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The EU really focused on importing rather than conserving natural gas.

A huge solar/wind install which significantly reduced the need for natural gas turbines over the year doing as much to fill tanks as their new LNG terminal while providing more long term utility. Instead by focusing on being able to import and store vs conserve and store they further spiked prices.

I am not saying they wanted to maximize misery for political reasons or profits for the energy sector. However, I can’t help but feel they mismanaged this even though the worst predictions like rationing or 10x price increases never happened.

Perhaps I should give them more credit and say their plan actually worked reasonably well even if it’s benefitted from unusual weather. Winter is far from over and they are already in the clear.

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Have... have you lived here? Solar makes zero sense in most of Europe: most of the year it would barely trickle charge the grid. Yeah, it'd work brilliantly at small scale for a few months every year, but grid storage is measured in "at most a few days", no technology exists that would make solar even remotely sensible in most of Europe. And no, "building it where it's sunny, then sending it on" would be nowhere near enough to cover the rest of Europe. People did consider that. Then they actually ran the numbers. Then they went "oh... okay that's never going to work".

Solar is being rolled out like crazy and the main constraint is not the available sunlight but rather getting a connection to the grid. In fact if you look at where there's the most solar power in Europe, it's north western Europe (Benelux + Germany) even though one might expect it would produce more in Southern Europe

This is because of extreme subsidies. In the Netherlands people can still subtract the solar power they feed back to the grid from their bill on a kWh basis. This is called "salderen". It's pretty unfair because the power is fed back when it's cheap and the people without panels (or that can't have them) are paying for it through higher prices and taxes. Because obviously the energy companies aren't charities so they make up the difference one way or another. And in winter these panels aren't very effective there.

Meanwhile here in Spain where solar panels would do a lot more good there aren't many due to lack of incentives. I don't think they should do the same kind of feedback incentive but it would be great if they'd subsidize the purchase price which is much harder to stomach due to Spain's much lower salary standards. And of course these are great to power air conditioning which is pretty much a must in Spain whereas the Netherlands needs more energy in winter for heating. So a net win for the environment.

Global Solar Atlas* gives a pretty good overview of the gains from solar that can be expected depending on latitude. North of France solar just isn't very efficient so to get a decent amount of power out of it would require setting up solar farms across large areas. Maybe setting up solar in pasture would work, but good luck getting that past the NIMBYs.

Wind is more attractive, but needs tons of infra work to be a proper solution and the power of atom can't be harnessed because of the stark lack of research and knowledge, the heavy upfront costs, and shenanigans from so-called "green" parties.

I'm guessing the politicians' battle plan is basically "hope someone else fixes it and lets me take credit."

* https://globalsolaratlas.info/map

The map highlights a future of power cables through Turkey and Spain with North Africa and the Arab states providing power sourced from the sun, with additional solar -> ammonia -> transport -> storage -> hydrogen -> baseload generation.

Details aside it's much like today, with the massive gas lines to Russia out of the picture (transformed and redirected if you will).

It's a big shift, yes, but on the scale of what has been done before.

You’re missing the point. I worked on a project years ago that used incentives to drive PV installations when the ROI wasn’t great.

Basically a $50M in annual small scale solar incentives saved ratepayers something like $600M in excess capital costs because it reduced peak demand. For electricity, the hottest week of the summer costs more than the coldest month. The more you can maximize usage of the big power plants off peak, the lower your rates go and the more efficient you are.

Being against solar is completely nuts.

> For electricity, the hottest week of the summer costs more than the coldest month.

This is true of the USA, but is not true about Europe, where few people have AC, and you only see the sun a few hours a day.

Europe sees more of the sun than the US in summer, being on average further North. I am not sure about what you are trying to say. Completely agree about the general lack of AC, though.

