Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
So there’s no need for subsidies money because the epic capitalism Invisible hand private market “just needs permission to go green”? This might be one of the dumbest “conclusions” to an article I’ve read in a while. I hope this entire thing was written by AI.
Affair MATTEI … guys… europe and the med sea is FILLED with gas and oil , but we are under the boot of Victoria EMBANKMENT and the brit crown… they shut down the drilling platforms in the Italian sea water and speaking about renewvable … there is only one thing which is not a fanny tail … the 44 terawatt per hour that are possible do produce around mons etna … the other stuff are simply damn manipulations, ask to a geologist expert in energy probe. Here is not facebook and stuff like that must be said.
Could only read 1st paragraph. From Fortune’s Zionist/Empire agenda… Russia.
It is Europe’s alliance with US that has made all of its energy shocks. Nordstream was a US devotion hari kari. US played a somewhere between extreme and 100% role in puppeting Ukraine to war against Russia (Nordstream 2 was created specifically because of a nazified Ukraine demanding higher transit fees), and forcing its colonial rulers to give you Russophobia.
Going back to 2021 Russia-EU relations would be obviously best for EU, and understanding that US/Israel was its real enemy all along, but especially in contempt for global economy this month, is key to EU future, but whatever source has cheapest energy (It is China by far) is path to minimizing energy shocks. Geopolitically sensitive energy reliance is the achiles heal that will always be used to extort EU/world/people.
explain that to the graybeard in politics
Trump was driving trade diversification around the world with the idiotic tariffs, and now, with the illegal war against Iran, he’s creating a resurgence of interest in renewables and EVs. Exact opposite of what he says he wants but maybe not so bad in the long run.
Maybe he was always a democrat plant 😂
/s
That’s a really positive outlook and I love it.
Except that a bunch of people on the other side of the planet are dying because of this.
The enemies of europe (and any other country) are billionares and politicians.
if your words and your actions, which never seem to gel
will get you into heaven, i’d sooner be in hellOwed to a Hypocrite, a song about the dangers of preachers and politicians
Politicans can be cool. Some are not. But you could be.
100%, especially from Poland perspective
- More nuclear power plants
- more renevables
- more public transport and evs
nuclear power is very geopolitically sensitive and very expensive. It is a target to get Chernobyled if war or civil unrest happens.
Do you kbow where Europe get it’s uranium to power these nuclear power plants from? No? Let me tell you: We import it from countries like Kazakhstan, Niger a bit from Canada. France, one of the biggest nuclear powered countries imports it’s uranium from Russia. This is exactly the same as with oil and gas. So tell me: How do nuclear power plants help us, if we have to import the fuel?
Do you know what are the resources we have in Europe: Wind, water and sun. To be fair, we have cole too, but this is one of the dirtiest ways to produce energie.
The only way out are renewable energies.
I know I know.
But fuel is small money factor in comparison to importing lng to gas power plants.
You dropped half of your w
It’s called “reduce, reuse, recycle”
Or, you know, you could stop making enemies.
Oh, yeah let Russia do whatever they want. Useless troll
That’s not remotely what they said. Useless troll
It’s not that easy. E.g. Europe was on good terms with Russia. It is not like Europe decided to become an enemy of Russia, Russia attacked an European country. Of course we should question ourselves if we should have trusted Russia in the first place.
The only way out is to become more enery independent by using more renewable energies.
Russia attached a European country
Mf Russia is a European country. You ask if you can trust Russia and yet most countries in the world wouldn’t trust EU and NATO for shit.
them’s fightin’ words
The technology is there. We need solar, wind, batteries, hydro-storage and nuclear, which is hold back by fear and costs driven by bureaucracy. What we lack is political capital and supranational coordination. We need to scale up production and learn from the Chinese. The demand for batteries is there.
Nah, we’ll just buy gas from US and postpone electrification of transport couple decades. What could go wrong?
Thank you! We just do not do enough fracking here yet.
I would electrify my transport in a heartbeat, if only it wasn’t so fucking expensive. Like ~30k€ for cheapest Kia BEV? Not even speaking about more “premium” brands. How tf should I get that with mediocre eastern european salary?
I love my BYD dolphin
It was the cheapest car I could find, and it cost about €17,000
Yup, but in Poland there are still small fraction of evs…
Revault is government company, why they dont want to sell evs cars cheaper? Is it really necessary to make bigger profit than from ice?
