There will be blackouts

I wrote the headline of this article before the latest news about the gas crunch in Europe. I planned to discuss hypothetical scenarios in which renewable power-reliant grids — and people — suffer the effects of too much demand at a time of insufficient supply. However, the scenario is no longer entirely hypothetical.

A shortage of gas supplies recently combined with a wind drought in much of Europe to produce higher electricity bills and, in some places, protests. According to the FT, the UK has suffered a particularly hard blow because of its significant reliance on wind power relative to other European countries. Indeed, the UK had to restart a coal plant earlier this month to offset the effects of the wind drought. However, next time this happens the coal plant may not be around to provide that additional power.

The UK has vowed to retire all its coal plants in the next three years. This means that if another wind drought occurs it would have to lean more heavily on gas or imports. But the UK is not the only country planning to retire its coal plants. Germany, for instance, has also set its sights on coal plant retirement even if during the first half of this year it was coal that made up the biggest part of its energy mix, topping wind, whose share in the mix fell to the lowest in 2018. And that’s according to Deutsche Welle, not some conservative climate-denying website.

If something about the energy situation in the UK and Germany sounds a bit off it’s because it is. And what is off is that the energy future these countries’ governments are planning goes against common sense even if it is flawless theoretically and ideologically. In fact it very much smacks of the five-year plans that governments in Eastern Europe set for various industries in the past.

In some industries, such as heavy machinery manufacturing, these plans could work, at least in the supply part because all it takes is raw materials and equipment, and you can manufacture as many tractors as you want. In others, however, setting such production goals is risky business because you don’t just depend on raw materials and equipment. In agriculture, to take a non-random example, you depend very much on the weather.

I was reminded of that fact earlier this year when a cold spell put an end to all my plans for apricot cider and sour cherry jam. Our cherry trees froze. Our apricots yielded a tenth of their usual output. That agriculture is a highly risky business is public knowledge and the reason it is risky is the fact it is overwhelmingly dependent on the weather. Of course, there are all sorts of technological advances being made in agriculture allowing people to grow a lot of foods in artificial environments but until we can feed whole nations with lab-grown wheat and meat, we depend on the weather.

Speaking of those tech advancement in agriculture, one can’t fail to notice their primary goal is to make food production less dependent on the weather. It makes perfect sense, really. The weather is a fickle mistress and a highly unreliable business partner. This, then, begs the question: if in agriculture we are purposefully moving towards lower dependency on the weather, why are we at the same time equally purposefully moving towards much greater, even complete, dependence on the weather in energy?

The answer, of course, is emissions. I’m sure many would readily argue that over the long term the emission-related advantages of wind and solar over fossil fuels are questionable but that’s beside the point I’m trying to make here. The emissions problem of modern civilisation has been elevated to such paramount importance that all other problems we have such as hunger and poverty have been pushed back and even redefined to now become consequences of human-made climate change.

Yet both hunger and poverty have very much to do with the weather and they have had very much to do with the weather since time immemorial. Once upon a time, in fact until quite recently, most of the Earth’s human population was almost entirely dependent on the weather for survival. It was with the advent of the Industrial Age —and fossil fuels — that this dependence began to diminish and, yes, hunger and poverty began gradually declining. Both are still a huge problem and one that will probably never be solved but hard scientific data unequivocally proves humankind is better off now in every respect than it was before the Industrial Age. Except, that is, in the respect of emissions.

The focus on emissions has become so singular and exclusive that a lot of other problems have been either brushed aside as insignificant or willfully ignored. And yet, amid the European gas crunch that is threatening to spill over globally, the facts begin to leak in. Consider this recent article in Bloomberg — a news agency with a strong green bend — that says the current energy crisis in Europe has been in the making for years. The authors point to the rise of wind and solar in Europe, and the shutdown of coal and gas power plants. From an emission-centric perspective, the article is nothing short of blasphemy. From a common sense perspective, it was about time.

“Europe is short of gas and coal and if the wind doesn’t blow, the worst-case scenario could play out: widespread blackouts that force businesses and factories to shut,” the authors write. Indeed, in the autumn and winter solar is not at its best, so it’s wind that needs to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, weather, as already pointed out, is not a reliable partner in energy security.

The UK energy minister has promised there will not be blackouts but some people worry. Other people blame Gazprom and Putin but Gazprom has fulfilled all its contract obligations with regard to gas supplies to Europe. Could it send more gas given the dire need? It probably could. Must it? There is no stipulation anywhere that obliges the company it to supply as much gas as Europe needs and in the political circumstances it would be perfectly understandable if it doesn’t. But the blame game once again shows just how dependent Europe is on energy imports.

There has been a lot of talk about reducing this dependence, including by building a solid amount of wind and solar capacity. This has clearly failed to solve the dependence problem. So have attempts to replace at least some Russian supply with Central Asian gas. Those plans must have fallen through when emissions took the upper hand over energy security. So it seems that at the moment Europe is reaping the fruit of its war on emissions and, sadly, seeing the proof that this war will not be as victimless as Brussels officials like to make it sound.

In a sense, the current crisis is a blessing in disguise. The disguise may be and it is — scary but it is still a blessing. The currency energy crunch and the real threat of blackouts may prompt some politicians to stop galloping to a solar-wind-hydrogen future that sounds so good in climate models and energy consultancy forecasts. It might not be a bad idea to take a break for a reality check. Otherwise it won’t be long before we see yet another proof that the “whatever it takes” approach is usually not the wisest one.