Remember the big energy crisis that Europe was supposed to be doomed with for years to come? Yeah, it's pretty much gone.
I work for a European energy company and I disagree with this statement. First of all, energy prices are still incredibly high in comparison to what they used to be. Not just gas, but electricity is still around 150% more expensive as it was before the crisis.
Furthermore, and I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere before, it's all hanging by a thread. A few weeks ago I modeled European Gas flows, and if somebody (Russia?) were to blow up the Norwegian pipeline that's supplying Europe with gas, we'd be done. Our gas storage would be empty in roughly two months and then we'd have the worst energy crisis imaginable. There simply aren't enough LNG tankers to make up for that. Furthermore, if the Chinese start to compete for LNG in a more serious way, driving up LNG prices, that's also trouble. Europe is utterly reliant on energy imports because it has declined the chance to become more independent with nuclear power. We don't have that much uranium, but it's not that expensive, and breeding reactors are a thing, so if we had wanted some independence, we could have had it.
A further factor in all of this, which is why I don't see energy prices decreasing a lot further, is the frankly insane Co2 pricing in the EU. A ton of CO2 is currently roughly 90$, and producing a MWh of energy with coal (which we are currently doing a lot) generates around 0.8 tons of CO2, meaning that emission pricing alone does not allow for even halfway competitive power prices as long as coal is part of the mix even if the coal and the plants were free.
Sure, the EU could massively subsidize industry with the money they are making from that, but they don't because they're wasting it on expensive "renewables", and so we're getting increasingly left behind. It's a very strange, sad kind of suicide, really.
I apologize if this comes across overly emotional, but the level at which I detest our European elites simply cannot be put into language. What an absurd, stupid clown-show.
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I work for a European energy company and I disagree with this statement. First of all, energy prices are still incredibly high in comparison to what they used to be. Not just gas, but electricity is still around 150% more expensive as it was before the crisis.
Furthermore, and I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere before, it's all hanging by a thread. A few weeks ago I modeled European Gas flows, and if somebody (Russia?) were to blow up the Norwegian pipeline that's supplying Europe with gas, we'd be done. Our gas storage would be empty in roughly two months and then we'd have the worst energy crisis imaginable. There simply aren't enough LNG tankers to make up for that. Furthermore, if the Chinese start to compete for LNG in a more serious way, driving up LNG prices, that's also trouble. Europe is utterly reliant on energy imports because it has declined the chance to become more independent with nuclear power. We don't have that much uranium, but it's not that expensive, and breeding reactors are a thing, so if we had wanted some independence, we could have had it.
A further factor in all of this, which is why I don't see energy prices decreasing a lot further, is the frankly insane Co2 pricing in the EU. A ton of CO2 is currently roughly 90$, and producing a MWh of energy with coal (which we are currently doing a lot) generates around 0.8 tons of CO2, meaning that emission pricing alone does not allow for even halfway competitive power prices as long as coal is part of the mix even if the coal and the plants were free.
Sure, the EU could massively subsidize industry with the money they are making from that, but they don't because they're wasting it on expensive "renewables", and so we're getting increasingly left behind. It's a very strange, sad kind of suicide, really.
I apologize if this comes across overly emotional, but the level at which I detest our European elites simply cannot be put into language. What an absurd, stupid clown-show.
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