Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
The rightwingers will never allow that.
So there’s no need for subsidies money because the epic capitalism Invisible hand private market “just needs permission to go green”? This might be one of the dumbest “conclusions” to an article I’ve read in a while. I hope this entire thing was written by AI.
Its published in Fortune, I’m curious what you expected when you clicked on the link.
A bit more of a guide on energy independence than just a mostly vague history lessen with an incoherent conclusion
To be fair, the permitting and environmental impact process is crazy and is really holding back deployment. If the government gets out of the way of renewable projects the growth would increase massively.
Some of the process might be necessary. However, it should be the government’s burden to bear, not the applicants’. The process should be as straightforward and simple as possible on the applicant end.
Exactly, that’s how it should be but it isn’t. Wind power has to do an environmental assessment on birds when it’s only 1/6000 deaths. Offshore wind needs to show effect of the noise on marine wildlife when fossil fuels and farminc poison the water.
Here’s a UK example, maybe unfair to use UK as an example but this is how it is for one of the largest wind producers in Europe.
Mandatory almost always
- Planning Statement
- Site Layout Plans and Drawings
- Environmental Statement (EIA) [almost always required at this scale]
- Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment (LVIA) [politically critical]
- Ornithology Report [required if any bird sensitivity; very often triggered]
- Ecological Impact Assessment (EcIA)
- Noise Impact Assessment (ETSU-R-97)
- Transport Assessment
- Grid Connection Offer / Electrical Layout
Conditionally required
- Design and Access Statement [required in England for most major developments]
- Habitat Regulations Assessment (HRA) [if near/impacting SAC/SPA/Ramsar sites]
- Shadow Flicker Assessment [if residential receptors within ~10 rotor diameters]
- Construction Environmental Management Plan (CEMP) [often required pre-construction condition; sometimes submitted upfront]
- Peat Management Plan [if peat soils present; critical in Scotland/uplands]
- Heritage Impact Assessment [if within setting of listed buildings / conservation areas]
- Archaeological Survey Report [if potential below-ground remains]
- Flood Risk Assessment [if in flood zones or drainage impact possible]
- Hydrology and Hydrogeology Report [if affecting watercourses, groundwater, or peat]
- Aviation Impact Assessment [if within radar/airspace consultation zones]
- Socioeconomic Impact Assessment [if material local economic effects claimed]
- Community Consultation Report [mandatory for DNS/major schemes in some jurisdictions; strongly expected]
- Decommissioning Plan [often secured via planning condition but sometimes included upfront]
But it can also be blocked by these:
- Local Planning Authority (LPA) [primary decision-maker; can refuse planning permission]
- Secretary of State / Planning Inspectorate [can overturn or refuse on appeal or call-in]
- Statutory Nature Bodies (e.g. Natural England, NatureScot, NRW) [can object on ecology/HRA grounds]
- Local Community / Parish Councils [political pressure; can trigger refusal]
- Environmental NGOs (e.g. RSPB, Wildlife Trusts) [strong objections, especially on birds/bats]
- Ministry of Defence (MOD) [radar / aviation objections]
- Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) / NATS [airspace / radar interference]
- National Grid ESO / Distribution Network Operator (DNO) [can delay or deny viable grid connection]
- Historic England / Cadw / Historic Environment Scotland [heritage objections]
- Environment Agency / SEPA / NRW [flood risk, hydrology, pollution concerns]
- Highways Authority [can block due to abnormal load transport constraints]
- Landowners / Rights Holders [access, cable routes, lease issues]
- Aviation Stakeholders (airports, heliports) [radar / flight path conflicts]
- Public Inquiry (Inspector) [can recommend refusal after appeal]
- Legal Challenges (Judicial Review) [can quash approval post-consent]
Needless to say, spending millions on reports and assessments when it can be blocked anyway by some rando NIMBYs sucks. Then there’s also the fact that the UK grid needs tooooons of investment just to accommodate these new developments.
So all of these reports are not really an issue when you’re making a massive power plant where the price of the plant dominates the cost. The process makes a bit of sense for large scale installations but the amount of work you need to put in for a modest 20MW wind farm in absolutely bonkers.
