This is a Good Week to Look Into German Citizenship

Clock at Sansucci in Potsdam

This coming week is special. You might know it as "intercontinental meeting scheduling goes sideways" week. Most of Europe adjusted their clocks for daylight savings this morning, the US does so in a week.

German Consulates around the world add new appointments at midnight in Germany. Polling for an appointment right before midnight has the best chance of grabbing one, and this week midnight in Germany is at a different time in the US. Lots of people miss this, your chances of getting an appointment are better this week by checking at the correct time.

If your family emigrated from Germany in the 20th century, you might have a path to German citizenship. Grandparents, great-grandparents, etc are all possible. 1904 is the significant cutoff, emigration before that almost always forfeited German citizenship.

Your ancestor might have been told they had to choose one citizenship or another at age 18 or 21 or 23. That is a longstanding myth, people born as dual citizens were always able to retain both and pass it down to their children.

Your ancestor might not have inherited citizenship from a German mother prior to 1975. Staatsangehörigkeit § 5 is a declaration process to address this former gender discriminatory policy, allowing descendants of German mothers to declare their citizenship.

If you've idly wondered whether there is a path to Europe for your family, this week is a good week to look into it.

Everything I've written about this process and related matters is linked from this blog post.

Daylight Savings and Consular appointments

German Consulates around the world add new appointments every weekday at midnight in Germany. For example, that is 3pm in California — or rather, it was at 3pm in California. Europe moves the clocks by an hour for Daylight Savings Time on October 26th, which happened a few hours ago at the time of this writing.

The US moves its clocks one week from now, on November 2. So for this one week, midnight in Germany is 4pm in California. This might be a good week for finding an appointment, slightly fewer people will likely be polling as some will be checking at the wrong time.

Clock at Sansucci in Potsdam

Electric short-haul vehicles

The market for forklifts and similar lift trucks electrified early. The market for Class I lift trucks intended mainly for use inside warehouses crossed 50% electric in approximately 2010. In indoor environments there is a substantial advantage for a vehicle which produces no exhaust fumes. The early models used lead-acid batteries, gradually shifting to Lithium chemistries as batteries aimed at electric vehicles improved.

More recently, other classes of forklift which handle heavier loads and outdoor use have been electrifying, as batteries have reached a capacity to operate all day without charging and electricity is less expensive than the equivalent propane for internal combustion forklifts.

Electric lift trucks have several inherent advantages over propane:

• Efficiency: electric vehicles excel with frequent starts and stops, which a forklift spends all day doing.
• Regenerative lowering: it takes energy to lift a heavy load, but regenerative braking techniques can recover energy while lowering a heavy load. Anything lifted up will (eventually) be lowered back down, over time the fleet of forklifts will recover a good portion of the energy spent lifting.

Short haul trucking

Drayage trucks, heavy vehicles intended for short distance duty such as to and from transport hubs, are at the start of their electrification process now. They also have several inherent advantages:

• Idling: even with a decade of effort in schedule optimization and just-in-time arrival, such vehicles spend a substantial amount of time waiting for loading and unloading. Internal combustion vehicles consume fuel while idling, electric trucks do not.
• Emissions: air quality near ports and transportation hubs has been a concern for decades, and have resulted in ever more strict limits on emissions in the vicinity of the port. A zero emission electric drayage vehicle more easily meets these requirements.

Vehicle to Grid?

To me, one of the interesting potential developments for electric vehicles is to take advantage of the battery capacity available in fleets of electric vehicles with one common owner and fairly stable usage patterns. Warehouses and ports mostly do not operate at 100% capacity 24/7. Noise ordinances and the economics of three shift work means they will often not be fully staffed overnight. There will be hours where some of the equipment is plugged into chargers and mostly sitting idle.

These are the same hours where solar production is not available. Might the fleet owner be able to make some amount of revenue while the equipment sits idle? The equipment does need to end the night with a mostly full battery for the first shift's work, but there may be an opportunity to charge while power is cheap and, knowing usage patterns in advance, participate in virtual power plants to bid into the day-ahead market.

School buses remain the best example of Fleet-V2G potential. They can charge after dropping off children after school, at a time when solar power is still generally feeding the grid. They will sit all night, and can supply some amount of power in the late evening hours.

Virtual Power Plants and the California Grid

The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) has published a report regarding electricity generation in the summer of 2025, which includes data through the end of September 2025. They provide a nifty interactive chart at that link, and the underlying data is easy to find in the source of the web page. I've included the data for July and September at the bottom of this post, as we're going to dive into those details in a moment.

Below is the graph of the sources of energy on the California electrical grid in September of 2025, the period ending about two weeks ago at the time of this writing. Importantly, the Solar resources shown are only utility connected solar arrays. Rooftop solar is behind the meter, reducing demand for electricity rather than adding to the supply measured here. There is approximately another 19 Gigawatts of solar capacity installed behind the meter.

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This is the same data, shown as a percentage of the total. Because total electricity consumption varies throughout the day, the contribution of baseload sources like Methane-fired generators varies as a percentage of the total even though their output is constant.

A few observations:

• The contribution of wind power is smaller than I expected. I may get a skewed view of the prevalence of wind generation in California as I pass through the Altamont Pass wind farm regularly, but I expected wind to be a larger percentage.
• It is too small to be visible in the graph, but Solar power never actually drops to zero. It continues to supply about 4 Megawatts all night. I believe this might be Ivanpah, a solar thermal generation plant in the desert, which continues generating power from stored heat even after the sun has set.

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I tried to incorporate behind-the-meter solar into a similar graph, below. This is a crude estimate:

• In 2024, 19 Gigawatts of rooftop solar was installed versus 21 GWatts of utility-scale. I made the assumption that the production from rooftop solar would be approximately 19/21 of the utility number.
• Prior studies show that rooftop solar is not installed in ideal locations nor properly angled toward the sun, I made the additional assumption that it would be 80% as productive as utility solar.

