Holy Cow! The EU Energy Crisis Has Massively Accelerated
As noted in my post Energy Insanity In Germany. These People are Nuts!, the massively idiotic German "government" is determined to shut down the remainder of it's nuclear power plants by end of 2022 in their quest to reach the nirvana of nearly all "renewable" energy. This is what a false idol looks like. They are in the midst of climate hysteria and irrational worship of the God of renewable power.
These people will remain in the grip of "climate change insanity" until they face a possible failure of their grid or their other suppliers (discussed below).
Today, UK and EU natural gas prices have soared today to the oil price equivalent of $341 USD per barrel of oil!! German power prices have soared to $0.48 USD per Kilowatt-hour. (The US average is about $0.10 per kW-hr)
Northern EU Natural Gas Prices Reach the Equivalent of $341 USD per barrel of oil
Part of this is this crisis is due to the inability of the Germans to approve the NordStream 2 gas pipeline that is now ready and waiting to provide cheap and abundant natural gas supplies from Russia. It's especially crazy since natural gas inventories in Germany and the EU are already too low for this time of the year.
Electric power prices (spot mkt prices presumably) in Germany have also soared when the demand for heating homes is higher, like, you know, during winter.
Germany's Electrical Power Cost Hits $0.48 US per kW-Hr compare to the US average of about $0.10 per kW-hr
Germany already has a high-voltage power cables with Norway that run on the seabed to provide 1,400 MW of power. A subsea power cable to Sweden is also complete with 600 MW potential. Germany also has power connections with the French grid powered substantially by nuclear reactors. These connections may allow them to survive periods of "no wind" and nearly non-existant solar power in the normally-cloudy winter months (at 50 deg North Latitude). These connections to other country's grids are also vitally necessary in summer when Germany is producing EXCESS solar power on sunny days in the summer. They have to emergency-dump excess solar power to other countries or risk grid failure.
It is these robust electric cable connections with the sane, real and reliable power grids of neighboring countries is what allows the Germans to live in a dream world of renewable energy without a nearly 100% base- load conventional fossil or nuclear fuel backup.
I've mentioned before that large-scale renewable wind and solar power requires near-100% baseload backup by conventional or nuclear power plants. Therein lies the problem with large-scale (>10 to 25% of the total power generated by) intermittent solar and wind power: the installed total generation capacity is DOUBLE (the expensive wind and solar plants PLUS near-100% fossil/nuke power plant backup). How can doubling the capital invested ever be considered economic?? There are instabilities in this arrangement as we're seeing.
But apparently even all of these connections are not good enough to prevent a real shortage of power as we see with spot power pricing (shown above). Perhaps it's because some 25% of France's nuclear plants (total of 56 plants) are offline for maintenance---which is very unusual at this time of year. Mind you, power consumption in Europe is highest in the winter months. Also Germany is short of natural gas for clean natural gas generated electricity (as shown above). The evidence is in that this system is unstable. An advanced country cannot have an unstable power grid.
All this is happening as the German government is MANDATING ALL-ELECTRIC AUTOS in the future while reducing their stable base-load power generation to very low levels (or rely on energy imports).
See my posts Germany's Solar Projects are a Bust and Germany Abandons Nuclear Power.