Whether history might not repeat itself, asks Nico Beckert with regard to the market for heat pumps. German companies were once world leaders in the solar industry, but today Chinese suppliers dominate the market. Now the Chinese are also highly active in the booming heat pump market. If they were to drive European suppliers out of the market again through favorable prices, then, Marx would be right, history would repeat itself as a farce.
The committees in the EU Parliament have reached agreement on their position on the AI Act. This means that Brussels is already further ahead than Berlin. The German government has not yet reached an agreed position, analyzes Corinna Visser.
According to the will of the EU Parliament, the advertising industry may no longer make flowery advertising promises such as “environmentally friendly” or “climate neutral”. The truthfulness of these statements would have to be proven in detail. And sustainability seals are also subject to strict scrutiny. Leonie Düngefeld knows the details.
The defense and technology group Rheinmetall has won a 770 million euro contract for the production of heat pump compressors. The company is thus investing in an important new business field and could simultaneously reduce the dependence of the European heat pump industry on international supply chains. The company has already been awarded the contract in late 2022 – but it only became recently known that the order is for heat pump compressors.
Rheinmetall’s investments are an “important decision“, Thomas Nowak, Secretary General of the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA) told Table.Media. There is a strong dependence on Asia for compressors, according to Nowak. Rheinmetall’s investment would give heat pump manufacturers another purchase option for key components and create “a sourcing point within Europe”, Nowak said. The creation of globally distributed production standard locations would be useful to make the heat pump ramp-up “resilient”, the expert said.
The compressors are often the most expensive component of heat pumps. They account for over a quarter of the costs and are responsible for compressing and heating the coolant.
The Rheinmetall example and the current dependence on imported compressors raise a fundamental question: Will China, with its advantages in the mass production of industrial goods, also force European manufacturers out of the booming heat pump market by offering low prices? Will the story of the solar manufacturing industry, which has practically completely migrated to China, repeat itself?
So far, experts do not see any clear indications of this. It is not certain that the People’s Republic will take over the next market for energy transition products. There are several reasons for this, which show some differences to the rise of the solar industry:
Overall, European manufacturers are heavily dependent on China and Asia for some components. “There can be shortages of certain products here,” says Jan Rosenow, European CEO of the think tank Regulatory Assistance Project. During the Covid pandemic, for example, microchips were in short supply, as were unremarkable goods such as the rubber feet that heat pumps stand on. The current dependence on Asia, however, mainly concerns compressors, says Nowak.
China is also one of the world’s most important manufacturers of heat pumps. It holds a market share of 40 percent of global production. European imports of Chinese heat pumps and components more than quadrupled between 2018 and 2022, from €327 million to €1.37 billion (both heat pumps and “reversible heat pumps”). According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China is one of the few manufacturers with a “significant share” of heat pump exports. The European market is booming. By 2030, six million heat pumps are expected to be installed in Germany alone – an increase of 500,000 units per year. The heat pump industry is currently investing far too little in new production facilities to meet global demand, the IEA writes.
According to experts, China will not shake up the heat pump market in the near future. “I can hardly imagine a similar development of dependencies as in the solar industry,” says Jan Rosenow, for example. This has multiple reasons:
With a clear majority, the members of the lead committees for Internal Market and Civil Liberties (IMCO and LIBE) in the EU Parliament adopted their position on the AI Act. In the end, 83 MEPs voted in favor of the compromise paper, with seven votes against and twelve abstentions. The plenary vote is scheduled to take place in the June 12-15 session.
It is also planned that the start of the trialogue on the AI Act will take place under the Swedish Council presidency. But the German government still has homework to do before that can happen. Although it agreed to the general direction of the Council last December, it still sees a need for change.
The vote in Parliament went surprisingly smoothly. The critical point was the vote on compromise package 11A, which deals with the ban on real-time remote biometric surveillance. The EPP wanted a separate vote on this issue. And indeed, the result here was less clear than for the overall paper: 57 voted in favor, 36 against and ten abstained. The ban has thus been adopted nonetheless.
