Europe's Energy Situation Only Gets Worse -- December 7, 2017

Updates

Later, 9:24 p.m. Central Time: why I love to blog. At the end of this post I talked about Poland and coal. Don sends me this big of trivia and I love it. The Navios Helios is on its way to Poland (or maybe it's already there) carrying US coal:

• track the ship
• Reuters story on Trump coal going to one of our best allies and trading partners, Poland
• German website with same story -- ya gotta love it 

Don says that much coal -- tons and tons and tons -- probably emits about as much CO2 as one day's emissions from the Bali volcano. From Vox:

 Original Post

Over at "Big Stories," I link to "Europe at a Tipping Point." The original post was dated May 18, 2013, and has been updated infrequently since then.

With regard to energy, Europe is a mess when it comes to energy. It is playing out differently than I expected but the outcome will be the same: Europeans are:

• going to face ever-increasing prices for electricity, at least relative to the US
• will face brown-outs/black-outs when energy is needed most simply because renewable energy is not dispatchable

Europe is in a real quandary. They have plenty of electricity from wind and solar when things are going well, but they need natural gas and coal plants to back up wind and solar. But playing back-up doesn't pay the bills for the coal plants. Bloomberg suggests that coal plants in Europe will bleed cash for the next decade.

The dilemma was spelled out in the first two paragraphs:

Almost all coal plants in the European Union will be outspending their income by the end of the next decade, relying on subsidies to stay open to back up wind and solar generation.

About 54 percent of the region’s plants already fail to break even, according to a report by London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative published Friday. The facilities are kept online by government handouts running into millions of euros for some stations just to be available in case they are needed to meet spikes in demand.

The article doe NOT mention natural gas.

The article says that Europe is depending on better battery technology to make wind and solar energy work. That seems to be a huge gamble. The biggest players -- Toyota, GM, Apple, Sony -- have spent billions of dollars over the past three decades trying to improve batteries. From what little I know not much progress has been made, and what progress is made will come at a huge cost paid for by the citizens.

If coal is phased out and battery technology does not improve significantly that leaves natural gas. Western Europe does not have any natural gas. I guess that's why it was not mentioned in the Bloomberg article.

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Europe and Coal

Sometime in 2018 we will look at EU coal import data for the full year, 2017. I think it will show that Germany imported more coal in 2017 than in the previous couple of years. If not, it will be close. But a bigger story, if that is even possible, involves Poland. See the Polish story here.