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Comment by markerz | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t energy independence more about other countries exports? From the perspective of Germany, their reliance on Russian oil caused a high spike in cost of energy during the current Ukraine invasion. For the US, we don’t really want to be at the whim of OPEC. The 1973 Oil Crisis is a historical example of OPEC taking a religious and political stance and using their oil exports to coerce the US against Israel. Another way of looking at it is that oil production has largely been an effective monopoly for a long time by authoritarian states (many OPEC, China, Russia), many that are politically unstable (Venezuela). There are only a few oil rich countries and many of them are allied with each other so there isn’t strong competition or incentive to keep prices competitive. Many of them view the US negatively.

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Exactly. Large parts of the economy require oil as feedstock or energy.

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.

Germany's plight is entirely owed to their own political malfeasance in shutting down their nuclear power plants. With them, they would have managed just fine without Russian oil and natural gas.

There is still a bulk of our modern economy which relies on combustion engines and oil. You are out of touch with this reality if you think Nuclear is a quick replacement for anything but basic power generation. We are generations away from electrifying everything.

Can you explain that thought more? The bulk of oil and natural gas don't go to electricity generation. How would more electricity generation help?

But that was kind of bad luck in timing.

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.

Nah, it was actual stupidity.

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://globalwindatlas.info/

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!

Yes. I agree. That is better way to put it. Sure, switch to wind/solar. But at least mothball nuclear so they could be ramped back up (i'm not sure if that is possible with nuclear like with other power plants).

But yes, have a better fall back position.

Or you know. Invest your money smartly, don't actually mothball nuclear, simply build more. And then you save a huge amount of money and you have reliable energy. Crazy how that would work.

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.

No, it's about what the US exports - because the US produces more oil than it needs domestically. We will always be at the 'whim of OPEC' as long as we are in a market-based system because OPECs actions impact global oil supplies.

'market-based' is the key here. Without competition there is no market.

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.

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