Uh, there is a positively huge difference between, say, Sweden and Greece. Sweden has almost no AC, Im sure Greece has a lot. Also a silly difference in insolation during winter. Ive seen on http://app.electricitymap.org/ that Greece has had some VERY good days for solar production lately, like above 60% of installed capacity. I suspect the installed capacity is not updated with reality, or theyre very lucky. Sweden produces maybe a few % of the summer figures at the moment.

That lack of AC won't last much longer. I'm admittedly at about the same latitude as the most southern tip of Germany in Romania. I doubt I'll last more than another year in August without installing AC for all rooms.

Also ask the Greeks. Or Italians. Or the Spanish or southern France.

Incidentally, with this warm winter I'm paying more for heating than my largest heating bill ever, that happened in a -20 C month. And that with government capped heating prices.

> Being against solar is completely nuts.

We don’t have a silver bullet. I wish people would just understand this simple fact. Most of these pro-this or anti-that positions are purely ideological and without regards for actual facts.

The absolute priority and necessity is to get out of fossil fuels. Solar cannot be enough for Europe, and building large solar farms in most places is nonsense, but at the same time it needs to be developed where it does make sense.

Exactly. It’s a solution, not the solution.

Then for you too: have you been here? Yes, there are a few countries for which Solar will work, and more countries for which a massive Solar investment will never pay off. But you know what will? Wind and hydro. You know what's already been constantly getting invested in? Wind and hydro.

Being against renewables is completely nuts. Being against solar in places where solar is a dumb idea for most of the year, and we could spend the same money on better green alternatives is being perfectly sensible.

Build solar installations where there's a reliable amount of sun, for most of the year (and each country where that's the case already has solar projects going). And then understand that even if you do that, the benefit will be local rather than EU wide because there simply isn't enough Europe that matches that description for solar to be the only renewable you can think of.

When I go to https://model.energy/ and model what's the cheapest way to provide baseload using wind and solar (and batteries and hydrogen) in Germany, the minimum cost solutions use quite a lot of solar. Hell, if I do the same for Sweden there's still quite a lot of solar in the mix.

From the site:

"This is a toy model with a strongly simplified setup. Please read the warnings before interpreting the results. In particular: [Very long list]"

Hydrogen as storage is still very far into the future.

To take some numbers it suggest for Sweden if we remove hydrogen storage, we just need 800% wind overcapacity, 400% solar overcapacity and 100% grid capacity battery solution.

And your objection to that conclusion is? The model is using real historical weather data. Without hydrogen, covering seasonality and rare prolonged dark/calm periods could become very expensive.

No one solution needed to be be total. It’s been 11 months and the concern has already shifted to next winter that’s a long time for wind/solar to be reducing demand for natural gas turbines. Burning less gas in July let’s you have that gas to burn in January assuming you have storage capacity.

My point is the plan seems to be “let’s just import it whatever the cost” rather than saying what can we do to minimize the need while also increasing imports.

> Burning less gas in July let’s you have that gas to burn in January assuming you have storage capacity.

Britain has bulldozed all of ita gas storage, we are all neoliberal just-in-time supply chains believe in the market.

If the rest of the world stops supplying Britain with energy snd food there will be frostbite and famine in 1 week

Ge5ting planning approval for a wind turbine takes 5 years.

During the energy crisis, conservative government has moved to make solar illegal on agricutural land

That’s just not true. Solar makes sense even in the far North, North of the arctic circle. I ran the numbers and deployed, it’s been profitable since day 1.

There are many renewable energy projects already going on, including large solar power stations in the Sahara desert that feed into the EU grid via submarine cables.

E.g.: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/solar-energy-egypt-europe...

The point is 2022 installs have been business as usual rather than in response to spiking energy prices.

This crisis was predicted 11 months ago with the invasion and they are already forecasting issues next winter that’s a long time fast track stuff.

The point is 2022 installs have been business as usual rather than in response to spiking energy prices.

Installs accelerated significantly:

https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-r...

"New report reveals EU solar power soars by almost 50% in 2022"

SolarPower Europe’s annual progress report for solar power reveals that the EU installed 41.4 GW of solar in 2022, up 47% from the 28.1 GW installed in 2021. ...

