Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
Could always try to quit making enemies?
So there’s no need for subsidies money because the epic capitalism Invisible hand private market “just needs permission to go green”? This might be one of the dumbest “conclusions” to an article I’ve read in a while. I hope this entire thing was written by AI.
Its published in Fortune, I’m curious what you expected when you clicked on the link.
To be fair, the permitting and environmental impact process is crazy and is really holding back deployment. If the government gets out of the way of renewable projects the growth would increase massively.
Some of the process might be necessary. However, it should be the government’s burden to bear, not the applicants’. The process should be as straightforward and simple as possible on the applicant end.
Trump was driving trade diversification around the world with the idiotic tariffs, and now, with the illegal war against Iran, he’s creating a resurgence of interest in renewables and EVs. Exact opposite of what he says he wants but maybe not so bad in the long run.
That’s a really positive outlook and I love it.
Except that a bunch of people on the other side of the planet are dying because of this.
Maybe he was always a democrat plant 😂
/s
He definitely has the intelligence of a plant.
The enemies of europe (and any other country) are billionares and politicians.
Politicans can be cool. Some are not. But you could be.
if your words and your actions, which never seem to gel
will get you into heaven, i’d sooner be in hellOwed to a Hypocrite, a song about the dangers of preachers and politicians
100%, especially from Poland perspective
explain that to the graybeard in politics
Nah, we’ll just buy gas from US and postpone electrification of transport couple decades. What could go wrong?
I’m sorry, but what does that have to do with anything?
I’ve been going around in cars powered by natural gas most of my life, but I’m the very very small minority. The overwhelming majority of cars don’t run on that, heating and the electric grid do. If you run out of gas the cars won’t stop, the trains will.
Thank you! We just do not do enough fracking here yet.
I would electrify my transport in a heartbeat, if only it wasn’t so fucking expensive. Like ~30k€ for cheapest Kia BEV? Not even speaking about more “premium” brands. How tf should I get that with mediocre eastern european salary?
Don’t buy new. The second hand market for EVs is great. 3-4 year old cars with over 200 miles range for £12-15k, and lots of them.
I love my BYD dolphin
It was the cheapest car I could find, and it cost about €17,000
Yup, but in Poland there are still small fraction of evs…
Renault is government company, why they dont want to sell evs cars cheaper? Is it really necessary to make bigger profit than from ice?
You meant Renault? They made the Zoe back in 2014, then made the Megane only electric, made the Spring through their Dacia subsidiary, now the 5, and they are launching the new Twingo generation as only electric. This makes them cover all EV segments, from the sub 20.000 euro electric car to the 60.000 one through alpine. They use more and more European made batteries and motors. Out of all the European car makers Renault and Mercedes are the ones that are the most pro electric now.
Yup, but why electric model is more expensive than ice one? Because of government subsidies?
The new twingo is the exact same price in constant euros as the first gen twingo that came out in 1993.
Besides that, prices of EVs are not more expensive over 5 or 10 years despite the shown price because you run them at a much much cheaper price : electricity is often cheaper than gas, the only real cost you would have to pay is tires and shock absorbers, breaks pads and disks get used a lot less because of regen, no belts or chains, no spark plugs, no oil change, no exhaust, no turbo, no belts driven AC, no starter motor, no alternators etc… All those things that cost a lot in mechanic repairs for most cars.
Have you considered the Dacia Spring? It should be fine for short-medium range trips and it costs “only” 20k
I own a Dacia, I want a cheap car with no luxury. But but the Spring is just a bad car. Poor charging, poor range, can’t accelerate at highway speed. Those are not luxuries. It was the first electric car at this price range, but now there are better competitors.
To me a car like that kinda defeats the point of owning a car.
If it’s only needed for driving around town and getting groceries, I can do that with (e-?)bike+transit+carsharing.
A significant fraction of my yearly km are driven on trip of over 500km/day, and to do that with the family it really helps to have a car. It’ll still be a while before electric cars are completely viable for my use case.
Replacing the short range use of cars with electrical ones is the wrong approach. It should mostly be reduced by offering alternatives. If people use the car only half as much, that’s a nearly 50% reduction on emission and fuel consumption, right there.
For over 500km/day, I use the train. Not many people put on 115 500 km/year on their car. You are an exception.
Easy there, we do ~15000 km/year, but ~4000 of those are on long trips. That’s “a significant fraction”. I didn’t say I spend all day every day in the car.
There are many logistical reasons why we still need one car, but we are actually also able to walk, bike, and use transit.
And I expect I spend more time on a train that you do. But it’s not always the most practical option.
Crossing the alps on a train means too many changes, with trains from different companies, and my bored kids (depends on the origin and destination, but it’s true in my case). Even using the plane, with all the associated changes and buffer times, usually takes 6 or 7 hours.
Holidays in the mountains also gets a hell of a lot harder without a car. That’s true in general, but it’s doubly so in the places where I like to go (less crowded secondary destinations). Public transport requires density, and the last thing I want in the mountains is high density.
