Twelfth letter from Andreas Bruckmüller to Michael Mrak
Dear Michael,
In your last letter you ended with two demands held together: patience with people, rigour with method, both at the same time. It is the hardest sentence in your letter, and the truest. I want to name the thing that decides between them, because you left it out.
In the eighth letter we counted four qualities a leader can practise. You have spent this letter on three of them, each worked with care. The question before the answer is how one inspires others without setting out to convert anyone. The small appointment is how one gets things done before the argument is won. The hygiene of the gaze is how one stays positive without lying to oneself. Three of the four. The fourth you set aside, and it is the one I do this work under. Be decisive.
I understand the reluctance. Decision sits awkwardly in a letter about patience. It reads like the enemy of listening. It is the opposite. Each of your two denials ends in a decision, and the decision belongs to us, not to them. With the exhausted, you decide the moment listening becomes a plan, because the plan is what returns agency, and agency is what no feeling restores on its own. With the ideological, you decide when the conversation has stopped being a conversation. That second decision is the rigour you asked for. Someone has to make it. Patience without it is the slow surrender your fifth-letter dividers are counting on.
Patience earns the right to decide. The decision is what it was for.
And the deciding can be bold. Boldness is deciding with the cost in full view and choosing anyway. People treat boldness as the risk and caution as the safe alternative, yet the cautious choice carries its own bill, paid quietly, in the option that closed while they waited. Every decision has two sides, and no version arrives with the cost removed. The work is to see both sides, choose the one whose price you can carry, and then carry it without looking back over your shoulder. A decision reopened every morning festers into a wound. The leaders I trust make the call, accept what it costs, and spend their energy on the next thing rather than the last one.
Every decision has a price. Pay it, and walk on.
Now let me unsettle one thing gently. You split the work into a technical layer and a cultural one, mine and yours, and you said both need each other. In my work they are one thing. The technical act is the cultural argument. I have watched a board change its mind not because a slide was good but because a competitor’s electrified plant posted a lower cost per unit. The number did the persuading. The neighbour you described, the one with the heat pump, is the economics, made visible on the street.
That is why the energy economy is where I would take your letter next. It is the place where the decision becomes physical, and where the argument you are so careful to win often turns out not to need winning.
The transformation in the energy market is no longer a matter of belief. New solar and onshore wind in Germany now generate electricity at roughly 4 to 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, the lowest cost of any source, renewable or conventional, on the Fraunhofer institute’s own figures. The binding constraint is no longer the technology. It is time. The approval of an onshore wind farm has averaged about two years, and reform has begun to bring even that down, towards eighteen months in the wind agency’s latest count. The planning takes years. The turbines rise in months. Decisiveness in this sector is about timing, because the direction is already settled, and the cost of a late decision is the premium you pay for it, in grid fees, in carbon, in insurance, in the rising price of having waited.
The strongest argument in the energy transition is a bill that came down.
So what can a company actually do, beyond agreeing with you in a meeting? It can read its own meter before it reads the news. Most firms do not know their own load curve, their own heat demand, the age of their own boiler. The audit comes before the argument. Then it can find its decision windows, because those windows exist whether or not anyone is convinced. The boiler reaches the end of its life. The fleet comes up for renewal. The roof needs work anyway. At each window a decision gets made by default if it is not made on purpose. Be decisive means choosing at the window, not lamenting it once it has closed. A company that electrifies its heat and its fleet lowers a cost and hedges a risk. The statement about the climate follows for free, whether anyone intended it or not.
The private person feels smallest in all this, and holds the same windows: the heating that fails in January, the roof already under scaffolding, the car at the end of its lease. The decision there looks tiny. It compounds. The first heat pump on a street is a curiosity. The third is a question every other owner begins to ask themselves. The private decision becomes the social model for the next door along. The private decision is the cultural act.
The clearest case of all is the car. It is the most personal energy decision a household makes, and the one carrying the most resistance. The worries are familiar: the range, the charger, the price, the quiet suspicion that the battery will wear out and leave its owner stranded with a depreciated mistake. Most of those worries have already shrunk against the facts, and the rest are shrinking. But the car is also a window, the lease that ends, the engine that finally fails, and at that window the decision gets made whether one steers it or not.
Here is the part I want to leave with you, because it bends back into your country. A car spends most of its life parked. Standing still, it is a battery. Bidirectional charging turns that battery into something the household and the grid can both use: power for the house when the price is high, support for the grid when demand peaks, a second income for an asset that used to do nothing but lose value overnight. The figures are no longer hypothetical. A study by Fraunhofer for Transport and Environment puts the gain to the German energy system at around 8 billion euros a year by 2040, and the saving to a single household at up to 45 per cent of its electricity bill. An E.ON pilot has already measured close to 900 euros a year for one home. The energy consumer becomes a supplier as well. Every driveway becomes a small power plant, and every driver a node in a system that used to run one way.
The wire now runs both ways. The question is whom we trust to govern the flow.
And here the hard part is acceptance, which is your subject more than mine. The hardware is ready. What lags is the rulebook. Only in 2025 did Germany begin drafting the legal definition that would keep a car’s stored electricity from being taxed twice, along with the market rules that would let a parked battery earn at all. Bidirectional charging asks a person to let a utility, or an algorithm, reach into the battery they paid for and decide when to draw from it. It asks for trust in a standard, in a contract, in a market they cannot see. You can argue with a forecast, and you cannot argue with a meter, but a meter that runs in both directions raises a question no meter can answer on its own: whether the rules are written for the driver or against them.
So I will stop where your work begins. I made those choices myself, and I will tell you plainly how it went: the car, the panels, the battery, the heat pump. Each carried a trade-off, the money down, the disruption, the weeks of learning a new rhythm. I weighed them once, decided, and did not reopen the question on the bad days. Not one has disappointed me, and every benefit they promised has arrived. In your image, I am the neighbour with the heat pump, and the most honest argument I can hand anyone is my own meter. That is the decision available to me: to electrify, to install, to connect, and to do it at the window rather than after it. The decision you understand better than I do is the one that comes next: whether people will accept a grid that reaches into their homes, and how we earn the trust that makes them willing. Tell me how you would build that trust. That is the brief I would hand you, if a letter could hand a brief.
Let us decide, then, and build the proof. I have built some of mine, and it holds.
Andreas
This text is an experiment: a public exchange of letters between Michael Mrak and myself, inspired by Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, in which reflections on sovereignty far beyond the digital context are developed further through dialogue.