The result hews considerably closer to the 67% renewable result announced by the state last year.

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Virtual Power Plants

I have combined the categories which CAISO reported separately as Batteries and Demand Response, because until 4/2024 Virtual Power Plants formed via aggregation of residential batteries like Powerwalls were contracted as Demand Response. Only utility-scale battery installations like Megapacks were accounted for as Batteries. Splitting into two categories obscures and substantially minimizes the true contribution of battery power to the grid.

We participate in a Virtual Power Plant in northern California, allocating about half of the 27 KWh of capacity installed at the house. For a number of days this summer in the late afternoon and early evening, the house supplied about 6 kilowatts of power back to the grid. It is quite smooth, we don't even notice unless we look at the app to see what it is doing.

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Raw data from the CAISO report web page.

"September": [
  [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1392.000662, 1319.840318,            // Demand Response
   1239.827827, 1177.653666, 1023.942241, 287.33, 0, 0],                                // Demand Response

  [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2264.012689, 6312.981683,            // Battery Storage
   10219.53932, 9740.80126, 7382.450552, 5789.963039, 2869.891625, 0],                  // Battery Storage

  [11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665,         // Imports
   11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 11665, 5500, 5500, 5500, 5500, 5500, 5500, 5500,         // Imports
   11665],                                                                              // Imports

  [742.4458, 725.114696, 719.58188, 591.859728, 356.992952, 328.293048, 330.9584,       // Wind
   323.6145657, 277.992424, 205.762648, 221.590544, 199.863504, 216.38616,              // Wind
   311.644072, 316.5584821, 324.313968, 396.1921449, 535.622064, 785.470392,            // Wind
   905.120696, 1081.627632, 1164.064064, 1096.58392, 1058.725816],                      // Wind

  [3.7224, 3.7224, 3.95928, 4.43304, 5.02524, 7.1064, 155.30868, 3417.63696,            // Solar
   8622.78732, 11304.55656, 12390.19452, 12923.98668, 13035.8448, 12592.86717,          // Solar
   12166.76592, 11529.86232, 8779.161639, 5405.92308, 1148.5296, 12.79152,              // Solar
   5.34672, 4.01004, 3.8916, 3.84084],                                                  // Solar

  [1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861,        // Other renewables
   1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861,        // Other renewables
   1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861,        // Other renewables
   1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861, 1755.632861],       // Other renewables

  [1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682,        // Other
   1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682, 1682],                   // Other

  [7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014,        // Hydro
   7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014, 7014],                   // Hydro

  [2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280,        // Nuclear
   2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280, 2280],                   // Nuclear

  [26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188,         // Methane
   26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188, 26188,         // Methane
   26188, 26188],                                                                       // Methane

  ...
]

Germany Photos Then and Now

In our collection of family photos we have a number of sets taken in Germany over the decades:

• in the early 1950s by my spouse's grandparents
• in the late 1960s by my father while stationed in Germany
• in 1995 by my spouse
• in summer 2024 on our first family trip to Germany
• in summer 2025 on our second family trip to Germany

In our trips of the last several summers we've made an effort to take photos of places our parents visited, allowing side-by-side comparison. The main thing one notes is the evolution of camera technology and its handling of colors, amusingly enough.

 

Göbelstraße 2, Hannover

My spouse's grandparents owned a house on this land decades ago. That house has since been replaced by larger buildings.

 

Burg Pfaltzgrafstein, Rhine River

 

Gasthaus Rheingold, Rhine River

 

Assmanhausen, Rhine River

 

Glockenspiel in Munich

 

Odeonsplatz in Munich

 

Karlsplatz in Munich

 

Heidelberg Bridge

 

Heidelberg Castle

New Ohio Exonym Just Dropped

Tell me your game development is done outside of the United States without telling me your game development is done outside of the United States.

As an alumnus of the University of Michigan, I approve of the association of Ohio with "Calamity".

New Google Blogger Features ?!?

**Try our New Beta Features**: Create a more engaging reading experience with the help of Google

Google Search previews: Easily insert visual Google Search previews for popular people, locations, pop-culture and more directly in your blog! In Compose View, look for the ‘G’ button in the editor tool bar to get started.

That is the notice greeting me at the top of draft.blogger.com today. After years of not noticing any change in the service at all, it is now getting search previews.

Honestly I would have expected any sudden burst of activity in Google Blogger to be more distinctly AI-related, part of someone's promotion packet to sprinkle LLMs anywhere and everywhere.

EasyPASS and entering Germany

If you've ever flown into Germany you've seen the two lines at customs and immigration, one for citizens of the European Union and one for non-EU citizens. The non-EU line is often longer and slower, though not exceptionally so at the times I've been through. Nonetheless in a family like ours, where the rest of them go through the EU line and I wait in the non-EU line, it leads to some extra complexities in travel.

EasyPASS is a program to enroll passports from several non-EU countries including the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan to be able to use the electronic readers in the EU line at German airports. One fills out a form to submit at an airport with an EasyPASS office, including Berlin (Brandenburg), Köln/Cologne/Bonn, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, München/Munich, and Stuttgart.

I enrolled at the Munich airport in July 2025, where EasyPASS is handled at the police substation. Follow the signs for the Politzei office, which is at the far end of the airport where there are a number of restaurants and shops. You ring the buzzer for admittance.

It is helpful if you speak a bit of German, but the police stationed at the airport have to deal with international travellers every day and understand English well. They were quite helpful in correcting a mistake I'd made in filling out the form. They then took my US passport to enroll in EasyPASS.

I don't have an outcome to report yet, it will likely be some months until our next trip to Germany to try using the EU line at the airport.