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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • It’s not true in general. It can be cheaper, but it can be more expensive. Source: I have traveled either plane or HSR twice a week for the last ten years, journeys between 200 and 500km. Anything longer than that I always fly, for time reasons (I try to avoid sleeping in hotels so I can be with my kids the next morning).

    In general, it depends on the distance, country and day of the week. Italy and Spain are great for trains, Germany much more hit and miss, but you can still get 19 or 29 euro tickets. Ryanair used to offer those but it’s much more rare nowadays. I have no data for France but I hear TGV is also good and they are working on reducing domestic flights.

    For my typical journey (usually booked with short notice, 1 to 3 weeks) I pay a maximum of 220 euros for train, the average a bit lower, and about 500 for flights, average maybe 400. And this is comparing first class, flex ticket for train versus economy class cheapest ticket for plane.

    Full disclosure: the train price includes a 50% discount that I get for 400 euros a year (BahnCard50). The ammortized price of the card is well under 10 euros a ticket.

    Fun fact: you can get a BahnCard100 which gives you a 100% discount on tickets, so flat fee for a while year. My company policy does not allow this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


  • You can cut it, but how? If you don’t have a system in place, thousands of private home will be injecting power into the grid because they don’t know any better. In extreme cases it could overload the grid. Not really explode, but cause voltage spikes, trip breakers, and ultimately (and somehow ironically) cause a blackout as the grid protection mechanisms kick in.

    I Germany all new installations need to be able to be remotely controlled to prevent grid feed in when there’s too much production.

    Disclaimer: hobby self-taught solar panel enthusiast, not an electrician or grid engineer.


  • The idea is there such an abundance of energy that they are willing to pay you to consume some of it to keep the net stable at 50 (or 60) Herz.

    In practice, there are always taxes and surcharges that the final prices is not negative, but is lower than the surcharges themselves.

    Too much energy is not good for the system, so there must be a way of compensation.