47% sounds like a major boom but 2021 installs where also up 34% over 2020.

So no the EU didn’t suddenly change policies in 2022 to bring a lot of new generation online, just continued the same long term trend.

Solar installations are limited by production capacity of the panels. There may be no significant options available for fast tracking.

Germany did complete some energy projects in record time, such as the construction of a new LNG facility to enable more gas imports by ship.

Global production capacity is on the order of 200 GW, that dwarfs the deficit from reduced natural gas imports from Russia.

And that LNG facility was my point, that’s far less useful once Russia’s pipelines open up again. It’s a massive investment with limited long term gain on top of also paying higher natural gas prices.

There is the possibility that Russian gas lines never open up (in the near future).

Ukraine war is likely going to turn out to be a massive political realignment.

> And that LNG facility was my point, that’s far less useful once Russia’s pipelines open up again. It’s a massive investment with limited long term gain on top of also paying higher natural gas prices.

It is strategic. Sometimes you do need to pay more to keep some options open and diversify your sources. The last year has shown how foolish it would be to get back in bed with Russia. Buying their gas is fine, getting dependent on it is not.

What kind of solar install could have been finished by now?

And what kind of yield would you get in December - February when you really need to heat the houses? Europe is much higher north than many assume

Offsetting demand natural gas demand in June also lets you stockpile that natural gas. The EU produces a great deal of natural gas and can store it just fine, they simply needed to make up a deficit.

As an example the UK "stockpile" of gas is notionally 9 TWh although in practice you definitely shouldn't treat that whole volume as slack because if it ever runs out everything is fucked.

The UK uses typically maybe 700 GWh per day of electricity. So the stockpile you're talking about is less than two weeks of electricity you've "offset" from the summer. OK, and now what do we do for the remaining months of winter ?

UK doesn’t supply 100% of electricity from natural gas only 38.5% and they continue to produce natural gas in the winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Unit...

Let’s suppose the deficit is 40% of natural gas which represents a daily deficit of ~40% * 0.385 = 15.4% of electricity generation. So that 9 TWh represents 9,000 / 700 / 0.385 / 0.4 = ~83 days which is already quite close to spring without any additional imports. But, I am also suggesting bringing more power generation online which further decrease the gap.

PS: Even just 3% of total daily electricity being covered by new generation that ~83 days to ~104 days, again before considering any extra imports.

The 38.5% figure you're using is a mean over the course of a year so you're double counting, and the 40% you've chosen to discount by is an arbitrary fiction, the question is about the value of a "stockpile" and so arbitrarily assuming we can just buy more gas as we please to fill some of it back up begs the question.

Point to a specific calculation where 38.5% double counting.

That 40% was a ridiculous over the top doomsday estimate as the UK procedures a lot of natural gas and only ~7% of their imports came from Russia in 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1324377/uk-natural-gas-i... The only reason to use 40% is to simulate the EU is reducing global supply and it’s impact wasn’t even close to that severe.

As to just buying more natural gas, that’s what actually happened so I don’t need to assume anything. The entire EU was able to successfully replace all Russian natural gas from the global market.

> Point to a specific calculation where 38.5% double counting.

The calculation you did. It uses this figure, but the figure itself is already accounted for in what you were trying to model, that is what double counting is.

The annual 38.5% includes both very windy days, and very sunny days, in which consequently PV input and wind power input were very high, as well as the dark and cold but still days in which neither produces very much power.

But the problem scenario we care about is long dark cold days of winter. You can't use a figure which averages in a bright but gusty June morning and use that as representative of a miserable January, you need to look at what it's like on such days, and it's much higher than 38.5%.

Remember, your original thesis is that somehow not using gas in June will save you needing gas in January and I've shown why that's nonsense, the "stockpile" involved is just far too small for this to make any sense.

