Pieter Cleppe writes about Europe’s energy struggles, and what will need to change:
The reality is that in order for either wind or solar power to be a key source of the EU’s power supplies, a reliable backup energy source is needed, until far better storage technology is developed. Until then, both solar and wind are going to be hobbled by the immutable facts that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine.
The options to provide that backup essentially boil down to either nuclear, gas, or coal. Germany and the EU have been conducting hostile policies toward nuclear and coal, meaning that they thereby have been indirectly favoring gas — Russian gas. It should be noted that the EU is actually tasked to promote nuclear, as a result of the Euratom Treaty, but it has declined to do so with enthusiasm and is even discriminating against nuclear power when it comes to state aid. In practice, Germany has simply continued with burning coal.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with investing more into wind and solar energy (assuming that the backup problem is properly addressed) — even despite their significant environmental downsides — as long as this happens without government subsidies, and that is hardly the case at the moment. Energy markets everywhere have been heavily distorted by government interference, subsidies, and political uncertainty, but the continued importance of nuclear power for the energy mix of various European countries, despite it being the least subsidized energy source, suggests that if there were a truly free energy market, nuclear energy would probably be very successful. It could again be the fuel of the future.
Read the whole thing here.