In March 2009 an EU regulation began to take the ordinary incandescent light bulb off the market. Soon such bulbs were imported into Germany as Heatballs, small heaters. The argument was that a bulb gives off 95 percent of its energy as heat.
In July 2011 the administrative court in Aachen was not convinced. Consumers would see Heatballs as bulbs for lighting, the court said, not as small heaters.
Not every German welcomed a more efficient product when the law required it.
Porsche sold 50,000 cars in 1986 and only 14,000 in 1993. That year it lost 239 million marks. Wendelin Wiedeking brought in Japanese consultants led by Chihiro Nakao. To Nakao the plant looked more like a warehouse than a factory. He handed Wiedeking a circular saw and told him to cut the storage shelves along the line in half.
Porsche took lean management and lean production from Japan. Wiedeking said: Nicht hohe Investitionen, sondern veränderte Prozesse sind der Schlüssel zum Erfolg. Not high investment but changed processes are the key to success. According to the magazine IndustryWeek, the hours needed to build a 911 later fell from 120 to 60.
Porsche’s efficient manufacturing was partly learned in Japan.
Vergeude keine Energie, verwerte sie! Do not waste energy, use it! The sentence is known as the energetic imperative of the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. It was meant as a general basic law of technology.
In May 2022 the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg announced die effizienteste Solarzelle der Welt, the most efficient solar cell in the world. Its Wirkungsgrad, its efficiency, was 47.6 percent. The institute had raised the value from 46.1 percent. The four-junction cell was measured under sunlight concentrated 665 times.
Volkswagen calls it the Modularer Querbaukasten, the modular transverse toolkit, or MQB. Many models share the same parts and the same basic structure. The first Golf built on it left the line in Wolfsburg in October 2012. Within ten years more than 32 million vehicles had been built on the platform.
According to Volkswagen, the number of engine and transmission variants fell by almost half. The air-conditioning units went from 102 versions to 28. For the Golf of 2019, about 80 percent of the existing body-shop equipment was used again.
In 2002 Ferdinand Piëch, then chairman of Volkswagen’s board of management, drove a concept car from Wolfsburg to Hamburg. The study was called 1L, for one liter of fuel per 100 kilometers.
The production version was the XL1, a plug-in hybrid. Volkswagen expected it to use 0.9 liters per 100 kilometers. It weighed 795 kilograms, and its drag coefficient was about 0.19. A limited production began in 2013, at a price from 111,000 euros. Sources differ on the number built, 200 or 250.
German pupils learn the ökonomisches Prinzip, the economic principle. It says that the ratio of effort to result should be as favorable as possible. It has two forms. The Maximalprinzip gets the most out of given means. The Minimalprinzip reaches a given goal with the least means, and it is also called the Sparprinzip, the saving principle.
School material from the publisher Klett explains it with a purchase. A man compares several offers for a laser printer.
The German driving license regulation sets what a candidate must show. In the theory test, the candidate must know how to drive in an environmentally aware and energy-saving way. In the practical test, the candidate must show that he or she masters eine umweltbewusste und energiesparende Fahrweise, an environmentally aware and energy-saving way of driving.
The goal of driving school training is set in its own regulation: a safe, responsible and environmentally aware road user.
During the energy crisis of 2022, a federal energy-saving ordinance applied for six months from 1 September. Its full name is Verordnung zur Sicherung der Energieversorgung über kurzfristig wirksame Maßnahmen. Illuminated advertising had to be switched off from 10 p.m. until 4 p.m. the next day. Shops had to keep their doors closed when an open door let heat escape. In offices, 19 degrees became permissible instead of 20.
In most German apartment buildings with central heating, a small meter sits on each radiator, the Heizkostenverteiler. The consumption part of each household’s heating bill is calculated from it. The rule behind it is the heating cost ordinance, introduced in February 1981 to save energy.
The ordinance requires that at least 50 and at most 70 percent of the cost of central heating be billed by measured consumption. The rest is shared by floor area.
A household that heats less pays a smaller share.