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Comment by vr46 | Hacker News Reader

They're laughing all the way to the bank, the US has locked Europe into so many long-term petrochem supply contracts courtesy of two energy crises, and the US have stated point-blank that the supplies (of LNG, in this case) are tied to the US-EU trade treaty plus whatever changes the US wants to make.

Same protection racket plus a foot on the brake of the EU's push to renewables.

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The renewables rollout just keeps going despite the discourse. It does mean buying things from China, which is now the least threatening option.

Alas, it is exactly the intermittent renewables that create a dependency on fossil fuels.

Unless you have nuclear or another reliable source like hydro, which you only get if you have the right topography for it.

How do renewables create a dependency on fossil fuels? This dependency already existed before renewables in the current sense were a thing.

If anything, renewables help existing stock of fossil fuels last longer as you don't burn as much when renewables are generating.

I'm going to guess if net energy use goes up, due to a glut of renewable energy, the gaps on cloudy, windless days will result in greater fossil fuel use than before.

There need to be assurances renewables are replacing fossil fuels rather than just adding capacity.

> the gaps on cloudy, windless days will result in greater fossil fuel use than before

How can it possibly, when ""before"" (what dates and countries are we talking about?) was mostly fossil fuel anyway?

Remember that Germany, France, Spain and Poland look completely different in terms of energy mix!

The way they do renewables in some places:

* solar with no storage

* shutting down existing nuclear

* natural gas peaker plants

* making everyone to use natural gas for heating by making it much cheaper than electricity

* slowing down the EV rollout by keeping to subsidize gas and diesel

could definitely be seen as a scheme to make the fossil fuel gravy train last as long as possible.

And that's not even talking about the absolutely out there schemes that didn't succeed like hydrogen powered vehicles (with most of hydrogen coming from fossil fuels and you can theoretically switch to zero emission one but you never would have because the fossil one is always going to be cheaper because making hydrogen is difficult).

But it could also all just be incompetence.

All true, but that does not create a fossil fuel dependency, it just prolongs an already existing one.

Gas for heating used to be the standard but is on its way out now. My house hasn't had a gas connection for 8 years, and many people qre switching to heat pumps and other cleaner methods of heating.

> The way they do renewables in some places: > * making everyone to use natural gas for heating by making it much cheaper than electricity

They do renewables in some places by selling cheap fossil fuels? That’s… not doing renewables.

> Alas, it is exactly the intermittent renewables that create a dependency on fossil fuels.

First of all, this is an insane statement.

> Unless you have nuclear

Second of all, with nuclear most countries will still be dependent on other countries for their fuel needs. So it doesn't solve the problem discussed here at all.

Stockpiling uranium ore, or lowly enriched uranium is much simpler than stockpiling natural gas.

Yes, but it won't matter. The state energy firms of EU countries are going heavily into debt to survive this crisis, and it'll just turn from "paying high electricity prices because oil is expensive" to "paying high energy prices to repay state debt".

I mean it'll help in the sense that energy supply will switch to renewable sources, sure. Great for the climate, hopefully, But it won't help in lowering energy cost.

And before you say "but solar panels". A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.

> The state energy firms of EU countries

Which state energy firms? Most countries have mostly privatized generation with just the grid in public ownership. EDF is something of an exception, but they have very different economics (and the nuclear fleet).

> "paying high energy prices to repay state debt"

The whole range of general taxation is available for that.

> A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.

Which European states?

Through various methods the EU is subsidizing the increased cost of fuel for a large number of customers, including electricity prices and gas prices.

e.g. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

The issue is that this is very expensive and EU countries are going deeper into debt to finance this.

I don't mind buying from china, as long as they're not irreplaceable essentials (like oil). Solar panels and -batteries are fine as long as they meet safety standards and don't have backdoors, and for all the fearmongering that Chinese made tech has backdoors in them, nobody seems to have found any evidence of that. And since it's electronics, any chip and any software can be investigated and taken apart by both amateur hackers and government funded (IT) security bureaus. Nothing. Unless I missed it, but I don't think something as big as that would go by quietly.

> [..] for all the fearmongering that Chinese made tech has backdoors in them, nobody seems to have found any evidence of that. [..]

Are you asserting no backdoors were found in Chinese made tech? I'm not sure how it'd happen in solar panels (which sucks, since I own a couple of these). Another thing to keep in mind is plausible deniability. If you don't patch software, it will be vulnerable, which is an issue in networked software, especially. So what I have seen happening (and I can name some examples of companies here, both Chinese and Taiwanese) where vulnerabilities are simply not patched. Sometimes, they're plain obvious.

I have seen KRACK vulnerability not getting patched. I have seen old MiFi without proper firmware updates, like ever. I have seen motherboard update software still using HTTP instead of HTTPS. And in the world of IoT, it has been a huge mess from the get-go.

Furthermore, the core network of a major telco here was maintained by Chinese engineers who were flown from China. You can probably guess the company name here.

The tactic is obviously not limited to China or Taiwan only, but it can be tackled with reproducible builds and FOSS.

US sells a lot of other things to Europe that Europe doesn't have to buy. That includes tech. I'm not looking forward to the ensuing trade war but it's not a one way street by any means.

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