As can be seen from the voting list, EPP MEP Andreas Schwab was among those who abstained from voting on the overall package. He urged that the additional rules for AI must also create real added value for companies and users, because Europe is in competition with the USA and China here.
Cornelia Ernst, data protection spokeswoman for the Left Party in the European Parliament, voted against the compromise. In her opinion, the parliamentary position contains many positive aspects, such as the ban on discriminatory biometric categorization, predictive policing and emotion recognition. Still, some loopholes remained in the parliamentary position. “The whole approach of risk-based regulation of AI was extremely weakened in the negotiations”.
The European consumer association BEUC welcomed the fact that the Parliament had strengthened consumer protection in the AI Act. “Consumers can breathe a sigh of relief in light of the Commission’s disappointing proposals and the stance taken by member states so far”, said Director General Ursula Pachl. The proposed bans on the use of facial recognition in publicly accessible spaces or social scoring by private entities are a big step forward, she said. “In the case of ChatGPT, we welcome the Parliament’s determination to regulate large-scale voice models“, Pachl said. However, it remains to be seen whether this will be enough to adequately protect consumers.
The German government intends to play an active role in the upcoming negotiations with the Council. This was communicated by the Federal Ministries of Justice and Economic Affairs, which are jointly responsible, at the request of Table.Media. According to the statement, both basically consider “a balance between openness to innovation and a legal framework that defines standards for trustworthy AI” to be necessary.
So far, however, the German government has behaved inconsistently. It has supported the Council’s decision. In a statement for the minutes, however, it refers to its opinion (dated Nov. 8, 2022), in which it again points out that there is still room for improvement.
This also relates specifically to the important question of Germany’s position on the ban on biometric remote surveillance in public spaces. The coalition agreement states that this should be “ruled out under European law”. However, this does not apply to “retrograde biometric identification, for example during the evaluation of evidence”. Discussions on banning remote biometric identification systems are ongoing. “We reserve the right to make further comments”.
The German government also sees potential for improvement in general-purpose AI systems such as Chat GPT. Germany has made it clear that for general-purpose AI, it is important “that the requirements are predictable for companies, that they are relevant and proportionate requirements, and that responsibilities can be traced”. Opinion formation is ongoing. “Innovation attentisms are to be avoided”, the ministries’ letter states.
What is also interesting to note, with regard to the implementing acts: “With a view to rapid legal certainty for companies and investors, a comprehensive regulation in the AI Regulation itself should be sought for the area of general-purpose AI, if possible”.
The opposition, at any rate, still sees a lot of work ahead for the German government: “I think it is important that the German government enters the trilogue negotiations with a united position. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case”, said CDU MEP Ronja Kemmer in an interview with Table.Media. In response to her question about the German government’s stance on generative AI – whether or not it should be included in the high-risk area – Kemmer said that the German government did not have a united position on this. “Germany cannot go into the trilogue negotiations like this”, says Kemmer, AI expert for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and chairwoman of the Digital Committee. “Germany must take a leading role in the negotiations here, and that won’t work if the governing parties can’t find a clear position”.
Basically, Kemmer fears that, contrary to what the Commission originally envisaged, instead of a share of only 15 percent of all AI systems, it is rather the other way around that 85 percent of all AI systems will now fall into the class of high-risk systems and thus be subject to regulation. This could deter startups and SMEs in particular from using AI because of the high bureaucratic requirements. “Then Europe is not an attractive location for AI”, Kemmer fears. “We need good framework conditions so that large language models like ChatGPT are also developed in Germany or Europe in the future”.
The publication of the book and the numerous comments have made Emmanuel Macron quite angry, as reported by the Canard Enchaîné. “Everyone will wonder how the economy minister can write so many books”, the head of state complained. “That ministers publish books instead of taking care of their ministry, that doesn’t seem serious. And then these erotic scenes…”. Also according to Canard Enchaîné, Bruno Le Maire told the President of the Republic that his contract with the publisher Gallimard obliged him to publish this new book because of the advance he had received.
