Yes, as part of that mix we had some horribly dirty old school plants. I'm not contesting that they should be replaced per se - but the current thread is about flexibility, and the way it was done left no wiggle room whatsoever. And now we have absurdly high energy prices, Moldova is in danger of going dark, and we probably could be doing more to export power to Ukraine. All because some politicians guessed wrong, at a moment when it was already pretty clear this whole direction is dangerous. The local legislation happened, I think, only last year.
It's not a new story, politicians making bad decisions. Doesn't mean they shouldn't be called out when they do, especially when it's costing all of us. And speaking of, what they should really do now is unlock the solar power program - which on paper forces the utilities companies to buy back power, but in practice allows them to drag their feet indefinitely.
Can it burn wood? Nah. Biogas? Nope.
Do you have coal everywhere? As we found in Poland it's a scarce resource controlled mostly by a few parties and hard to store and transport in required bulk. I wonder how much of your coal is imported.
The proper replacement would be biofuels, if anything.
Do you mean, lack of capacity in the power lines to that regions?
> only cars with odd numbers which should be allowed travel during weekend
That was also the norm in Italy during the oil crisis. It was done more recently as an anti pollution measure too.
Yes, more exactly reaching full capacity for the existing power/energy transport infrastructure. Which transport infrastructure is not bad per se, and that's another big plus for the government that used to rule until about 30 years ago, but most probably it wasn't built with this new energy source in mind.
I would have dug deeper for a source of the Romanian power transport network, but taking into consideration the existing geo-political conditions most probably that information is getting more and more sensible by the day, so I'll leave that sharing to someone else.
> That was also the norm in Italy during the oil crisis.
Yeah, I had a geography atlas published in 1982 who also had maps related to the major countries' economic infrastructure, so to speak, i.e. where most of their industries were located, where were they generating their power/energy, stuff like that. Being the kid that I was, with no internet access because the late '80s and no TV program to speak of, I of course devoured it, so that I can remember from those maps that Italy and France each of them had one tidal power unit installed, France somewhere around Bretagne or Normandy, Italy somewhere on the Tyrrhenian coast, near Grosseto (I might be slightly off with the Grosetto thing, though).
So, yeah, different countries were trying all sorts of unconventional stuff back then (in the late '70s - early 80s), but I do have the feeling that the cheap energy that I don't know how exactly (maybe Eastern Europe getting rid of its entire industry after 1990?) was available again starting with the 1990s made us forget almost all of that, on an institutional level.
I personally don't think renewables will be able to fill the gap for us. For one thing, transporting all the wind-generated power from the likes of Dobruja to Western Romania and Transylvania using existing power-transport infrastructure is no easy task. Second, I don't see solar taking over, for the simple reason that the fields from Southern Romania which it would best to use for such task are of greater use to agriculture (from an economics pov, that is).
On a more general note, we, Romanians, already have past history related to this, not a successful one at that. I'm talking of the period after the 1970s oil-shock crisis and of the '80s in their entirety, when the then government was very aware of the energy problem and was also very actively trying to tackle it and, in a way, solve it. That's why the discourse that we now hear from the West is in many ways familiar to us Romanians (only numbers with odd cars which should be allowed travel during weekends, energy "rationalization" etc), i.e. because we have been in that place before them (and failed).
There are several books from that period who explain the problem in detail and which also write about possible solutions. Most of them are from Editura Politica, such as Energy in a finite world [2], published in 1983, but one of the best, imo, is this one: "Energy, whereto?" [3], published in 1978, that has a very comprehensive list of almost all of the solutions that were available back then. It's very interesting that they also talk about shale gas, and about how it's not a recommended solution because it generates mini-earthquakes (they might have also mentioned the heavy water-use as a negative, I don't remember exactly).
Of course, when the mini-earthquakes did indeed happen in the early 2010s when we try to extract shale-gas in Eastern Romania the powers that be all acted surprised, like "what could all of this have happened?". It's not like there had been actual books written about the subject 30 years prior by people who most probably were still around in one way or another. Which would bring me to one of the most important problems we know have, i.e. the lack of specialists on the subject, but this post is already getting too long.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@44.8953743,23.1365373,18333m/da...
[2] https://www.targulcartii.ro/wolf-hafele/energia-intr-o-lume-...
[3] https://www.targulcartii.ro/i-popescu/energia-incotro-scrisu...