Edit:
As I wrote in another message, I would have thought that:
“Reducing car use is better than just replacing them. Cars as they cover a lot of difficult corner cases, but let’s offer good alternatives for the day to day life”
should be a pretty uncontroversial take, and yet I’m here discussing with people that want to use cars everyday, and cover the exceptions with the alternatives.
Wouldn’t you do it the other way around, where the car you own is for commuting and kids taxi, and you use a car rental or sharing service for the long trips?
We have bought the smallest car that would satisfy all our needs (a small station wagon), and we use it as necessary.
My commute is outrageous BTW, 50+50km, at highway speed and with airco, that might already be a stretch for the Dacia Spring. I do it mostly by train though.
I would have thought that:
“Reducing car use is better than just replacing them. Cars as they cover a lot of difficult corner cases, but let’s offer good alternatives for the day to day life”
should be a pretty uncontroversial take, and yet I’m here discussing with people that want to use cars everyday, and cover the exceptions with the alternatives.
I agree with you, and I get around town mostly on bike. Many people don’t, and I think it would be better if they drove EVs. Anyway, if I’d need to buy a car, I would still consider the Spring, since its range would be fine for heavy loads that I wouldn’t carry on a (cargo) bike or 100-200 km trips
- More nuclear power plants
- more renevables
- more public transport and evs
Do you kbow where Europe get it’s uranium to power these nuclear power plants from? No? Let me tell you: We import it from countries like Kazakhstan, Niger a bit from Canada. France, one of the biggest nuclear powered countries imports it’s uranium from Russia. This is exactly the same as with oil and gas. So tell me: How do nuclear power plants help us, if we have to import the fuel?
Do you know what are the resources we have in Europe: Wind, water and sun. To be fair, we have cole too, but this is one of the dirtiest ways to produce energie.
The only way out are renewable energies.
I know I know.
But fuel is small money factor in comparison to importing lng to gas power plants.
nuclear power is very geopolitically sensitive and very expensive. It is a target to get Chernobyled if war or civil unrest happens.
You dropped half of your w
It’s called “reduce, reuse, recycle”
Or, ya know, build on self-sustainable sources.
But nuclear is so bad!!1! Better burn coal and oil and “clean” gas!!
Renewables FTW, with a nuclear backdrop til we can phase out that too is the way forward IMO.
You know nuclear isn’t self-sustainable? Uranium is mined in only a few places.
The volume of uranium used is so low that is feasible to store years of supply; this is not possible with gas.
But it should be noted as a risk, of course.
Uranium-based nuclear power isn’t ideal, but thorium-based nuclear power shows a lot of promise, because thorium is both way more common than uranium, and way harder to weaponize.
It is the other way around though: because it cannot be weaponized, there was no incentive to develop an industrial reactor and a supply chain. The remaining technical and scientific challenges on this technology are non-trivial too as I understand, so it will be a few decades before we see one in action even if we took the decision to invest in it today.
Yeah but that’s still experimental, right?
Thorium reactor rely on transmuting thorium into a form of uranium, a form which itself can be extracted and weaponized…
And? You’re trying to argue it’s like oil?
So you advocate for coal, gas and oil until we can be 100% reliant on renewables?
There’s no option. Transitioning to nuclear will keep you burning stuff for 10-15 years whilst they’re built. Even SMRs will be 5-10. Renewables come online with a much smoother transition curve. You reduce burning stuff sooner, and we need whatever is quickest.
Still need batteries big enough to power global shipping etc. Nuclear can do that, even though building reactors takes time
It can, and I’m not anti-nuclear for all use cases. I just don’t think it stops us burning stuff soon enough.
No perfect solution, sadly. We’re also very late to start reducing emissions. And humanity doesn’t seem to be able to get their shit together and actually do something about it any time soon
That’s a bad faith interpretation of the above comment. We already can be 100% reliant on renewables. Nuclear is so clownishly expensive that it’s far cheaper to provide baseload power via solar, wind, batteries, and other energy storage mechanisms.
Well what will you use for power generation before we have enough renewable energy? You say it yourself: “can” be reliant. Yes but we are not, so what’s the way forward? Nuclear til we have enough renewables, or you know, my question : shall we burn coal up til then?
And nuclear energy is less expensive than coal, oil and gas IMO.
What are you on about? We don’t have the nuclear we’re talking about. This is about future plant construction. And new renewable capacity can be deployed in a fraction of the time that nuclear can.
France have upped their production massively, you don’t always need to build a whole new nuclear central to augment production.
This is the correct answer. Nuclear is not a perfect energy source, but it fills one big gap that we currently have with the renewable energy sources.
I would also say that gas can be an ok alternative in some situations. For example as replacement of a coal power plant if it is built together with solar and/or wind power. The gas power plant can increase the power when the renewables does not produce energy and be turned off during sunny or windy days.