Have you considered the Dacia Spring? It should be fine for short-medium range trips and it costs “only” 20k
To me a car like that kinda defeats the point of owning a car.
If it’s only needed for driving around town and getting groceries, I can do that with (e-?)bike+transit+carsharing.
A significant fraction of my yearly km are driven on trip of over 500km/day, and to do that with the family it really helps to have a car. It’ll still be a while before electric cars are completely viable for my use case.
Replacing the short range use of cars with electrical ones is the wrong approach. It should mostly be reduced by offering alternatives. If people use the car only half as much, that’s a nearly 50% reduction on emission and fuel consumption, right there.
I agree with you, and I get around town mostly on bike. Many people don’t, and I think it would be better if they drove EVs. Anyway, if I’d need to buy a car, I would still consider the Spring, since its range would be fine for heavy loads that I wouldn’t carry on a (cargo) bike or 100-200 km trips
In Denmark, we have been investing heavily in solar panels and windmills the last few years, which is awesome! Electric car purchases have also exploded.
Now we just need to do away with out pig production and we will have more fields to place solar panels on and there will still be plenty of space to turn former pig feed fields into wildlife reserves so our nature can recover from the damage these pig farmers have done to our country. It’ll take time, but I’m optimistic about our green policies in the future. We are heading in the right direction.
Do you know what the penetration percentage is of urban solar is in Denmark? Think of applications like rooftop solar, parking canopies/carports, façades, etc. Or even applications like brownfield?
Asking because there are many land uses in the world where solar could serve as a secondary function, all the while providing power exactly where it’s needed: in urban load centers.
Ground-mount solar on fields across the countryside would certainly help, but many solar installations rely on gravel to cover the ground underneath the panels, or low-growth native seed to reduce the amount of mowing needed over time.
Placing solar in urban contexts allows our countrysides to be rewilded and made polycultures supporting native wildlife. Ground-mount solar can introduce monocultures that don’t support native wildlife.
There’s no reason why panels can’t be in the same fields as the pigs… the lowest point of a panel can be higher than a pig…
The fields are not used to have pigs walking around. They are used to grow pigfood. Pigs in Denmark are being kept in massive indoor industrial compounds where they never see the sun. The sows are strapped to the ground with metal bars to be nonstop feeding machines for piglets.
We are around 6 million people in tiny little Denmark. We have over 40 million pigs who are produced for meat and all of them, ALL OF THEM are being exported to other countries, Italy and Poland, for slaughtering and the meat is sold to other countries. That transportation pollutes the environment and is entirely unnecessary. It is animal abuse and environmentally unsound to send them to other countries to get slaughtered. The farmers do this to save money because slaughter houses are cheaper in Poland.
The pig shit produced is so massive that farmers break the laws every spring and strat fertilizing the fields before the night frost has ended. This is illegal because the frost keeps the shit frozen on the ground, the ground cannot absorb the fertilizer and this means that when everything thaws, the excess nutrients and water will run off and straight into creeks and lakes and pollute the water there.
Pesticides used on the fields that are used to grow pigfood - not human food - pig food is also seepinging into the ground and is now polluting our ground water along with the excess pig shit which is fucking insane because we used to have naturally clean ground water and now we are facing a future were we might have to spend billions to keep the ground water clean if the farmers aren’t stopped.
Every year, thousands, if not millions of pigs die before ever seeing a butcher. They have no space, they get sick. The farmers fill their food with penicillin to the point that now several diseases have started to show resistense to penicillin which has the potential to develop into a health crisis for humans all over the fucking world, bro. If penicillin stops working, we are fucked.
Our coastlines are as good as dead at this point. There is no aquatic life left due to farmers polluting the land with their pig shit. Several species of animals are close to extinction because of the farmers. Especially several types of birds because there aren’t enough insects for them to eat and their habitat has been taken over by industrial farmers.
Over 60% of all Danish areal is being used for farming and most of that is to grow pig food.
But that is not enough. There still isn’t enough food for the pigs. So what do the farmers do? They import soybeans from South America where local soy farmers have to cut down rain forest to grow more soy beans to meet the demand. The soy beans are transported by container ships which we all know are some of the biggest polluters in the world. All to feed fucking pigs that no Dane will ever get to have.
Danes, btw, get to have the bad, left over pork while the prime stuff is sold to other countries.
