Yep - just look at their oil/energy situation: they still buy it by the boatload from you know who, but just through 3rd parties.
Yep - just look at their oil/energy situation: they still buy it by the boatload from you know who, but just through 3rd parties.
But look at solar adoption across Europe since 2022. It’s going gang busters and now with sodium batteries coming online next year, cheap home energy storage is about to boom as well.
Europe doesn’t want to buy Russian gas, but there is also the very real political reality of what happens if your citizens freeze to death. I will be very surprised if any EU state is reliant on Russian gas by 2035.
When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
Yeah they are just insane whishfull thinkers.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar. That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe. Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country. That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
That's positive news, but I'm talking about oil - which is still needed for modern industrial economies (plastics, diesel, etc).