I don't know when Europe managed to "escape Russian energy dependence" as it still seems to be buying tremendous amounts of Russian fossil fuels that are now branded as Turkish, Indian, Azeri, the list goes on.
UK 5,6%
Azerbadjan 3,8%
Algeria 12,5%
Norway 30,1%
Other LNG 9,4%
USA LNG 27,2%
Russia 11,5%
Most of the "Other LNG" comes from Turkstream in the underlying data. Edit: I was wrong, Turkstream is included in "Russia", other sources points to Qatar and Nigeria being the largest part of "Other LNG"
United States 15,0%
Norway 13,5%
Kazakhstan 12,7%
Libya 9,0%
Saudi Arabia 6,6%
Nigeria 6,3%
United Kingdom 5,2%
Iraq 4,5%
Guyana 4,3%
Brazil 4,1%
Azerbaijan 4,1%
Algeria 3,4%
Russia 2,5%
Mexico 2,1%
Other 6,6%
Europe has been dependent on Russian oil and gas for many years--and still is continuing to buy Russian natural gas. In fact, the EU imported €4.4 billion worth of Russian gas in the first half of 2025. https://www.brusselstimes.com/1707644/eu-imported-e4-4-billi...
No, Ukrainians bombed it for their own reasons and not on behalf of the US.
The exact reasons aren't entirely clear, originally they hated NS because it allowed Europe to ignore Ukraine in the gas trade which left them more exposed. By the time of the full scale war I would bet the reason was more "fuck Russia" than anything more carefully reasoned.
On the other hand: there's a global superpower doing horrific war crimes to Ukraine. I think they're justified in doing whatever it takes even if you don't like it.
Maybe a plausible argument if Ukraine had stopped Russian gas flowing through it's territory at the start of the war and there where flows through NS at the time.
But actually, by the time of the bombing the Russian gas was only flowing through Ukrainian pipelines. So Ukraine was ensuring "income to the Russian war machine", while Nord Stream was just costing them money; at most it could have been used as collateral in a loan.
Nord Stream 1 started operations in 2011. For 11 years money was flowing and the Russian army was in terrible shape in 2022. Now, without the Nord Stream money, it is in better shape.
When the pipeline was sabotaged, no gas and no money were flowing anyway, which makes it even more absurd. There is a very high likelihood that the front lines would be in the exact same place if Nord Stream had not been sabotaged.
Except of course, the EU would have had more leverage in negotiating LNG deals with the US and Qatar rather than making emergency deals.
EDIT: Downvoted while the Ukrainian transit pipelines were open from 2014-2025 and yielded Russian transit fees. And while Nord Stream was built partly because Ukraine stole Russian transit gas in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
Are you trying to argue the difference between keeping something offline vs taking it offline? Cause it's a weak argument.
It's like you're bending over backwards to make arguments in the direction you already decided you want it to go. Like you're trying to force a square peg into a round hole. If you already decided what you want to think then why do you need arguments?
The devil is in the details. The conditions that China wants aren't very lucrative to Russians, and the second pipeline, if it is even built, will take about a decade to build, so not "now".
Russian negotiating position is weak and Beijing knows that.
Russia selling gas to China is completely orthogonal to Nord Stream issue.
The strategic win in bombing Nord Stream was that Ukraine finally got Europe on their side. Before NS was blown up many countries, especially Germany were sitting on the fence, reluctant to give Ukraine any help. They were hoping for Ukraine to lose the war quickly, then they would give Putin some slap on the wrist punishment, and return to "business as usual" with Russia. Nord Stream being destroyed removed the biggest incentive for doing that.
It seems at least as plausible that they did it because wanted to hurt Russia as it does that Washington ordered them to do it, to put it mildly. Washington has been supporting Ukraine during the war but has been rather reticent to support attacking Russian assets that are outside the territory of Ukraine.
The wonders of propaganda make it so that "Ukrainians bombed it" is given as an irrefutable fact, and not something that needs a lot of evidence.
Nobody remembers anymore that Pres. Biden himself said, “If Russia invades ... there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” [°] Nor that the very next day, a EU parliament member, and now Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski thanked the US for the sabotage [^]. Nor that the same day, a competing natural gas pipeline has opened, the Baltic Pipe [_].
None of this matters, because "Ukrainians bombed it". Because WaPo and WSJ said so. In a waterway that is heavily controlled by all kinds of NATO vessels. Where NATO had an exercise 3 months before that, called BALTOPS. Come on.
My, admittedly layman, understanding is that it was a very difficult thing to do from a technical perspective. And that there are very few countries that have technical capabilities to accomplish this. Ukraine is not one of them.
I have no basis to conclude anything in this matter. I saw multiple news reports/interviews to that effect. True/not - you get to decide based on news you hear.
Do you have a basis to conclude that "every intelligence and law enforcement agency that has looked into it and published a report has found the opposite"? You exhaustively went through all Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies and read their reports? So you are quoting other news articles/interviews. Apparently their views differed. Ok.
If, after Russia attacked Georgia and Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas, Germany has decided to team up and provide Russia with a steady stream of cash in exchange for gas, it's on Germany. It can't go all surprised Pickachu when the pipeline suddenly blows up.
Ukraine indirectly funds Russia by buying diesel from India who bought it from Russia. Maybe they should start with cutting off themselves before going after allies.
Blowing up a pipeline in a war isn't violence, it's warfare, and thus IMHO Ukraine had every right to destroy a piece of infrastructure that could be used as political leverage and source of income for its invaders.
The funnier / biggest irony is that US and Russia are working together to fix the pipeline, buy distilleries in Germany to sell to the Germans Russian gas at US prices.
No. This was alleged to be taken out by Ukrainian special forces in order to twist Europe's arm, which is a good thing in the end, but so far as anyone knows it had nothing to to with the US. Until I hear anything proving otherwise I will take what we know as all we know for now.
The US were not thrilled about it when it was being constructed, obviously, but this was normal tensions towards Russia, prescient in the end but here we are.
If you have some more actual evidence outside of assumptions I am absolutely willing to hear it out. I just won't sit here and say "Must have been the US" without any insight.
> President Joe Biden said on Monday that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would be halted if Russia invades Ukraine and stressed unity with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the West rallies to avert a war in Europe.
Halted.. Absolutely, political pressure on Europe to not sign or use it.
You've made the leap to blowing it up somewhere, that is the stretch I'm not buying until it's admitted to. Personally, as an Irish who knows the history of occupation during tense years, I'm not surprised what a well trained spec ops can do with some basic equipment, so my money is on Ukrainian people just doing something Impressive but I'll wait for the facts to say it's exactly what happened.
What's the part that's hard to imagine? It's literally just a boat ride to a publicly-known location that isn't monitored in any way, diving to a depth humans can dive to, placing some standard military / commercial explosives, and getting out.
There were several countries arguably interested in getting rid of that pipeline (Ukraine, Poland, the US), but Ukraine wanted it the most, had easy access, and there's no need to overcomplicate internet theories.
No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred. Any diver, whether professional or recreational (which is my case), will know about this. I don't have a (alternative) theory about this, I'm just stating facts. Well, the alternative theory, if we are speaking of divers, is that they had some very special equipment and were extremely skilled. It wasn't some random people, renting a random boat, renting random diving gear and buying random explosives ..
> No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred.
This simply isn't true, I myself after a technical advancement in my PADI to be certified on a rebreather went >80m many times. It's absolute more common than it was in the past.
Those who are trained with special forces as alleged would also be required to be qualified.
I want to clarify my answer here as I made it seem a bit more nonchalant than it is, there is definitely some technical training that needs to be done to dive deeper, as you say no recreational scuba enthusiast should just try it. There are different gasses that you need and a whole different approach to preparation and decomp.
My main point is that it's not as rare as some might think, it's becoming more and more recreational.
The people who did it definitely took on risk, but in my eyes, more so because if something did happen to go wrong, there's no support to help you out (that we know of). It's a flying with 1 engine scenario. The fact that it was pulled off is impressive. But for any rec divers, don't try without the right training, equipment and people with you.
You have no clue about the "facts". Diving to 80m+ is no big deal now. Hundreds of random amateur tech divers do that every weekend as a casual hobby. They typically own their own gear (not rental), which can purchased new for about $30K including training. The equipment such as a closed-circuit rebreather (CCR) and drysuit is somewhat specialized but widely available on the open market from numerous manufacturers. I know a number of divers living in that region who have done much more complex and challenging dives, although obtaining and using the explosives is a separate issue.
Right, Achim Schlöffel is legitimate. In terms of complex tech diving he has been there and done that, and has the pictures to prove it. When he says something can be done there's no reason to doubt him.
"The open-sea diving depth record was achieved in 1988 by a team of COMEX and French Navy divers who performed pipeline connection exercises at a depth of 534 metres (1,750 ft) in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the "Hydra 8" programme employing heliox and hydrox."
Sounds like 80 meters is cake walk for any modern naval institution.
An 80 meter bounce dive is a cake walk for anyone with advanced technical dive training. Any motivated middle-class person could acquire the necessary skills and equipment to do it safely in a few years of steady effort. It doesn't require anything like the complex saturation diving procedures and equipment used by COMEX or certain naval institutions.
>Advanced Mixed Gas Diver (80m)...The Advanced Mixed Gas Diver course is a great way to extend already considerable open-circuit mixed gas diving skills.
They actually dived pretty deep (most Scuba gear and divers are limited to 40 meters), the planning of the operation was meticulous in that pretty much nobody saw the divers, and the explosives had to be designed with a good knowledge of the pipeline and its concrete. Ukrainian operations during the war have demonstrated that their typical MO is a lot more "seat-of-the-pants" than this operation would suggest.
You're literally arguing that a government intelligence agency couldn't find a couple of experienced people, provide them with commercially-available equipment, and get them to coordinate a medium-complexity task.
Yes, it's an operation that requires coordination and planning, which is why it's reasonable to assume it was carried out by an intelligence agency and not a lone fisherman with a grudge. But once you're in the realm of intelligence activities, this isn't exactly the "let's blow up their pagers" level of complexity.
Their sabotage attempts of several bridges in Crimea did not go this well, suggesting that the Ukrainians alone aren't the best at understanding explosives, and their successes like "fly a bunch of FPV drones out of a shipping container" are quite a bit simpler than this. "Intelligence agency" is a spectrum of capability. Suggesting that an intelligence agency that tried and failed to blow up a bride twice was the same as the one that executed a flawless operation against an underwater pipeline is a bit far-fetched.
It's not at all obvious that e.g. the drone attack, which involved >100 drones assembled inside Russia by human operatives who were able to safely exfiltrate, and 5 different storage containers, in a coordinated strike on 5 different airfields hundreds/thousands of kilometers apart and away from the border, is a less complex operation than the destruction of NordStream
Snuggling and launching drones from deep within enemy territory is a much more complicated op than a couple of dudes diving in the middle of nowhere.
Bringing that bridge down is also much harder than blowing up the pipeline, because the bridge is covered by a lot of defenses, and naval drones will always have limited payload (if they want to be fast enough to evade defenses). Dudes performing a dive in the middle of the sea far from the battlefield are much less vulnerable.
Wait, NORD Stream was BEHIND enemy lines? And is as short a span as a bridge (so more easily monitored complicating things). How many people traveled across the Nord Stream pipeline a day that required the operators to be hidden from?
They have demonstrated capabilities like blowing up the Kerch Strait bridge or several Russian oil refineries without US help, what makes you think Nord Stream is too difficult for them?
The first Kerch Bridge attempt was only a partial success. Traffic continued almost the next day. The second attempt was a complete failure. For the refineries, Ukraine uses at least GPS.
The sail boat theory is plausible from diving standpoint, but they allegedly installed explosives on NS-1 and NS-2 sites that were at least 100km apart, within 10 hours, with no decompression equipment. If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
> If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
The bridge is approximately 3km long or so, which makes it relatively easy to maintain a continuous 24/7 armed presence to prevent sabotage. An underwater pipeline is a 1200km stretch mostly in other international territory that is hard to protect. Definitely much easier to blow up a pipeline than it is to blow up a bridge.
Why bring up "decompression equipment"? Have you ever even done any tech diving? We just deco in the water. No special equipment is needed beyond a rebreather or some stage tanks.
We can't prove that there wasn't some US assistance (i.e. can't prove a negative) but there's pretty strong evidence that it was primarily a Ukrainian operation.
I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
My money is actually on Polish special forces (or one of the Baltic states), in an effort to force Germany to be serious about weaning itself off Russian natural gas.
> I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
It didn't make much of a difference to Germany since the gas flow via NS1 was already switched off for a while and NS2 never had delivered any gas before the sabotage happened. In the end it was more of a symbolic gesture to freeze the status quo that was already in place anyway.
Russia warns Europe that it will freeze to death if help to Ukraine will continue -> Russia stops NS1 to demonstrate their economical superpower -> EU companies are looking for $18 billion compensation -> NS1 blows up to make an excuse.
There are about half a dozen actors with an interest in doing it. It's like an Agatha Christie murder mystery. My favourite as a Brit was Ukraine with tech assistance from the British navy, as alleged by Moscow.
