Right now the EU has half a winters worth of gas supply in storage. So unless there is a massive cut in imports due to some sabotage of the gas pipelines from Norway or in the Med it should be fine.
Other then that high gas prices are great to move towards more green technologies.
Other then that high gas prices are great to move towards more green technologies.
First problem is that this is a short-term issue, and there is going to be no major changes in power generation over the next few months.
The second problem is that two major low-carbon-dioxide-emitting power generation methods, solar and wind, are intermittent. That is, they are not reliably available. To deal with that, you need to either store power generated when they are working or have a ton of capacity to generate power via other means to fill in for when they are offline.
Power storage is expensive. So what normally happens is that if you do wind, you also do natural gas or similar, and fill in the “gaps” in wind generation by burning natural gas.
So it’s not really an either-or proposition.
Most natural gas is not used in power plants, but for heating homes and in all sorts of industrial processes in a lot of cases that is for heating. Shutting down gas power plants is just an easy way of saving gas. In general in the next decade the challenge is less to get the grid 100% clean, but more to connect things to it, with heat pumps, electric cars, new industrial production processes and so forth.
That being said wind and solar are intermittend, but most of the time we have some wind and sunny days are also fairly common. That becomes even more true the larger the grid is. To put it quite simply it is always windy or sunny somewhere in the world, it is just a matter of transporting it. Within the EU that is already happening. Other then that overbuilding renewables is a good strategy as well, for days with some clouds and less strong wind. Those are much more common the perfect days. As for storage periods of no wind or solar are on average fairly short. So most of them can be bridged with fairly small power storage. With a days worth of storage on a nation sized grid, you can in most cases run 95% wind and solar with overgeneration. We even have quite a lot of it with reservoir hydro already. Some of that can even be seasonal.
That being said, last year the EUs electricity grid was 60% low carbon electricity already and that share is rising. So it makes already sense electrify everything possible. Intermittency is a problem, but it is not usolvable and in fact we are already working on a lot of the solutions.
You are absolutely correct, there won’t be major changes in power generation. But in such times there absolutely can be major political decisions which decide / push towards major changes in the mid-future. It was true in the past and Corona and the war in Ukraine showed it’s still true today.
Why not just go nuclear
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Because politicians love short term thinking. Seems to be changing lately, though. At least about nuclear power.
Stfu
Canada: man that sucks, too bad there’s no stable country to buy oil from haha, anyway I have a nice plump squirrel on the fire that needs my attention. Oh you’re buying it from America that’s cool man…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Natural gas prices in Europe have been climbing over the past week, as recent world events bring uncertainty to the market.
European natural gas prices are displaying increased uncertainty, with investors placing higher bets for the upcoming months due to growing concerns about Chevron’s operations in Israel and Australia, which are casting a long shadow over the market outlook.
The price for a November 2023 delivery was close to €50 per megawatt-hour, the highest since April, following a 15% surge on Monday, amid increasing supply concerns.
US oil giant Chevron Corp has stopped production at its offshore Tamar natural gas field near Israel’s northern coast, after being instructed so by the Israeli government, due to safety concerns as the conflict in the region intensifies.
At the same time, workers at Chevron Corp’s liquefied natural gas facilities in Australia were reportedly planning to resume strikes.
There is also a high probability, signalls the Copernicus Climate Change Service, that Europe will have a very mild winter, potentially reducing the demand for heating fuels.
The original article contains 312 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 46%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good news 👍
Yeah, it’s good news that there will be even more excuses to make food more expensive.
Couldn’t agree more