What exactly is the big gap? Are you going to mention baseload, a concept that’s been obsolete for a decade? The baseload power demand, according to the according to its actual definition, is zero on many grids. Solar and wind produce energy Joule-for-Joule far cheaper than fission. And we have any number of ways of storing that cheap energy. Renewables are the cheapest form of baseload power. It’s not 2010 anymore.
Plus, if we’re talking national security, we’ve seen from the Ukraine conflict that every nuclear plant is a huge geopolitical liability. There have been many near misses and scares relating to Ukraine’s fission plants. Many have had to be shut down due to the risk of being struck. And hell, Iran’s plants are actively being targeted by US and Israeli air strikes. In a big war, your enemy can create an instant chernobyl in your backyard if they want. You can design a reactor to be intrinsically safe, but that doesn’t help if someone drops a ballistic missile on top of it. And yes, if you did this to a nuclear power like the US or Russia, it might provoke a retaliatory strike with actual nuclear bombs. But there are dozens of countries that have nuclear reactors but no nuclear weapons. For them, having nuclear power plants is a huge strategic liability. Far better to have innumerable solar panels and wind turbines scattered across the countryside than one big vulnerable reactor, an Achilles heel that an enemy can target to knock your whole power grid offline.
Solar and wind power are dependent on the weather to generate power, where nuclear power is not. I agree that there are many ideas on how to store the energy from solar and wind power, but how many of them is used on such large scale that it makes a difference on the grid?
Out of topic but do you have any data that shows that the baseload is obsolete? I have a hard time to believe that based on the definition from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/baseload
Baseload refers to the minimum level of demand on an electrical supply system over a 24-hour period, with baseload power sources being those plants that generate dependable power to consistently meet this demand.
Yes, but unless we figure out how to store a ton of electric energy, renewables are limited in use and somehow counterproductive as it makes energy cheaper during sunny days and thus making nuclear even more expensive (due to the fact that nuclear can’t be easily throttled). 🤷
In practice you only need to store about a day’s worth of electricity, a few hours really. Solar panels are so stupidly cheap now that you can solve seasonal variations in production by just spamming solar panels. You deploy enough panels to meet your demand on a cloudy day in winter. Then the rest of the year you have dirt cheap abundant electricity. Maybe shut down some of your most energy-intensive industries on the cloudiest winter days if you must. Give everyone at the steel mill a week off and instead ask them to work longer hours in the summer.
And what about people living in extreme latitudes? We can use excess solar power during the summer to capture atmospheric CO2, use that to make synthetic liquid fuels, and the handful of folks living north of the arctic circle can just keep burning carbon-neutral diesel fuel forever. You could use small fission plants for these remote locations, but there’s unlikely to ever be enough demand just in the high latitudes to sustain an entire nuclear supply chain. Synthetic carbon-neutral liquid fuels would have many applications, so a supply chain could be developed.
For places up north connected to the grid, would it not be enough to send solar-generated electricity from sunnier areas to the south most of the time? (Although synthetic fuel burning sounds like a good backup plan for when the grid connection fails).
Storing a ton is easy. It’s storing gigatons that’s hard.
Uranium is one of the most dense elements. It’s like 30x more dense than gasoline.
That’s happening but moving to renewable isn’t something you can just magically do
Unless we figure out energy storage, it will never be a solution.
Energy storage is slowly being figured as battery prices drop year by year
That’s nowhere near enough. It’s magnitudes away.
Nah, if you assume 6-12h of storage needed it’s close to break even. I’d say if prices of batteries get halved again, it’s solved
Can we do some calculations for worst case, ie winter week with clouds at best? How much does a single household consume when using heat pumps for warming? That would be at least 30kWh per day just for heating. Let’s round it to 40kWh pet day which makes 280kWh per week. Shall we add an EV car into equation? 140kWh? We are at 420kWh per week you might need to back up with batteries. Now multiply this number with millions of households. Or simply take a look at electric energy consumption in your country during winter days (when many don’t even have heat pumps and EVs) and you think there is enough batteries around and is simply a matter of price? Good luck with that. Wind and hydro would help to some extent, though.
When I said break even, I meant financial feasibility. Point is you can invest in solar power plus 12h of storage and this makes financial sense.
As for winter periods, noone expect solar to magically work in winter. Point is to reduce dependency on fossil and this can be achieved. You’d still expect strategic energy reserves and winter power to be delivered through fossil, due to avaliabliy and good energy density.
You could substitute fossil with wind power during winter, but that still requires storage.
Energy storage is a largely unnecessary. You only need to store a few hours worth of electricity. Solar panels are so stupid cheap that you can solve seasonal variations in solar production by spamming solar panels. You build enough panels to meet all your needs on a cloudy winter day. Then the rest of the year you have abundant cheap power.
The energy storage problem has been solved by stupidly cheap solar panels. People will whine about the footprint required, but the actual math shows this is just FUD.
