European Energy Independence

Quintillus

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In the first decade of the 21st century, a major topic in American politics was energy independence. How could the U.S. make itself less reliant on imported energy sources - primarily oil?

I suspect a major theme in the 2020s will be the same basic question, but for Europe, and with a major focus on natural gas.

The reason has been clear for some time - Europe is dependent on Russian natural gas, just as the U.S. was on Middle Eastern oil, and if Russia ever wanted to leverage that against Europe, they could. The only difference is that over the past half year, Russia has decided to do just that, and Europe hasn't really been planning for that possibility.

So, what can Europe do to increase its energy independence? I see a lot of possibilities, which could be pursued in parallel, and some of which are seeing limited action.

- Add more dockyard and pipeline facilities for importing natural gas from the U.S. and Canada (as well as other, more distant suppliers).
- Build more natural gas storage facilities. The E.U. has announced energy suppliers will be required to fill their existing storage tanks this summer, but that obviously suggests that more could be built to increase resiliency.
- Reopen shuttered nuclear plants, and build new nuclear plants, to decrease reliance on natural gas as a fuel source. Macron has already proposed building a dozen new plants in France, but in the short-term recommissioning recently closed ones would be faster, and some countries (most notably Germany) have a multitude of plants that were closed before the end of their service life.
- Reopen recently closed coal plants. Not desirable from an environmental standpoint, but better than running out of fuel.
- Accelerate wind/solar deployment. Europe has been doing all right in this category, but it's only replacing a couple percentage points of electricity generation per year - not enough to solve the problem on its own.
- Provide incentives for customers to replace gas furnances/heaters with electric. Italy is already doing this for gas water heaters.
- Fund natural gas exploration efforts, and hydrogen fuel cell development. This may not work as well in Europe as it did in the U.S. (where hydraulic fracking unlocked vast new reserves), but could still help.
- Increase efficiency standards. This is a gradual one, but could add up over time.

I think it will be interesting to see which options are chosen. IMO, the most sensible option would be an "all of the above" approach, but with a long-term focus on nuclear buildout to replace the natural gas baseline power production and replacing in-home natural gas with electric; and a short-term focus on recommisioning coal and nuclear plants that have been idled, and expanding the ability to import more natural gas from overseas.

But I also expect that to be controversial, especially in Germany with its pro-green-except-nuclear environment.

Thoughts? Knowledge about progress in these areas? I expect we'll gradually hear more about this as the years progress.
 
If we are talking about Germany, electricity production and nuclear power are a red herring. The amount of natural gas used for electricity production is insignificant compared to the amount of gas that is used for heating. In fact the energy generated be burning natural gas in Germany exceeds the entire electricity consumption of Germany. The rate wind power is growing, we could replace gas power plants in a few years. It has not been happening, because from ecological point of view, it makes more sense to replace coal first (and nuclear was replaced for more ideological reasons). In any case, the electricity situation is in principle solvable within a few years.

Now heating is a completely different matter, because much more gas is used and it is much more decentralized. Essentially, if we want to completely move away from natural gas, we would need to replace the heaters in 50% of the homes. This would take decades. That does not mean we should not start, but for the foreseeable future, there is no alternative to natural gas.

Using electricity directly for heating is extremely inefficient. This would not matter if we had endless electricity, but we are far from that. As long as there is still a single power plant running on fossil fuel, it makes no sense at all to switch to electricity for direct heating. It could be an option to use heat pumps operated by electricity which has similar efficiency as burning fossil fuels directly if powered by fossil fuel power plants.

Where possible, geothermal should be expanded heavily expanded. With the right geological conditions you can heat small cities fairly cheap.

Another option is somewhat back to the roots: Wood or other biomass in modern heaters.
 
But I also expect that to be controversial, especially in Germany with its pro-green-except-nuclear environment.
It will never not be absolutely wild to me how people (not just in Germany) will speak endlessly on the threat of climate change, but when presented with nuclear energy as a solution, decide the threat of climate change isn't that serious.

If your house is on fire, do you pass over the fire extinguisher because it might stain the carpets?
 
It will never not be absolutely wild to me how people (not just in Germany) will speak endlessly on the threat of climate change, but when presented with nuclear energy as a solution, decide the threat of climate change isn't that serious.

If your house is on fire, do you pass over the fire extinguisher because it might stain the carpets?

Beats me how they're so dependent on gas for heating.

Use a heat pump or buy some warm clothes.
 
Diversify energy sources and gas suppliers. If Europe is afraid of Russians shooting themselves in foot, then build more LNG terminals and pay more for the same amount.
Everyone is talking about Russians using gas as leverage like it's common knowledge, but nobody can give example where Russia has ever turn off gas supply and what were the demands.
 
Using electricity directly for heating is extremely inefficient.

Not sure about this. Our reverse cycle AC runs as a heater in winter and cooler in summer and the electricity use is pretty similar both ways. Maybe if you're just talking about direct heat outputting systems it might be the case.
 