Biden never announced that he would blow up Nord Stream 2. What he said in effect, in a press conference after Germany grudgingly agreed to prevent Nord Stream 2 from going online if Russia were to escalate its actions in Ukraine, was essentially "it's not going to go online" and giving a vague "it won't" answer when the questioner pointed out what if Germany disagreed, since it was Germany's call in the matter after all.
A month or so later, Russia launched the 2022 offensive against Ukraine, and there was no longer any question of NS2 entering service because it was clear to all that the preconditions for Germany's rescission of approval for the pipeline had been satisfied. With that context, Biden's answer is best understood as him being quite confident in the quality of US intelligence that Russia was planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine that Europe was assessing as faulty. So while Europe was interested in the question of "what if Russia doesn't invade Ukraine?" Biden's answer was (in not so many words) "I'm not contemplating that scenario."
Batteries are an expensive solution that doesn't scale well at the grid level. It is useful for grid stability (fast frequency response) but simply a non-starter when you're dealing with national grids.
Batteries are an added cost to the system, without producing more electricity, and as a result prices will go up.
A far cheaper source of flexibility is Demand Side Response. Particularly data centres that are willing to be market actors. Compute can happen anywhere, so it should happen where the wind blows and the sun shines. It is cheaper to transmit bits than Megawatts.
> Batteries are an expensive solution that doesn't scale well at the grid level.
I'd like to see the reasoning behind why they don't pan out. LoFePO4 have dropped to $60/kWh in China. At 3,000 cycles that means they add about 2¢ to every kWh they store.
We don't get that cheap price where I live of course, but they being installed at a rapid pace now. I think most are being installed "behind the meter", which means they are being installed by people who pay retail. That's happening because paired with solar, they've dropped below the break even point at retail prices. Grid scale needs roughly another factor of 3 price drop to hit the same point. If CATL's $10/kWh sodium batteries that get 10,0000 cycles pan out, it will drive the price down by another factor of 10.
Your "demand" side response arises naturally with batteries. Those who can do without the power simply won't buy one. Or if they can get by with only a little emergency power, they buy a small one.
I experienced that first hand. I owned a 4.8kWh battery a while ago. That is by any definition is small. It costs about the same as a generator at today's prices (it didn't back then). A flood caused power to be cut off for a week. We only fired up the generator once, before discovering we could reduce our usage to what a small battery and a 6.6 kW solar array could cope with, even in the very overcast conditions that accompany a heavy rain event.
Demand side response drives up costs a lot. You end up with expensive, rapidly depreciating capital equipment sitting idle and not earning any revenue. The same problem applies whether the equipment is a GPU cluster or aluminum smelter. If we're going to have a modern industrial economy then we need to have enormous quantities of cheap electrical power available 24 hours a day.
Long distance high voltage transmission lines can help to an extent but create the same sort of concerns about dependence on unreliable foreign countries as fossil fuel imports.
Demand side management is a nice concept, but it is neither free nor a cure-all:
It has real costs because it limits the utilization of involved infrastructure and is simply not feasible for a lot of industries. It does not help when residential demand exceeds the available supply either.
The most practical solution will probably be a mix of overprovisioning (especially considering how cheap solar panels have become), battery storage and fuel powered fallback, with the balance shifting as long as batteries and panels get cheaper.
A huge portion of compute is triggered on request, so there isn't that much ability to time shift it. A build was just kicked off because I merged some code. In theory, that could happen overnight. In reality, changing the delay from 20 minutes to 12 hours would be unworkable.
In Californias batteries have in recent years decreased the fossil gas usage by ~40% and essentially removed the duck curve.
Demand side response is of course cheaper but there will always be people willing to buy it expensive electricity to fulfill a certain demand.
Take a BEV. The charging is generally optimized for when electricity is cheap and abundant, but when going on a roadtrip without flexibility in their charging people are willing to pay more.
Paying more opens the possibility for batteries and other solutions to fulfill the demand.
Gas and electricity prices are somewhat intertwined but not as much as you make it seem. Gas is primarily used in Germany for heating and Nuclear electricity doesn't help with this.
Germany fully realizes that Gas is only an intermediate tech which still is relevant for the next 15-20 years.
He was asked by foreign leaders in Europe. He claimed there was demand but at the time Europe was buying Russian gas which was funding Ukraine war and Europe was seeking alternatives.
not favourable to taking risks of pipelines spilling on Quebecois land, while not getting much value our of it.
per Mark Carney, he's interested in pipeline projects, maybe through to churchill instead of going through Quebec, but so far no private company is interested in investing.
At the relatively high cost US LNG gets imported, it creates a big incentive to start considering alternatives. A lot of the investment commitments will probably never be delivered. Fundamentally, a lot of states in the EU will have to sell this to their voters and tax payers and that's where this stuff will slowly die. Because it's a hard sell.
LNG imports will be demand driven, not supply driven. And demand is going to decrease over time; not increase. That calls into question the need for more infrastructure. On both sides. Germany already topped up its reserves for the coming winter; ahead of schedule. There is no shortage.
The US is building a big LNG bubble with investments that might end up under water. What happens if demand flattens and decreases mid to long term, as can reasonably be expected at this point? Can the US sustain high LNG prices when cheaper sources become available? What will high export prices do for domestic pricing for energy? How eager will investors be to make big multi decade investments in this (given all this)?
The existing terminals are underutilized already (below 50%). It's hard to see where all this extra demand to fill even more terminals is going to come from. There is no urgency for any of this on the EU side.
However there is quite a bit of urgency on lowering energy prices for industry and consumers. LNG is not the way to do that. I don't see that changing.
Wat? Most of European countries buy gas from Norway, Algeria and other countries. The US share is just 16.5 %. That is not really a lock in. That is just diversification.
We just need to wait out the inevitable collapse and breakup of Russia, then we can go in and scoop up the energy resources. This time it has to be a more hands-on approach, to not repeat the same mistake that we made at the end of the Cold War.
It's clear to all parties that this is a false promise made to appease Trump.
The question is how deep they'll have to go in 3 years. Can they stall it out, or will the US actually demand they fulfill the promise, causing at least some amount of lock-in?
Gas power generation is a necessary evil to balance out the variability of intermittent energy generation (i.e. wind and solar).
Hydropower isn't a feasible alternative because the easy resources have been developed.
The only alternative source of flexibility available today is demand side response.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes, as I've not explained in detail. It is a complex issue. My opinions are based on having a phd in the topic, 10+ years in control rooms, years of market operations and design, and years contributing to europe-wide risk assessment methodologies.
The easiest money I ever made was investing in natural gas infrastructure during the COVID insanity of everyone calling it dead due to renewables.
I really don’t understand the disconnect otherwise very intelligent people have on this subject. Every single person I’ve talked to in the actual industry seems to be aware of this fact and how dire things are getting. However it seems that everyone else believes that grid scale batteries are somehow going to save the day in the next decade or two.
Energy storage is energy storage. Natural gas is just a giant underground battery.
And that’s before you get to industrial uses of natural gas as a feedstock, while ignoring how much is still used for heating infrastructure and how long it would take to retrofit everything to heat pumps.
I often wonder what I’m missing, but I’m confident enough in this one to have put my money where my mouth is at least.
Maybe you're the person to answer this question then.
How can I find the price of battery storage, per kWh delivered to the customer, assuming a pure wind/solar/battery grid?
I can easily find the price per kWh of battery capacity but that's not the same thing. I'm looking for the effective levelized cost of electricity, over the lifetime of the battery, so I can compare against generation sources.
> It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
they dont help grid stability via inertia of spinning masses, but PLLs and the like exist, where you can control frequencies and phases without a spinning mass.
you dont need to burn gas to have a flywheel either
Batterie prices are falling constantly and grid sized battery production has not even started. The focus was and is mobile batteries.
So expect prices to drop further.
Also yes, batteries help very much with grid stability as they can give steady power on demand anywhere. Have lots of batteries everywhere == lots of on demand grid stabilizers.
> Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
My experience has been that the vast majority of people, even very technical people, don't really understand the energy mix required to sustain modern industrial technology. Their only experience is with their utility bill which shows them a pie-chart with a big area showing "green" so they can feel better about the state of things.
Electricity production accounts for the minority of energy usage, and residential a minority of the usage of electricity. People don't think about the energy required to send an Amazon package to their door or have fruits from South America stocking their grocery store year round, or even to create the industries that ultimately make up their paychecks each month.
The pandemic was the best view of what real energy usage changes would look like. Early pandemic was a rare moment when global energy usage dipped and that had nothing to do with the demand on the residential grid.
Many things are technically possible. Fewer things are economically practical. Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough? How much will that cost and how many years will it take? A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude. Have you actually done the math on this or are you just repeating platitudes?
> A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude.
The UK is forging ahead with large scale battery storage projects. I have not done the math, but I assume there is a sound economic case in order for these projects to receive this level of investment.
Edit: Here's some more data on revenue for battery storage in the UK [3]
Yes, I have done the math. Thing is, if you ignore the climate, coal and co is still cheaper. That's why it is still used so much.
If you factor in climate costs, things are different.
> Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough?
why is this relevant? clearly europe can also buy from outside of europe.
the nice thing about batteries is you dont need a new battery for each watt, compared to needing gas.
the simplest thing is to keep buying russian gas, and also pay ukraine to attack russia. no need to change anything or do any new buildouts whether thats batteries or in US LNG export terminals+european import terminals. those also take time where the russian fuel is readily available. the russian invasion isnt gonna last forever, so a move to US gas is wasted investment when europe can move back to Russian gas eventually anyways
Apart from the obvious advantages of cheap energy, the reason Europe bought so much Russian gas is the theory that interconnected economies don't go to war. Now that Europe considers Russia a belligerent threat even after Nordstream was completed the reintegration might not happen.
Residential energy use is the least interesting thing to think about at a grid scale. The grid actually will get more brittle and/or expensive if everyone wealthy enough to get batteries and solar gets them.
What about the manufacturing and industrial uses? Or the need for natural gas to be a feedstock?
How many batteries does it take to power a giant hyperscaler datacenter for a few days during poor weather conditions? You can’t really rely on backup generators at that usage rate as the expense (and environmental impact) gets to be crazy. Or you end up just building natural gas turbines co-located with such facilities and we are back to where we began.
this is to say, that natural gas isnt the necessary evil to account for intermittent power sources.
its a necessary evil to fully capitalize on other investments. i dont care if the hyperscaler can run their GPUs overnight. perfectly happy for them to delay their training because theyre running in daytime.
the capital owners who bought the GPUs sure care, but why should i accept their pollution in order for them to run a bit faster?
This is just another way to say you are in favor of western hemisphere degrowth.
Without industry you don’t have an economy in the long run. Replace hyperscaler with aluminum smelter or manufacturing line if you prefer. If you can’t operate those capital assets 24x7 they simply will not be built in your country.
Cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy is the foundation of wealth. Nuclear fission was likely humanities transition technology but we fumbled the ball 40 years ago so here we are.
Could you explain what you would use that we can produce in Europe and can generate electricity to fill the batteries with? The batteries cannot be produced in Europe and have very limited lifetime.
Europe has 100 days worth of natural gas storage facilities. All it needs to do is to get renewables + batteries + nuclear above ~70% or so to be able to withstand being cut off for a year. Getting to ~95% is relatively cheap and easy. 100% is hard and expensive, but they don't need 100%. If they get to 95%, that's multiple years worth of storage.
> An exercise to the reader, calculate the space and materials required to replace the average norwegian hydro reservoir with batteries.
Solution: I can't compute the space and materials, but can estimate the cost.
Norway has 1240 storage reservoirs with a total capacity of 87 TWh [1], which yields an average of 70 GWh/reservoir.
Last year, in China, a 16 GWh battery storage plant received an average bid price of $US66.3/KWh [2]. From this we can compute that a 70 GWh plant should cost $US4.65 billion.
A bit on the high side, but can battery prices fall by another order of magnitude? Then again, this is for replicating one reservoir. Replicating 1240 would be a 5 trillion dollar endeavor.
That's why I said 100% renewable was hard and expensive. A grid that gets 5-10% of its energy from natural gas, but can get 100% of it's power from nuclear + gas during a dankelflaute provides optimally cheap + secure power.
> The problem is dispatchability/flexibility, not storage. At a more complex level the issue is grid inertia and frequency response.
Agreed they are. But they want to move away from it, especially for air quality reasons. They've had a huge problem with air pollution. They are big into EVs. This means less reliance on foreign oil and cleaner air.
Nuclear is as dead as a great technology can be. A few more incremental improvements in solar and battery industry and nuclear won't be profitable even in theory, to say nothing of construction cost overruns.
Reactors are only good at providing baseload but that isn't how grids operate anymore. Renewables are too cheap, if a power plant can't drop output fast enough it is punished.
nuclear plants can cut power as quickly as any other power plant, you are just controlling steam. divert the steam from the turbine and you aren't generating power anymore.
