'Beyond what we could imagine': Europe's coming energy crunch | Hacker News Reader

'Beyond what we could imagine': Europe's coming energy crunch

politico.eu

2 pointsleonidasrup9 comments

Unlike with Russia in 2022, there's nothing Europe can realistically do about it, only path forward is now the renewable energy. Time horizon is too short for nuclear, Russian supplies are already outlawed and beyond realistic control anyway (Nord Stream pipelines are rotten in the bottom of the sea and Ukraine won't agree to renew transit to matter the pressure, even if it is abandoned and has to fight alone - in drone war there's very little leverage anyone has on them).

EU is highly energy efficient and already uses a lot of renewables, more than any other large country or block of countries. So in a relative sense, in terms of competitiveness, we win in an energy crisis.

It's a much bigger problem for Africa, Southeast and South Asia, and Latin America. They simply have no way out and will suffer, having no say in this situation and no recourse no matter how politically poisonous it was. They will absorb all the real harm. While suffering they will provide global demand for renewable tech making it even cheaper and transition, faster.

EU is loosing in energy competition. Energy prices are higher then in US, much higher than in China. It's highly dependent on fossil energy imports, it's the single biggest import item.

https://www.seair.co.in/blog/imports-from-europe.aspx

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Germany run to Qatar to secure future gas supplies. They just replaced Russian gas with LNG imports.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-minister-heads-to-qatar-to-seek...

Germany extended coal mining.

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-coal-e....

But that's the whole point: make prices as high as possible politically to make transition faster. It will have to be done in any case. When it happens now is a lot better situation than 2022 one because back then, political threshold was quite low: it was possible to just surrender to Putin to "fix" things. Now, there's no one to surrender to, it can't work anymore, or not at the time scale necessary. So possible price level became a lot higher -> transition a lot faster.

As for imports/exports: EU is a major net exporter and has always been, but it doesn't really help (or harm) things much.

Instead of making energy prices high as possible, we should make the price for emitting CO2 as high as possible. These are two very different things.

And it has to be done world wide, because CO2 reduction in one country doesn't help if the industry (the source of emissions) just moves to another country.

By making energy prices high you are sabotaging European industry and economy in the international competition. High energy costs make EU net importer as can be seen here:

https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/balance-of-trade

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas

By "transition", you mean transition to renewables? It's quite possible that by increasing share of solar and wind renewables (there is not much potential for hydropower expansion if Europe) we just:

1. don't decrease electricity price in the long term. Backup power plants, big expansion of grids to transport renewable electricity over long distances are quite expensive (remember the $400bn price tag for Desertec). To encourage decarbonisation we need much, much cheaper electricity cost - we are competing with cheap Chinese coal.

2. become even more dependent on China. 95% of PV is produced in China. China is strongly pushing for export of Chinese wind turbines. Politically, I don't see much differences between governments in Russia and China.

https://ecfr.eu/publication/last-gasp-securing-europes-wind-...

3. don't decrease consumption of fossil fuels. Renewables need reliable backup, that's mostly provided by fossil fuels. Uncompetive energy prices will cause European industry to move to other regions and Europe will become a mix of agricultural and service economy. That's already happening now:

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/basf-touts-bumper-china-...

Decarbonisation is world wide problem and has to be solved world wide. For example if country A, B, C each decrease CO2 emissions by 2 millions tons of CO2 and country D increases CO2 emissions by 6 millions tons nothing is gained for the atmosphere (or maybe the voters in countries A,B,C will feel better, because they personally are doing something).

We gotta build a lot of solar and batteries. And wind.

Let's go.

You have to invert the priorities. Lots of wind, then useful amounts of storage and backup energy (probably domestic coal in Germany) and little bit solar.

In Europe most gas consumption is in winter, when PV does not produce much. (The sun is not shining much, that's the reason why outside temperature are low...).

https://www.bruegel.org/dataset/european-natural-gas-demand-...

Also we don't build solar or batteries in any significant amount in Europe, we import them from Asia. We only install them in Europe.

Europe will burn gas in winter for a long time, but it can stop burning gas in summer.

Solar is cheaper than wind. For the energy transition, it doesn’t matter who makes the panels. I mean I agree that keeping the know how in Europe is important. But it’s not like they suddenly stop working (unless they get hacked, I guess.)

Not a good sign that the first person they quote, Merz, is so anti wind turbines that his right-wing business supporters had to tell him to shut up about it.

His new position is that they are "temporary" and will be replaced with fusion.

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