It is also contributing to the housing crisis in Denmark because the big industrial farms have helped kill the countryside life in Denmark. When everything smells like pigshit in the countryside it’s already not fun to live there, but there are also no jobs because pig farmers will not hire Danes to work on their farms because they would have to pay us more and actually care about our well being. They instead hire guest workers from poor countries to work with the pigs and get ammonia poisonings because the air in those stalls is filled with pig pee vapor. At least the workers can go outside at some point, but the pigs live in that air their whole lives.
Now that you know the basics of industrial pig farming in Denmark you may think: gosh, this must be a super lucrative industry since all this shit is being done to the animals and thr environment to keep up production. They must stand for at least 60% of the Danish BNP, right? That’s what my best friend thought when I told her about how pig farming works in Denmark.
Less than 1%. Less than fucking 1% does this POS industry contribute to the overall Danish BNP.
But how in the hell has it been able to get this far, you may think.
Because of a political party named Venstre who has historically been a farmer party and fought for farmers. The level of lobbying going there is disgusting. The farmers pay them so much fucking money to keep the public ignorant about what is going on and they have been successful in the past, but not anymore. There has been a recent movement to expose pig farmers and they have been successful. The Danish public is fucking outraged because they were lied to.
I have avoided eating pig meat as much as possible for at least ten years because I found pig farming unethical, but even I didn’t know the true magnitude of this insane industry until four or five years ago.
When I learned that they contribute less than 1 fucking percent to the BNP while taking up over 60% of our land to grow fucking pig food for 40+ million pigs whose entire lives are suffering while our wildlife and nature is dying out - I went from being against pork to wanting it absolutely outlawed here. Get that shit out of my country.
Take the pig fields back, turn them into nature and solar parks. Fuck pig farmers.
This is fucking insane and shows that lobbying and the practice of paying for political outcomes should be outlawed and, more importantly, the adherence to the laws needs to be controlled and failure to do so needs prison sentences or at least complete repossession of the offenders business.
Yep. The good news is that our Dutch neighbors whose country has a similar setup to us, have cut their pig production by a third recently and the plan is to further cut into it. That is what we need to do in Denmark too. Cut it down until it is phased out entirely and continue to promote sustainable farming.
In time I also hope we will be able to take a look at lobbying because the farm lobbying is the most extreme case we have here. We just had the election here in Denmark and Venstre has had their worst election result EVER. The party is over a 100 years old and used to be one of the biggest parties in Denmark. They ruled my country all the way up through the 2000s where means were given to farmers, tax money, given to them, special agreements that gave farmers carte Blanche to pretty much do whatever they wanted and even the smallest attempt at putting restrictions on them by left leaning governments had them throw temper tantrums. This is the general case for all European industrial farmers.
Back then it worked because farming is a cultural heritage type of thing and part of the Danish identity so these industrial farmers (and the politicians who support them) who actually helped kill the old farming culture have used the image of the wholesome farmer as a shield against all criticism towards farmers.
The anti-industrial farmer movement in Denmark is huge and multifaceted. A lot of this is also paving the way for Danes to sort of grieve over the identity we have lost which is reflected in fiction and art. There is a lot of authors writing about the shift from farming culture to the modern middle class and the effects it has had on the Danish self image. The fact that this is being reflected in art at the same time as the pig issue has exploded is almost poetic.
It was a matter of time before we would have to recon with all of this and the fact that we are finally here is pretty exciting, because it has really gotten out of hand. I legit remember my dad as early as the early 2000s and maybe even the 90s talk about how farming was going to destroy our country if it wasn’t regulated so I grew up with a pretty intense disgust for big farming while also growing up right next to one of legit, romantic old timey farms where the farmer knows and loves his animals and treats them well. A dying breed. So yeah, I have a complicated relationship with farming, but I hope for an support sustainable farming and want Venstre to actually support those instead of helping indsturial farmers climb to the top and hoard their wealth for themselves while legit farmers end up having to sell their land to the big farms so they can destroy my country for no reasons because it’s not even a profitable industry for anyone but the few hundred pig farm owners in my country. It’s fucking ridiculous.
I’m saying this only because Donny keeps calling them windmills and nobody wants to be like him - they’re wind turbines, not mills. There is no grain being crushed as there would be in a mill.
Donny and the Danes. Yeah, it’s quite amusing but they’re the natural evolution of a windmill. Vindmøller are fine for me
That may be the case in Danish
Dutch, but it’s incorrect to call them mills in English.Dutch = the Netherlands
Danish = Denmark.