So yeah, if the government would get out of the way the whole process is a piece of cake and we can have full grid saturation incredibly fast.
Could always try to quit making enemies?
EU literally destroyed its own nuclear energy. You had energy, eurotards killed it youself.
Lithuania had nuclear power plant, eu entry condition was to dismantle it.
Go ahead. Buy 750 billion worth of propane from trump instead
Latvia never had a nuclear power plant. Lithuania did, in Ignalina, that started operations back in 1983. It was also the same design as the one in Chernobyl, with the same design flaw, and that was only addressed after the disaster in '86. The building didn’t have a proper containment structure, so yes, the recommendation was to shut it down.
The problem is that the plans for replacement never came to fruition, and decommissioning costs went through the roof. All due to incompetence of the government.
Everything was fixable. They just didn’t want competition in, and now energy is just super expensive. Same design still operational in Russia and causes no issues
Yes, Russia is famous for its safety standards and care for her peoples welfare.
It is though. They have universal healthcare and working social system. Electrical and utilities are lowest prices on the planet
Is universal healthcare why hiv is spreading rampantly and the life expectancy is at the bottom half of the world, one of the lowest for a developed country?
There is universal healthcare and a working social sytem in theory, not in practice. That doesn’t even account for the loss of life from the way where over a million are, avoidable, dead. They aren’t values, they just churn them like meat to grind.
People are seeking to flee Russia, not move there.
Could only read 1st paragraph. From Fortune’s Zionist/Empire agenda… Russia.
It is Europe’s alliance with US that has made all of its energy shocks. Nordstream was a US devotion hari kari. US played a somewhere between extreme and 100% role in puppeting Ukraine to war against Russia (Nordstream 2 was created specifically because of a nazified Ukraine demanding higher transit fees), and forcing its colonial rulers to give you Russophobia.
Going back to 2021 Russia-EU relations would be obviously best for EU, and understanding that US/Israel was its real enemy all along, but especially in contempt for global economy this month, is key to EU future, but whatever source has cheapest energy (It is China by far) is path to minimizing energy shocks. Geopolitically sensitive energy reliance is the achiles heal that will always be used to extort EU/world/people.
ukraine warred on russia?
huh, normally the tankies on are on .ml
explain that to the graybeard in politics
Lol. Ok. So you plan is to discover oil in poland or something?
It’s typically too late to do anything about it when bad things already happened
Get rid of oil, duh.
Affair MATTEI … guys… europe and the med sea is FILLED with gas and oil , but we are under the boot of Victoria EMBANKMENT and the brit crown… they shut down the drilling platforms in the Italian sea water and speaking about renewvable … there is only one thing which is not a fanny tail … the 44 terawatt per hour that are possible do produce around mons etna … the other stuff are simply damn manipulations, ask to a geologist expert in energy probe. Here is not facebook and stuff like that must be said.
terawatt per hour
Terawatt is already an energy per time unit, and terawatthour is an energy unit. This whole comment doesn’t seem worth addressing, it’s just that stupid.
really … it’s a scientific measure and the Etna monts is one of the most powerful source for geothermal energy … but the idiocracy diffused in europe is big that you are able to wait the tubercolosis insted to warm up again the home in which you live. Check a science called GEOLOGY you will find replies not policies written by idiotic bureaucrats
I looked up your claims, and there is absolutely no mention of Etna being a powerful source of geothermal energy.
“Check a science called GEOLOGY you will find replies”
Maybe take a communications class online or something? I have no idea what are you trying to say.
“you are able to wait the tubercolosis insted to warm up again the home in which you live”
What?
Nah, we’ll just buy gas from US and postpone electrification of transport couple decades. What could go wrong?
I’m sorry, but what does that have to do with anything?
I’ve been going around in cars powered by natural gas most of my life, but I’m the very very small minority. The overwhelming majority of cars don’t run on that, heating and the electric grid do. If you run out of gas the cars won’t stop, the trains will.
Thank you! We just do not do enough fracking here yet.
I would electrify my transport in a heartbeat, if only it wasn’t so fucking expensive. Like ~30k€ for cheapest Kia BEV? Not even speaking about more “premium” brands. How tf should I get that with mediocre eastern european salary?