Mostly because it's very expensive and slow to build, what with nuclear engineers not wanting their workplaces to be as dangerous as a construction site. Look up who invented the Maximum Credible Accident, it wasn't the environmentalists.
Completely wrong. Renewables plus battery storage and long-distance transmission lines can potentially solve the power generation problem, although we're decades away from being able to scale that up in a way that addresses base load requirements for heavy industry in an economical way. But beyond power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for the chemicals industry. Renewables won't solve that and the German chemical manufacturing industry is dying.
Many people only look at "electricity" generation when they think about renewables, but fail to recognize that that is only part of energy consumption (and a surprisingly small one at that). Globally electricity production only accounts for ~21% of energy usage, so even if we had an entirely green grid across the entire planet we still would have a long way to go as far as having sustainable energy usage.
The largest source of "renewable" energy (not just electricity) in the EU is biomass [0], which, in many cases is wood pellets shipped (using bunker fuel to power the ships of course) from North America to the EU.
Page 8 of this report [1] gives a pretty good visual of how this trend has increased over time.
Europe is basically reverting to using wood for it's primary heating fuel.
It's a prerequisite. But we actually need to make the policy decisions to stop using fossils, otherwise we'll just burn it all in addition to using renewables and look pretty bad in the history books for bringing about the climate apocalypse.
"Let's not buy from Russia, it's an overt dictatorship lazily cosplaying as a democracy that's waging wars on other nations and killing innocent civilians."
Another level of irony is that this is partly because Europe does not want to develop shale gas for environmental reasons, so it imports US LNG... which is mostly shale gas [1].
That's not especially ironic though. In doing that Europe avoids the pollution associated with shale gas exploitation. The gas itself isn't different once it is extracted, so it doesn't matter if the imported gas is shale gas or whatever else.
The root problem is needing gas at all, of course.
If a problem has no solution then it's not really a "problem", it's just a fact to be accepted. Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals. There is no conceivable future where we don't need that stuff to maintain a modern industrial civilization.
> Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals.
Maybe, but the vast majority of gas use in industry is for heat and power and electricity is a trivial substitute there.
And even the direct use as process input is far from unavoidable, because in a lot of cases this use could be reduced/eliminated or shift to synthetic inputs, which would happen organically if prices shifted long-term anyway.
The hypocrisy is that, like many other polluting industries, Europe is just sending pollution somewhere else. Then it self-congratulates on how green it is. And it pays foreign powers through the nose at the same time, and then European governments say that "there is no money".
There is very little strategic thinking in Europe.
Also, both Europe and the US are happy to have China do the dirty jobs so that they stay clean in their countries. With the consequences we all know today in terms of dependence.
Furthermore, China doesn't want to be dirty anymore, in fact they are maybe the ones who take green technologies the most seriously. So the dirtiest jobs are pushed to other countries, mostly in southeast Asia.
> Also, both Europe and the US are happy to have China do the dirty jobs so that they stay clean in their countries
Can you give examples? What "dirty jobs" is China, and now apparently other countries, being purportedly forced to do? So is Trump really an environmentalist when he levied massive tariffs on countries in the region?
No, when countries devastate their environment they do it on their own volition. China was disastrously dirty mostly due to domestic reasons like the absolute lack of pollution controls, coal burning, and so on. China introspected and decided that they wanted to be better than that (the Olympics might legitimately have been a major turning point) and have done an amazing job cleaning the country up, and many areas are now truly Western. Air quality is infinitely better...at the same time that the country is making more than ever for the rest of the world.
Other countries haven't got there yet. India, the Philippines and so on have only themselves to blame for the state of their country, however self-comforting the delusion that it's really outsiders that are to blame might be.
> What "dirty jobs" is China, and now apparently other countries, being purportedly forced to do?
In past decades, we had this system that China manufactures goods, they are shipped in ships to US and Europe, and because US and Europe don't manufacture much anything, often the ships would travel back empty. Western countries started to legislate mandated plastic waste recycling, but didn't really have facilities to actually recycle. So we would ship our plastic waste to China, with a promise that it will be recycled. Legislators were happy. In practice, plastic waste is not so easy to recycle, and was often just dumped somewhere in Asia.
In 2017, China stopped accepting imports of plastic waste.
Some countries like Sweden, burn their household waste in combined heat and power generation plants. If you incinerate in sufficiently high temperatures, and have exhaust filters, you can do in cleanly without causing air pollution.
There are no outsiders when it comes to pollution. We get one planet. That's it.
So, China is free to choose to pollute, as is Europe and the US free to choose production from a source that doesn't pollute as much.
Their electrical infrastructure that is built on coal (60% of current generation) even if they've made huge improvements. Rare earth mining and building of all those electrical batteries and solar panels is a pretty dirty business. Reality is China produces a colossal amount of stuff, and much of it is pretty dirty (it would probably be dirty anywhere as that's the nature of making things at an industrial scale)
Right now China seems headed in the right direction for pollution, moreso than the US. And probably the only way they end up reducing pollution completely is to grow wealthy enough to replace old methods.
The US literally dumped their trash in China for "recycling". China doesn't want to anymore and India and several southeast Asia countries took over (Indonesia, Vietnam, ...).
And sure the the western world wasn't forced to trash China, but when a country decides to buy Chinese production that we know was made with no regard for the environment because it is more competitive than doing it locally where one has no choice but to care, then you are effectively exporting pollution.
As for Trump being an environmentalist with his tariffs. A few decades ago, he would have been, not so much anymore. If he didn't insist on trashing his own country that is.
> The US literally dumped their trash in China for "recycling"
No one "dumped" anything. There weren't random ships sneaking onto the coast and dumping their contents. No airdrops tossing out garbage bags.
This was a pull industry and China had such a negligent position on their environment that people -- Chinese people, in China, allowed by China -- made money tendering for recycling contracts and then just stacking it into a giant pile, presumably awaiting some innovation that would make it worthwhile to process. That precisely speaks to exactly what I was saying, and externalizing that and blaming it on others is the sort of patronizing, laughably bigoted infantilizing that people do about developing nations, and it's extraordinarily unhelpful. China started caring, and regulated these exploiters out of business.
> and India and several southeast Asia countries took over (Indonesia, Vietnam, ...)
Vietnam is a surprisingly clean country. Like you can drop a Google Maps pin almost anywhere in Vietnam and while it might not be glitzy and rich, there is a sense of pride in environment and a care and a concern about the commons.
India and Bangladesh, on the other hand... Yeah, this isn't covertly imported garbage, but instead is 100% domestic sourced, just as the vast majority of China's was before it became more enlightened. Countries that are cesspools overwhelmingly have themselves to blame.
I just had to respond because this sort of infantilizing "every bad thing is caused by outsiders" angle isn't remotely helpful. Like almost all of the world's ocean plastics come from Southeast Asia, and it's amazing seeing people try to rationalize how in cultures where plastics are used for everything, and discarded thoughtlessly everywhere, actually it's somehow the West's fault.
The environmental issues with shale gas are local, if you ignore global warming as a whole. So in that sense, not doing it in your own back yard makes a lot of sense.
I'm not so sure. As a whole, yes, global warming is a huge issue, but one shale gas well alone will surely have very marginal effect on that. Comparing that to the fact that it can seriously contaminate groundwater and air in your imminent vicinity seems like a more serious issue in that regard.
A barrel of oil means about 560 kg of co2 emissions. Including the mortality cost til 2100 from emissions bumps the cost of emissions to about $145 per barrel using nrs from[1] (0.56 tons of emissions from a barrel x $260 scc per ton of emissions). I'll leave it to you to quantify the local effects and whether they are worse.
Considering that the industry is highly profitable I'd say that Europe spends more importing gas than producing it locally, which would also benefit the economy and improve strategic independence.
Investments in fossil fuel infrastructure still happen, too, in the form of LNG terminals.
I don't think this is true, Europe just doesn't have these reserves. If Europe had oil and gas reserves, they would not even build gas pipelines from Russia in the first place.
Fossil fuel reserves are not a fixed number. When prices rise, energy companies expand exploration and find more. Many areas are still basically unexplored for deep minerals. There are undrilled shale basins across western Europe, and the Black Sea and Ionian Sea have barely been tapped. Technical innovations like fracking and horizontal drilling also expand the reserves that can be economically extracted.
There may be valid political and environmental reasons not to go this route but it's silly to claim that fossil fuel reserves are so limited when no one has really looked.
From what I've read so far it seems people have really looked and we have some estimates (not yet proven reserves). The highest estimates I found are around 10-20 years of current consumption rate. That doesn't seem like a lot, and Europe's consumption is going down so it doesn't feel like this will change much for shale oil.
But Norway still has big gas reserves and supplies 33% of Eueropian consumption, so I was actually wrong in the original comment and the US LNG impact is pretty overstated, it's just 15%. Most of the rest comes from middle east.
Sorry, you won't get any reasonable response for that condescending tone, especially since you clearly didn't even do a basic google search for that estimate to see how low it is, so your "I'm gonna teach you how the world works, kid" attitude is not even justified.
It makes sense from EU point of view. We'll let another continent destroy itself environmentally and leverage their output during the process. Better that destroying our own soil.
We already damaged Europe in many ways, so yes what you say is true. One day US population will realize the same, but I guess things need to get worse before they start to improve.
With a "normal" US Admin, I doubt this would be a concern. With this current regime, it could be risky. I could see Trump having a fit and if he realizes the EU needs US LNG, he could cut the supply or put a huge tax on it.
But if that happens, maybe the US Fossil Fuel "Cartel" will revolt. I think the EU really need to accelerate their renewal push even more. From what I read they are doing good w/renewals, but I would be nervous if I was in the EU until renewals and/or nuclear power provides 90% of the power.
That doesn't really support his rhetoric. He has always said that he doesn't like the trade deficit, which is a dumb idea, so increasing exports would go along the same vein as increasing tariffs to limit imports.
I think what would be more likely is the EU does something with it as a bargaining chip to reduce import tariffs rather than Trump trying to tax it out of existence.
And just to be clear Trump's trade policy is dumb and I don't support it.
As an American how stupid do you have to be to promise $750B for fossil fuel infrastructure instead of say, grid tied battery infrastructure. Europe is weaning themselves off of fossil fuels so quickly(relatively).
Because that gets you a trade deal and reduces the risk of further immediate damage to your economy. Besides, is there an actual contract, with clear penalties, for this $750B purchase? I'll be surprised if it actually happens. I think EU negotiators are well aware that Trump doesn't care about what is in the deal, just that he "wins".
Sure, but this is always a risk with him. Maybe you buy $100B of natural gas, but have the temerity to regulate an American company he likes and he slaps you with punitive tariffs. Or he doesn't like something else with your domestic politics. He's not a rule-based actor or cares about anything but loyalty and subservience to him.
I'm guessing a lot of of people/countries are aiming to just string him along as long as possible.
You're extrapolating one somewhat rude adiplomatic president to America going to war with Europe? That's enough internet for you, sir. Time to go for a walk.
Adiplomatic is... _very mild_ considering the threats he's made about taking over Greenland and Canada. Bluster or not, the fact is... the President of the United States is openly talking about it, and currently using the military and all it's levers quite actively here and abroad.
Russia is not at war with Europe, its at war with Ukraine.
Both the US and Russia are currently trying to influence the EU to do things that aren't what EU citizens want.
per the drunk signal text leak, Europe's shipping is being negatively impacted by the American Israel/Gaza stance, to the extent that the US has made up for it by bombing the Houthis.
...which says both that the US is an ongoing problem for europe, but that the relationship isnt nearly so shaky as it seems. Trump is getting US strategic goals in Europe, to make Europe pay for anti-Russia preparedness, while the US focuses on anti-China.
There is an obvious rift between Europeans, European leaders, and the US. Europeans seem tired of the US and it's policies, however simultaneously are unaware that the cushy "European" lifestyle they love only exists because of the US. Which is something that European leaders are keenly aware of.
So it creates a situation where the leadership will constantly bend at the knee to the US's demands, and the populace will get progressively more and more anti-US. However in it's current state, Europe is stuck under the thumb of the US on three sides - tech, military, and energy.
The only "clean" way to rectify this problem is for Europeans to slash regulations, slash social programs, and dramatically increase annual working hours. All things which are the antithesis of contemporary Europeans ideals. Europe desperately needs a modern industry hub, right now it's all US and China on the board.
I would say that the cushy lifestyle of Europe and the US depends on the cheap labor in China and Asia in general combined with many companies who operate and own capital there being owned by European and American companies. Not sure which calculus would lead one to conclude that the US is the sole reason of European lifestyle.
How does slashing social programs and dramatically increasing working hours solve the problem of a missing industry hub, or energy independence? These seem entirely disconnected.
If European countries want to survive as independent powers rather than as vassal states of the USA and/or China (and this is still in doubt) then they will eventually have to re-industrialize. Like if they want to have any stuff then someone has to make the stuff. They're also going to have to rebuild their militaries instead of counting on the USA to defend them. All of that will require an enormous amount of capital and the money will have to come from somewhere. Taxing the rich won't be enough, which means the only possible course of action is to cut social spending and force their citizens to work harder. This will be unpopular and cause a lot of protests by naive people who don't want to face the harsh realities of modern geopolitics and natural resource constraints.