Not sure about this. Our reverse cycle AC runs as a heater in winter and cooler in summer and the electricity use is pretty similar both ways.

Might be in Europe with larger population than Australasia.
 
Not sure about this. Our reverse cycle AC runs as a heater in winter and cooler in summer and the electricity use is pretty similar both ways. Maybe if you're just talking about direct heat outputting systems it might be the case.

That is a heat pump, which I mentioned as an exception. With those you do not really use electricity as a heat source, but the heat from the environment.
 
That's a pretty hefty exception!
 
Russia is in Europe so technically Europe already has energy independence
I thought only the part west of the Urals was in Europe. :dunno:
 
That is a heat pump, which I mentioned as an exception. With those you do not really use electricity as a heat source, but the heat from the environment.

I thought everyone used heat pumps. They're all over the place here. Ours is a Mitsubishi 8000kw iirc.
 
We eliminated most gas boilers decades ago. Gasworks shut down.

Last few gas places are declining.

Which is what we are looking at doing but heat pumps have a high upfront cost and require more space than a boiler so fitting them in our elderly housing stock (and UK homes are smaller than the European average) is going to be expensive and difficult.
 
Which is what we are looking at doing but heat pumps have a high upfront cost and require more space than a boiler so fitting them in our elderly housing stock (and UK homes are smaller than the European average) is going to be expensive and difficult.

Think they're required in new builds here and in rentals.

Well not them specifically but some source of heating so usually defaults to heat pumps.
 
On nuclear waste, that can be a problem, but it's not like nobody has addressed it. The Finns built a permanent storage facility. France does reprocessing to reduce its amount of nuclear waste, and is actively exploring long-term storage options. I don't expect there to be a solution that everyone loves - a problem oil pipelines also face - but I think the Finns see the wisdom in cleaner energy today addressing the climate change problem, with nuclear storage being tractable. It's also possible that we may only need one more generation of nuclear fission plants to tide us over to a clean and post-nuclear fission future... but burning fossil fuels until that future will make it much more difficult.

On German house heating, I agree. When a family member lived in Germany for a while, I was surprised to learn how fossil-fuel intensive heating is in Germany, and not just natural gas but oil as well. Although given the timescales to switch to electric heating, I think efforts to switch need to begin now. My grandparents' gas furnace lasted over 50 years - it might still be working for all I know - and while it may have been better built than most, any new gas furnaces added today have a decent chance of still being in operation in 2052. Even if they are break-even today or a slight loss today (and with heat pumps, they may still wind up ahead of gas-based electricity), over the course of that 30 years they should wind up being significantly cleaner.

I thought everyone used heat pumps. They're all over the place here. Ours is a Mitsubishi 8000kw iirc.

My understanding is this various significantly depending on the locale. I believe that in Europe in general (not uniformly throughout the continent by any means), the rate is higher than in the U.S., but in the U.S., the last I checked, less than 10% of homes used heat pumps. And that is also highly variable by which part of the U.S. you are talking about; New England is the most dependent on natural gas, whereas the Southeast is the area that uses electricity the most for heating homes. Which actually makes a fair amount of sense; even above-ground heat pumps are going to be plenty warm enough in the winter in much of the South.

I was surprised to learn that my current apartment has a heat pump (in addition to a traditional furnace for when it gets really cold); I'd never seen an apartment with one before. But it's a relatively new apartment, so perhaps that shows that they're starting to be added in newer apartments.

It will never not be absolutely wild to me how people (not just in Germany) will speak endlessly on the threat of climate change, but when presented with nuclear energy as a solution, decide the threat of climate change isn't that serious.

I agree, and what surprises me is how many people in the Green Party (or local equivalent) are anti-nuclear as well. I suppose it goes back decades to when "green" was about clean water and not having acid rain, and when the image of nuclear was more flavored by "bomb" and by the most questionable safety record of first-and-second gen reactors (Chernobyl was a mix of first-and-second gen; I believe Three Mile Island was second-gen). But for me, it's increasingly a consideration in who I vote for.

I'll also note that 20 years ago, I was in the anti-nuclear camp. But as I learned more about climate change, the calculus changed for me. Sure, solar-and-hydrogen-storage sounds better. But from a practical standpoint, we aren't going to be able to build enough of that soon enough, but probably could get where we need to go if we also include nuclear.
 
Reopening closed coal power plants is the only quick action that can be taken. But the idiots governing Europe have been doubling down on shutting them, and so0me proceeded quickly to dismantle.

"Energy independence" for Europe is not feasible in the next couple of decades - road transportation continues to require fuels and any shift towards electricity there will be slow. The idiots have also spent the past 30 years dismantling railways in favor of highways. The only rail added was fast long-distance transportation for passengers. Freight and slow passenger which actually carried the most people was at beast maintained as it was, in many more peripheral places abandoned and replaced with highways.

In their "wisdom" successive EU commissions has also favoured concentration and oligopoly on suppliers of railway material.
 
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