Europe Looks To Wean Itself Quickly From Russian Energy

Margrethe Vestager, Vice-President of the European Commission, further urged EU citizens to take a shower sooner. “When you turn off the water, say, ‘Take it, Putin!’” He said last week, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Similar sentiments have resonated across Europe since Putin gave the green light for a military invasion of Ukraine in late February, and only intensified as evidence of Russian atrocities against civilians continues to emerge. President Vladimir Putin is chairing a meeting on agriculture via video link at the Novo-Ogaryovo State Residence outside Moscow on April 5. (Mikhail Klimentyev / SPUTNIK / AFP via Getty Images) “The Russian oil and gas market is financing war crimes,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said this week, as Lithuania, along with Latvia and Estonia, announced that it was suspending all energy imports from Russia. However, reversing the course is not an easy task, as the 27-nation EU spends about $ 300 million on Russian energy every day. The rapid crackdown on Russian pumping, which earlier this year was seen as merely a given in the EU’s energy equation, is pushing the EU bloc to try to voluntarily reduce fossil fuel purchases from Russia by two-thirds. year and gradually abolish them completely by 2030. Unlike the US, however, the EU has not yet imposed sanctions on Russia’s gas and oil sector. Either because of the prospect of future embargoes, Putin’s whims or the high demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG), potential gas shortages in Europe are now considered a crisis. This has prompted calls to speed up solar and wind power, which is key to Europe’s Green Pact, the world’s most ambitious renewable energy transition, which aims to see the EU neutral by 2050. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, entered the discussion during his visit to Berlin this week, writing on Twitter on Monday that “Spain needs to build a huge solar panel. “It could feed the whole of Europe.” The story goes on In response, Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain, where renewables provide 45% of electricity, invited the American billionaire to visit, writing on Twitter: “In Spain, we welcome investors.” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks to reporters ahead of a meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris on March 21. (Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images) Certainly, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is accelerating the push for green energy. “Let us push renewable energy at lightning speed,” recently urged Frans Timmermans, executive vice president for the Europe Green Agreement. “Putin’s war in Ukraine demonstrates the urgent need to accelerate our transition to clean energy.” Renewed enthusiasm for solar and wind energy, which already supplies more than 38% of the EU’s electricity, according to London’s Ember think tank, will not be enough to fill the potential gap left by its shutdown. which normally supplies 40% of the EU’s gas. To cover the deficit, some countries are considering extending the life of coal-fired power plants, a move Green Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030. “We will see widespread use of coal-fired power plants and we will lose our climate targets in the electricity sector in the short term, which is not great,” said Professor Johan Lilliestam, who heads Energy Transitions and the Public Policy Team at IASS. in Potsdam, Germany, told Yahoo News. However, the short-term use of coal can be offset by emissions trading schemes that limit the amount of emissions allowed, he added. So while a short-term carbon boost plants are not “beautiful,” he said, “it is also not a disaster.” The tanker Gaslog Gibraltar Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) is moored at the Grain LNG Input Terminal, operated by National Grid Plc, on the Isle of Grain near Rochester, UK, on ​​March 30. (Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg via Getty Images) The frantic EU battle over liquefied natural gas worries Brussels-based Raphael Hanoteaux, senior political adviser on gas policy at the E3G think tank. “It’s definitely good to hear the European Commission say that the fastest, easiest and most affordable way to reduce fossil fuel consumption is to speed up the Green Deal,” he told Yahoo News, creating faster solar, wind and even biogas and green hydrogen. “But the other side of the coin is the European Commission and the Member States say we will need a lot of LNG.” The EU is considering “how to reduce our dependence on Russian gas, but not on gas in general. “It means we are opening up new fossil fuel dependencies – possibly with the United States or Qatar.” In the short term, the more expensive LNG is the easiest substitute for Russian pipeline gas. “But LNG does not bring anything good or new to the table,” Hanoteaux said. “It’s almost a trap to invest in it.” Remains cautious about building expensive new infrastructure for LNG, which cools to minus 260 degrees F. for easy transport and requires special vessels, ports and terminals to “refill” the liquid to its original state. Some EU countries, including Germany, do not have LNG ports and are now planning to build them quickly. An abandoned idea for a gas pipeline to France from Spain, which has the most LNG ports in Europe, is back on the table, Hanoteaux said. There is also talk of modernizing existing pipelines commonly used to pump gas from Germany to France so that they can reverse flows from France to Germany. The EU is also considering purchasing its own LNG vessels to transport condensed gas. This solution runs the risk that as soon as billions of dollars are invested in LNG infrastructure, the tendency to “lock in the economy” will prevail, cultivating either dependence on gas for much longer than necessary or leaving a range of very expensive ones. “Latent assets”. Ships are sailing in the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands before the tanks in February this year. (Federico Gambarini / Picture Alliance via Getty Images) “If we do not have Russian gas tomorrow, we will need LNG,” Hanoteaux said. “It can bring relief in the very short term. But the question we have is [how LNG affects] the Green Agreement and the most interesting question is what should we do in the medium term. “ Entitled “EU Can Stop Russian Gas Imports by 2025”, a report published in March by E3G and energy think tanks Ember, Bellona Europa and RAP states that “accelerating the development of electricity from renewable sources” [from wind and solar]energy efficiency and electricity “, Europe could end the Russian energy habit much faster than expected, without new gas infrastructure or extension of the use of coal-fired power plants. “In three to five years, clean energy solutions are able to deliver at a cheaper price and on a more affordable long-term basis than any other strategy,” Hanoteaux said of the report. “This whole episode quickly showed that gas is a real vulnerability,” Thorfinn Stainforth, an energy analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy, told Yahoo News. “In the long run, it has taught us that fossil fuels are vulnerable because you depend on whoever imports them.” The war in Ukraine, he added, also raises security questions about nuclear energy. “Nuclear power plants are so concentrated that they can be occupied by your enemy,” as in the case of Chernobyl and Enerchodar, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, which caught fire last month after being bombed by the Russians. “A distributed network of renewable energy sources is more difficult to capture,” he said. However, both France and the United Kingdom are revealing plans to strengthen their nuclear fleet. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has boasted that the UK could have seven new plants by 2050. The Enagás liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at Zona Franca in Barcelona, ​​Spain, March 29. (Albert Gea / Reuters) The abrupt cessation of Russian energy, which has sparked a frantic search for substitutes, has had a positive effect, Roland Freudenstein, vice president of the GLOBSEC think tank in Brussels, told Yahoo News. “First of all, we will have to reduce private energy consumption, which it is [environmentalists] “they have been preaching for decades,” he said. “In the long run, the crisis is good news for the Green Agreement, because it means that we need to focus more intensively and faster on renewable energy sources than we planned. “In the short term, it’s bad, because we’ll probably need to use more energy from minerals than we expected and planned.” “The climate crisis and the gas crisis have the same long-term solutions,” Lilliestam said. That is, renewable energy and efficiency. But we must make sure that they are also synergistic along the way, that policies respond to each individual crisis, do not stand in the way of each other as we build the new system – and that is a problem I can “Beyond that, he said, Europe needs to insulate homes, install heat pumps and modernize its transport system.” We need electric vehicles, we need trains, buses, we need bike lanes, we need windmills. We need batteries. “European cooperation in the electricity market. These are all solutions to both crises.” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis on the podium, accompanied by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, left at a press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in …