In fact, “La fugue américaine” is the fifth book published in four years by Bruno Le Maire, who has been severely challenged by the Covid crisis and now with inflation. Bruno Le Maire justified himself on Twitter on April 27, stating that he was “dedicated to serving the French” and assuring that “two things are non-negotiable: Spending time with my loved ones and cultivating my passion”. And literature in particular is his great passion: “Literature allows me to escape from everyday life”.
Being a minister means – in principle – devoting body and soul to one’s role. If you assume that political competition is always a bit of a race for popularity, then it’s also a race for visibility. The role of minister in France is an executive role that confers visibility only in the context of loyalty to the other ministers and the head of state. They are also locked into a specific domain, that of their ministry, and cannot claim a full and comprehensive personality. So from the perspective of political competition, being a minister is good, it gives visibility, but it is a visibility that has its limits.
The fact that he is writing a book allows Bruno Le Maire to distinguish himself from the government and grow intellectually. The Minister of Economy, a good little soldier who is very loyal to the Prime Minister and the President, is condemned to a certain invisibility and remains confined to rather technical subjects. The fact that he has written all these books allows him to exist in a different way and, above all, to step out of the shadow of Emmanuel Macron. In other words, he can work on his presidential stature.
In France, the book is associated in the political world with the figure of the president in the history of the V Republic, precisely with the Mémoires de Guerre by General de Gaulle or with Démocratie Française by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. President Macron has referred several times to his missed vocation as a writer while making clear his fondness for literature. His official photo, for example, features André Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir alongside Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs.
Mais voilà. A president who writes would be suspected of deserting his task and cutting himself off from the population. And this accusation is already persistent in France against Emmanuel Macron. The latter simply cannot use the aura of the literary world to his advantage. Not so Bruno Le Maire, who has understood this very well – and who is also thinking about the end of Emmanuel Macron’s second and last term in office.
Whether history might not repeat itself, asks Nico Beckert with regard to the market for heat pumps. German companies were once world leaders in the solar industry, but today Chinese suppliers dominate the market. Now the Chinese are also highly active in the booming heat pump market. If they were to drive European suppliers out of the market again through favorable prices, then, Marx would be right, history would repeat itself as a farce.
The committees in the EU Parliament have reached agreement on their position on the AI Act. This means that Brussels is already further ahead than Berlin. The German government has not yet reached an agreed position, analyzes Corinna Visser.
According to the will of the EU Parliament, the advertising industry may no longer make flowery advertising promises such as “environmentally friendly” or “climate neutral”. The truthfulness of these statements would have to be proven in detail. And sustainability seals are also subject to strict scrutiny. Leonie Düngefeld knows the details.
The defense and technology group Rheinmetall has won a 770 million euro contract for the production of heat pump compressors. The company is thus investing in an important new business field and could simultaneously reduce the dependence of the European heat pump industry on international supply chains. The company has already been awarded the contract in late 2022 – but it only became recently known that the order is for heat pump compressors.
Rheinmetall’s investments are an “important decision“, Thomas Nowak, Secretary General of the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA) told Table.Media. There is a strong dependence on Asia for compressors, according to Nowak. Rheinmetall’s investment would give heat pump manufacturers another purchase option for key components and create “a sourcing point within Europe”, Nowak said. The creation of globally distributed production standard locations would be useful to make the heat pump ramp-up “resilient”, the expert said.
The compressors are often the most expensive component of heat pumps. They account for over a quarter of the costs and are responsible for compressing and heating the coolant.
The Rheinmetall example and the current dependence on imported compressors raise a fundamental question: Will China, with its advantages in the mass production of industrial goods, also force European manufacturers out of the booming heat pump market by offering low prices? Will the story of the solar manufacturing industry, which has practically completely migrated to China, repeat itself?