See my answer to BlackLaZoR
Stop buying gas from the enemy after 4 years of war? Preposterous!
The EU has reduced Russian gas imports from 45% of the total gas imports of the union before the invasion of Ukraine to 13% at the end of 2025 and will be at 0% by 2027.
Coal and oil are already at 0%.
It’s not like you can just switch off 150bn cubic meters of gas overnight
The problem is that they replaced most of it with the 3 times more expensive USA’s LNG.
That was the point of the whole war and why Biden sabotaged Stoltz and Macron.
deleted by creator
This is an outrage!
But it’ll be an outage.
The technology is there. We need solar, wind, batteries, hydro-storage and nuclear, which is hold back by fear and costs driven by bureaucracy. What we lack is political capital and supranational coordination. We need to scale up production and learn from the Chinese. The demand for batteries is there.
Exactly, don’t buy from the usa, our once allie has shown open hostility.
Its pretty funny how little that narrows down your nationality
Non-usians is a pretty wide nationality.
In Denmark, we have been investing heavily in solar panels and windmills the last few years, which is awesome! Electric car purchases have also exploded.
Now we just need to do away with out pig production and we will have more fields to place solar panels on and there will still be plenty of space to turn former pig feed fields into wildlife reserves so our nature can recover from the damage these pig farmers have done to our country. It’ll take time, but I’m optimistic about our green policies in the future. We are heading in the right direction.
Do you know what the penetration percentage is of urban solar is in Denmark? Think of applications like rooftop solar, parking canopies/carports, façades, etc. Or even applications like brownfield?
Asking because there are many land uses in the world where solar could serve as a secondary function, all the while providing power exactly where it’s needed: in urban load centers.
Ground-mount solar on fields across the countryside would certainly help, but many solar installations rely on gravel to cover the ground underneath the panels, or low-growth native seed to reduce the amount of mowing needed over time.
Placing solar in urban contexts allows our countrysides to be rewilded and made polycultures supporting native wildlife. Ground-mount solar can introduce monocultures that don’t support native wildlife.
I don’t know a lot about the subject so I asked my boyfriend who knows way more about solar energy.
Paraphrasing him, the short reply to moving solar panels into cities is a no.
The longer answer is a multitude of reasons, but the main one is weight. Most house roofs, especially in older buildings will not be able to carry the weight of solar panels. The return from having solar panels on roofs in the city will also not be as good as if they are in the fields because the panels can’t move and maybe some roofs are placed in bad positions for optimal sun intake.
He also mentioned higher risks of fires due to the space between the roof and the solar panels, potentially feeding a fire with oxygen and making harder to put out the fire.
Due to the nature of a city layout, the solar panels would also be peppered out in a bigger area than if they were all collected on one plain field. This also means difficulties with maintainece which also costs more time and money than if you keep them in a field.
Keeping them in a concentrated area in a field is the most optimal solution for now. Maybe in the future, if solar panels have their weights significantly reduced, it will be a viable option to place them on roofs in cities. As for now, the best we can do with urban solar panels is to have them in mind when new buildings are raised and several contracting companies apparently work on this already, so things are happening. But many big Danish cities have old buildings, some are hundreds of years old. Its not uncommon to find houses here that are between 200 ans 400 years old.
I would like to add, that if we did like they have in the Netherlands and close down one third of our pig production, we would be able to secure more wild life areas that we have had in a hundred years and still have land for solar panels to spare.
To me it isn’t an either or with solar panels and nature. We could have both. Currently we barely have space for either because the pig farmer take up all the space to grow pig food.
I don’t think people understand how actually insane it is with the farming here. There is not one place here where you don’t see fields. They take up all the space. If we shut down their industry, there would be more space for nature while the space needed for solar energy wouldn’t even take up a 10th of land. I don’t have the actual numbers of space needed for solar panels, but it would be ridiculously low. I am way more interested in having the pig food fields confiscated by the state and made into protected nature. That is where the true gain for nature lies.
Also: According to my boyfriend, the current energy production in Denmark which is covered by solar panels and especially windmills is around 60%. We aren’t far from having reached our goal for sustainable green energy so the solar panel fields are literally nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Rebutting your LLM’s points:
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“Older” houses in much of Europe are often made of stone, newer are frequently cinderblock, and the roof beams in both are massive. They’re holding up tile and slate roofs - the weight of solar panels is a rounding error, and not the concern it is with shoddy US stick-frame construction. So if that’s the “main reason” we’re doing pretty well already.
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Sub-optimal angle just means the panel doesn’t produce AS MUCH power as it theoretically could. Not that it produces none, and many sub-optimal placements are still financially viable. Beyond that, any south-facing roof available is going to do very well.
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Fire risks are again much lower on the very common hard-surface roofs. And that same space that allows the oxygen in also separates the fire from the roof, so the only things burning are the panels themselves and the fire soesn’t spread as it might with a ground-based installation which, by the way, also has air under the panels and are often over grass.
