Pain in any language

Apollo 440’s album Electro Glide in Blue was released in 1997. It was a good year for Europe, 1997. Energy was affordable, economies were booming, people were generally happy. Pain in Any Language is a sad song. Some say it is one of the saddest they’ve ever heard. And it’s probably the best musical accompaniment to the current state of Europe. You might even say it was kind of prescient. This is going to be one dark, grim Substack.

Take the latest news from the EV world, for example. Global sales were up by a lovely 20% in August. But in Europe, EV sales were down. By 33%. And that includes hybrids.

The drop was led by Germany, which last year axed subsidies for the vehicles. The axing led to a sharp decline in EV sales, so earlier this month, the government surrendered to reality — and approved new incentives, under which, per Reuters, “companies would be able to deduct up to 40% of the value of newly purchased electric and qualifying zero-emission vehicles from their tax bill in the year of their purchase, falling progressively to 6%.”

In other words, Germany’s government still thinks it’s only a matter of time until EVs become competitive. They just need a leg up. Another leg up. They might soon need a couple of more legs up because the Chinese are coming — and they’re bringing their cars as knock-down kits as their government advises they keep key EV tech at home. This would compromise some green job plans and that’s tragic.

It’s not as tragic as the future fate of LNG import capacity in Europe, however, at least according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which is a highly impartial, totally unbiased research entity.

So, according to this entity — and Bloomberg — “Europe has likely reached peak consumption of liquefied natural gas yet continues building import terminals and related infrastructure, raising the risk that those works sit idle and become stranded assets.”

LNG imports into Europe are set for an 11% decline this year, the think tank said in a new report, and this should rise to 37% by 2030, thanks to the increased deployment of wind and solar, and if anyone is laughing, so help me, there will be consequences. Stranded assets are no laughing matter and the fact that I initially missed the t in assets while typing is no laughing matter, either.

Times are grim, indeed. “The country’s LNG regasification capacity will almost triple by the end of the decade,” one IEEFA activist, that is, analyst, told Bloomberg. “As increased electrification and renewables deployment help Germany continue to reduce gas consumption, it is unclear whether it will need so much.” See? Germany is not deindustrialising. It’s deploying renewables and reducing gas consumption.

Let’s hear it from the country’s very own foreign office, in an X response to some statement made by Donald Trump during this week’s debate.

“Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables. And we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest. PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs.” That PS got promptly fact-checked, by the way, and it turns out at least one German has at least once eaten, um, a cat.

The whole statement is may be the shortest success story ever produced in world fiction. It would be hard to beat it but Germany’s neighbour France is trying. French regulator recommends 10% household electricity price cut in early 2025, Reuters told us this week, adding that “European electricity prices have soared over the last two years, driven mostly by the war in Ukraine and problems at state-owned utility EDF which had to fix several nuclear reactors affected by stress corrosion.”

That’s probably why Germany shut its own reactors. Stress corrosion sounds like a serious problem and who needs this sort of serious problems when you can have more wind and solar. They don’t get stress corrosion. So what if your companies are considering relocation because of high energy prices? The important fact is that Germany’s energy system is fully operational and windosolar heavy.

So is Australia’s, only it appears to be wasting record amounts of wind and solar — and that’s apparently a good thing, according to some people. One of these people said New South Wales recently curtailed 27.4% of wind and solar output, which was the highest rate ever recorded, with ABC adding that “Amazingly, the amount of curtailed renewable power was equal to the entire output from coal-fired power stations in NSW at the time.”

It is indeed an amazing coincidence although any significance beyond that eluded me at first. Then it hit me — perhaps the amazingness of the coincidence is that it may happen again and New South Wales could shut down its coal plants? “At one point”, as the ABC report stated about the record curtailment. It would indeed be amazing to be able to switch coal plants on and off depending on solar and wind output. More fiction gold if ever I’ve seen any.

For now, however, the curtailment story appears to be “a good thing” because it turns prices negative on the spot electricity market and this is obviously a good thing for consumers. Until the generators go out of business because, you know, profits and other unimportant stuff they sorta need to stay alive.

Ireland recently got a reminder of that unimportant fact at a recent renewable energy auction, which failed to attract bids for the minimum projected amount of new generation capacity. Said projection was 2,500 GWh and the auction only attracted bids for 2,071 GWh, per Bloomberg.

I was going to invite you to take a stab at the reason but what’s the point? It’s not even funny any longer — not that it ever was, I mean, energy is a serious thing. Anyway, the reason, per the Bloomberg report, was that “a reduction in the maximum price it [the government] would support meant fewer participants.”

It really is a pain in any language except perhaps Italian, after the current government of the country said it was considering a reversal of a long-standing ban on nuclear power. Miracles, it appears, do happen. They just need an ounce of common sense and a drop of reality.