West Germany had a very strong army and better social systems than now until 1990. It could easily have built nuclear weapons, but wasn't allowed to.
The dichotomy between social programs and weapons (a variation of the old butter vs. guns nonsense) is false, and I suspect is just used by some people here who want to slash social programs no matter what.
The situation prior to 1990 is hardly relevant today. Back then West Germany was still coasting on Marshall Plan largesse, and had low labor costs due to a favorable demographic profile and huge numbers of Gastarbeiter. That situation no longer obtains, plus they're still trying to develop the former East Germany after Soviet occupation wrecked it. Now if Germany wants to survive as an independent power with freedom of action then they'll have to make some tough choices.
If you want to claim that butter vs. guns is nonsense then please be specific and explain exactly where the money will come from. And let's not have any vague non-answers like "tax the rich" or "cut waste".
“Britain received twice as much aid as West Germany did, but economic growth in Britain dramatically lagged behind that of the Germans.”
Germany needs nukes and a navy to project power to solve the energy dependence. It isn't that expensive and could be done by eliminating waste in the procurement process. The money is already there. Oh yes, and tax the rich, especially landowners with multiple properties.
(Why would I listen to you preemptively ruling out viable strategies? I do not take orders here.)
So in other words you're proposing more wishful thinking and inaction. Germany has made many attempts to eliminate waste already with nothing much to show for it.
As for their so-called "navy" it's a government jobs program with uniforms. Their warships aren't even able to defend themselves, let alone project power. What a joke.
The lifeblood of the European economy is still the same things that were the lifeblood 30 years ago.
There is no tech scene in Europe, despite tech being at the global economic forefront for those 30 years.
The US spent more per capita than Europe did on support to Ukraine. It also provided the lions share of weapons and armaments.
And now Europe is turning to the US to supply most of it's energy. Which is methane. Heaven forbid the EU give green investment funds special economic rules to foster growth, it might generate a few billionaires.
Europe is a trust fund state burning old money and milking old industry. It desperately needs to build its own independence. Russia coming knocking seems to have been a bit of a wakeup call, but even still single child Europeans are sitting on the beaches of the Mediterranean complaining that they cannot retire at 55.
> The only "clean" way to rectify this problem is for Europeans to slash regulations, slash social programs, and dramatically increase annual working hours. All things which are the antithesis of contemporary Europeans ideals. Europe desperately needs a modern industry hub, right now it's all US and China on the board.
What an absurdity to say that the only way out for Europeans is to follow the U.S. in their hyper-capitalist folly, as if speed-running their way to more concentration of power & capital was Europe's only salvation.
Yes, Europeans have to accept the fact that they will have to work longer given the current demographic trends and Brussels needs to make sure EU regulations don't impede innovation. But for the the most part European leaders just need to initiate a strategic shift and move on from the dogma that Europe's success is tied to U.S. dependency.
What has so far looked like pragmatism on the part of EU leaders is increasingly looking like a lack of courage to assert the EU's power and chart a path of their own
> however simultaneously are unaware that the cushy "European" lifestyle they love only exists because of the US
Why do so many Americans believe this? I would like to see some real accounting of the US-EU relationship. Americans only focus on the supposed defense relationship, where supposedly the EU is under investing because the US will supposedly come to the rescue.
Every single other aspect of the US-EU relationship is ignored.
Don't even try, you won't get a reasonable answer. I've had a discussion with a similar commenter here quite recently, and in the end, they ignored my arguments and still pretended that I admitted that "Europeans view Americans as suckers."
Even if you were to show them data, you could never convince them, as their position is based on emotions. And you can't argue someone out of a position using facts, if that person didn't arrive at that position using facts to begin with.
Because there has been a major trade imbalance for decades, and Europe has been underspending for defense and being more than happy with the US tax payer paying for its security.
Things were fine in Germany under the moderate Merkel government, which emphasized deescalation with Russia until the Cowboys Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and John McCain came along and fanned the flames.
After the illegal and horrible Russian invasion (which was provoked nonetheless) the EU got progressively drawn into the US proxy war. They were criticized for not doing enough in 2022 by the US. In 2025 on the other hand they were criticized for wanting to prolong the war by Trump.
The EU pays the bill, the US reaps its benefits from weakening Russia, which is the entire goal of the slow moving war of attrition. Successes include US dominance in Syria, attempted dominance in Venezuela and possible Greenland.
Ruining the EU's social systems will achieve nothing. This is an energy problem and the US tries to control all choke points of energy delivery to the EU.
> Things were fine in Germany under the moderate Merkel government
Disagree completely.
I would put significant part of the blame for the whole Ukraine disaster on western reaction in 2014, when Crimea was annexed (thats not to say that Putin isnt an imperialistic asshole, just that this could have been avoided regardless).
The "Merkel policy" (link EU/Russia by trade to prevent war) is a solid long-term plan, but the EU needed to demonstrate willingness to reduce that trade (even when it hurt themselves) to punish expansionism/destabilizing behavior.
It failed to do this almost completely. This made it clear to anyone that a (successful) annexation of the whole Ukraine would have gone (mostly) unpunished.
In this case, I blame the Merkel government for putting the financial well-being of its citizens over ethical principles, but a big part of the problem is that most voters are too stupid and uninformed to even realize that such a tradeoff is being made anyway, and react to economical signals only.
> In this case, I blame the Merkel government for putting the financial well-being of its citizens over ethical principles,
Its much worse than that in terms of realpolitik: the gains were short-term, the costs will be paid for over decades, and disproportionately allocated to germanys eastern neighbors like the Poles and Estonians who are at increased risk of Russian aggression.
It really was such a bad tradeoff and I don't think this is hindsight: Russia is basically doing what is has been doing for centuries.
Complete failure of the German political system between 1990-2020+
Ukraine itself traded with Russia from 2024-2025 and collected transit fees for Russian gas.
Nuland and others were active in Ukraine before and during the Maidan revolution.
But please, continue to blame Germany, blow up its pipelines, send 1,000,000 refugees who collect social security (the topic of this subthread, do the slash-social-security hawks here want to evict the Ukrainians and send them to the front lines)?
Use your favorite search engine to find the "rand corporation overextending and unbalancing russia" paper. There are dozens of similar papers, also from Brookings: "path to persia"
By the way, the Trump administration also perpetuated this "misinformation" when they pretended to seek peace in January 2025.
I don't know when Europe managed to "escape Russian energy dependence" as it still seems to be buying tremendous amounts of Russian fossil fuels that are now branded as Turkish, Indian, Azeri, the list goes on.
Do the list go on ? For gas Q2 2025, figure 5 at https://www.bruegel.org/dataset/european-natural-gas-imports it's
Most of the "Other LNG" comes from Turkstream in the underlying data. Edit: I was wrong, Turkstream is included in "Russia", other sources points to Qatar and Nigeria being the largest part of "Other LNG"If I read it right, for oil in Q1 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Europe has been dependent on Russian oil and gas for many years--and still is continuing to buy Russian natural gas. In fact, the EU imported €4.4 billion worth of Russian gas in the first half of 2025. https://www.brusselstimes.com/1707644/eu-imported-e4-4-billi...
Exactly at the moment people start buying BS from Brussels's ursula, roberta and rest of corrupted clique.
Wasn't it the point of Nord Stream sabotage? https://brian-whit.medium.com/nord-stream-sabotage-a-look-at...
No, Ukrainians bombed it for their own reasons and not on behalf of the US.
The exact reasons aren't entirely clear, originally they hated NS because it allowed Europe to ignore Ukraine in the gas trade which left them more exposed. By the time of the full scale war I would bet the reason was more "fuck Russia" than anything more carefully reasoned.
Anything that makes it harder for Russia to make foreign currency and decrease the demand for Rubles is a strategic win for Ukraine.
If it significantly harms the people helping them or curries disfavour towards Ukraine then it could be strategically misguided.
(Not saying that's the case here, all considered)
On the other hand: there's a global superpower doing horrific war crimes to Ukraine. I think they're justified in doing whatever it takes even if you don't like it.
It's not about liking it disliking, it's about generating difficult material costs for the same people who are paying to arm you.
Those are smaller second order effects. Gutting the income to the Russian war machine is the first order effect and a clear win for Ukraine.
Maybe a plausible argument if Ukraine had stopped Russian gas flowing through it's territory at the start of the war and there where flows through NS at the time.
But actually, by the time of the bombing the Russian gas was only flowing through Ukrainian pipelines. So Ukraine was ensuring "income to the Russian war machine", while Nord Stream was just costing them money; at most it could have been used as collateral in a loan.
Nord Stream 1 started operations in 2011. For 11 years money was flowing and the Russian army was in terrible shape in 2022. Now, without the Nord Stream money, it is in better shape.
When the pipeline was sabotaged, no gas and no money were flowing anyway, which makes it even more absurd. There is a very high likelihood that the front lines would be in the exact same place if Nord Stream had not been sabotaged.
Except of course, the EU would have had more leverage in negotiating LNG deals with the US and Qatar rather than making emergency deals.
EDIT: Downvoted while the Ukrainian transit pipelines were open from 2014-2025 and yielded Russian transit fees. And while Nord Stream was built partly because Ukraine stole Russian transit gas in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
Are you trying to argue the difference between keeping something offline vs taking it offline? Cause it's a weak argument.
It's like you're bending over backwards to make arguments in the direction you already decided you want it to go. Like you're trying to force a square peg into a round hole. If you already decided what you want to think then why do you need arguments?
Nord Stream money is being replaced by China in the new gas deal:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-china-bless-v...
So Russia can now export gas, get foreign currency, and buy weapons with the money. I do not see any strategic wins here.
Additionally, China gets an economic boost. That is a sublime strategy.
Three points there:
1. Power of Syberia 1 throughput is not fully utilized.
2. China pays half of the EU price.
3. Power of Syberia 2 not be build in the near future. It's not the deal to actually do something. It's too continue further discussion.
The devil is in the details. The conditions that China wants aren't very lucrative to Russians, and the second pipeline, if it is even built, will take about a decade to build, so not "now".
Russian negotiating position is weak and Beijing knows that.
Russia selling gas to China is completely orthogonal to Nord Stream issue.
The strategic win in bombing Nord Stream was that Ukraine finally got Europe on their side. Before NS was blown up many countries, especially Germany were sitting on the fence, reluctant to give Ukraine any help. They were hoping for Ukraine to lose the war quickly, then they would give Putin some slap on the wrist punishment, and return to "business as usual" with Russia. Nord Stream being destroyed removed the biggest incentive for doing that.
Is there some credible reason to actually believe this?
That Ukrainians did it?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/ukrainian-man-ar...
That they did it for their own motivations?
It seems at least as plausible that they did it because wanted to hurt Russia as it does that Washington ordered them to do it, to put it mildly. Washington has been supporting Ukraine during the war but has been rather reticent to support attacking Russian assets that are outside the territory of Ukraine.
The wonders of propaganda make it so that "Ukrainians bombed it" is given as an irrefutable fact, and not something that needs a lot of evidence.
Nobody remembers anymore that Pres. Biden himself said, “If Russia invades ... there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” [°] Nor that the very next day, a EU parliament member, and now Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski thanked the US for the sabotage [^]. Nor that the same day, a competing natural gas pipeline has opened, the Baltic Pipe [_].
None of this matters, because "Ukrainians bombed it". Because WaPo and WSJ said so. In a waterway that is heavily controlled by all kinds of NATO vessels. Where NATO had an exercise 3 months before that, called BALTOPS. Come on.
[°] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8
[^] https://archive.ph/20220927190022/https://twitter.com/radeks...
[_] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Pipe
It's not only WaPo and WJS but investigations in Sweden and Germany. Read the reports.
"Nord Stream sabotage: Berlin issues arrest warrant for Ukrainian man"
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/08/14/n...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-is-known-about-nor...
And let’s not forget the crazy analysis of Dr. Braun.[0]
0. https://hansbenjaminbraun.ch/nordstream.html
My, admittedly layman, understanding is that it was a very difficult thing to do from a technical perspective. And that there are very few countries that have technical capabilities to accomplish this. Ukraine is not one of them.
> it was a very difficult thing to do from a technical perspective
Why would you conclude this where every intelligence and law enforcement agency that has looked into it and published a report has found the opposite?
I have no basis to conclude anything in this matter. I saw multiple news reports/interviews to that effect. True/not - you get to decide based on news you hear.
Do you have a basis to conclude that "every intelligence and law enforcement agency that has looked into it and published a report has found the opposite"? You exhaustively went through all Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies and read their reports? So you are quoting other news articles/interviews. Apparently their views differed. Ok.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FVbEoZXhCrM
"There will be no longer a NordStream 2, we will bring an end to it"
Shocking, there is no longer a NordStream 2. =D
Good. It should’ve never existed. I hope whoever is responsible for its untimely demise gets a medal.
With allies like this, who really needs Russia as an enemy.