So far, experts do not see any clear indications of this. It is not certain that the People’s Republic will take over the next market for energy transition products. There are several reasons for this, which show some differences to the rise of the solar industry:
Overall, European manufacturers are heavily dependent on China and Asia for some components. “There can be shortages of certain products here,” says Jan Rosenow, European CEO of the think tank Regulatory Assistance Project. During the Covid pandemic, for example, microchips were in short supply, as were unremarkable goods such as the rubber feet that heat pumps stand on. The current dependence on Asia, however, mainly concerns compressors, says Nowak.
China is also one of the world’s most important manufacturers of heat pumps. It holds a market share of 40 percent of global production. European imports of Chinese heat pumps and components more than quadrupled between 2018 and 2022, from €327 million to €1.37 billion (both heat pumps and “reversible heat pumps”). According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China is one of the few manufacturers with a “significant share” of heat pump exports. The European market is booming. By 2030, six million heat pumps are expected to be installed in Germany alone – an increase of 500,000 units per year. The heat pump industry is currently investing far too little in new production facilities to meet global demand, the IEA writes.
According to experts, China will not shake up the heat pump market in the near future. “I can hardly imagine a similar development of dependencies as in the solar industry,” says Jan Rosenow, for example. This has multiple reasons:
With a clear majority, the members of the lead committees for Internal Market and Civil Liberties (IMCO and LIBE) in the EU Parliament adopted their position on the AI Act. In the end, 83 MEPs voted in favor of the compromise paper, with seven votes against and twelve abstentions. The plenary vote is scheduled to take place in the June 12-15 session.
It is also planned that the start of the trialogue on the AI Act will take place under the Swedish Council presidency. But the German government still has homework to do before that can happen. Although it agreed to the general direction of the Council last December, it still sees a need for change.
The vote in Parliament went surprisingly smoothly. The critical point was the vote on compromise package 11A, which deals with the ban on real-time remote biometric surveillance. The EPP wanted a separate vote on this issue. And indeed, the result here was less clear than for the overall paper: 57 voted in favor, 36 against and ten abstained. The ban has thus been adopted nonetheless.
As can be seen from the voting list, EPP MEP Andreas Schwab was among those who abstained from voting on the overall package. He urged that the additional rules for AI must also create real added value for companies and users, because Europe is in competition with the USA and China here.
Cornelia Ernst, data protection spokeswoman for the Left Party in the European Parliament, voted against the compromise. In her opinion, the parliamentary position contains many positive aspects, such as the ban on discriminatory biometric categorization, predictive policing and emotion recognition. Still, some loopholes remained in the parliamentary position. “The whole approach of risk-based regulation of AI was extremely weakened in the negotiations”.
The European consumer association BEUC welcomed the fact that the Parliament had strengthened consumer protection in the AI Act. “Consumers can breathe a sigh of relief in light of the Commission’s disappointing proposals and the stance taken by member states so far”, said Director General Ursula Pachl. The proposed bans on the use of facial recognition in publicly accessible spaces or social scoring by private entities are a big step forward, she said. “In the case of ChatGPT, we welcome the Parliament’s determination to regulate large-scale voice models“, Pachl said. However, it remains to be seen whether this will be enough to adequately protect consumers.
The German government intends to play an active role in the upcoming negotiations with the Council. This was communicated by the Federal Ministries of Justice and Economic Affairs, which are jointly responsible, at the request of Table.Media. According to the statement, both basically consider “a balance between openness to innovation and a legal framework that defines standards for trustworthy AI” to be necessary.
So far, however, the German government has behaved inconsistently. It has supported the Council’s decision. In a statement for the minutes, however, it refers to its opinion (dated Nov. 8, 2022), in which it again points out that there is still room for improvement.
This also relates specifically to the important question of Germany’s position on the ban on biometric remote surveillance in public spaces. The coalition agreement states that this should be “ruled out under European law”. However, this does not apply to “retrograde biometric identification, for example during the evaluation of evidence”. Discussions on banning remote biometric identification systems are ongoing. “We reserve the right to make further comments”.
