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Comment by clarionbell | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile European chemical manufacturing is collapsing under weight of record energy costs.[1][2] Most of other manufacturing is somehow tied to chemicals, you can't build things without material after all. So this will feed ongoing industrial collapse, which now affects even Germany.[3]

Meanwhile, low income households are running into financial issues if they want to turn up the heat.[4]

The whole process has been mismanaged at best.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/business/economy/Europes-specialty-chemi...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-chemical-ind...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_(2022%E...

[4]https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/heating-eating-energy-b...

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And the reason for that? Fossil fuels. Cited from one of your articles:

> “Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release.

Gas prices are high at least in part because of reduced exploitation of resources. For example here in Ireland we have stopped extracting our own gas and now import.

I'm I'm favour of increased renewables, but we need to be truthful about the costs. A fully renewable energy system is probably always going to be more expensive per unit than a fossil fuel based one.

> A fully renewable energy system is probably always going to be more expensive per unit than a fossil fuel based one.

No probably not at all unless you mean in the short term. The fossil industry gets way way way more financial support. The externalities of fossils are costing us incredible amounts of money, health and lives and will do for many many decades if not centuries to come. Renewables are now cheaper than nearly anything despite decades of suppression by the fossil industry.

https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-subsidies-fossil-fuels

https://www.eesi.org/files/FactSheet_Fossil_Fuel_Externaliti...

https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2025/Jul/91-Percent...

https://sps.columbia.edu/news/fossil-fuel-industrys-ceaseles...

If you ignore the increased grid complexity and need to over provision then sure.

Netherlands is sitting on a massive, massive natural gas reserve. Off limits due to earthquakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field

Sat, past tense. Yes there's still quite a bit in there but the Netherlands is VERY densely populated. And public opinion has swayed towards letting it sit there.

The real reason it's off limits is simply because of externalities. The NAM just doesn't want to pony up the the money to pay for repairs of houses. It's rare for that to backfire like this in the fossil fuel industry.

Might not be a bad call to leave it. I'm sure we'll find a novel use for natural gas decades down the line which might be way more valuable than just burning it.

That quote mentions gas only. What about coal, oil, and biofuel?

Record energy costs are a thing. If solar and wind are 'free', why have European energy prices risen so much?

The real-world contra-indicators are the USA, China and pretty much any country outside the groupthink of the G20.

Whilst state interference is a factor, more tellingly they haven't slavishly followed the suicidal empathy of being 'green' and shutting down nuclear and fossil fuel power plants before a sufficient replacement was available.

China installed more renewables in 2025 than the rest of the world combined.

We're talking about historically, up until now. They've continued to bring online more fossil fuel and nuclear plants in last decade, whilst Europe has done the complete opposite. It's only this year that fossil fuel plants are predicted to peak in China. The point being plentiful 'anything' forces prices down, including energy, and China are doing exactly what I said in the previous point: not shutting down nuclear or fossil fuels yet.

For example - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/charting-chinas-evol...

Europe on the other hand, has shut down nuclear and fossil fuels over the last decade and removed a source of cheap energy from the grid. And by cheap I mean, the build costs, are a sunk cost.

Well you need fossil fuels for feedstock in the chemical industry. It's one place they can't be replaced.

The real reason is because Europe cut itself off from cheaper Russian gas.

It was Putin that cut off gas supply to Europe almost completely in autumn 2021 in preparation of the invasion and then completely shut it off during 2022. That was before the pipelines were blown up.

That's not true. Russia continued to supply gas after 2021.

They unilaterally cut supply through NS1 though and before the invasion deliberately kept gas storage in Germany empty.

It's not all of europe but maybe this is what the the other person is referring to.

Not sure about that. If you plot energy cost and % of wind power by country, it is highly correlated.

Not if you compare states with similar levels of economic development, like US states or EU countries.

Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma have around 50% wind and 10 cent electricity.

When comparing EU states, the correlation is more about who taxes electricity and who builds wind. Comparing pre-tax prices has a very slight downward trend as the country has more wind.

You see a lot of propaganda graphs online that have the EU states clustered in the top right and a cluster of unlabelled Petro states and dictatorships who subsidize electricity in the other quadrant.

The intended implication is that you should emulate the countries they are afraid to name because it would make their graph ridiculous.

The causation is the other way. High energy prices have made wind and solar more viable.

There's absolutely mismanagement, and politicians could do an awful lot to change this. Ironically, in the UK at least, most of the reasons why they don't are due to historic regulations designed to protect either the fossil fuel industry or an initially weak green energy industry, which no longer serves any purpose except to push both households and businesses into decline.

The problems of the chemical companies are related to natural gas prices, not electricity. This is because gas is used in the production. It even says so in one of the links you posted:

“Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release

Ed Conway (of Sky) did a nice piece on this recently covering the UK's chemical industry decline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ3hT8tqZgo

My takeaway was that it's not really high energy costs (though for sure that doesn't help) but, in the UK's case at least, much more caused by political and policy ignorance over decades. Industrial, polluting industries were simply not vote winners and none of the politicians understood or cared about the strategic implications of letting these industries collapse.

I suspect this is now changing.

There's a recent case of Wacker. They tried to build their own windpark in Germany but this got shot down by residents. Now they are moving to a chinese industrial area that is connected to windparks and battery storage providing cheap energy.

Why "abundant cheap energy is a key requirement to survive in today's globalized markets" has not made it into the EU leaderships' mindset is beyond comprehension.

Because it's reductive bullshit.

Energy price is just one of many inputs for the viability of industry.

Availability of (educated) labor, wage level, infrastructure, political stability and a ton of other factors are at least as if not more important.

Why should we keep tolerating irreversible damage to planet/climate just to keep costs/prices low? If you can't produce some shit sustainably because that makes it too expensive, then maybe it should not get produced in the first place?

If you don't propose what you think is a better alternative we don't know what we are agreeing with by upvoting. Is it:

1. Let Russia take most of eastern Europe in exchange for gas

2. Make Europe Great Again i.e. complain loudly about current politicians then do everything even worse with no plan or logic

3. Fully automated Luxury Communism

4. Ask Harry Potter to make chemical inputs with his magic wand.

5. Nuclear, just because we think it's neat.

>Let Russia take most of eastern Europe in exchange for gas

Do people seriously think this is a possibility? Or is that hyperbole?

Russia can barely manage to hold the eastern half of Ukraine, I genuinely don’t see how they could take the eastern half of all of Europe..

I mean there's precedent in living memory...

> Russia can barely manage to hold the eastern half of Ukraine

Not even half, just a fifth.

Better management?? Easier processing for residential solar panels? How about government subsidies on solar panels for lower income homes?

Hell, maybe create a unified portal when companies buy energy - show the cost difference side by side.

The poster is implying that solar+wind are somehow making it worse for the industry, so they're probably not thinking of "more solar" as a solution.

As an other commenter said, we don't know what they think has been mismanaged.

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