By Chris MacIntosh
You knock some forms of energy out of the market and the price of the energy that’s left goes up. How about that?
As of 2019, almost 6% of Europe’s electricity was generated by burning wood chips (trees), which is almost twice the amount of electricity generated by solar.
Roughly 30% of the wood-chips came from Russia.
Sanctions have put a halt to this and additional supply cannot be made up by the US and Canada (the other two big wood-chip suppliers to Europe). You probably know where we are heading here… About 2% of Europe’s base load electricity production is gone, putting additional demand on electricity generated by gas, coal and nuclear.
Burning wood is quite literally retarded, but these muppets have decided in their wisdom that wood chips are actually “green”. In any event, they’ve now lost 30% of this wonderful “green, renewable” energy source.
Gas can’t be increased (for obvious reasons) and neither can nuclear (those nuke plants that haven’t been shuttered are operating at full capacity). So that leaves coal, which needs to come from South Africa, the US, Indonesia, or Australia — not that there was much spare capacity from these producers even before the sanctions went on… and that was with Russian thermal coal exports. Oh, what a pickle!
When looking at the components of European energy, it is literally impossible to come away without a view that their energy crisis has no realistic viable solutions on the horizon.
One would logically think that Europeans would be going hell for leather to bring back online idled nuclear power plants or at least halt anymore being closed. But it would seem that ideals trump logic in Europe.
THE GREAT DOUBLING DOWN
You would think that by now folks in Europe (and around the world) would be waking up to the fact that the belief in “renewables powering the planet” is what has largely caused the energy crisis and that “doubling down” on renewable energy is as bad an idea as putting your special bits in a toaster. But it seems that this isn’t the case. We should not underestimate egos and political ideology.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Citizens Journal
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