Europe's crisis is wholly self-induced; a deliberate decision to switch off in favour of coal (Germany), or defund (France), or delay replacement of (UK) nuclear power stations in a region with cold dark winters and not the almost embarrassing excess of oil of Canada/Texas/Russia/Venezuela.
That's it. A power grid cannot be allowed to fail and no financially credible projects to store the required amount of energy (minimum, tens of TWh) exist, so renewables in such an environment have left us wholly dependent on gas. Nuclear fuel can be stockpiled, wind simply cannot, again at the required scale. If you think it can be within the next 30 years you're an idiot, a liar or a data scientist, it's that simple.
And yes, I've been to engineering conferences in EU where almost the entire topic now is "how do we minimise the damage from unreliable power". It takes zero financial acumen to realise the capital cost of the plant is not decreasing, the output is, and the best case is a reduction in output proportional to the interruption in power. That is the best case, much more frequent is a far greater loss of product. Quite a few people, myself included, were visibly on the verge of crying, because the writing is on the fucking wall. Quite honestly, the Energiewenders do not seem to give a shit, nor do they seem to about Germany's reversion to coal, a move that permanently make's Europe's position on the world stage re climate change laughable.
This is not a Russia-induced crisis - comedy shows were mocking the certainty of Putin using gas as a weapon fifteen years ago. This is entirely self-induced.
France didn't defund their nuclear industry, quite to the contrary, and neither did the Brits.
The problem is that the EPR is a fundamentally flawed design that led to serious time and budget overruns wherever it was attempted - Flamanville, Olkilouto, Hinkley Point C, Taishan all have fallen victim to that.
Additionally, you are completely ignoring that nuclear plants need cooling - and the lack of said cooling water is what has been impacting France and Switzerland as well over the last weeks.
> A power grid cannot be allowed to fail and no financially credible projects to store the required amount of energy (minimum, tens of TWh) exist, so renewables in such an environment have left us wholly dependent on gas. Nuclear fuel can be stockpiled, wind simply cannot, again at the required scale. If you think it can be within the next 30 years you're an idiot, a liar or a data scientist, it's that simple.
There are alternatives: Pumped hydro for storage, battery parks for ultra-short-term demand smoothening (like the Tesla battery park in Australia), bio-mass/bio-gas as fuel for burner plants (think of cow dung, sewage sludge, household bio waste and the likes), electric cars as distributed energy storage units, or simply a massive overbuild of renewable electricity generation and trans-European UHV distribution networks to get, say, wind power from the Portuguese coast to the German industry in the Ruhrpott - China already does similar distances ffs.
Additionally, it's high time to make the demand side smart as well: big consumers like aluminium smelters or parts of the chemical industry could be converted to dynamically react to the power available on the grid, extremely large consumers could be placed on seasonal holidays (e.g. during winter), and large consumers could also finally take the money in their hands and invest into energy efficiency so they don't need as much energy any more. A shocking amount of industry equipment is three decades or even older!
And finally: Right now the European electricity grid has almost zero real-time visibility. The "smart meters" we have are bullshit, they're just used once a year and all "advantage" they have over the old Ferraris wheel meters is that they have an LCD - for a truly smart grid, grid operators need a live feed of who is consuming or producing what amount of energy and what the exact load conditions of grid-side equipment like sub-district transformers are.
> Additionally, you are completely ignoring that nuclear plants need cooling - and the lack of said cooling water is what has been impacting France and Switzerland as well over the last weeks
Not to mention nuclear plants can be cooled by sea water or by waste water.
I don't think you appreciate the scale of energy storage. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity every hour. And electricity is less than half of total energy use. And as countries develop these figures are going to rise, not shrink.
If your solution involves shutting down industry because of insufficient energy production, then that's going to have a cascading effect of making good more expensive, and making products using those gooda more expensive. It may very well be that nuclear is cheaper than renewables when the cost of economic shutdowns due to insufficient energy are taken into account.
If the US continued to build nuclear plants at the same pace it did in the 1960s and 70s we'd have reached 100% nuclear generation by 2010. The world would be in a much better place.
That's it. A power grid cannot be allowed to fail and no financially credible projects to store the required amount of energy (minimum, tens of TWh) exist, so renewables in such an environment have left us wholly dependent on gas. Nuclear fuel can be stockpiled, wind simply cannot, again at the required scale. If you think it can be within the next 30 years you're an idiot, a liar or a data scientist, it's that simple.
And yes, I've been to engineering conferences in EU where almost the entire topic now is "how do we minimise the damage from unreliable power". It takes zero financial acumen to realise the capital cost of the plant is not decreasing, the output is, and the best case is a reduction in output proportional to the interruption in power. That is the best case, much more frequent is a far greater loss of product. Quite a few people, myself included, were visibly on the verge of crying, because the writing is on the fucking wall. Quite honestly, the Energiewenders do not seem to give a shit, nor do they seem to about Germany's reversion to coal, a move that permanently make's Europe's position on the world stage re climate change laughable.
This is not a Russia-induced crisis - comedy shows were mocking the certainty of Putin using gas as a weapon fifteen years ago. This is entirely self-induced.