I love my BYD dolphin
It was the cheapest car I could find, and it cost about €17,000
Don’t buy new. The second hand market for EVs is great. 3-4 year old cars with over 200 miles range for £12-15k, and lots of them.
Maybe in UK?
There is a second hand market where I live (Czech rep), but it’s still not cheap. We’re traditionally a country where others’ used car end up. Same with EVs, but re-sellers ask a premium for this “brand new technology” and yada yada yada… The cheapest of Swasticar model 3 (first production year 2019, with over 200k km, smaller battery) I could find is over £15k. Kia EV6 similarly aged and (ab)used? Hand over well over £20k…
That sucks, but could you buy in a neighbouring country. If you save enough it could be financially worth it.
Obviously UK would be of no use. Stearing wheel in the wrong place.
Yup, but in Poland there are still small fraction of evs…
Renault is government company, why they dont want to sell evs cars cheaper? Is it really necessary to make bigger profit than from ice?
You meant Renault? They made the Zoe back in 2014, then made the Megane only electric, made the Spring through their Dacia subsidiary, now the 5, and they are launching the new Twingo generation as only electric. This makes them cover all EV segments, from the sub 20.000 euro electric car to the 60.000 one through alpine. They use more and more European made batteries and motors. Out of all the European car makers Renault and Mercedes are the ones that are the most pro electric now.
Yup, but why electric model is more expensive than ice one? Because of government subsidies?
The new twingo is the exact same price in constant euros as the first gen twingo that came out in 1993.
Besides that, prices of EVs are not more expensive over 5 or 10 years despite the shown price because you run them at a much much cheaper price : electricity is often cheaper than gas, the only real cost you would have to pay is tires and shock absorbers, breaks pads and disks get used a lot less because of regen, no belts or chains, no spark plugs, no oil change, no exhaust, no turbo, no belts driven AC, no starter motor, no alternators etc… All those things that cost a lot in mechanic repairs for most cars.
Citroen ec3 was 2x more expensive than ice version…
European evs are ridiculously expensive in comparison to for example Tesla
Tesla’s start at over 30.000 euros! That’s not a cheap car by no means!
Plus: there is a huge problem at the top of Tesla. It’s not the subject here but I cannot close my eyes on Greenland’s fate just for a car. I have the same reservation over Tibet or the Uyghurs for other brands.
Have you considered the Dacia Spring? It should be fine for short-medium range trips and it costs “only” 20k
I own a Dacia, I want a cheap car with no luxury. But but the Spring is just a bad car. Poor charging, poor range, can’t accelerate at highway speed. Those are not luxuries. It was the first electric car at this price range, but now there are better competitors.
Thanks for the insight
Yeah, it’s gimped too much. Especially the first generation with weaker motor feels barely like shopping bag on wheels… It could work for work/school commute for me, but apart from that? Visiting parents in different region? No. Weekend family trip? No. And honestly I don’t want to spend that much on something I can’t use for more purposes than just daily commute.
To me a car like that kinda defeats the point of owning a car.
If it’s only needed for driving around town and getting groceries, I can do that with (e-?)bike+transit+carsharing.
A significant fraction of my yearly km are driven on trip of over 500km/day, and to do that with the family it really helps to have a car. It’ll still be a while before electric cars are completely viable for my use case.
Replacing the short range use of cars with electrical ones is the wrong approach. It should mostly be reduced by offering alternatives. If people use the car only half as much, that’s a nearly 50% reduction on emission and fuel consumption, right there.
Wouldn’t you do it the other way around, where the car you own is for commuting and kids taxi, and you use a car rental or sharing service for the long trips?
We have bought the smallest car that would satisfy all our needs (a small station wagon), and we use it as necessary.
My commute is outrageous BTW, 50+50km, at highway speed and with airco, that might already be a stretch for the Dacia Spring. I do it mostly by train though.
I would have thought that:
“Reducing car use is better than just replacing them. Cars cover a lot of difficult corner cases, but let’s offer good alternatives for the day to day life”
should be a pretty uncontroversial take, and yet I’m here discussing with people that want to use cars everyday, and cover the exceptions with the alternatives.
