Europe has been trying to reduce its reliance on imported energy for four years now. It has had partial success, notably through demand destruction resulting from excessive prices. This month, part of Europe doubled down on that plan just as the United States grid presented an object lesson in the importance of reliable energy from all the sources that Europe wants to get rid of, and soon.
Earlier this week, nine European countries announced they would build 100 GW of offshore wind power capacity as they seek to source more of their electricity locally rather than from imported energy commodities, namely natural gas. The group, featuring the UK, Ireland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Iceland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, will jointly build large-scale wind projects, per plans, as reported by Reuters. The group will also use the power generated by the turbines jointly.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United States is going through a spell of extra-harsh winter weather that has seen part of the country boost generation from perhaps the least expected source: oil. New England generated a third of its electricity from oil as of this Monday, with some reports saying the share of the fuel in the region’s electricity mix reached 40% at one point. Wind and solar, meanwhile, contributed some 6% of the total.
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In Texas, the state grid operator began preparing for little to no wind generation before the storm hit over the weekend. ERCOT said last week it expected very little generation from Texas’ massive capacity, citing an estimated risk that frigid weather could take offline as much as 60% of that capacity, which stands at 40.6 GW. Solar is essentially non-existent in snowy weather. As a result, generators have boosted gas, nuclear, and even coal, because demand is soaring as one might expect in such weather conditions.
What the situation in the United States has shown the rest of the world is that baseload electricity capacity matters, and it matters a lot during emergency times. Baseload electricity is the minimum amount of electricity that is constantly available on the grid, not only when the weather allows. Gas, coal, nuclear, and oil—in New England and Saudi Arabia—are baseload generation sources. Wind and solar are not, even with batteries, and even with a dozen interconnectors, which is what the plan is for that massive 100 GW wind power installation in the North Sea.
The motivation behind such plans, however, is understandable. Most of Europe does not produce its own baseload generation fuels. Germany has rather abundant lignite reserves, but coal is not exactly a favored fuel in the European Union’s biggest economy, so developing these reserves is out of the question—even as Germany cranked up its remaining coal power plants in response to the winter weather that refuted predictions of snow-free, cold-free European winters in a rather decisive way this month.