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Higher installation and maintenance costs are partially offset by the fact that the cost of land purchase and taxes are €0. That was already covered by the building’s main use. Then you can add the social and financial benefit of keeping those fields in food production. Moving away from animal agriculture would not only mean more food available locally, but also for export as crop yields in other places fall due to climate change.
Finally, the whole framing presents a false dichotomy. This doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition - both-and is an option. We can have solar panels on buildings AND in fields. We can convert growing fields from feed production to food production AND put solar panels on the former pig farms that can’t support crops. Particularly in warmer climates (maybe less applicable in Denmark) we can even raise the solar panels a bit higher AND still grow crops underneath (Agrivoltaics)!
You don’t know what you’re talking about and the fact that you discredit my boyfriend’s words by calling it an LLM is pathetic.
Bye 👋
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There’s no reason why panels can’t be in the same fields as the pigs… the lowest point of a panel can be higher than a pig…
The fields are not used to have pigs walking around. They are used to grow pigfood. Pigs in Denmark are being kept in massive indoor industrial compounds where they never see the sun. The sows are strapped to the ground with metal bars to be nonstop feeding machines for piglets.
We are around 6 million people in tiny little Denmark. We have over 40 million pigs who are produced for meat and all of them, ALL OF THEM are being exported to other countries, Italy and Poland, for slaughtering and the meat is sold to other countries. That transportation pollutes the environment and is entirely unnecessary. It is animal abuse and environmentally unsound to send them to other countries to get slaughtered. The farmers do this to save money because slaughter houses are cheaper in Poland.
The pig shit produced is so massive that farmers break the laws every spring and strat fertilizing the fields before the night frost has ended. This is illegal because the frost keeps the shit frozen on the ground, the ground cannot absorb the fertilizer and this means that when everything thaws, the excess nutrients and water will run off and straight into creeks and lakes and pollute the water there.
Pesticides used on the fields that are used to grow pigfood - not human food - pig food is also seepinging into the ground and is now polluting our ground water along with the excess pig shit which is fucking insane because we used to have naturally clean ground water and now we are facing a future were we might have to spend billions to keep the ground water clean if the farmers aren’t stopped.
Every year, thousands, if not millions of pigs die before ever seeing a butcher. They have no space, they get sick. The farmers fill their food with penicillin to the point that now several diseases have started to show resistense to penicillin which has the potential to develop into a health crisis for humans all over the fucking world, bro. If penicillin stops working, we are fucked.
Our coastlines are as good as dead at this point. There is no aquatic life left due to farmers polluting the land with their pig shit. Several species of animals are close to extinction because of the farmers. Especially several types of birds because there aren’t enough insects for them to eat and their habitat has been taken over by industrial farmers.
Over 60% of all Danish areal is being used for farming and most of that is to grow pig food.
But that is not enough. There still isn’t enough food for the pigs. So what do the farmers do? They import soybeans from South America where local soy farmers have to cut down rain forest to grow more soy beans to meet the demand. The soy beans are transported by container ships which we all know are some of the biggest polluters in the world. All to feed fucking pigs that no Dane will ever get to have.
Danes, btw, get to have the bad, left over pork while the prime stuff is sold to other countries.
It is also contributing to the housing crisis in Denmark because the big industrial farms have helped kill the countryside life in Denmark. When everything smells like pigshit in the countryside it’s already not fun to live there, but there are also no jobs because pig farmers will not hire Danes to work on their farms because they would have to pay us more and actually care about our well being. They instead hire guest workers from poor countries to work with the pigs and get ammonia poisonings because the air in those stalls is filled with pig pee vapor. At least the workers can go outside at some point, but the pigs live in that air their whole lives.
Now that you know the basics of industrial pig farming in Denmark you may think: gosh, this must be a super lucrative industry since all this shit is being done to the animals and thr environment to keep up production. They must stand for at least 60% of the Danish BNP, right? That’s what my best friend thought when I told her about how pig farming works in Denmark.
Less than 1%. Less than fucking 1% does this POS industry contribute to the overall Danish BNP.
But how in the hell has it been able to get this far, you may think.
Because of a political party named Venstre who has historically been a farmer party and fought for farmers. The level of lobbying going there is disgusting. The farmers pay them so much fucking money to keep the public ignorant about what is going on and they have been successful in the past, but not anymore. There has been a recent movement to expose pig farmers and they have been successful. The Danish public is fucking outraged because they were lied to.
I have avoided eating pig meat as much as possible for at least ten years because I found pig farming unethical, but even I didn’t know the true magnitude of this insane industry until four or five years ago.
When I learned that they contribute less than 1 fucking percent to the BNP while taking up over 60% of our land to grow fucking pig food for 40+ million pigs whose entire lives are suffering while our wildlife and nature is dying out - I went from being against pork to wanting it absolutely outlawed here. Get that shit out of my country.
