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I
Why Greens Love s Vladmir Putin Europe’s secret savior? Has his invasion of
Ukraine finally forced Europe to make the transition

Putin to green energy and away from planet-destroying fossil

fuels? According to a recent Politico Europe feature, the

Emmet Penney answer is yes. “It took a war criminal to speed up

Europe’s green revolution,” the magazine states. It was only
once Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine that clean energy
became more than a climate-policy aspiration—it became a
October 13, 2022
security necessity. For this “achievement,” the Russian
strongman earned the No. 1 spot in Politico’s Green 28
rankings.

The dubious honor reflects a wider elite consensus. Soon

after Russia launched its invasion, The Guardian’s
environment correspondent interviewed a number of
climate experts who agreed that it “could mark a turning
point for the world’s efforts to decarbonize.” Shortly after
that, McKinsey released a report suggesting the fallout of
the war could “accelerate progress” toward net-zero
emissions in the medium term. And just a few days ago,
Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the UN World
Meteorological Organization, remarked that “from a
climate perspective, the war in Ukraine may be seen as a
PHOTO: WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
blessing.”

European leaders have taken such thinking to extremes.

Sure, they concede, Europe might have a few hard winters
triggering emission spikes. After all, the European Union’s
“Factories are taking coal consumption jumped 10 percent in the first half of this
jobs, wealth, and year with no signs of abating. And more Europeans are

institutional burning wood, which is more carbon intensive than

burning coal, to keep their houses warm. If, of course, they
knowledge with can afford it.
them.” But ultimately, Politico assures us, in decoupling from
Russian fossil fuels, no one in Brussels harbors any more
doubts about the need for renewables: “In the days after
the invasion, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner
—a free-market liberal who is no great friend of the climate
agenda—declared renewable energy to be ‘the energy of
freedom.’” And that’s why the European Union now wants
to increase its renewable energy targets from 32 percent of
its power to 45 percent of its power by 2045.

It’s easy to be seduced by such silver linings. Maybe Europe

will go green and be the climate envy of the world with
wind, solar, and batteries replacing outmoded
hydrocarbons. But if that’s true, what does it mean for
Europe? Put another way, what will that cost?

To answer the question, we can start by tallying the costs of

the transition so far.

The over-investment in renewables and underinvestment

in fossil fuel or nuclear infrastructure have added entropy
to the European energy system. Think of it this way: Wind
and solar operate less than half of the time, and you don’t
get to pick which half of the time that is. It’s like running
your electricity system on a bunch of rigged coin tosses.
The work it takes to integrate disorganized energy into a
system that relies on round-the-clock balance and
harmony adds overall costs. Back in the 1990s, most
renewable energy in Europe was hydropower, which is
reliable and clean. It made for 10 percent of the Continent’s
electricity mix. By 2020, renewables reached 17 percent of
the mix, with the vast majority of the additions being wind
and solar. How much is Europe paying for that 7 percent
gain?

The dollars and cents are pretty straightforward. Between

2008 and 2021, renewable energy subsidies have cost
consumers in the EU about $746 billion. They will
continue to add about $67 billion a year to people’s bills.
Compared to non-EU countries within the G20, household
EU electricity prices are 80 percent higher than average.
Industrial-electricity costs are about 30 percent higher.
(These disparities roughly hold when it comes to natural-
gas and transport-fuel prices, too.)

What I’m describing above are the good times. These are
the costs before the energy crisis, which began last year,
and came to a head once Putin invaded Ukraine. These
were the times when European countries like Germany
could shut down nuclear energy plants willy-nilly and still
rely on cheap Russian gas to guarantee overall system
reliability. That was the basic logic of Germany’s so-called
energy turnaround, or Energiewende: Shut down nuclear,
build renewables, import gas. And given that nuclear still
isn’t considered green in the European Union, Germany’s
plan has been the default option for decarbonization.

“This is a world that is no longer there,” EU foreign-policy

chief Josep Borrell told the annual gathering of EU
ambassadors this week. Europe is rapidly decoupling from
Russian fossil fuels. European prosperity will go with it.
And that’s frightening, because the European grid needs
$300 billion in re-investment every year for oil and gas
alone just to maintain current levels of production.

The costs aren’t just high bills and blackouts. Europe will
lose some of its manufacturing base as firms flee the
Continent in pursuit of more secure, less expensive
hydrocarbons elsewhere. Horror director John Carpenter
once said that whenever he reads about a reboot of his
original Halloween movie coming out, a funny thing
happens: He reaches out his hand, and someone puts a
check in it. The United States similarly benefits every time
Europeans impose new green diktats on themselves: As
European natural-gas prices have climbed 400 percent this
year, manufacturers have made landfall in America to spare
themselves. Factories are taking jobs, wealth, and
institutional knowledge with them. Renewables can’t
provide these manufacturers with the inputs they need to
keep running. It would be like trying to put firewood in
your gas tank.

What about that vaunted security surplus renewables

supposedly provide? Hasn’t Europe once and for all freed
itself of the Russian yoke? After all, wind and solar don’t
require Putin’s cooperation. The earth itself provides, no?

True, but renewables do require other inputs, over which

China has nearly complete dominion. The Middle
Kingdom has a lock on nearly every single critical mineral
needed for the energy transition, from cobalt to
manganese.

But what about manufacturing renewables? Can’t Europe

create jobs doing that? The short answer is no. Between
2012 and 2021, Europe’s share of renewables
manufacturing jobs dropped from 20 percent to 13 percent.
International Energy Agency chief Faith Birol recently
warned that China produces 80 percent of the world’s solar
cells today, a share he projects will rise to 95 percent in
three years. According to a recent report, 25 percent of
Europe’s current renewables-manufacturing capacity is at
risk due to high energy prices. It looks more and more like
Europe will own none of the supply chain for renewables—
and it will be unhappy.

Lastly, the energy transition is premised on the idea that

renewables will remain cheap. And there has been good
reason to think they will: After the last few decades, the
cost of building wind and solar has plummeted severalfold.
But will that stay the case? Not likely. Growth in wind has
been flat over the last year, and the input costs have soared,
putting the screws to the entire industry. As executives
from SSE, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa warned the G20 in
an open letter, “at the current pace of growth, we are only
on-track to reach less than two-thirds of the global wind
capacity required by 2030 for a net-zero and Paris-
compliant pathway,”

General Electric just cut 20 percent of its onshore-wind

unit. The troubled unit is adversely affecting the
“performance of its overall renewable-energy business,”
reports Reuters. “In July, the company blamed its North
American onshore-wind business for two-thirds of the
decline in its second quarter renewable revenue.” Supply-
chain problems have likewise dogged solar over the last
year or so, troubling the assumption that its costs will only
drop over time. Plus, things like the incipient copper crisis
spell hard times for renewables’ affordability.

If Europeans continue on a trajectory of building

renewables and “greening” their economy at any cost, they
will be poorer, weaker, and less secure than they are right
now. As the energy analyst John Constable put it, “Europe
will simply become a theme park of its own cultural past.”

Hail Putin, I guess.

Emmet Penny is the editor-in-chief of Grid Brief.

@nukebarbarian ↗

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#green energy #vladimir putin #ukraine war

#industrial policy

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