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Ask Slashdot: Minimizing Oil and Gas Dependency In a Central European City?
An anonymous reader writes I live in a big city in central Europe. As most of you know from recent news, most of Europe's (and quite a bit of China's) gas supply comes from Russia and is very likely to be cut off several times during the next few winters (China's time will come in later years). What many might not know is that not just our natural gas supply, but also our petrol ('gas' for the Americans in the audience) often comes partly from Russia and some of our electricity comes from gas powered stations. Most of our leaders, at least in Germany and Hungary, are in bed with the Russians and likely won't do anything about fuel security. I live in an building with a south-facing roof and I own the roof space but I don't have enough land here to put a wind turbine or something similar on. Can anyone make good suggestions for ways to cut down my dependence on unreliable power supplies? Extra points for environmentalism, but I am even willing to pay more to be sure the heating is there in winter and my server keeps running.
I think most Europeans think they have cold winters, but they don't really know what "winter" means. Hint: if your entire country gets paralyzed by less than 30cm of snow, you don't get bad winters. If you rarely dip below zero Celsius during daytime, you don't get bad winters.
It always amuses me to see French exchange students arrive here. The ones with a modicum of sense will have talked with people here so they'd get good winter gear ASAP, but a few think that they're used to the cold. Then they get their first -25C in January.