The principle of supply and demand is invoked in a wide variety of contexts – but it is now important that those who are responsible for the demand also know about the supply. In a specific case, this would be the demand for sustainably generated electricity and information about where it is available and especially when, as the energy monitor now presented by the city of Ebersberg does.
Shaping one’s own energy consumption in an environmentally friendly and climate-friendly manner is a concern for many people, and recently there has certainly been an additional incentive for some people that the consumption of energy should not be used to finance rogue states all over the world. The latter in particular can best be achieved by avoiding the use of fossil fuels as far as possible, after all these come almost exclusively from countries where at least one has no problems massacring one’s own people – sometimes those in the neighboring country as well.
Of course, this gentle energy consumption would be easiest if everyone could meet their needs completely independently – which, however, only applies to the very few people who live in their own plus-energy house. Everyone else – including those who have signed a contract for green electricity with their energy supplier – draws the same electricity mix from the grid, which is sometimes more or less sustainable depending on the ratio of generation and consumption. How much electricity currently comes from which source is completely unknown to end consumers.
Such overviews, as now shown by the Ebersberg energy monitor, offer a bit of enlightenment. If you value using the electricity that is generated regionally and in an environmentally friendly way, you can choose the right time slot for it here. Of course, this will not always be possible for everything, but leaving the washing machine running at lunchtime at the weekend could actually noticeably increase the proportion of real green electricity in your own energy balance. Or who doesn’t plug the electric car into the socket immediately after work on Friday, but waits until Sunday when the electricity from the PV systems is not needed in the commercial area.
The energy monitor for an individual municipality is of course not representative; for Ebersberg, for example, it does not say anything about whether the electricity currently flowing in from the grid comes from a lignite, oil-fired power plant, a biogas plant or a wind turbine. To do this, the overview would have to be larger, which is certainly a worthwhile task for the future. However, the energy monitor in its current form is more than just a gimmick. On the one hand, it might encourage one or the other to use it more sustainably. On the other hand, it shows at the local level how much has already been achieved on the way to the energy transition and what still needs to be done.