For what you wanted to do to actually make sense the UK would need to buy at least ten times as much storage as it has now, ie enough to last out a nasty winter. But it shows no sign of wanting to do that, if anything exactly the opposite, preferring to "leave it to the market" and then acting confused when the market does what you'd expect, ie gouge them for every penny it can.

> It uses this figure, but the figure itself is already accounted for in what you were trying to model, that is what double counting is.

No, let’s use some numbers to derive the average power per day from natural gas:

“In 2020, total electricity production stood at 312 TWh (down from a peak of 385 TWh in 2005), generated from the following sources:[45]

Gas: 35.7% (0.05% in 1990), Nuclear: 16.1% (19% in 1990 …”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom

So in 2020 the UK produced 312 TWh * 35.7% = 111.384 TWh (Natural gas) / 365 = 305 GWh per day from Natural Gas.

Ignoring domestic production when the war started they where going to need to make up ~7% of that or 21 GWh per day or ~7.7 TWh across the entire year from missing Russian natural gas supply.

Now you've gone on a weird tangent where instead of talking about the topic on which I pointed out the numbers don't work (stockpiling gas in June so as to not need it in January), you've decided that for some reason the UK's goal needs to be making exactly the same ratio of extra electricity as as the fraction of Russian gas they used to import.

But those aren't comparable numbers, which will be why you've got this ludicrously small result. Even with the weird choice to replace specifically Russian gas in the UK (What about elsewhere? What about the huge price increases? What about global supply concerns?) you need to replace the gas not some portion of electricity. So that means you need to stockpile... drum roll... 5.6 billion cubic meters of gas.

But gas is a physical material, you need to keep it somewhere and the UK doesn't own storage for 5.6 billion cubic meters of gas.

It might seem like they must have more than that, but imagine what it would look like, imagine a 20km by 20km box, 14 metres high, that's the internal dimensions of the storage you're imagining.

The UK did own a noticeable fraction of 5.6 billion cubic meters, not enough but a fair start, the Rough storage site. Rough is actually gas wells which are dry, re-purposed as storage. However, the UK government didn't want to pay for this, so after it was sold into the private sector the owner decided they weren't bothered and it was moth-balled. Once emergency payments were forthcoming, a fraction of Rough that was in least bad condition was re-opened for this winter. Again though, even the whole site if magically restored to 100% service would not store 5.6 billion cubic meters, that's just a lot of gas.

The UK produces natural gas, so their Russian imports was only 4% of it’s total supply. Non Russian imports in 2022 where fine so why you bring it up?

As to storage that’s hardly a fixed number, the UK is looking to add another 1.7 Billion cubic meters of storage for next year, but could easily have done so in 2022. https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/uk-gas-storage-capa...

Also, this may be shocking for you but people don’t store gas at standard pressure and temperature in big above ground tanks. So no 5.6 billion cubic meters of gas isn’t a 20km by 20km box. The UK has plenty of geologic features to store gas namely the same places it was extracting it from for decades.

For comparison when the graph here shows just shy of 4,000 billion cubic feet in storage in NA, that’s ~113 billion cubic meters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage

That would not have helped for this winter.

Natural gas in a tank is just as useful if it’s there because it was imported or stockpiled.

You misunderstand. For it to be useful this winter, additional solar would have needed to have been deployed at the beginning of summer. Your timeline is: Russia invades February 24. Your most effective solar window is April-October. The solar would have needed to be built in 1-2 months to offset summer gas use.

It’s more effective to bring solar online sooner because it’s providing power every month after being installed thus providing a longer window to stockpile natural gas. However, while output is lower in December it’s still useful for December, January, and February and then continues to provide power into the future.

The EU is very much still concerned about having enough natural gas for next winter.

Almost all of Europe is north of the 42nd parallel, which is about even with where Illinois borders Wisconsin.

Berlin only gets about 9 hours of visible light today.

I don’t really know, my point was really more about them seemingly putting all their eggs in one basket even though the total drop in natural gas as a percentage of energy generation supply wasn’t that big.