Take the pig fields back, turn them into nature and solar parks. Fuck pig farmers.
This is fucking insane and shows that lobbying and the practice of paying for political outcomes should be outlawed and, more importantly, the adherence to the laws needs to be controlled and failure to do so needs prison sentences or at least complete repossession of the offenders business.
Yep. The good news is that our Dutch neighbors whose country has a similar setup to us, have cut their pig production by a third recently and the plan is to further cut into it. That is what we need to do in Denmark too. Cut it down until it is phased out entirely and continue to promote sustainable farming.
In time I also hope we will be able to take a look at lobbying because the farm lobbying is the most extreme case we have here. We just had the election here in Denmark and Venstre has had their worst election result EVER. The party is over a 100 years old and used to be one of the biggest parties in Denmark. They ruled my country all the way up through the 2000s where means were given to farmers, tax money, given to them, special agreements that gave farmers carte Blanche to pretty much do whatever they wanted and even the smallest attempt at putting restrictions on them by left leaning governments had them throw temper tantrums. This is the general case for all European industrial farmers.
Back then it worked because farming is a cultural heritage type of thing and part of the Danish identity so these industrial farmers (and the politicians who support them) who actually helped kill the old farming culture have used the image of the wholesome farmer as a shield against all criticism towards farmers.
The anti-industrial farmer movement in Denmark is huge and multifaceted. A lot of this is also paving the way for Danes to sort of grieve over the identity we have lost which is reflected in fiction and art. There is a lot of authors writing about the shift from farming culture to the modern middle class and the effects it has had on the Danish self image. The fact that this is being reflected in art at the same time as the pig issue has exploded is almost poetic.
It was a matter of time before we would have to recon with all of this and the fact that we are finally here is pretty exciting, because it has really gotten out of hand. I legit remember my dad as early as the early 2000s and maybe even the 90s talk about how farming was going to destroy our country if it wasn’t regulated so I grew up with a pretty intense disgust for big farming while also growing up right next to one of legit, romantic old timey farms where the farmer knows and loves his animals and treats them well. A dying breed. So yeah, I have a complicated relationship with farming, but I hope for an support sustainable farming and want Venstre to actually support those instead of helping indsturial farmers climb to the top and hoard their wealth for themselves while legit farmers end up having to sell their land to the big farms so they can destroy my country for no reasons because it’s not even a profitable industry for anyone but the few hundred pig farm owners in my country. It’s fucking ridiculous.
I’m saying this only because Donny keeps calling them windmills and nobody wants to be like him - they’re wind turbines, not mills. There is no grain being crushed as there would be in a mill.
Donny and the Danes. Yeah, it’s quite amusing but they’re the natural evolution of a windmill. Vindmøller are fine for me
That may be the case in Danish
Dutch, but it’s incorrect to call them mills in English.Dutch = the Netherlands
Danish = Denmark.
If you’re going to be a Poindexter about windmills, then at least get the language right of the country you are criticizing.
I’m also terribly sorry that we don’t call them wind turbines and that it triggers you that we call them windmills because of trump. We called them windmills decades before Trump even knew what they were and we will continue to do so.
Language corrected. That was an unintentional error.
As for the rest of your heavily sarcastic post though, here’s my middle finger, which is all you deserve for posting such a deliberately assholish comment.
Thank you. I just don’t appreciate to be told that the way we refer to windmills in my country is wrong because trump says it. I found that pretty insulting and gave the energy back.
We call them windmills where I live.
And who would those be? Renewable energy independence is the only way.
Nuclear is a much better option in the short and medium term.
And renewable doesn’t solve the supply chain issue, a lot of materials for construction and maintenance need to be imported as well.
Nuclear takes decades to permit and build. You can build solar, wind, and BESS storage plants in 2 years, including permitting l, procurement, and construction.
The IPCC put it best: the fastest way to decarbonize and make independent the power sector is through renewables + storage.
We should hold onto the nuclear plants we have, and recommission the ones still standing (so long as they still operate safely), but all remaining efforts should be put towards renewables deployment.
Nuclear isn’t a option in the short term at all, simply because you can’t build it fast enough.
It’s also too damn expensive. And please tell where in germany we get the uran and the building materials for nuclear.
Canada. SMRs and uranium.
Ein von der Firma NuScale Power zusammen mit dem Energieversorger Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) geplantes Projekt in Idaho (siehe auch das Idaho National Laboratory) sollte Stand Anfang 2023 USD 102/MWh erreichen, wenn man die Subventionen herausrechnete.[17] Das Projekt wurde im November eingestellt, weil die ursprünglich für die Errichtung geplanten Kosten von 5,3 Milliarden Dollar auf bereits 9,3 Milliarden Dollar gestiegen waren.[18] Zum Vergleich der Stromkosten: Nach Schätzungen aus dem April 2023 erreichen Solarfreiflächenanlagen Stromgestehungskosten von USD 24 bis USD 96/MWh
zu teuer.