If, after Russia attacked Georgia and Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas, Germany has decided to team up and provide Russia with a steady stream of cash in exchange for gas, it's on Germany. It can't go all surprised Pickachu when the pipeline suddenly blows up.
Ukraine indirectly funds Russia by buying diesel from India who bought it from Russia. Maybe they should start with cutting off themselves before going after allies.
Ukraine just made a decision on that, importing fuel from India is going to restricted starting October 1st https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/09/15/7530979/
> It should’ve never existed.
You shouldn't be calling for violence in response to a political disagreement.
Blowing up a pipeline in a war isn't violence, it's warfare, and thus IMHO Ukraine had every right to destroy a piece of infrastructure that could be used as political leverage and source of income for its invaders.
Nice reversing of victim and offender
It's a popular page in the playbook these days.
(I'm not entirely sincere with the original snipe.)
Of course :-)
The funnier / biggest irony is that US and Russia are working together to fix the pipeline, buy distilleries in Germany to sell to the Germans Russian gas at US prices.
Source?
Here:
- https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-united-states-nord-st...
- https://www.dw.com/en/germany-cdu-nord-stream-russia-gas-afd...
- https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/03/03/russia-and-us-held...
[go to "www.google.com" ....]
I would not describe this as "US and Russia are working together to fix the pipeline", but more like "some people think about it".
agreed. The caveat being that the people thinking about it have the power to make it happen, without needing to ask anyone else.
well, at least everyone can work on reducing their own personal dependence on natural gas
Haha hilarious, and in character, if true
No. This was alleged to be taken out by Ukrainian special forces in order to twist Europe's arm, which is a good thing in the end, but so far as anyone knows it had nothing to to with the US. Until I hear anything proving otherwise I will take what we know as all we know for now.
The US were not thrilled about it when it was being constructed, obviously, but this was normal tensions towards Russia, prescient in the end but here we are.
> [...] as anyone knows it had nothing to to with the US
ROLF - that must up there with "we want the hostages back and we're actively working towards that goal".
If you have some more actual evidence outside of assumptions I am absolutely willing to hear it out. I just won't sit here and say "Must have been the US" without any insight.
> If you have some more actual evidence outside of assumptions I am absolutely willing to hear it out.
https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-germanys-scholz-stress-u...
> President Joe Biden said on Monday that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would be halted if Russia invades Ukraine and stressed unity with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the West rallies to avert a war in Europe.
Halted.. Absolutely, political pressure on Europe to not sign or use it.
You've made the leap to blowing it up somewhere, that is the stretch I'm not buying until it's admitted to. Personally, as an Irish who knows the history of occupation during tense years, I'm not surprised what a well trained spec ops can do with some basic equipment, so my money is on Ukrainian people just doing something Impressive but I'll wait for the facts to say it's exactly what happened.
Are we sure that Ukrainian special forces have the capability to blow up nord stream without heavy US help?
What's the part that's hard to imagine? It's literally just a boat ride to a publicly-known location that isn't monitored in any way, diving to a depth humans can dive to, placing some standard military / commercial explosives, and getting out.
There were several countries arguably interested in getting rid of that pipeline (Ukraine, Poland, the US), but Ukraine wanted it the most, had easy access, and there's no need to overcomplicate internet theories.
> diving to a depth humans can dive to
No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred. Any diver, whether professional or recreational (which is my case), will know about this. I don't have a (alternative) theory about this, I'm just stating facts. Well, the alternative theory, if we are speaking of divers, is that they had some very special equipment and were extremely skilled. It wasn't some random people, renting a random boat, renting random diving gear and buying random explosives ..
> No, "normal" humans don't dive to 80m deep, where the explosion occurred.
This simply isn't true, I myself after a technical advancement in my PADI to be certified on a rebreather went >80m many times. It's absolute more common than it was in the past.
Those who are trained with special forces as alleged would also be required to be qualified.
I want to clarify my answer here as I made it seem a bit more nonchalant than it is, there is definitely some technical training that needs to be done to dive deeper, as you say no recreational scuba enthusiast should just try it. There are different gasses that you need and a whole different approach to preparation and decomp.
My main point is that it's not as rare as some might think, it's becoming more and more recreational.
The people who did it definitely took on risk, but in my eyes, more so because if something did happen to go wrong, there's no support to help you out (that we know of). It's a flying with 1 engine scenario. The fact that it was pulled off is impressive. But for any rec divers, don't try without the right training, equipment and people with you.
You have no clue about the "facts". Diving to 80m+ is no big deal now. Hundreds of random amateur tech divers do that every weekend as a casual hobby. They typically own their own gear (not rental), which can purchased new for about $30K including training. The equipment such as a closed-circuit rebreather (CCR) and drysuit is somewhat specialized but widely available on the open market from numerous manufacturers. I know a number of divers living in that region who have done much more complex and challenging dives, although obtaining and using the explosives is a separate issue.
Hard, but doable. Here is the analysis by an experience diver.
https://www-ostsee--zeitung-de.translate.goog/panorama/exper...
Right, Achim Schlöffel is legitimate. In terms of complex tech diving he has been there and done that, and has the pictures to prove it. When he says something can be done there's no reason to doubt him.
https://is-expl.com/about/instructors/wgZMC8Y7
You can look this up on wikipedia you know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_diving
"The open-sea diving depth record was achieved in 1988 by a team of COMEX and French Navy divers who performed pipeline connection exercises at a depth of 534 metres (1,750 ft) in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the "Hydra 8" programme employing heliox and hydrox."
Sounds like 80 meters is cake walk for any modern naval institution.
An 80 meter bounce dive is a cake walk for anyone with advanced technical dive training. Any motivated middle-class person could acquire the necessary skills and equipment to do it safely in a few years of steady effort. It doesn't require anything like the complex saturation diving procedures and equipment used by COMEX or certain naval institutions.
There are a lot of rummors going around (Espcially in Poland) that diver name was Volodymer Z. and currently he is in Ukraine.
Not trying to give any hints there, just sharing some rummors.
Googling for 10 seconds comes up with
>Advanced Mixed Gas Diver (80m)...The Advanced Mixed Gas Diver course is a great way to extend already considerable open-circuit mixed gas diving skills.
They actually dived pretty deep (most Scuba gear and divers are limited to 40 meters), the planning of the operation was meticulous in that pretty much nobody saw the divers, and the explosives had to be designed with a good knowledge of the pipeline and its concrete. Ukrainian operations during the war have demonstrated that their typical MO is a lot more "seat-of-the-pants" than this operation would suggest.
You're literally arguing that a government intelligence agency couldn't find a couple of experienced people, provide them with commercially-available equipment, and get them to coordinate a medium-complexity task.
Yes, it's an operation that requires coordination and planning, which is why it's reasonable to assume it was carried out by an intelligence agency and not a lone fisherman with a grudge. But once you're in the realm of intelligence activities, this isn't exactly the "let's blow up their pagers" level of complexity.
Their sabotage attempts of several bridges in Crimea did not go this well, suggesting that the Ukrainians alone aren't the best at understanding explosives, and their successes like "fly a bunch of FPV drones out of a shipping container" are quite a bit simpler than this. "Intelligence agency" is a spectrum of capability. Suggesting that an intelligence agency that tried and failed to blow up a bride twice was the same as the one that executed a flawless operation against an underwater pipeline is a bit far-fetched.
It's not at all obvious that e.g. the drone attack, which involved >100 drones assembled inside Russia by human operatives who were able to safely exfiltrate, and 5 different storage containers, in a coordinated strike on 5 different airfields hundreds/thousands of kilometers apart and away from the border, is a less complex operation than the destruction of NordStream
Snuggling and launching drones from deep within enemy territory is a much more complicated op than a couple of dudes diving in the middle of nowhere.
Bringing that bridge down is also much harder than blowing up the pipeline, because the bridge is covered by a lot of defenses, and naval drones will always have limited payload (if they want to be fast enough to evade defenses). Dudes performing a dive in the middle of the sea far from the battlefield are much less vulnerable.
Wait, NORD Stream was BEHIND enemy lines? And is as short a span as a bridge (so more easily monitored complicating things). How many people traveled across the Nord Stream pipeline a day that required the operators to be hidden from?
They have demonstrated capabilities like blowing up the Kerch Strait bridge or several Russian oil refineries without US help, what makes you think Nord Stream is too difficult for them?
According to the New York Times, Ukraine receives major help from the US on all fronts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-...
The first Kerch Bridge attempt was only a partial success. Traffic continued almost the next day. The second attempt was a complete failure. For the refineries, Ukraine uses at least GPS.
The sail boat theory is plausible from diving standpoint, but they allegedly installed explosives on NS-1 and NS-2 sites that were at least 100km apart, within 10 hours, with no decompression equipment. If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
> If they can do that, why do they repeatedly fail at Kerch Bridge?
The bridge is approximately 3km long or so, which makes it relatively easy to maintain a continuous 24/7 armed presence to prevent sabotage. An underwater pipeline is a 1200km stretch mostly in other international territory that is hard to protect. Definitely much easier to blow up a pipeline than it is to blow up a bridge.
Why bring up "decompression equipment"? Have you ever even done any tech diving? We just deco in the water. No special equipment is needed beyond a rebreather or some stage tanks.
They sent their A team for the pipeline and B team for the bridge?
We can't prove that there wasn't some US assistance (i.e. can't prove a negative) but there's pretty strong evidence that it was primarily a Ukrainian operation.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
Yeah it didn't seem very difficult
physically it wasn't that hard - ship, explosives, scuba divers
it's the clusterfuck of EU police inactivity afterwards that needs to be paid more attention to
Yes.
I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
My money is actually on Polish special forces (or one of the Baltic states), in an effort to force Germany to be serious about weaning itself off Russian natural gas.
> I don’t think Ukraine would have risked an operation against a country they were actively trying to get military support from.
It didn't make much of a difference to Germany since the gas flow via NS1 was already switched off for a while and NS2 never had delivered any gas before the sabotage happened. In the end it was more of a symbolic gesture to freeze the status quo that was already in place anyway.
Follow the money.
Russia warns Europe that it will freeze to death if help to Ukraine will continue -> Russia stops NS1 to demonstrate their economical superpower -> EU companies are looking for $18 billion compensation -> NS1 blows up to make an excuse.
argument doesn't make sense, but +1 for polish involvement. Third time lucky eh?
Yes, Ukraine wanted to control gas deliveries to the EU, which merrily proceeded via a Ukrainian transit pipeline until 2025.
The EU is screwed by all energy oligarchies, including transit nations.
Then POTUS himself publicly announced he'd blow up NS. After it was blown up, we suddenly don't know who did it ;(
I didn't know dementia is so contagious.
There are about half a dozen actors with an interest in doing it. It's like an Agatha Christie murder mystery. My favourite as a Brit was Ukraine with tech assistance from the British navy, as alleged by Moscow.
tbf if frost damages a crop Moscow will blame the British, they're obsessed with you lol.
Biden never announced that he would blow up Nord Stream 2. What he said in effect, in a press conference after Germany grudgingly agreed to prevent Nord Stream 2 from going online if Russia were to escalate its actions in Ukraine, was essentially "it's not going to go online" and giving a vague "it won't" answer when the questioner pointed out what if Germany disagreed, since it was Germany's call in the matter after all.
A month or so later, Russia launched the 2022 offensive against Ukraine, and there was no longer any question of NS2 entering service because it was clear to all that the preconditions for Germany's rescission of approval for the pipeline had been satisfied. With that context, Biden's answer is best understood as him being quite confident in the quality of US intelligence that Russia was planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine that Europe was assessing as faulty. So while Europe was interested in the question of "what if Russia doesn't invade Ukraine?" Biden's answer was (in not so many words) "I'm not contemplating that scenario."
That's a very self-limiting viewpoint when a significant portion of warfare is deception, so by definition you're not going to get "all we know".
For example, Seymour Hersh (renowned wartime investigative journalist), published a brief on US involvement: https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the...
That article has been thoroughly debunked. Seymour Hersh just made things up with no fact checking or hard evidence.
What's your counter evidence?
No counter evidence is needed because Hersh hasn't actually presented any legitimate evidence in the first place.
If 'no counter-evidence is needed' were valid, we could dismiss anything we don't like without argument.
AKA: Argument from ignorance
yes, follow the money, almost always.
There are a lot of posts here pushing batteries.
Batteries are an expensive solution that doesn't scale well at the grid level. It is useful for grid stability (fast frequency response) but simply a non-starter when you're dealing with national grids.
Batteries are an added cost to the system, without producing more electricity, and as a result prices will go up.
A far cheaper source of flexibility is Demand Side Response. Particularly data centres that are willing to be market actors. Compute can happen anywhere, so it should happen where the wind blows and the sun shines. It is cheaper to transmit bits than Megawatts.
> Batteries are an expensive solution that doesn't scale well at the grid level.
I'd like to see the reasoning behind why they don't pan out. LoFePO4 have dropped to $60/kWh in China. At 3,000 cycles that means they add about 2¢ to every kWh they store.