A rough ballpark to see if it could have been meaningful, they had most of the year and annual production is something like ~200GW of solar panels vs average electricity production in the EU is ~300 GW. I have no idea how much could have been fast tracked but moving the needle quite far seems possible.

But again I am not an expert and their plan seems to have worked.

Diversifying it is a good point. While gas was maybe the focus for this winter, of course it would be good to start the solar initiative at the same time so that it can be ready for some future year.

Lots of 5-10 acre-looking parks along the Autobahns outside of cities, financed by various regional power companies and run by specialized solar operators, often outside their home regions (example: an EnBW park run by a company based near Stuttgart, located next to a rest stop in Thüringen)

Even if they could somehow magically install gigawatts of solar power, all those furnaces in people's homes still run on natural gas.

That's the fundamental problem: heating in Europe generally requires gas, because that's how the infrastructure was designed. They should be pushing for conversions to electric heat pumps, to avoid this kind of thing in the future: electric can run on any power source, whether it's fossil fuel or solar or nuclear.

And some countries already are. For example, in Lithuania there are subsidies (~40% of installation price) for replacing gas, wood or coal furnaces with heat pumps. (Also subsidies for installing solar panels and batteries too.)

It's just that... Theres so many households and only so few manufacturing/importing/installing capabilities. And the subsidies aren't limitless too :-)

Heat pumps are not efficient at all for large temperature deltas. Electric is general bad for heating (efficiency wise) unless we literally manage to generate tons of it for very cheap (e.g. fusion).

Big chunks of Europe don't get cold enough for the delta to be unacceptable. A 20K delta (so e.g. you want it to be 20° C inside, but the outside air temperature is 0° C) is still well inside the range where the heat pump has > 100% efficiency.

When it's really cold, which even in Northern Europe is only a few days per year, air source heat pumps would be < 100% efficient and you'd step to resistive heating, but it's weird to optimise for a worst case scenario.

And ground source heat pumps are a thing, unlike the air the ground has a relatively stable temperature we can leverage to stabilise home temperatures.

Ground-source heat pumps fix that problem I believe. Of course, drilling a hole is extra work and expense. For multi-unit housing, it should be a lot more economical since you could drill one hole for coolant circulation and share that among all the units.

I imagine the lead time on even a 3x increase in solar panel production would be well over a year.

They had 6-8 months to solve this problem.

Enough natural gas exists in the world outside of Russia to power Europe. Is that true of solar panels?

also it's winter and much of Europe is pretty far north, so short days and allot of clouds with rain and maybe some snow.

Europe produces natural gas, the need is to offset an import deficit not completely replace all electricity and home heating across the EU.

For scale average electricity profusion in the EU is 300GW, vs 200 GW of worldwide solar panel production. So, it could have clearly moved the needle.

Solar electricity supply is not elastic and obviously doest't work at night. And installation won't happen overnight as well as production. So stocking gas was the only viable short term option

Sure but it’s been 11 months, assuming the concern was this winter that’s quite a bit of time to do something.

11 months is no time at all for any kind of large-ish project. And small-scale projects are getting harder due to the economic situation as well. You just cannot do much of anything in 11 months.

Assuming you don’t treat it as an emergency 11 months isn’t that long.

But, look at how quickly and how many COVID vaccines where created and entered mass production. Or how quickly Germany got their new LNG terminal online from scratch. We normally take forever to build a bridge, but 15 days after a hurricane Florida got large temporary bridge ready for traffic. https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/12/15/how-this-bridg... That’s the kind of response that gets stings done.

So, 11 months is a long time when people actually decide acting right now is important.

It does work at night, for about 4-6 months if you’re far enough North.

A liquid natural gas port was fast-tracked. It worked.

Installing wind that fast is "impossible". Remember that Europe needs to import stuff, and most things are in scarce supply at the moment. Thats not even mentioning lack of workforce, competence and permitting!

It is happening, but it takes 5 years to get going and 10 years to see the results.

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