This is a misrepresentation: natural gas is used for a variety of purposes, with industry and home use approximately tied, varying by EU country. Germany for example, uses more natural gas for industrial purposes than heating homes.
>Though maybe you prefer everyone die of cold until we have a solution to transition out of natural gas without returning to coal or wait 10 years to build more nuclear.
This kind of personal vitriol doesn't belong on Hacker News.
In my country (portugal) since I was young every winter many people die of cold because it's too expensive to heat their homes. This is in a developed EU country and before any pressures post supply chain disruptions. I think middle class people have a romantic view of the world where nobody is dying like this nowadays, but a simple 10% increase in home heating prices will cause extra deaths during winter. I know there's other things that could be done but my argument is that these pipes need to be built today, and it's not dumb to try and build them in a way that is environmentally friendly instead of just throwing our hands up because it's gas so it has to be purely bad.
Poland takes ~200 million euro for 30 bcm (0.15 bcm/m euro) over ~700 km of pipeline [1]. NS2 would cost 9.5 billion while transporting 110 bcm (0.01 bcm/m euro) [2]. It would take over a decade to break even (ignoring maintenance costs or any sort of cost overrun) and the world has been moving away from fossil fuels so it'd break even at a time when nobody wants it.
[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/can-ukraine-do-without-russian-gas-tra... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#:~:text=For%20Nord....
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-germany-displeased-at-us... [2] https://iuvmpress.news/biden-ready-to-stop-nord-stream-2-if-...
Maybe not closing nuclear would have been enough.
Around 2010 they had 17 reactors, then they shut down 8. Last years they only had 6 running, now only 3.
Yeah, they needed gas alright, because nuclear seems so much worse...
Now, NPPs are of course pretty expensive, and purely from a $/kWh perspective it's pretty difficult for the large-scale-engineering kind of power plant (this extends to any kind of thermal plant) to compete with the cheaper renewables. But $/kWh is not everything - NPPs are plannable and commandable capacity (unless you're the French), renewables aren't, so their kilowatt-hours are not actually directly comparable.
Naturally natural gas especially in Germany is not primarily used for electricity generation, but largely for process heat, residential heating and as a chemical. A lot of that could be replaced by using electricity, but that'd be quite expensive, too. However, even though natgas isn't used primarily for electricity, due to merit order / economic dispatch the gas price has a hugely outsized impact on electricity prices. This, among with very high taxes and dues on electricity, is what causes world-record prices in Germany.
Let's face it, we're in this shit because of political shortsightedness, not because it was the best way to go.
For power generation, lignite and coal stayed about the same, gas increased from 20 to 30, oil stayed about the same. The only thing that went significantly down was nuclear going from 22.4 to 8.1.
It all depends on where your priorities are, and obviously getting rid of nuclear was more important than burning Russian stuff into the atmosphere.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...
Congrats on Germany for their excellent energy management and master strategic decision to get rid of their nuclear plants. Absolute legend.
Though maybe you prefer everyone die of cold until we have a solution to transition out of natural gas without returning to coal or wait 10 years to build more nuclear.