We don't get that cheap price where I live of course, but they being installed at a rapid pace now. I think most are being installed "behind the meter", which means they are being installed by people who pay retail. That's happening because paired with solar, they've dropped below the break even point at retail prices. Grid scale needs roughly another factor of 3 price drop to hit the same point. If CATL's $10/kWh sodium batteries that get 10,0000 cycles pan out, it will drive the price down by another factor of 10.
Your "demand" side response arises naturally with batteries. Those who can do without the power simply won't buy one. Or if they can get by with only a little emergency power, they buy a small one.
I experienced that first hand. I owned a 4.8kWh battery a while ago. That is by any definition is small. It costs about the same as a generator at today's prices (it didn't back then). A flood caused power to be cut off for a week. We only fired up the generator once, before discovering we could reduce our usage to what a small battery and a 6.6 kW solar array could cope with, even in the very overcast conditions that accompany a heavy rain event.
In northern countries, winters are a problem, solar output is pathetic.
Demand side response drives up costs a lot. You end up with expensive, rapidly depreciating capital equipment sitting idle and not earning any revenue. The same problem applies whether the equipment is a GPU cluster or aluminum smelter. If we're going to have a modern industrial economy then we need to have enormous quantities of cheap electrical power available 24 hours a day.
Long distance high voltage transmission lines can help to an extent but create the same sort of concerns about dependence on unreliable foreign countries as fossil fuel imports.
Demand side management is a nice concept, but it is neither free nor a cure-all:
It has real costs because it limits the utilization of involved infrastructure and is simply not feasible for a lot of industries. It does not help when residential demand exceeds the available supply either.
The most practical solution will probably be a mix of overprovisioning (especially considering how cheap solar panels have become), battery storage and fuel powered fallback, with the balance shifting as long as batteries and panels get cheaper.
Grid level battery storage is already coming online at scale (e.g. https://www.ess-news.com/2025/08/18/statera-energy-powers-up...).
LiFePo cells are already down to ~$60 for 1kWh (8000 cycles), which is pretty palatable for a lot of applications and prices still trend down.
Demand Side Response can be enabled by batteries and can save money.
For example, the OVO Charge Anytime tariff provides EV charging at just 7p kWh [1]. Average kWh cost is 26.35p/kWh[2]. From the linked case study:
> £7.7m/€9m total customer savings
Once Vehicle-to-Home and Vehicle-to-Grid is more widespread the savings will be even greater [3].
1. https://info.kaluza.com/hubfs/Charge%20Anytime%20EU%202024-0...
2. https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk
3. https://info.kaluza.com/hubfs/What%E2%80%99s%20next%20for%20...
A huge portion of compute is triggered on request, so there isn't that much ability to time shift it. A build was just kicked off because I merged some code. In theory, that could happen overnight. In reality, changing the delay from 20 minutes to 12 hours would be unworkable.
On the other hand, when I commit code at 4PM on the West Coast it can be handled on a server in a place where there is low electricity cost.
In Californias batteries have in recent years decreased the fossil gas usage by ~40% and essentially removed the duck curve.
Demand side response is of course cheaper but there will always be people willing to buy it expensive electricity to fulfill a certain demand.
Take a BEV. The charging is generally optimized for when electricity is cheap and abundant, but when going on a roadtrip without flexibility in their charging people are willing to pay more.
Paying more opens the possibility for batteries and other solutions to fulfill the demand.
There's not really a choice in replacing fossils with renewables&nuclear if we want to mitigate the climate catastrophe.
I don't think the "EU" buys fuel. It's individual countries. The promise by the EU to buy LNG was empty. What country is going to buy it?
Germany, for instance. LNG terminals on the North Sea were built in record time.
Germany had an unpaid energy karma debt for stupidly decomm'ing their nuclear power for political reasons without a viable technical solution.
Russia might not have made the decision to invade Ukraine if Germany hadn't tied its energy needs so transparently to Russian natural gas.
And absent blowing up Nord Stream, might have hung Ukraine out to dry anyway.
So having to rapidly build LNG import terminals? Repaying that debt.
Gas and electricity prices are somewhat intertwined but not as much as you make it seem. Gas is primarily used in Germany for heating and Nuclear electricity doesn't help with this.
Germany fully realizes that Gas is only an intermediate tech which still is relevant for the next 15-20 years.
This is revisionist history.
The German fossil gas usage in the grid has been stable for decades at around 80 TWh.
The nuclear topic neither increased nor decreased fossil gas usage to make electricity.
Nuclear Power is too expensive, the power plants too old, still to place for nuclear waste and the operators didn’t want to continue.
Weren't there discussions to start buying LNG from Canada as well? In fact even Carney spoke about that if I remember correctly.
Yes, and apparently that is going through. I think the idea that Europe will be "dependent" on America is highly overstated.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2025/08/26/canada...
Trudeau said no for environmental reasons.
He said no because there was no market demand for it, and then reversed position in 2022 when there suddenly became market demand.
He was asked by foreign leaders in Europe. He claimed there was demand but at the time Europe was buying Russian gas which was funding Ukraine war and Europe was seeking alternatives.
Carney made announcements couple days ago.
Like US would allow that to happen. This has been discussed for over a decade.
quebec has been the main difficulty.
not favourable to taking risks of pipelines spilling on Quebecois land, while not getting much value our of it.
per Mark Carney, he's interested in pipeline projects, maybe through to churchill instead of going through Quebec, but so far no private company is interested in investing.
At the relatively high cost US LNG gets imported, it creates a big incentive to start considering alternatives. A lot of the investment commitments will probably never be delivered. Fundamentally, a lot of states in the EU will have to sell this to their voters and tax payers and that's where this stuff will slowly die. Because it's a hard sell.
LNG imports will be demand driven, not supply driven. And demand is going to decrease over time; not increase. That calls into question the need for more infrastructure. On both sides. Germany already topped up its reserves for the coming winter; ahead of schedule. There is no shortage.
The US is building a big LNG bubble with investments that might end up under water. What happens if demand flattens and decreases mid to long term, as can reasonably be expected at this point? Can the US sustain high LNG prices when cheaper sources become available? What will high export prices do for domestic pricing for energy? How eager will investors be to make big multi decade investments in this (given all this)?
The existing terminals are underutilized already (below 50%). It's hard to see where all this extra demand to fill even more terminals is going to come from. There is no urgency for any of this on the EU side.
However there is quite a bit of urgency on lowering energy prices for industry and consumers. LNG is not the way to do that. I don't see that changing.
Germany has enough natural gas reserves to keep people from freezing to death but not enough to keep their chemical manufacturing industry alive.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Wat? Most of European countries buy gas from Norway, Algeria and other countries. The US share is just 16.5 %. That is not really a lock in. That is just diversification.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/15/trump-trade-deal-europe...
A good article on the energy politics between US and EU.
We just need to wait out the inevitable collapse and breakup of Russia, then we can go in and scoop up the energy resources. This time it has to be a more hands-on approach, to not repeat the same mistake that we made at the end of the Cold War.
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It's clear to all parties that this is a false promise made to appease Trump.
The question is how deep they'll have to go in 3 years. Can they stall it out, or will the US actually demand they fulfill the promise, causing at least some amount of lock-in?
What difference does it make? Trump will re-neg on the agreement even if they actually did it.
Completely unsustainable position
Renewables solves this.
This is confidently incorrect.
Gas power generation is a necessary evil to balance out the variability of intermittent energy generation (i.e. wind and solar).
Hydropower isn't a feasible alternative because the easy resources have been developed.
The only alternative source of flexibility available today is demand side response.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes, as I've not explained in detail. It is a complex issue. My opinions are based on having a phd in the topic, 10+ years in control rooms, years of market operations and design, and years contributing to europe-wide risk assessment methodologies.
I emplore anyone who is actually interested in how energy mix actually impacts grid stability/reliability to look into the Eirgrid DS3 programme (https://www.eirgrid.ie/ds3-programme-delivering-secure-susta...).
The easiest money I ever made was investing in natural gas infrastructure during the COVID insanity of everyone calling it dead due to renewables.
I really don’t understand the disconnect otherwise very intelligent people have on this subject. Every single person I’ve talked to in the actual industry seems to be aware of this fact and how dire things are getting. However it seems that everyone else believes that grid scale batteries are somehow going to save the day in the next decade or two.
Energy storage is energy storage. Natural gas is just a giant underground battery.
And that’s before you get to industrial uses of natural gas as a feedstock, while ignoring how much is still used for heating infrastructure and how long it would take to retrofit everything to heat pumps.
I often wonder what I’m missing, but I’m confident enough in this one to have put my money where my mouth is at least.
Maybe you're the person to answer this question then.
How can I find the price of battery storage, per kWh delivered to the customer, assuming a pure wind/solar/battery grid?
I can easily find the price per kWh of battery capacity but that's not the same thing. I'm looking for the effective levelized cost of electricity, over the lifetime of the battery, so I can compare against generation sources.
What about large quanzities of batteries everywhere around europe?
If prices continue to drop, there will be a powerwall alike in every second house in some years.
This is an insane suggestion if you had a concept for how expensive batteries are and the scale of flexibility issues on the european grid.
It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
> It also does nothing to help transmission grid frequency stability and control.
they dont help grid stability via inertia of spinning masses, but PLLs and the like exist, where you can control frequencies and phases without a spinning mass.
you dont need to burn gas to have a flywheel either
Batterie prices are falling constantly and grid sized battery production has not even started. The focus was and is mobile batteries.
So expect prices to drop further.
Also yes, batteries help very much with grid stability as they can give steady power on demand anywhere. Have lots of batteries everywhere == lots of on demand grid stabilizers.
Could pumped-storage batteries help in that case?
You can't run a factory or data center off of batteries for long. Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
> Why do people think that residential power is the issue here?
My experience has been that the vast majority of people, even very technical people, don't really understand the energy mix required to sustain modern industrial technology. Their only experience is with their utility bill which shows them a pie-chart with a big area showing "green" so they can feel better about the state of things.
Electricity production accounts for the minority of energy usage, and residential a minority of the usage of electricity. People don't think about the energy required to send an Amazon package to their door or have fruits from South America stocking their grocery store year round, or even to create the industries that ultimately make up their paychecks each month.
The pandemic was the best view of what real energy usage changes would look like. Early pandemic was a rare moment when global energy usage dipped and that had nothing to do with the demand on the residential grid.
If the batteries are big enough, also that is possible.
Many things are technically possible. Fewer things are economically practical. Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough? How much will that cost and how many years will it take? A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude. Have you actually done the math on this or are you just repeating platitudes?
> A few local small-scale demonstration projects don't tell us much about the difficulties of scaling up by orders of magnitude.
The UK is forging ahead with large scale battery storage projects. I have not done the math, but I assume there is a sound economic case in order for these projects to receive this level of investment.
Edit: Here's some more data on revenue for battery storage in the UK [3]
[1] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/statera-u...
[2] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/fidra-ene...
[3] https://modoenergy.com/research/gb-research-roundup-january-...
Yes, I have done the math. Thing is, if you ignore the climate, coal and co is still cheaper. That's why it is still used so much. If you factor in climate costs, things are different.
> Does Europe have the capacity to manufacture batteries that are big enough?
why is this relevant? clearly europe can also buy from outside of europe.
the nice thing about batteries is you dont need a new battery for each watt, compared to needing gas.
the simplest thing is to keep buying russian gas, and also pay ukraine to attack russia. no need to change anything or do any new buildouts whether thats batteries or in US LNG export terminals+european import terminals. those also take time where the russian fuel is readily available. the russian invasion isnt gonna last forever, so a move to US gas is wasted investment when europe can move back to Russian gas eventually anyways
Apart from the obvious advantages of cheap energy, the reason Europe bought so much Russian gas is the theory that interconnected economies don't go to war. Now that Europe considers Russia a belligerent threat even after Nordstream was completed the reintegration might not happen.
Residential energy use is the least interesting thing to think about at a grid scale. The grid actually will get more brittle and/or expensive if everyone wealthy enough to get batteries and solar gets them.
What about the manufacturing and industrial uses? Or the need for natural gas to be a feedstock?
How many batteries does it take to power a giant hyperscaler datacenter for a few days during poor weather conditions? You can’t really rely on backup generators at that usage rate as the expense (and environmental impact) gets to be crazy. Or you end up just building natural gas turbines co-located with such facilities and we are back to where we began.
this is to say, that natural gas isnt the necessary evil to account for intermittent power sources.
its a necessary evil to fully capitalize on other investments. i dont care if the hyperscaler can run their GPUs overnight. perfectly happy for them to delay their training because theyre running in daytime.
the capital owners who bought the GPUs sure care, but why should i accept their pollution in order for them to run a bit faster?
This is just another way to say you are in favor of western hemisphere degrowth.
Without industry you don’t have an economy in the long run. Replace hyperscaler with aluminum smelter or manufacturing line if you prefer. If you can’t operate those capital assets 24x7 they simply will not be built in your country.
Cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy is the foundation of wealth. Nuclear fission was likely humanities transition technology but we fumbled the ball 40 years ago so here we are.
