Despite Ukraine war, Europe imported even more Russian gas last year

Both wind farms and nuclear power plants end up with a "strike price", which is effectively a collar option around the spot price so that revenue is guaranteed. It can in some cases result in wind farms having to pay money back if the spot price goes up too much.

Separately there is the capacity auction https://www.emrsettlement.co.uk/schemes/capacity-market/ and a fast frequency response market (which batteries are starting to appear in).

> Had we built more and smaller nuclear power plants decades ago

The "learning rate" for reactors appears to be negative: over time, they get harder to build. Possibly as people discover more ways in which things could go wrong. Hinckley Point C is over time and budget.

Small nuclear plants are (maybe) cheaper per "plant" but not cheaper per watt and likely never will be.

https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/docs/hydrogenprogramlibrarie...

According to the article the controversy is a law making it mandatory to buy something that costs €17,000 which is close enough to double the price of a reasonable alternative. The thing being heat pumps doesn't really an issue.

It is the same as the "anti-solar" push back in the day. It was pointed out at the time that Germany's initial Energiewende push was going to be a disaster and they ended up with some of the most expensive electricity in Europe for a while there. Again, that isn't an anti-solar or anti-wind observation. That is an observation that the people running the electricity grid are incompetent and verging on enemies to German prosperity. It makes a lot of sense that people like the AfD if they can consistently pitch "we're not going to just slug you for thousands of euros" but that isn't an anti-heat-pump stance.

There isn't resistance to any particular technology, if it made sense to use I'd expect general support for the idea. The controversy is the people who are insisting on driving the costs up for no reason are quite controversial, because they are morons and shouldn't be in charge of anything.

My theory is post-WWII the British did something to permanently screw up the ability of the German elite circles to function, it is quite stunning to watch them struggle to understand why people might not like expensive, scarce energy and ongoing visible money wasting projects.

I mean, compared to pipelines, as mentioned in my comment. AFAIK, we (Spain) get most of our gas from North Africa (Algeria I guess?), so there are more pipelines into Europe, not just from Russia.

So I guess I more wanted to know how the costs compared between shipping this cryogenically frozen gas and importing natural gas from say Africa.

Over that decade, the UK's one nuclear reactor under construction has gone from site approval to .. still not finished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

Mind you, quite a lot of the no-progress-on-anything can be blamed on Britain's NIMBYs and press. People want electricity but hate pylons; what can you do?

I work in the energy sector and there's a huge amount of misinformation/confusion around why energy is expensive (I'm gonna ignore unreliable because that's a whole other can of worms). The energy price is almost entirely set by natural gas, the UK doesn't yet have the ability to turn away natural gas as a source, meaning it basically has to pay whatever's asked.

Even if you don't care about the environment (although I think you should!) and just want cheap energy, more renewable energy and flexibility in the market is exactly what you're looking for. You can actually see this on charts super clearly. Take a look on https://grid.iamkate.com/ specically at the energy mixup and the wholesale energy cost. You'll see that the amount of gas being used is an inverted graph of the cost (i.e. when we're using gas as a nation, that's driving up the price, when we don't have to, energy is a lot cheaper, and sometimes negatively priced)

I am pretty sure Russia had a hand in amplifying the concerns of people hit by those earthquakes.

edit: when writing about stress for Dutch people, you can also mention the stress caused by not being able to afford heating/reducing heating to 16 deg C

No? If you don’t drill then the carbon emissions from that drilling don’t happen.

I think that fact opens a loophole for carbon credits, actually.

100% Gas will use 100TWh of gas to generate power

50% renewable will use 50TWh of gas to generate power

Want to know how the US responded? It was essentially “uh we were only sanctioning specific individuals and companies who we were unhappy with, not the entire nation so lol”, and their second argument was that the Memorandum “IS NOT LEGALLY BINDING”. Yes, the US said that.

Just as a refresher, the third clause of the full Memorandum reads that signatories will:

‘Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.’

So the US had already violated this by 2007.

And the memorandum was again disregarded in 2014 when the Ukrainian constitution was also used as toilet paper, since it fundamentally altered the nature of Ukrainian sovereignty.

So again, remind us why Russia should feel compelled to follow this mythical Budapest memorandum (non-binding btw) when the other parties were clearly violating the terms or acting in bad faith?

If you can’t explain why, I’ll just assume that you don’t have a valid response.