For over 500km/day, I use the train. Not many people put on 115 500 km/year on their car. You are an exception.
Easy there, we do ~15000 km/year, but ~4000 of those are on long trips. That’s “a significant fraction”. I didn’t say I spend all day every day in the car.
There are many logistical reasons why we still need one car, but we are actually also able to walk, bike, and use transit.
And I expect I spend more time on a train that you do. But it’s not always the most practical option.
Crossing the alps on a train means too many changes, with trains from different companies, and my bored kids (depends on the origin and destination, but it’s true in my case). Even using the plane, with all the associated changes and buffer times, usually takes 6 or 7 hours.
Holidays in the mountains also gets a hell of a lot harder without a car. That’s true in general, but it’s doubly so in the places where I like to go (less crowded secondary destinations). Public transport requires density, and the last thing I want in the mountains is high density.
Edit:
As I wrote in another message, I would have thought that:
“Reducing car use is better than just replacing them. Cars cover a lot of difficult corner cases, but let’s offer good alternatives for the day to day life”
should be a pretty uncontroversial take, and yet I’m here discussing with people that want to use cars everyday, and cover the exceptions with the alternatives.
I agree with you, and I get around town mostly on bike. Many people don’t, and I think it would be better if they drove EVs. Anyway, if I’d need to buy a car, I would still consider the Spring, since its range would be fine for heavy loads that I wouldn’t carry on a (cargo) bike or 100-200 km trips
Stop buying gas from the enemy after 4 years of war? Preposterous!
The EU has reduced Russian gas imports from 45% of the total gas imports of the union before the invasion of Ukraine to 13% at the end of 2025 and will be at 0% by 2027.
Coal and oil are already at 0%.
It’s not like you can just switch off 150bn cubic meters of gas overnight
The problem is that they replaced most of it with the 3 times more expensive USA’s LNG.
That was the point of the whole war and why Biden sabotaged Stoltz and Macron.
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This is an outrage!
But it’ll be an outage.
Or, ya know, build on self-sustainable sources.
But nuclear is so bad!!1! Better burn coal and oil and “clean” gas!!
Renewables FTW, with a nuclear backdrop til we can phase out that too is the way forward IMO.
You know nuclear isn’t self-sustainable? Uranium is mined in only a few places.
The volume of uranium used is so low that is feasible to store years of supply; this is not possible with gas.
But it should be noted as a risk, of course.
Uranium-based nuclear power isn’t ideal, but thorium-based nuclear power shows a lot of promise, because thorium is both way more common than uranium, and way harder to weaponize.
It is the other way around though: because it cannot be weaponized, there was no incentive to develop an industrial reactor and a supply chain. The remaining technical and scientific challenges on this technology are non-trivial too as I understand, so it will be a few decades before we see one in action even if we took the decision to invest in it today.
Yeah but that’s still experimental, right?
Thorium reactor rely on transmuting thorium into a form of uranium, a form which itself can be extracted and weaponized…
And? You’re trying to argue it’s like oil?
So you advocate for coal, gas and oil until we can be 100% reliant on renewables?
There’s no option. Transitioning to nuclear will keep you burning stuff for 10-15 years whilst they’re built. Even SMRs will be 5-10. Renewables come online with a much smoother transition curve. You reduce burning stuff sooner, and we need whatever is quickest.
Still need batteries big enough to power global shipping etc. Nuclear can do that, even though building reactors takes time
It can, and I’m not anti-nuclear for all use cases. I just don’t think it stops us burning stuff soon enough.
No perfect solution, sadly. We’re also very late to start reducing emissions. And humanity doesn’t seem to be able to get their shit together and actually do something about it any time soon
That’s a bad faith interpretation of the above comment. We already can be 100% reliant on renewables. Nuclear is so clownishly expensive that it’s far cheaper to provide baseload power via solar, wind, batteries, and other energy storage mechanisms.
Well what will you use for power generation before we have enough renewable energy? You say it yourself: “can” be reliant. Yes but we are not, so what’s the way forward? Nuclear til we have enough renewables, or you know, my question : shall we burn coal up til then?
And nuclear energy is less expensive than coal, oil and gas IMO.
