As a disgruntled climate scientist, I think Europe needs to get off natural gas by 1990. It’s not as if the security benefits weren’t obvious when we all were buying from the Arab world, or the wider global security destabilization caused by climate change.
The cancellation of the NS2 pipeline has been a silver lining, even if it's hard to compare the long-term quanta of brutality a given amount of CO2 leads to vs the short term brutality of war.
It's not enough: they need to actively get rid of the parts of it that are built. The problem with sanctions at the moment is Russia is betting that once they win, give it a few years and business sycophants will be arguing that Ukraine is "ancient history we can't let hold back THE ECONOMY".
> Shutting down atomic power in Germany was such a brilliant move.
What's done is done. Europe has enough wind potential to power the world [1]. Add solar [2], batteries, transmission, pumped hydro, remaining operational nuclear, and electrify everything (EVs, heat pumps, etc). Fill the remainder with LNG shipments from the US in the short term [3]. It's a national defense/security/sovereignty issue now to get off of Russian gas, and it should be treated as such with regards to allocation of resources to speed the effort.
Europe does not have enough wind power potential to power the world, by a very large margin. To power France with wind, not just electricity but all energy needs including oil, natgas, etc... you would need one large windmill for every single square kilometer of the country...
I confirmed it’s in SciHub if you want to grab a copy.
> The continuous development of onshore wind farms is an important feature of the European transition towards an energy system powered by distributed renewables and low-carbon resources. This study assesses and simulates potential for future onshore wind turbine installations throughout Europe. The study depicts, via maps, all the national and regional socio-technical restrictions and regulations for wind project development using spatial analysis conducted through GIS. The inputs for the analyses were based on an original dataset compiled from satellites and public databases relating to electricity, planning, and other dimensions. Taking into consideration socio-technical constraints, which restricts 54% of the combined land area in Europe, the study reveals a nameplate capacity of 52.5 TW of untapped onshore wind power potential in Europe - equivalent to 1 MW per 16 European citizens – a supply that would be sufficient to cover the global all-sector energy demand from now through to 2050. The study offers a more rigorous, multi-dimensional, and granular atlas of onshore wind energy development that can assist with future energy policy, research, and planning.
"Global" in this context means all of Europe, not all of earth. 1 MW per 16 European citizens is not remotely close to enough power for the entire earth.
Wind power is useful but not directly comparable to gas or nuclear, for obvious reasons. You can't store the wind or the electricity generated from it.
Everyone who had eyes and was watching the natural gas situation in Germany and other countries to the east of it, would see that even a few years ago.
Yeah, this has been my frustration for a while. Honestly, at this point just buy natural gas from a country that isn't helmed by a warlord. Similarly, Germany decommissioning its nuclear reactors isn't helping matters. I genuinely wonder what short term solutions are feasible with respect to decreasing dependence on Russian gas--can Europe ramp up production of heat pumps or similar? Is "Norway expanding its natural gas capacity" a reasonable short term option? Would love to hear from people who know anything about this.
