I do not really understand why we are obsessed with energy independence. It only matters if we were to ban exports which is an absurd thing to do.
Parts that cannot be down for more than a week, or bad things happen, and which by virtual of volume have limited storage capacity (at normal consumption rates).
Consequently, US energy independence is about creating a credible detachment of the US from global market oil prices, such that countries thinking of using an oil embargo to pressure the US... don't.
In reality, oil embargos obviously impose immediate and intermediate term costs on the exporters as well, so doing a painful thing that the US might be able to blunt anyway becomes less attractive.
They started shutting down nuclear, to make switch to wind/solar, before Russia invaded. (or at least being very trusting of Russian supply, so that is error in hindsight).
You could make argument that the switch to wind/solar should have been more gradual, or with more ability to roll back. But don't think it is a good argument to not switch to wind/solar. Just about how to do it.
The same wind turbine in the scotland produces 3 to five times more power than in Germany
The same solar panel produces 3 times more power in Spanish winter than in German winter.
This is basic information available to anyone
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
But fine, you decided to do energy transition inefficiently.
At least don’t switch of nuclear while you are still relying on fossil fuels!
But yes, have a better fall back position.
Simply take the price of a typical modern 1.5GW electric reactor from somebody like South Korea. Calculate how many you need in Germany, add up the cost. And that's not even taking into account the cost savings you could get from building a large number of the same plants.
You end up with a number significantly less then what Germany has spend over the last 25 years, will spend the next 20 and has spent on energy subsidies because of their high electricity prices.
In the 70's when the US was NOT producing enough.
Then OPEC had a 'monopoly' or at least an outsized influence. A large enough % of the market that they could dominate the price.
Right now we are NOT at the 'whim' because we can produce more if we need it. IF we stopped, then we would return to being at their 'whim'.
Solar, Wind, anything, is all very important for National Security. See Germany.
For example, India banned onion exports this year [1] & the US has restricted oil exports before. [2]
Moreover, without officially banning exports a similar result can be achieved by mixing exports taxes with consumption subsidies.
If international oil prices got too high, like over $200, the political pressure for an oil export ban / restriction than made domestic prices $50-$100 would be hard for congress to tolerate.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/asia-feels-sting-...
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Crude_oil_export_ban#:~:text=The%20c....
Energy independence is vastly preferable to waging war, and may be worth making some environmental tradeoffs for — even if we would like to see cleaner alternatives to fracking in the long run.
Environmental collapse will lead to wars, so this statement is self-contradicting.
In fact the sooner we run out of oil, the better - high oil prices mean that any alternative will get huge investment. France built out nuclear due to an oil price shock.
“European countries are estimated to have spent additional 792 billion euros in the last year just on the status quo system to protect consumers from the effects of the energy crisis introduced by the Russian invasion into Ukraine”
Honestly I think building solar and wind farms in Europe would do more for America’s military power than more tanks.
That’s probably a long time from now though, as they are expanding LNG regasification terminals (6 projects that I’m aware of) since the pipelines from Russia became unavailable.
Think of it like this. How many oil producers do we have a problem with? That are dictators, at war, or generally bad. Every time we buy gas, we give them money. We send trillions of dollars to our enemies.
It is such an overwhelming National Security issue, that I'm frankly surprised Republicans fought renewable energy for so long. Oil isn't going to last forever. We should have been throwing resources at our own internal energy R&D. .
If it is about getting low price energy, then integration with the global system is unavoidable, no matter how many domestic export bans you enact, etc. - you will be impacted by global energy prices.
(Americans hate inflation so much they preferred the Volcker recession in the 70s, which is what caused the deindustrialization, which is what caused things to move to Asia.)
You are going back to old Adam Smith.
Let places/people that can make things more efficiently, do them.
Example: Don't give subsidies to car companies in countries that aren't good at making cars, it is inefficient. Better to focus on what you are good at.
There are exceptions:
National Security. See Energy, Semi-conductors.
or
To protect an industry while it grows, gets up to speed. Japan didn't become industrial power house out of nothing, they were very protectionist. Now they are dominant, but they aren't dominant because they let anybody at all come in and compete. They subsidized and protected their industry until they could stand on their own.