What are you on about? We don’t have the nuclear we’re talking about. This is about future plant construction. And new renewable capacity can be deployed in a fraction of the time that nuclear can.
France have upped their production massively, you don’t always need to build a whole new nuclear central to augment production.
This is the correct answer. Nuclear is not a perfect energy source, but it fills one big gap that we currently have with the renewable energy sources.
I would also say that gas can be an ok alternative in some situations. For example as replacement of a coal power plant if it is built together with solar and/or wind power. The gas power plant can increase the power when the renewables does not produce energy and be turned off during sunny or windy days.
What exactly is the big gap? Are you going to mention baseload, a concept that’s been obsolete for a decade? The baseload power demand, according to the according to its actual definition, is zero on many grids. Solar and wind produce energy Joule-for-Joule far cheaper than fission. And we have any number of ways of storing that cheap energy. Renewables are the cheapest form of baseload power. It’s not 2010 anymore.
Plus, if we’re talking national security, we’ve seen from the Ukraine conflict that every nuclear plant is a huge geopolitical liability. There have been many near misses and scares relating to Ukraine’s fission plants. Many have had to be shut down due to the risk of being struck. And hell, Iran’s plants are actively being targeted by US and Israeli air strikes. In a big war, your enemy can create an instant chernobyl in your backyard if they want. You can design a reactor to be intrinsically safe, but that doesn’t help if someone drops a ballistic missile on top of it. And yes, if you did this to a nuclear power like the US or Russia, it might provoke a retaliatory strike with actual nuclear bombs. But there are dozens of countries that have nuclear reactors but no nuclear weapons. For them, having nuclear power plants is a huge strategic liability. Far better to have innumerable solar panels and wind turbines scattered across the countryside than one big vulnerable reactor, an Achilles heel that an enemy can target to knock your whole power grid offline.
Solar and wind power are dependent on the weather to generate power, where nuclear power is not. I agree that there are many ideas on how to store the energy from solar and wind power, but how many of them is used on such large scale that it makes a difference on the grid?
Out of topic but do you have any data that shows that the baseload is obsolete? I have a hard time to believe that based on the definition from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/baseload
Baseload refers to the minimum level of demand on an electrical supply system over a 24-hour period, with baseload power sources being those plants that generate dependable power to consistently meet this demand.
Yes, but unless we figure out how to store a ton of electric energy, renewables are limited in use and somehow counterproductive as it makes energy cheaper during sunny days and thus making nuclear even more expensive (due to the fact that nuclear can’t be easily throttled). 🤷
Storing a ton is easy. It’s storing gigatons that’s hard.
Uranium is one of the most dense elements. It’s like 30x more dense than gasoline.
In practice you only need to store about a day’s worth of electricity, a few hours really. Solar panels are so stupidly cheap now that you can solve seasonal variations in production by just spamming solar panels. You deploy enough panels to meet your demand on a cloudy day in winter. Then the rest of the year you have dirt cheap abundant electricity. Maybe shut down some of your most energy-intensive industries on the cloudiest winter days if you must. Give everyone at the steel mill a week off and instead ask them to work longer hours in the summer.
And what about people living in extreme latitudes? We can use excess solar power during the summer to capture atmospheric CO2, use that to make synthetic liquid fuels, and the handful of folks living north of the arctic circle can just keep burning carbon-neutral diesel fuel forever. You could use small fission plants for these remote locations, but there’s unlikely to ever be enough demand just in the high latitudes to sustain an entire nuclear supply chain. Synthetic carbon-neutral liquid fuels would have many applications, so a supply chain could be developed.
For places up north connected to the grid, would it not be enough to send solar-generated electricity from sunnier areas to the south most of the time? (Although synthetic fuel burning sounds like a good backup plan for when the grid connection fails).
That’s happening but moving to renewable isn’t something you can just magically do
Unless we figure out energy storage, it will never be a solution.
Energy storage is slowly being figured as battery prices drop year by year
That’s nowhere near enough. It’s magnitudes away.