True but dont forget. If you will buy it from France, you will leave money locally :) and economy will get this money back
It is much faster to build nuclear power plants that can cover a country’s needs than to fully transition said country to renewable.
It’s expensive upfront. But it is cheap to operate afterwards, and cost efficient to renew. Look at France.
Germany made a major, major mistake when then phased out of nuclear energy.
We have uranium in Europe. We just don’t exploit it. But even if we did not, there is plenty of countries in the world exporting uranium, on all continents. It’s much less of a strategic issue than relying on rare materials for renewable, or on gas/oil.
I present Exhibit A, the new Reactor Flamaville in France. Construction took 17 years and 12 billion Euros.
Exhibit B, solar panels I can mount on my roof for a few thousand that run for 20 years without maintenance.
I rest my case.
EDIT: I did some estimating and figured that instead of building a NPR, France could have supplied around 500.000 households with solar and storage instead. That would be the populations of Lyon, Toulouse and Nice combined. And they would have around 65% of their power for free.
I am not sure if you mean it that way, but I will take this comment as a good joke!
What are you talking about? Building new plants takes decades. Renewables are much faster to build and are even cheaper than keep running existing nuclear plants
No, what are you talking about? A nuclear power plant takes less than a decade to build.
Renewable energy at the scale of a country is impossible to achieve in such a short time in Europe. We dont have huge geothermal taps, which countries having achieved 100% renewable energy have, and we consume a lot more energy.
Cheaper is great, but it’s not continuous, it’s not scaleable in a short period of time, and requires a fuckton more maintainance capability than a dozen nuclear power plants.
I will reiterate: A full renewable energy grid in Europe is impossible with our current tech, especially in a reasonable timeframe. That’s why instead of solar power plants, countries prefer to subsidies local, individual solar panel installations, for instance.
A nuclear power plant takes less than a decade to build.
This is demonstrably a lie. The most recent nuclear power plant built in the US took 15 years to complete.
And the power plants in china took 6, with some that took 4 year. You can make nuclear faster if you want to. This is not a technology problem (or at least, not only), but a bureaucratic one. Chinese are building plants based on the AP1000, the same the US are building. It is a US design.
I agree with @knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de, everything about nuclear technology involves cost and time overruns. A nuclear power plant would ultimately take a decade or more to complete. Even the newer developments of SMRs or Thorium require real world experience and expertise that limit the number of countries who can explore this technology.
While countries are quick to make claims that they unlocked commercial thorium reactors, I’d say the only superpower realistically on track is China.
China hopes to complete the world’s first commercial thorium reactor by 2030 and has planned to further build more thorium power plants across the low populated deserts and plains of western China, as well as up to 30 nations involved in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Is nuclear really cheaper than renewables + batteries nowadays? I wonder if there are recent studies looking into it
Quick search points to this:
Levelized Cost of Electricity: which is a measure of the total cost of building and operating a power plant over its lifetime and expressed in dollars per megawatt-hour. […] LCOE serves as a comprehensive metric that consolidates all direct cost components of a specific power generation technology. This includes capital expenditures, financing, fuel costs, operations and maintenance, and any expenses related to carbon pricing. However, LCOE does not account for network integration or other indirect costs
LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases
[…] Global weighted average levelized cost of electricity for newly commissioned utility-scale solar photovoltaic, onshore wind, offshore wind, and hydropower projects experienced a downward trend. The most notable drop occurred in utility-scale solar PV, which saw a 12% decrease from 2022 [in LCOE costs][…]
In contrast, nuclear power continues to face cost overruns and long construction timelines […]
Source: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-Of-Nuclear-Vs-Renewables
[Caveat: Below numbers are most likely not using LCOE]:
[…] In 2025, developers added 87 gigawatts of combined solar and storage, delivering power at an average of $57/MWh
By contrast, benchmark cost of a typical fixed axis solar farm increased 6% compared to 2025, hitting $39/MWh, while onshore wind reached $40/MWh and offshore wind climbed to $100/MWh globally […]
If we aren’t there yet, I still think we might see renewables + batteries as cheaper options in the short term.
I’d really like to see an LCOE analysis including batteries. If we naively assume LCOE costs for PV+batteries is the same as PV, we might already be there
My focus isn’t on which type of energy is cheapest. An energy grid that is not predictable is worthless. Wiknd power, solar power, are great complements, but a grid using only those is not viable. Hydroelectric is great, but limited. Geothermal is not really viable in mainland Europe.
I’m worried about a realistic transition from fossile fuels to non fossile fuels. Nuclear is realistic, renewable as a main source in Europe is utopic and unrealistic.
Nuclear power plants have to turn off if the weather gets too hot. They have to dump their waste heat in rivers or other bodies of water. To keep them from cooking the local wildlife, countries have to limit the amount of heat they’re allowed to dump into the river. When the temperature of the river increases due to warm weather, the amount the reactor can dispose of in the river decreases. Rivers are not the infinite cold reservoirs your thermodynamics class taught you.