Could you explain what you would use that we can produce in Europe and can generate electricity to fill the batteries with? The batteries cannot be produced in Europe and have very limited lifetime.
Not sure if I understand you right, but you can build batteries without rare elements.
Europe has 100 days worth of natural gas storage facilities. All it needs to do is to get renewables + batteries + nuclear above ~70% or so to be able to withstand being cut off for a year. Getting to ~95% is relatively cheap and easy. 100% is hard and expensive, but they don't need 100%. If they get to 95%, that's multiple years worth of storage.
Batteries don't provide meaningful flexibility on a continental scale. They're useful in localised frequency control or microgrid flexibility.
An exercise to the reader, calculate the space and materials required to replace the average norwegian hydro reservoir with batteries.
Nuclear tech doesn't provide required ramp rates at a useful price. I do agree however that more nuclear helps.
The problem is dispatchability/flexibility, not storage. At a more complex level the issue is grid inertia and frequency response.
> An exercise to the reader, calculate the space and materials required to replace the average norwegian hydro reservoir with batteries.
Solution: I can't compute the space and materials, but can estimate the cost.
Norway has 1240 storage reservoirs with a total capacity of 87 TWh [1], which yields an average of 70 GWh/reservoir.
Last year, in China, a 16 GWh battery storage plant received an average bid price of $US66.3/KWh [2]. From this we can compute that a 70 GWh plant should cost $US4.65 billion.
A bit on the high side, but can battery prices fall by another order of magnitude? Then again, this is for replicating one reservoir. Replicating 1240 would be a 5 trillion dollar endeavor.
[1] https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftpr...
[2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/mind-blowing-battery-cell-prices...
That's why I said 100% renewable was hard and expensive. A grid that gets 5-10% of its energy from natural gas, but can get 100% of it's power from nuclear + gas during a dankelflaute provides optimally cheap + secure power.
> The problem is dispatchability/flexibility, not storage. At a more complex level the issue is grid inertia and frequency response.
That's something batteries are extremely good at.
Germany is at 60% already! It’s close
No, it's not, because it uses so much natural gas for heating and in chemical plants. Also, it has to be the entire grid, not just one country.
The Chinese are going all in on electric to get away from oil and gas for geostrategic reasons.
Meanwhile team tRump are all in on oil and gas because non carbon is for libtards.
Please look at: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CN/72h/hourly
China is heavily reliant on coal.
The US Grid is presently less carbon intensive than the Chinese grid.
>China is heavily reliant on coal.
Agreed they are. But they want to move away from it, especially for air quality reasons. They've had a huge problem with air pollution. They are big into EVs. This means less reliance on foreign oil and cleaner air.
Presently.
Green energy like nuclear
Nuclear is as dead as a great technology can be. A few more incremental improvements in solar and battery industry and nuclear won't be profitable even in theory, to say nothing of construction cost overruns.
Reactors are only good at providing baseload but that isn't how grids operate anymore. Renewables are too cheap, if a power plant can't drop output fast enough it is punished.
nuclear plants can cut power as quickly as any other power plant, you are just controlling steam. divert the steam from the turbine and you aren't generating power anymore.
The problem is that a nuclear plant is extremely high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.
Halving the output essentially means doubling the price.
For Vogtle halving the expected capacity factor means the generated electricity now costs a completely stupid 40 cents per kWh or $400 per MWh.
Politically hamstrung because a bunch of short sighted people have their panties in a bunch?
Mostly because it's very expensive and slow to build, what with nuclear engineers not wanting their workplaces to be as dangerous as a construction site. Look up who invented the Maximum Credible Accident, it wasn't the environmentalists.
Completely wrong. Renewables plus battery storage and long-distance transmission lines can potentially solve the power generation problem, although we're decades away from being able to scale that up in a way that addresses base load requirements for heavy industry in an economical way. But beyond power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for the chemicals industry. Renewables won't solve that and the German chemical manufacturing industry is dying.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Many people only look at "electricity" generation when they think about renewables, but fail to recognize that that is only part of energy consumption (and a surprisingly small one at that). Globally electricity production only accounts for ~21% of energy usage, so even if we had an entirely green grid across the entire planet we still would have a long way to go as far as having sustainable energy usage.
A lot of natural gas is still needed for chemical feedstock in Europe, no matter how electricity is generated.
The largest source of "renewable" energy (not just electricity) in the EU is biomass [0], which, in many cases is wood pellets shipped (using bunker fuel to power the ships of course) from North America to the EU.
Page 8 of this report [1] gives a pretty good visual of how this trend has increased over time.
Europe is basically reverting to using wood for it's primary heating fuel.
0. https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/renewable-energy/bioenerg...
1. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadRepo...
wood is carbon neutral, after the first chop, at least.
in canada and the US, a lot of that wood is going up in smoke without powering any industry already
It's a prerequisite. But we actually need to make the policy decisions to stop using fossils, otherwise we'll just burn it all in addition to using renewables and look pretty bad in the history books for bringing about the climate apocalypse.
"Let's not buy from Russia, it's an overt dictatorship lazily cosplaying as a democracy that's waging wars on other nations and killing innocent civilians."
Another level of irony is that this is partly because Europe does not want to develop shale gas for environmental reasons, so it imports US LNG... which is mostly shale gas [1].
The US love Europe's policies...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/surging-us-lng-expor...
That's not especially ironic though. In doing that Europe avoids the pollution associated with shale gas exploitation. The gas itself isn't different once it is extracted, so it doesn't matter if the imported gas is shale gas or whatever else.
The root problem is needing gas at all, of course.
If a problem has no solution then it's not really a "problem", it's just a fact to be accepted. Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals. There is no conceivable future where we don't need that stuff to maintain a modern industrial civilization.
> Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals.
Maybe, but the vast majority of gas use in industry is for heat and power and electricity is a trivial substitute there.
And even the direct use as process input is far from unavoidable, because in a lot of cases this use could be reduced/eliminated or shift to synthetic inputs, which would happen organically if prices shifted long-term anyway.
The hypocrisy is that, like many other polluting industries, Europe is just sending pollution somewhere else. Then it self-congratulates on how green it is. And it pays foreign powers through the nose at the same time, and then European governments say that "there is no money".
There is very little strategic thinking in Europe.
Also, both Europe and the US are happy to have China do the dirty jobs so that they stay clean in their countries. With the consequences we all know today in terms of dependence.
Furthermore, China doesn't want to be dirty anymore, in fact they are maybe the ones who take green technologies the most seriously. So the dirtiest jobs are pushed to other countries, mostly in southeast Asia.
"China doesn't want to be dirty anymore" and yet China boosting coal capacity at record high
The Chinese coal usage has recently in absolute terms started to decline.
Their renewable buildout is large enough to both cover the grid expansion and force coal off the grid.
> Also, both Europe and the US are happy to have China do the dirty jobs so that they stay clean in their countries
Can you give examples? What "dirty jobs" is China, and now apparently other countries, being purportedly forced to do? So is Trump really an environmentalist when he levied massive tariffs on countries in the region?
No, when countries devastate their environment they do it on their own volition. China was disastrously dirty mostly due to domestic reasons like the absolute lack of pollution controls, coal burning, and so on. China introspected and decided that they wanted to be better than that (the Olympics might legitimately have been a major turning point) and have done an amazing job cleaning the country up, and many areas are now truly Western. Air quality is infinitely better...at the same time that the country is making more than ever for the rest of the world.
Other countries haven't got there yet. India, the Philippines and so on have only themselves to blame for the state of their country, however self-comforting the delusion that it's really outsiders that are to blame might be.
> What "dirty jobs" is China, and now apparently other countries, being purportedly forced to do?
In past decades, we had this system that China manufactures goods, they are shipped in ships to US and Europe, and because US and Europe don't manufacture much anything, often the ships would travel back empty. Western countries started to legislate mandated plastic waste recycling, but didn't really have facilities to actually recycle. So we would ship our plastic waste to China, with a promise that it will be recycled. Legislators were happy. In practice, plastic waste is not so easy to recycle, and was often just dumped somewhere in Asia.
In 2017, China stopped accepting imports of plastic waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban
Some countries like Sweden, burn their household waste in combined heat and power generation plants. If you incinerate in sufficiently high temperatures, and have exhaust filters, you can do in cleanly without causing air pollution.
https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/blog/turning-waste-energy-...
There are no outsiders when it comes to pollution. We get one planet. That's it.
So, China is free to choose to pollute, as is Europe and the US free to choose production from a source that doesn't pollute as much.
Their electrical infrastructure that is built on coal (60% of current generation) even if they've made huge improvements. Rare earth mining and building of all those electrical batteries and solar panels is a pretty dirty business. Reality is China produces a colossal amount of stuff, and much of it is pretty dirty (it would probably be dirty anywhere as that's the nature of making things at an industrial scale)
Right now China seems headed in the right direction for pollution, moreso than the US. And probably the only way they end up reducing pollution completely is to grow wealthy enough to replace old methods.
The US literally dumped their trash in China for "recycling". China doesn't want to anymore and India and several southeast Asia countries took over (Indonesia, Vietnam, ...).
And sure the the western world wasn't forced to trash China, but when a country decides to buy Chinese production that we know was made with no regard for the environment because it is more competitive than doing it locally where one has no choice but to care, then you are effectively exporting pollution.
As for Trump being an environmentalist with his tariffs. A few decades ago, he would have been, not so much anymore. If he didn't insist on trashing his own country that is.
> The US literally dumped their trash in China for "recycling"
No one "dumped" anything. There weren't random ships sneaking onto the coast and dumping their contents. No airdrops tossing out garbage bags.
This was a pull industry and China had such a negligent position on their environment that people -- Chinese people, in China, allowed by China -- made money tendering for recycling contracts and then just stacking it into a giant pile, presumably awaiting some innovation that would make it worthwhile to process. That precisely speaks to exactly what I was saying, and externalizing that and blaming it on others is the sort of patronizing, laughably bigoted infantilizing that people do about developing nations, and it's extraordinarily unhelpful. China started caring, and regulated these exploiters out of business.
> and India and several southeast Asia countries took over (Indonesia, Vietnam, ...)
Vietnam is a surprisingly clean country. Like you can drop a Google Maps pin almost anywhere in Vietnam and while it might not be glitzy and rich, there is a sense of pride in environment and a care and a concern about the commons.
India and Bangladesh, on the other hand... Yeah, this isn't covertly imported garbage, but instead is 100% domestic sourced, just as the vast majority of China's was before it became more enlightened. Countries that are cesspools overwhelmingly have themselves to blame.
I just had to respond because this sort of infantilizing "every bad thing is caused by outsiders" angle isn't remotely helpful. Like almost all of the world's ocean plastics come from Southeast Asia, and it's amazing seeing people try to rationalize how in cultures where plastics are used for everything, and discarded thoughtlessly everywhere, actually it's somehow the West's fault.
I assume they don't want fracking. Let Texas and North Dakota keep their earthquakes and polluted water tables.
The environmental issues with shale gas are local, if you ignore global warming as a whole. So in that sense, not doing it in your own back yard makes a lot of sense.
Global warming is the biggest harm though so it doesn't make sense to ignore it.
I'm not so sure. As a whole, yes, global warming is a huge issue, but one shale gas well alone will surely have very marginal effect on that. Comparing that to the fact that it can seriously contaminate groundwater and air in your imminent vicinity seems like a more serious issue in that regard.
A barrel of oil means about 560 kg of co2 emissions. Including the mortality cost til 2100 from emissions bumps the cost of emissions to about $145 per barrel using nrs from[1] (0.56 tons of emissions from a barrel x $260 scc per ton of emissions). I'll leave it to you to quantify the local effects and whether they are worse.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8322393/ - they include effects only to 2100 which is way too short term IMO, should be higher
It makes sense not to invest a lot of money into fossile infrastructure when you plan to be fossile free in about twenty years.
Considering that the industry is highly profitable I'd say that Europe spends more importing gas than producing it locally, which would also benefit the economy and improve strategic independence.
Investments in fossil fuel infrastructure still happen, too, in the form of LNG terminals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/environment/energ...
Fracking is only profitable when oil is $120 a barrel or more.
I don't think this is true, Europe just doesn't have these reserves. If Europe had oil and gas reserves, they would not even build gas pipelines from Russia in the first place.
Europe has 14 billion cubic metres of technically recoverable shale gas reserves.
That's 5% of Europe's yearly consumption.
Fossil fuel reserves are not a fixed number. When prices rise, energy companies expand exploration and find more. Many areas are still basically unexplored for deep minerals. There are undrilled shale basins across western Europe, and the Black Sea and Ionian Sea have barely been tapped. Technical innovations like fracking and horizontal drilling also expand the reserves that can be economically extracted.
There may be valid political and environmental reasons not to go this route but it's silly to claim that fossil fuel reserves are so limited when no one has really looked.
From what I've read so far it seems people have really looked and we have some estimates (not yet proven reserves). The highest estimates I found are around 10-20 years of current consumption rate. That doesn't seem like a lot, and Europe's consumption is going down so it doesn't feel like this will change much for shale oil.