Nah, if you assume 6-12h of storage needed it’s close to break even. I’d say if prices of batteries get halved again, it’s solved
Can we do some calculations for worst case, ie winter week with clouds at best? How much does a single household consume when using heat pumps for warming? That would be at least 30kWh per day just for heating. Let’s round it to 40kWh pet day which makes 280kWh per week. Shall we add an EV car into equation? 140kWh? We are at 420kWh per week you might need to back up with batteries. Now multiply this number with millions of households. Or simply take a look at electric energy consumption in your country during winter days (when many don’t even have heat pumps and EVs) and you think there is enough batteries around and is simply a matter of price? Good luck with that. Wind and hydro would help to some extent, though.
When I said break even, I meant financial feasibility. Point is you can invest in solar power plus 12h of storage and this makes financial sense.
As for winter periods, noone expect solar to magically work in winter. Point is to reduce dependency on fossil and this can be achieved. You’d still expect strategic energy reserves and winter power to be delivered through fossil, due to avaliabliy and good energy density.
You could substitute fossil with wind power during winter, but that still requires storage.
Energy storage is a largely unnecessary. You only need to store a few hours worth of electricity. Solar panels are so stupid cheap that you can solve seasonal variations in solar production by spamming solar panels. You build enough panels to meet all your needs on a cloudy winter day. Then the rest of the year you have abundant cheap power.
The energy storage problem has been solved by stupidly cheap solar panels. People will whine about the footprint required, but the actual math shows this is just FUD.
See my answer to BlackLaZoR
The enemies of europe (and any other country) are billionares and politicians.
Politicans can be cool. Some are not. But you could be.
100%, especially from Poland perspective
if your words and your actions, which never seem to gel
will get you into heaven, i’d sooner be in hellOwed to a Hypocrite, a song about the dangers of preachers and politicians
Exactly, don’t buy from the usa, our once allie has shown open hostility.
Its pretty funny how little that narrows down your nationality
Non-usians is a pretty wide nationality.
And who would those be? Renewable energy independence is the only way.
Nuclear is a much better option in the short and medium term.
And renewable doesn’t solve the supply chain issue, a lot of materials for construction and maintenance need to be imported as well.
Nuclear takes decades to permit and build. You can build solar, wind, and BESS storage plants in 2 years, including permitting l, procurement, and construction.
The IPCC put it best: the fastest way to decarbonize and make independent the power sector is through renewables + storage.
We should hold onto the nuclear plants we have, and recommission the ones still standing (so long as they still operate safely), but all remaining efforts should be put towards renewables deployment.
Not too sure why this comment got downvoted.
Grid balancing is no joke - you’ll likely have new nuclear up and running before you rebuild the grid of an entire nation (which is needed for renewables to take the lead).
Let’s not forget, lithium for batteries, a key element in a renewable grid (to help offload and balance) is also not widely produced in Europe. Water batteries could work, but those are not small projects.
Nuclear is your “short” term because renewables (grid rebuild) are still a long term project.
Nuclear isn’t a option in the short term at all, simply because you can’t build it fast enough.
It’s also too damn expensive. And please tell where in germany we get the uran and the building materials for nuclear.
It is much faster to build nuclear power plants that can cover a country’s needs than to fully transition said country to renewable.
It’s expensive upfront. But it is cheap to operate afterwards, and cost efficient to renew. Look at France.
Germany made a major, major mistake when then phased out of nuclear energy.
We have uranium in Europe. We just don’t exploit it. But even if we did not, there is plenty of countries in the world exporting uranium, on all continents. It’s much less of a strategic issue than relying on rare materials for renewable, or on gas/oil.
I present Exhibit A, the new Reactor Flamaville in France. Construction took 17 years and 12 billion Euros.
Exhibit B, solar panels I can mount on my roof for a few thousand that run for 20 years without maintenance.
I rest my case.
EDIT: I did some estimating and figured that instead of building a NPR, France could have supplied around 500.000 households with solar and storage instead. That would be the populations of Lyon, Toulouse and Nice combined. And they would have around 65% of their power for free.
I am not sure if you mean it that way, but I will take this comment as a good joke!
What are you talking about? Building new plants takes decades. Renewables are much faster to build and are even cheaper than keep running existing nuclear plants
No, what are you talking about? A nuclear power plant takes less than a decade to build.
