Re:Europe’s energy crisis hits science
by makomk on Thursday September 08, 2022 @10:16AM
(#32765842)
The whole emphasis on the closure of Rough is a good example of what's wrong with the UK media coverage actually. Rough is just natural gas storage - it's only any use if you can buy the natural gas to fill it at a lower price and then use that gas when prices have gone up. Traditionally this was used to take advantage of predictable summer-winter variations in natural gas prices but those don't really exist and haven't for years. Instead gas prices have been sky-high as the rest of Europe filled up its storage (which it needs because a lot of countries physically cannot import gas fast enough with Russia shutting off its supply) and will remain high for the next few years. There's just not a lot Rough can do about that.
Pretty much across the board, the media has been pushing anything the government didn't do as the solution to the crisis which we missed out on because our government is incompetent regardless of its actual usefulness, including stuff like onshore wind and solar which is just plain worse as a way of keeping the country reliably supplied with electricity during winter than the offshore wind the government went with instead.
The UK is in a slightly odd place on this. The media have as usual been horrendous (running all the anti-wind-farm scare stories), while the renewables expansion and coal phaseout has proceeded pretty well. We do even have some idle coal capacity in case of emergencies. What we don't have is quite enough gas. See previously 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...
"In 2013, the then energy minister Michael Fallon said the decision to allow Rough to close would save the UK £750m over 10 years."
.. at the cost of up to $100bn being proposed to subsidize emergency supplies. Absolutely classic "just in time" supply chain economics.
I would also say a lot of people in the UK share the blame for not taking Russia seriously enough as a threat after the terrorist attack in Salisbury and the shooting down of an airliner.