If you’re going to be a Poindexter about windmills, then at least get the language right of the country you are criticizing.
I’m also terribly sorry that we don’t call them wind turbines and that it triggers you that we call them windmills because of trump. We called them windmills decades before Trump even knew what they were and we will continue to do so.
Language corrected. That was an unintentional error.
As for the rest of your heavily sarcastic post though, here’s my middle finger, which is all you deserve for posting such a deliberately assholish comment.
Thank you. I just don’t appreciate to be told that the way we refer to windmills in my country is wrong because trump says it. I found that pretty insulting and gave the energy back.
We call them windmills where I live.
Exactly, don’t buy from the usa, our once allie has shown open hostility.
Its pretty funny how little that narrows down your nationality
Non-usians is a pretty wide nationality.
Or, ya know, build on self-sustainable sources.
But nuclear is so bad!!1! Better burn coal and oil and “clean” gas!!
Renewables FTW, with a nuclear backdrop til we can phase out that too is the way forward IMO.
You know nuclear isn’t self-sustainable? Uranium is mined in only a few places.
The volume of uranium used is so low that is feasible to store years of supply; this is not possible with gas.
But it should be noted as a risk, of course.
Uranium-based nuclear power isn’t ideal, but thorium-based nuclear power shows a lot of promise, because thorium is both way more common than uranium, and way harder to weaponize.
It is the other way around though: because it cannot be weaponized, there was no incentive to develop an industrial reactor and a supply chain. The remaining technical and scientific challenges on this technology are non-trivial too as I understand, so it will be a few decades before we see one in action even if we took the decision to invest in it today.
Yeah but that’s still experimental, right?
Thorium reactor rely on transmuting thorium into a form of uranium, a form which itself can be extracted and weaponized…
And? You’re trying to argue it’s like oil?
So you advocate for coal, gas and oil until we can be 100% reliant on renewables?
That’s a bad faith interpretation of the above comment. We already can be 100% reliant on renewables. Nuclear is so clownishly expensive that it’s far cheaper to provide baseload power via solar, wind, batteries, and other energy storage mechanisms.
Well what will you use for power generation before we have enough renewable energy? You say it yourself: “can” be reliant. Yes but we are not, so what’s the way forward? Nuclear til we have enough renewables, or you know, my question : shall we burn coal up til then?
And nuclear energy is less expensive than coal, oil and gas IMO.
What are you on about? We don’t have the nuclear we’re talking about. This is about future plant construction. And new renewable capacity can be deployed in a fraction of the time that nuclear can.
There’s no option. Transitioning to nuclear will keep you burning stuff for 10-15 years whilst they’re built. Even SMRs will be 5-10. Renewables come online with a much smoother transition curve. You reduce burning stuff sooner, and we need whatever is quickest.
Still need batteries big enough to power global shipping etc. Nuclear can do that, even though building reactors takes time
It can, and I’m not anti-nuclear for all use cases. I just don’t think it stops us burning stuff soon enough.
This is the correct answer. Nuclear is not a perfect energy source, but it fills one big gap that we currently have with the renewable energy sources.
I would also say that gas can be an ok alternative in some situations. For example as replacement of a coal power plant if it is built together with solar and/or wind power. The gas power plant can increase the power when the renewables does not produce energy and be turned off during sunny or windy days.
What exactly is the big gap? Are you going to mention baseload, a concept that’s been obsolete for a decade? The baseload power demand, according to the according to its actual definition, is zero on many grids. Solar and wind produce energy Joule-for-Joule far cheaper than fission. And we have any number of ways of storing that cheap energy. Renewables are the cheapest form of baseload power. It’s not 2010 anymore.
Plus, if we’re talking national security, we’ve seen from the Ukraine conflict that every nuclear plant is a huge geopolitical liability. There have been many near misses and scares relating to Ukraine’s fission plants. Many have had to be shut down due to the risk of being struck. And hell, Iran’s plants are actively being targeted by US and Israeli air strikes. In a big war, your enemy can create an instant chernobyl in your backyard if they want. You can design a reactor to be intrinsically safe, but that doesn’t help if someone drops a ballistic missile on top of it. And yes, if you did this to a nuclear power like the US or Russia, it might provoke a retaliatory strike with actual nuclear bombs. But there are dozens of countries that have nuclear reactors but no nuclear weapons. For them, having nuclear power plants is a huge strategic liability. Far better to have innumerable solar panels and wind turbines scattered across the countryside than one big vulnerable reactor, an Achilles heel that an enemy can target to knock your whole power grid offline.