Renewable energy at the scale of a country is impossible to achieve in such a short time in Europe. We dont have huge geothermal taps, which countries having achieved 100% renewable energy have, and we consume a lot more energy.
Cheaper is great, but it’s not continuous, it’s not scaleable in a short period of time, and requires a fuckton more maintainance capability than a dozen nuclear power plants.
I will reiterate: A full renewable energy grid in Europe is impossible with our current tech, especially in a reasonable timeframe. That’s why instead of solar power plants, countries prefer to subsidies local, individual solar panel installations, for instance.
A nuclear power plant takes less than a decade to build.
This is demonstrably a lie. The most recent nuclear power plant built in the US took 15 years to complete.
And the power plants in china took 6, with some that took 4 year. You can make nuclear faster if you want to. This is not a technology problem (or at least, not only), but a bureaucratic one. Chinese are building plants based on the AP1000, the same the US are building. It is a US design.
I agree with @knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de, everything about nuclear technology involves cost and time overruns. A nuclear power plant would ultimately take a decade or more to complete. Even the newer developments of SMRs or Thorium require real world experience and expertise that limit the number of countries who can explore this technology.
While countries are quick to make claims that they unlocked commercial thorium reactors, I’d say the only superpower realistically on track is China.
China hopes to complete the world’s first commercial thorium reactor by 2030 and has planned to further build more thorium power plants across the low populated deserts and plains of western China, as well as up to 30 nations involved in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Is nuclear really cheaper than renewables + batteries nowadays? I wonder if there are recent studies looking into it
Quick search points to this:
Levelized Cost of Electricity: which is a measure of the total cost of building and operating a power plant over its lifetime and expressed in dollars per megawatt-hour. […] LCOE serves as a comprehensive metric that consolidates all direct cost components of a specific power generation technology. This includes capital expenditures, financing, fuel costs, operations and maintenance, and any expenses related to carbon pricing. However, LCOE does not account for network integration or other indirect costs
LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases
[…] Global weighted average levelized cost of electricity for newly commissioned utility-scale solar photovoltaic, onshore wind, offshore wind, and hydropower projects experienced a downward trend. The most notable drop occurred in utility-scale solar PV, which saw a 12% decrease from 2022 [in LCOE costs][…]
In contrast, nuclear power continues to face cost overruns and long construction timelines […]
Source: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Power-Play-The-Economics-Of-Nuclear-Vs-Renewables
[Caveat: Below numbers are most likely not using LCOE]:
[…] In 2025, developers added 87 gigawatts of combined solar and storage, delivering power at an average of $57/MWh
By contrast, benchmark cost of a typical fixed axis solar farm increased 6% compared to 2025, hitting $39/MWh, while onshore wind reached $40/MWh and offshore wind climbed to $100/MWh globally […]
If we aren’t there yet, I still think we might see renewables + batteries as cheaper options in the short term.
I’d really like to see an LCOE analysis including batteries. If we naively assume LCOE costs for PV+batteries is the same as PV, we might already be there
My focus isn’t on which type of energy is cheapest. An energy grid that is not predictable is worthless. Wiknd power, solar power, are great complements, but a grid using only those is not viable. Hydroelectric is great, but limited. Geothermal is not really viable in mainland Europe.
I’m worried about a realistic transition from fossile fuels to non fossile fuels. Nuclear is realistic, renewable as a main source in Europe is utopic and unrealistic.
Predictability of renewables can be minimized via national grid interconnection. Even if it’s cloudy and the wind is stagnant in one location, odds are that’s not the case 500-1,000 miles / km away. The larger the grid, the more predictable renewables becomes.
Also, most Lithium-based BESS storage can discharge power to accommodate unpredictable renewables for up to as long as 4 hours, which can be enough to bridge the gap. If storage can’t do it, the grid will.
And let’s not forget other types of renewables + storage that don’t care about clouds or the wind: run-of-the-river hydro (not reservoir hydro), pumped storage hydro, tidal, solar thermal, even wave although I highly doubt wave power will take off, etc.
The more diverse our power generation, both in type and location, the more predictable our grid will be. Diversity is key.