The German government also sees potential for improvement in general-purpose AI systems such as Chat GPT. Germany has made it clear that for general-purpose AI, it is important “that the requirements are predictable for companies, that they are relevant and proportionate requirements, and that responsibilities can be traced”. Opinion formation is ongoing. “Innovation attentisms are to be avoided”, the ministries’ letter states.
What is also interesting to note, with regard to the implementing acts: “With a view to rapid legal certainty for companies and investors, a comprehensive regulation in the AI Regulation itself should be sought for the area of general-purpose AI, if possible”.
The opposition, at any rate, still sees a lot of work ahead for the German government: “I think it is important that the German government enters the trilogue negotiations with a united position. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case”, said CDU MEP Ronja Kemmer in an interview with Table.Media. In response to her question about the German government’s stance on generative AI – whether or not it should be included in the high-risk area – Kemmer said that the German government did not have a united position on this. “Germany cannot go into the trilogue negotiations like this”, says Kemmer, AI expert for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and chairwoman of the Digital Committee. “Germany must take a leading role in the negotiations here, and that won’t work if the governing parties can’t find a clear position”.
Basically, Kemmer fears that, contrary to what the Commission originally envisaged, instead of a share of only 15 percent of all AI systems, it is rather the other way around that 85 percent of all AI systems will now fall into the class of high-risk systems and thus be subject to regulation. This could deter startups and SMEs in particular from using AI because of the high bureaucratic requirements. “Then Europe is not an attractive location for AI”, Kemmer fears. “We need good framework conditions so that large language models like ChatGPT are also developed in Germany or Europe in the future”.
The publication of the book and the numerous comments have made Emmanuel Macron quite angry, as reported by the Canard Enchaîné. “Everyone will wonder how the economy minister can write so many books”, the head of state complained. “That ministers publish books instead of taking care of their ministry, that doesn’t seem serious. And then these erotic scenes…”. Also according to Canard Enchaîné, Bruno Le Maire told the President of the Republic that his contract with the publisher Gallimard obliged him to publish this new book because of the advance he had received.
In fact, “La fugue américaine” is the fifth book published in four years by Bruno Le Maire, who has been severely challenged by the Covid crisis and now with inflation. Bruno Le Maire justified himself on Twitter on April 27, stating that he was “dedicated to serving the French” and assuring that “two things are non-negotiable: Spending time with my loved ones and cultivating my passion”. And literature in particular is his great passion: “Literature allows me to escape from everyday life”.
Being a minister means – in principle – devoting body and soul to one’s role. If you assume that political competition is always a bit of a race for popularity, then it’s also a race for visibility. The role of minister in France is an executive role that confers visibility only in the context of loyalty to the other ministers and the head of state. They are also locked into a specific domain, that of their ministry, and cannot claim a full and comprehensive personality. So from the perspective of political competition, being a minister is good, it gives visibility, but it is a visibility that has its limits.
The fact that he is writing a book allows Bruno Le Maire to distinguish himself from the government and grow intellectually. The Minister of Economy, a good little soldier who is very loyal to the Prime Minister and the President, is condemned to a certain invisibility and remains confined to rather technical subjects. The fact that he has written all these books allows him to exist in a different way and, above all, to step out of the shadow of Emmanuel Macron. In other words, he can work on his presidential stature.
In France, the book is associated in the political world with the figure of the president in the history of the V Republic, precisely with the Mémoires de Guerre by General de Gaulle or with Démocratie Française by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. President Macron has referred several times to his missed vocation as a writer while making clear his fondness for literature. His official photo, for example, features André Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir alongside Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs.
Mais voilà. A president who writes would be suspected of deserting his task and cutting himself off from the population. And this accusation is already persistent in France against Emmanuel Macron. The latter simply cannot use the aura of the literary world to his advantage. Not so Bruno Le Maire, who has understood this very well – and who is also thinking about the end of Emmanuel Macron’s second and last term in office.
