% to 4.5% in that time. Last year 67.9% of new flats were equipped eith heat pumps. That combined with the imcrease in electric vehicle use should cause an increase in electricity used, and it’s weird that it doesn’t.
Guess cars are just a tiny puzzle piece. And there’s other factors. We’re insulating houses now. Industry and manufacturing got way more efficient. I believe they sometimes can make the same amount of profit with 40-60% less energy now, compared to 15years ago. Every shopping mall got upgrades, fridges in the supermarket have been replaced. All the lightbulbs. They tore down the telephone exchanges here which had been entire buildings with power-hungry tech and now it’s a few servers in the back of one room.
And I mean in the old days we also had our natural gas heating use two or three kilowatts of electricity each day because the water needs to circulate. And the shower and warm water might have been a resistive waterboiler and add some more kWh each day. Which is in fact now being replaced by heatpumps and more nuanced control.
A decent amount of people and farmers also put solar on their roofs to save on electricity and I’m not sure if that’s part of those numbers.
Seems it’s just enough savings to also afford additional EVs and heatpumps, and it’s still less total electricity.