Predictability of renewables can be minimized via national grid interconnection. Even if it’s cloudy and the wind is stagnant in one location, odds are that’s not the case 500-1,000 miles / km away. The larger the grid, the more predictable renewables becomes.
Also, most Lithium-based BESS storage can discharge power to accommodate unpredictable renewables for up to as long as 4 hours, which can be enough to bridge the gap. If storage can’t do it, the grid will.
And let’s not forget other types of renewables + storage that don’t care about clouds or the wind: run-of-the-river hydro (not reservoir hydro), pumped storage hydro, tidal, solar thermal, even wave although I highly doubt wave power will take off, etc.
The more diverse our power generation, both in type and location, the more predictable our grid will be. Diversity is key.
Edit: let’s not forget about the other end of the power equation from generation: utilization. Energy efficiency and conservation through Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS) are another tool to help the grid manage unpredictable renewables.
You must hate nuclear then, it has awful synergy with renewables since you can’t turn it off and on again quickly. Just overproducing with renewables and using batteries + gas plants for the few days the wind doesn’t blow enough is much more realistic.
This is just…wrong. an unpredictable grid is perfectly fine for almost everything we currenty use it for, it just requires a very small amount of moving usage around and feedback on pricing/demand.
I’m not sure we define unpredictable in the same way. I mean not being able to rely on a continuous source of power (batteries mitigate but don’t solve this issue) is problematic.
Tell that to Georgia Power. And while you’re at it, pay my electric bill for me if it’s so damn cheap!
Nuclear is part of the solution. We shouldn’t rely on a single source of energy.
👆🏻 This is a key point.
No-one should rely on a single source; neither geographical location nor type of energy.
Europe is sharing both gas and electricity amongst countries, but also needs to generate more and use less.
Nuclear is a much better option in the short and medium term.
Nuclear is not a good option at all if you want to stop buying energy from the “enemies” such as the billionaires and politicians who will be in charge for it.
Not too sure why this comment got downvoted.
Grid balancing is no joke - you’ll likely have new nuclear up and running before you rebuild the grid of an entire nation (which is needed for renewables to take the lead).
Let’s not forget, lithium for batteries, a key element in a renewable grid (to help offload and balance) is also not widely produced in Europe. Water batteries could work, but those are not small projects.
Nuclear is your “short” term because renewables (grid rebuild) are still a long term project.
Where do you store the waste? Nuclear is more expensive than renewables. Where do you get the nuclear material for the plants? Where do you get enough professionals to man these new plants? How to ensure the new plants you’ve build (fastly) are safe? How to ensure the plants are not easy targets for enemy attacks and sabotage?
It’s not a perfect solution, and ideally we would all be on renewable, I am not disagreeing with you there.
But a full renewable grid in Europe is simply not realistic with the tech we have now. A full nuclear grid is.
Keep researching renewable and nuclear (fusion would be the ideal option, even above renewable), but use the best we have now.
We have uranium in Europe. But we can also import it from many countries all around the globe, ao strategically much more diversified than rare materials needed for renewable.
Educate new professionals. Build them securely, not fastly. Still a better time perspective than a full renewable switch. Plants will always be easy targets, nuclear or not. Modern plants do not catastrophically fail like Chernobyl. Do yoh really think France has not thought of the security implications with their plants all over the country?
Now for nuclear waste… Yeah, it’s a problem. Also being researched. But it is little waste. It’s manageable until we have the right renewable tech or nuclear fusion.
As for the cost, again, it is expensive upfront, cheap to operate, cost efficient to renew.
Your talking points are twenty years out of date.
Stop with the lie that it’s cheap to operate it’s not true at all wind and pv already beat it and are still on a downward trend
I feel like it should have been clear to everyone since at least 9/11 and the aftermath but no one in leadership has made the obvious case that renewables are great for national security and not just the environment. Really shameful loss for humanity.
I was of the opinion that after 9/11, if the USA was actually interested in security, we would have invested in alternative energy.
Instead we invested in death and oil. Like always.
EU literally destroyed its own nuclear energy. You had energy, eurotards killed it youself.
Lithuania had nuclear power plant, eu entry condition was to dismantle it.
Go ahead. Buy 750 billion worth of propane from trump instead
Latvia never had a nuclear power plant. Lithuania did, in Ignalina, that started operations back in 1983. It was also the same design as the one in Chernobyl, with the same design flaw, and that was only addressed after the disaster in '86. The building didn’t have a proper containment structure, so yes, the recommendation was to shut it down.
The problem is that the plans for replacement never came to fruition, and decommissioning costs went through the roof. All due to incompetence of the government.
Everything was fixable. They just didn’t want competition in, and now energy is just super expensive. Same design still operational in Russia and causes no issues
Yes, Russia is famous for its safety standards and care for her peoples welfare.
