With Ukraine in flames and the EU green agenda in pieces, 2022 was the year that fears over food and energy security once again hit Europe.
alongside International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol to diuscuss the energy situation of her European Union heading into 2023.While the European Commission President tried to spin it that the EU had successfully managed to negotiate its dire energy situation so far, and that it would continue doing so next year, the actual statistics dropped by the bloc leader were stark.
Even taking into account some of the extreme energy-saving measures put in place across the union this year, the fact of the matter is that the European Union is expected to have a gas shortfall in the region of tens of billions of cubic meters next year. Even worse, no one is quite sure yet how exactly this shortfall is going to be avoided. Though seriously bad news for the bloc’s member states, the news is far from unexpected. Since the war in Ukraine along with the concomitant sanctions saw the bloc’s access to Russian natural gas disrupted, the entirety of 2022 has been punctuated by warnings from across the continent that Europe is going to struggle with its energy situation for many years to come. Back in August, the Belgian energy minister, Tinne Van der Straeten,that the EU would see five to ten “terrible” winters if radical action is not taken. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country is actually in a stronger position than most of its neighbours due to its abundance of nuclear reactors, ominously warned his people that they were now facing the “But how did things get so bad? What went so horribly wrong that fears over rolling blackouts and energy rationing are now a regular talking point within European states that had once ruled the world? While the answer to this question is multifaceted, the first place we need to look is at Europe’s obsession with climate change.Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheal Martin makes a national statement on the second day of the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow on November 2, 2021 The transient nature of many renewable energies currently employed on the continent means that they can hardly be relied upon to supply a consistent amount of electricity on demand. As a result, even before the current gas crisis, overreliance on green energy sources combined with increasing national grid loads have resulted in some countries drifting dangerously close to blackouts. For example, long before Russia began shelling Kyiv, Ireland found itself under serious threat of seeing rollingas a result of its precarious balance of renewable and fossil fuel electricity generation. Having become increasingly reliant on wind energy at a time when more and more electricity-intensive data centres are being constructed by foreign corporations on the island, a sudden drop in wind speeds in 2021 resulted in official warnings that the block could see energy shortages. Although the country did eventually manage to make it through that winter unscathed, Ireland’s state-owned electricity transmission operator EirGrid warned that such a precarious situation was likely to continue for many more years to come and that increased demands in the country would likely result in higher costs for consumers. With many EU nations like Ireland struggling to keep the lights on with their new and fancy renewables alone, they were left with little choice but to turn to fossil fuels. However, investing in domestic drilling is both expensive, and would commit many nations to look after a domestic fossil-fuel sector believed to be heretical in their green-obsessed minds. As such, importing gas and oil from abroad to keep the heating on became the solution of choice. Exported climate sins are not easily visible to your leftie voters, after all.A local resident rides past an abandoned Russian tank marked Z in Kyrylivka Although it was to be in circumstances nobody could have hoped for, former U.S. President Donald Trump would have watched EU lawmakers eat perhaps the largest ever humble pie this year. Havingat the President for warning them about their overreliance on Russian energy exports, authorities were left with a massive Putin-shaped hole in their energy budgets that they were completely unable to fill with their renewable pet projects. Things were looking especially bad in Germany. While the country’s overwhelmingly left-wing establishment politicians had openly mocked Trump for his suggestion that their Russian gas affair would end in disaster, they were now faced with the hard truth that the energy imports they relied upon to keep their country moving now came from what is now seen as an enemy state. What were they to do?
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