But Norway still has big gas reserves and supplies 33% of Eueropian consumption, so I was actually wrong in the original comment and the US LNG impact is pretty overstated, it's just 15%. Most of the rest comes from middle east.
That's not how the world works...
Shale gas exploitation is banned in Europe so no-one is spending money looking for it, but estimates are that reserves are significant.
Yea, the world works by imagining shale gas into existence.
Please don't do that...
Sorry, you won't get any reasonable response for that condescending tone, especially since you clearly didn't even do a basic google search for that estimate to see how low it is, so your "I'm gonna teach you how the world works, kid" attitude is not even justified.
It makes sense from EU point of view. We'll let another continent destroy itself environmentally and leverage their output during the process. Better that destroying our own soil.
We already damaged Europe in many ways, so yes what you say is true. One day US population will realize the same, but I guess things need to get worse before they start to improve.
Have you seen the environmental impact of shale gas?
If the US is willing to destroy certain areas of its country in exchange for money, Europe will give them the dollars.
If Europe has nobody else to do it for them, I'm sure they'll do it themselves.
With a "normal" US Admin, I doubt this would be a concern. With this current regime, it could be risky. I could see Trump having a fit and if he realizes the EU needs US LNG, he could cut the supply or put a huge tax on it.
But if that happens, maybe the US Fossil Fuel "Cartel" will revolt. I think the EU really need to accelerate their renewal push even more. From what I read they are doing good w/renewals, but I would be nervous if I was in the EU until renewals and/or nuclear power provides 90% of the power.
True but if Europe was willing to accept Russian gas fueling their economy then they have no excuse to not accept American gas in it's place.
That doesn't really support his rhetoric. He has always said that he doesn't like the trade deficit, which is a dumb idea, so increasing exports would go along the same vein as increasing tariffs to limit imports.
I think what would be more likely is the EU does something with it as a bargaining chip to reduce import tariffs rather than Trump trying to tax it out of existence.
And just to be clear Trump's trade policy is dumb and I don't support it.
As an American how stupid do you have to be to promise $750B for fossil fuel infrastructure instead of say, grid tied battery infrastructure. Europe is weaning themselves off of fossil fuels so quickly(relatively).
And to lock yourself in with the Trump admin.
Because that gets you a trade deal and reduces the risk of further immediate damage to your economy. Besides, is there an actual contract, with clear penalties, for this $750B purchase? I'll be surprised if it actually happens. I think EU negotiators are well aware that Trump doesn't care about what is in the deal, just that he "wins".
The penalty is upsetting Trump if they try to pretend they're doing it.
Sure, but this is always a risk with him. Maybe you buy $100B of natural gas, but have the temerity to regulate an American company he likes and he slaps you with punitive tariffs. Or he doesn't like something else with your domestic politics. He's not a rule-based actor or cares about anything but loyalty and subservience to him.
I'm guessing a lot of of people/countries are aiming to just string him along as long as possible.
Also he probably won't be around that long.
Judging by the way the US is going... are they just gonna lock themselves in to their next adversary's fuel?
At least we were an ally at the start of this of this trend
You're extrapolating one somewhat rude adiplomatic president to America going to war with Europe? That's enough internet for you, sir. Time to go for a walk.
I didn't say go to war, I said adversarial.
Adiplomatic is... _very mild_ considering the threats he's made about taking over Greenland and Canada. Bluster or not, the fact is... the President of the United States is openly talking about it, and currently using the military and all it's levers quite actively here and abroad.
And vice president, and congress/senate/scotus that enables them.
> You're extrapolating one somewhat rude adiplomatic president to America going to war with Europe?
This is hugely downplaying Trump and his role in the world and domestically.
Russia is not at war with Europe, its at war with Ukraine.
Both the US and Russia are currently trying to influence the EU to do things that aren't what EU citizens want.
per the drunk signal text leak, Europe's shipping is being negatively impacted by the American Israel/Gaza stance, to the extent that the US has made up for it by bombing the Houthis.
...which says both that the US is an ongoing problem for europe, but that the relationship isnt nearly so shaky as it seems. Trump is getting US strategic goals in Europe, to make Europe pay for anti-Russia preparedness, while the US focuses on anti-China.
I don't understand economics that much or how money works. But is the following possible in a clandestine manner?
US and EU provide each other money through swaplines by printing freshly created respective currencies and exchanging them.
Then EU can use those dollars to buy US LNG.
Is this a far fetched idea? This is like undercover QE.
why would the US gov want euros?
Europeans need to wake up.
There is an obvious rift between Europeans, European leaders, and the US. Europeans seem tired of the US and it's policies, however simultaneously are unaware that the cushy "European" lifestyle they love only exists because of the US. Which is something that European leaders are keenly aware of.
So it creates a situation where the leadership will constantly bend at the knee to the US's demands, and the populace will get progressively more and more anti-US. However in it's current state, Europe is stuck under the thumb of the US on three sides - tech, military, and energy.
The only "clean" way to rectify this problem is for Europeans to slash regulations, slash social programs, and dramatically increase annual working hours. All things which are the antithesis of contemporary Europeans ideals. Europe desperately needs a modern industry hub, right now it's all US and China on the board.
I would say that the cushy lifestyle of Europe and the US depends on the cheap labor in China and Asia in general combined with many companies who operate and own capital there being owned by European and American companies. Not sure which calculus would lead one to conclude that the US is the sole reason of European lifestyle.
How does slashing social programs and dramatically increasing working hours solve the problem of a missing industry hub, or energy independence? These seem entirely disconnected.
If European countries want to survive as independent powers rather than as vassal states of the USA and/or China (and this is still in doubt) then they will eventually have to re-industrialize. Like if they want to have any stuff then someone has to make the stuff. They're also going to have to rebuild their militaries instead of counting on the USA to defend them. All of that will require an enormous amount of capital and the money will have to come from somewhere. Taxing the rich won't be enough, which means the only possible course of action is to cut social spending and force their citizens to work harder. This will be unpopular and cause a lot of protests by naive people who don't want to face the harsh realities of modern geopolitics and natural resource constraints.
West Germany had a very strong army and better social systems than now until 1990. It could easily have built nuclear weapons, but wasn't allowed to.
The dichotomy between social programs and weapons (a variation of the old butter vs. guns nonsense) is false, and I suspect is just used by some people here who want to slash social programs no matter what.
The situation prior to 1990 is hardly relevant today. Back then West Germany was still coasting on Marshall Plan largesse, and had low labor costs due to a favorable demographic profile and huge numbers of Gastarbeiter. That situation no longer obtains, plus they're still trying to develop the former East Germany after Soviet occupation wrecked it. Now if Germany wants to survive as an independent power with freedom of action then they'll have to make some tough choices.
If you want to claim that butter vs. guns is nonsense then please be specific and explain exactly where the money will come from. And let's not have any vague non-answers like "tax the rich" or "cut waste".
The Marshall plan is overrated:
https://www.nzz.ch/english/how-the-marshall-plan-is-overly-r...
https://mises.org/mises-wire/marshall-plan-isnt-success-stor...
“Britain received twice as much aid as West Germany did, but economic growth in Britain dramatically lagged behind that of the Germans.”
Germany needs nukes and a navy to project power to solve the energy dependence. It isn't that expensive and could be done by eliminating waste in the procurement process. The money is already there. Oh yes, and tax the rich, especially landowners with multiple properties.
(Why would I listen to you preemptively ruling out viable strategies? I do not take orders here.)
So in other words you're proposing more wishful thinking and inaction. Germany has made many attempts to eliminate waste already with nothing much to show for it.
As for their so-called "navy" it's a government jobs program with uniforms. Their warships aren't even able to defend themselves, let alone project power. What a joke.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/german-navy-confirms-its-u...
> the cushy "European" lifestyle they love only exists because of the US
Could you elaborate ?
World-wide global trade security and defense is made possible mostly due to the American military. Hard to import/export when cargo ships get sunk.
Sure, look at the bottom countries
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
The lifeblood of the European economy is still the same things that were the lifeblood 30 years ago.
There is no tech scene in Europe, despite tech being at the global economic forefront for those 30 years.
The US spent more per capita than Europe did on support to Ukraine. It also provided the lions share of weapons and armaments.
And now Europe is turning to the US to supply most of it's energy. Which is methane. Heaven forbid the EU give green investment funds special economic rules to foster growth, it might generate a few billionaires.
Europe is a trust fund state burning old money and milking old industry. It desperately needs to build its own independence. Russia coming knocking seems to have been a bit of a wakeup call, but even still single child Europeans are sitting on the beaches of the Mediterranean complaining that they cannot retire at 55.
Wake up.
> The only "clean" way to rectify this problem is for Europeans to slash regulations, slash social programs, and dramatically increase annual working hours. All things which are the antithesis of contemporary Europeans ideals. Europe desperately needs a modern industry hub, right now it's all US and China on the board.
What an absurdity to say that the only way out for Europeans is to follow the U.S. in their hyper-capitalist folly, as if speed-running their way to more concentration of power & capital was Europe's only salvation.
Yes, Europeans have to accept the fact that they will have to work longer given the current demographic trends and Brussels needs to make sure EU regulations don't impede innovation. But for the the most part European leaders just need to initiate a strategic shift and move on from the dogma that Europe's success is tied to U.S. dependency.
What has so far looked like pragmatism on the part of EU leaders is increasingly looking like a lack of courage to assert the EU's power and chart a path of their own
> however simultaneously are unaware that the cushy "European" lifestyle they love only exists because of the US
Why do so many Americans believe this? I would like to see some real accounting of the US-EU relationship. Americans only focus on the supposed defense relationship, where supposedly the EU is under investing because the US will supposedly come to the rescue. Every single other aspect of the US-EU relationship is ignored.
Don't even try, you won't get a reasonable answer. I've had a discussion with a similar commenter here quite recently, and in the end, they ignored my arguments and still pretended that I admitted that "Europeans view Americans as suckers."
Even if you were to show them data, you could never convince them, as their position is based on emotions. And you can't argue someone out of a position using facts, if that person didn't arrive at that position using facts to begin with.
Because there has been a major trade imbalance for decades, and Europe has been underspending for defense and being more than happy with the US tax payer paying for its security.
Things were fine in Germany under the moderate Merkel government, which emphasized deescalation with Russia until the Cowboys Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and John McCain came along and fanned the flames.
After the illegal and horrible Russian invasion (which was provoked nonetheless) the EU got progressively drawn into the US proxy war. They were criticized for not doing enough in 2022 by the US. In 2025 on the other hand they were criticized for wanting to prolong the war by Trump.
The EU pays the bill, the US reaps its benefits from weakening Russia, which is the entire goal of the slow moving war of attrition. Successes include US dominance in Syria, attempted dominance in Venezuela and possible Greenland.
Ruining the EU's social systems will achieve nothing. This is an energy problem and the US tries to control all choke points of energy delivery to the EU.
> Things were fine in Germany under the moderate Merkel government
Disagree completely.
I would put significant part of the blame for the whole Ukraine disaster on western reaction in 2014, when Crimea was annexed (thats not to say that Putin isnt an imperialistic asshole, just that this could have been avoided regardless).
The "Merkel policy" (link EU/Russia by trade to prevent war) is a solid long-term plan, but the EU needed to demonstrate willingness to reduce that trade (even when it hurt themselves) to punish expansionism/destabilizing behavior.
It failed to do this almost completely. This made it clear to anyone that a (successful) annexation of the whole Ukraine would have gone (mostly) unpunished.
In this case, I blame the Merkel government for putting the financial well-being of its citizens over ethical principles, but a big part of the problem is that most voters are too stupid and uninformed to even realize that such a tradeoff is being made anyway, and react to economical signals only.
> In this case, I blame the Merkel government for putting the financial well-being of its citizens over ethical principles,
Its much worse than that in terms of realpolitik: the gains were short-term, the costs will be paid for over decades, and disproportionately allocated to germanys eastern neighbors like the Poles and Estonians who are at increased risk of Russian aggression.
It really was such a bad tradeoff and I don't think this is hindsight: Russia is basically doing what is has been doing for centuries.
Complete failure of the German political system between 1990-2020+
Ukraine itself traded with Russia from 2024-2025 and collected transit fees for Russian gas.
Nuland and others were active in Ukraine before and during the Maidan revolution.
But please, continue to blame Germany, blow up its pipelines, send 1,000,000 refugees who collect social security (the topic of this subthread, do the slash-social-security hawks here want to evict the Ukrainians and send them to the front lines)?
> which was provoked nonetheless
This is misinformation.
> the US proxy war
This is misinformation.
Use your favorite search engine to find the "rand corporation overextending and unbalancing russia" paper. There are dozens of similar papers, also from Brookings: "path to persia"
By the way, the Trump administration also perpetuated this "misinformation" when they pretended to seek peace in January 2025.
> the "rand corporation overextending and unbalancing russia" paper.
This document does not say what you said it says.
> also from Brookings: "path to persia"
This document is about Iran, and has nothing to do with Ukraine.