Edit: let’s not forget about the other end of the power equation from generation: utilization. Energy efficiency and conservation through Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS) are another tool to help the grid manage unpredictable renewables.
You must hate nuclear then, it has awful synergy with renewables since you can’t turn it off and on again quickly. Just overproducing with renewables and using batteries + gas plants for the few days the wind doesn’t blow enough is much more realistic.
This is just…wrong. an unpredictable grid is perfectly fine for almost everything we currenty use it for, it just requires a very small amount of moving usage around and feedback on pricing/demand.
I’m not sure we define unpredictable in the same way. I mean not being able to rely on a continuous source of power (batteries mitigate but don’t solve this issue) is problematic.
Nuclear power plants have to turn off if the weather gets too hot. They have to dump their waste heat in rivers or other bodies of water. To keep them from cooking the local wildlife, countries have to limit the amount of heat they’re allowed to dump into the river. When the temperature of the river increases due to warm weather, the amount the reactor can dispose of in the river decreases. Rivers are not the infinite cold reservoirs your thermodynamics class taught you.
Tell that to Georgia Power. And while you’re at it, pay my electric bill for me if it’s so damn cheap!
Canada. SMRs and uranium.
Ein von der Firma NuScale Power zusammen mit dem Energieversorger Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) geplantes Projekt in Idaho (siehe auch das Idaho National Laboratory) sollte Stand Anfang 2023 USD 102/MWh erreichen, wenn man die Subventionen herausrechnete.[17] Das Projekt wurde im November eingestellt, weil die ursprünglich für die Errichtung geplanten Kosten von 5,3 Milliarden Dollar auf bereits 9,3 Milliarden Dollar gestiegen waren.[18] Zum Vergleich der Stromkosten: Nach Schätzungen aus dem April 2023 erreichen Solarfreiflächenanlagen Stromgestehungskosten von USD 24 bis USD 96/MWh
zu teuer.
True but dont forget. If you will buy it from France, you will leave money locally :) and economy will get this money back
Nuclear is part of the solution. We shouldn’t rely on a single source of energy.
👆🏻 This is a key point.
No-one should rely on a single source; neither geographical location nor type of energy.
Europe is sharing both gas and electricity amongst countries, but also needs to generate more and use less.
Nuclear is a much better option in the short and medium term.
Nuclear is not a good option at all if you want to stop buying energy from the “enemies” such as the billionaires and politicians who will be in charge for it.
Where do you store the waste? Nuclear is more expensive than renewables. Where do you get the nuclear material for the plants? Where do you get enough professionals to man these new plants? How to ensure the new plants you’ve build (fastly) are safe? How to ensure the plants are not easy targets for enemy attacks and sabotage?
It’s not a perfect solution, and ideally we would all be on renewable, I am not disagreeing with you there.
But a full renewable grid in Europe is simply not realistic with the tech we have now. A full nuclear grid is.
Keep researching renewable and nuclear (fusion would be the ideal option, even above renewable), but use the best we have now.
We have uranium in Europe. But we can also import it from many countries all around the globe, ao strategically much more diversified than rare materials needed for renewable.
Educate new professionals. Build them securely, not fastly. Still a better time perspective than a full renewable switch. Plants will always be easy targets, nuclear or not. Modern plants do not catastrophically fail like Chernobyl. Do yoh really think France has not thought of the security implications with their plants all over the country?
Now for nuclear waste… Yeah, it’s a problem. Also being researched. But it is little waste. It’s manageable until we have the right renewable tech or nuclear fusion.
As for the cost, again, it is expensive upfront, cheap to operate, cost efficient to renew.
Stop with the lie that it’s cheap to operate it’s not true at all wind and pv already beat it and are still on a downward trend
Your talking points are twenty years out of date.
Trump was driving trade diversification around the world with the idiotic tariffs, and now, with the illegal war against Iran, he’s creating a resurgence of interest in renewables and EVs. Exact opposite of what he says he wants but maybe not so bad in the long run.
That’s a really positive outlook and I love it.
Except that a bunch of people on the other side of the planet are dying because of this.
Maybe he was always a democrat plant 😂
/s
He definitely has the intelligence of a plant.