Solar and wind power are dependent on the weather to generate power, where nuclear power is not. I agree that there are many ideas on how to store the energy from solar and wind power, but how many of them is used on such large scale that it makes a difference on the grid?
Out of topic but do you have any data that shows that the baseload is obsolete? I have a hard time to believe that based on the definition from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/baseload
Baseload refers to the minimum level of demand on an electrical supply system over a 24-hour period, with baseload power sources being those plants that generate dependable power to consistently meet this demand.
Yes, but unless we figure out how to store a ton of electric energy, renewables are limited in use and somehow counterproductive as it makes energy cheaper during sunny days and thus making nuclear even more expensive (due to the fact that nuclear can’t be easily throttled). 🤷
In practice you only need to store about a day’s worth of electricity, a few hours really. Solar panels are so stupidly cheap now that you can solve seasonal variations in production by just spamming solar panels. You deploy enough panels to meet your demand on a cloudy day in winter. Then the rest of the year you have dirt cheap abundant electricity. Maybe shut down some of your most energy-intensive industries on the cloudiest winter days if you must. Give everyone at the steel mill a week off and instead ask them to work longer hours in the summer.
And what about people living in extreme latitudes? We can use excess solar power during the summer to capture atmospheric CO2, use that to make synthetic liquid fuels, and the handful of folks living north of the arctic circle can just keep burning carbon-neutral diesel fuel forever. You could use small fission plants for these remote locations, but there’s unlikely to ever be enough demand just in the high latitudes to sustain an entire nuclear supply chain. Synthetic carbon-neutral liquid fuels would have many applications, so a supply chain could be developed.
Storing a ton is easy. It’s storing gigatons that’s hard.
Uranium is one of the most dense elements. It’s like 30x more dense than gasoline.
That’s happening but moving to renewable isn’t something you can just magically do
Unless we figure out energy storage, it will never be a solution.
Energy storage is a largely unnecessary. You only need to store a few hours worth of electricity. Solar panels are so stupid cheap that you can solve seasonal variations in solar production by spamming solar panels. You build enough panels to meet all your needs on a cloudy winter day. Then the rest of the year you have abundant cheap power.
The energy storage problem has been solved by stupidly cheap solar panels. People will whine about the footprint required, but the actual math shows this is just FUD.
See my answer to BlackLaZoR
Energy storage is slowly being figured as battery prices drop year by year
That’s nowhere near enough. It’s magnitudes away.
Nah, if you assume 6-12h of storage needed it’s close to break even. I’d say if prices of batteries get halved again, it’s solved
Can we do some calculations for worst case, ie winter week with clouds at best? How much does a single household consume when using heat pumps for warming? That would be at least 30kWh per day just for heating. Let’s round it to 40kWh pet day which makes 280kWh per week. Shall we add an EV car into equation? 140kWh? We are at 420kWh per week you might need to back up with batteries. Now multiply this number with millions of households. Or simply take a look at electric energy consumption in your country during winter days (when many don’t even have heat pumps and EVs) and you think there is enough batteries around and is simply a matter of price? Good luck with that. Wind and hydro would help to some extent, though.
When I said break even, I meant financial feasibility. Point is you can invest in solar power plus 12h of storage and this makes financial sense.
As for winter periods, noone expect solar to magically work in winter. Point is to reduce dependency on fossil and this can be achieved. You’d still expect strategic energy reserves and winter power to be delivered through fossil, due to avaliabliy and good energy density.
You could substitute fossil with wind power during winter, but that still requires storage.
Stop buying gas from the enemy after 4 years of war? Preposterous!
The EU has reduced Russian gas imports from 45% of the total gas imports of the union before the invasion of Ukraine to 13% at the end of 2025 and will be at 0% by 2027.
Coal and oil are already at 0%.
It’s not like you can just switch off 150bn cubic meters of gas overnight
The problem is that they replaced most of it with the 3 times more expensive USA’s LNG.
That was the point of the whole war and why Biden sabotaged Stoltz and Macron.
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This is an outrage!
I feel like it should have been clear to everyone since at least 9/11 and the aftermath but no one in leadership has made the obvious case that renewables are great for national security and not just the environment. Really shameful loss for humanity.
I was of the opinion that after 9/11, if the USA was actually interested in security, we would have invested in alternative energy.
Instead we invested in death and oil. Like always.
