OPINION | JEREMY GORDON
Jeremy Gordon is an independent communication consultant with 15 years of experience in the international energy industry. His company Fluent in Energy supports partners of all kinds to communicate matters of clean energy and sustainable development.
Coming to a head
Jeremy Gordon says that rising gas prices show that Europe can’t afford to do without nuclear
THE UNIT: Illustration copyright Alexy Kovynev In October, as Europe tried to cope with energy prices
surging by a factor of four or more in the space of a year, market analysts predicted the price spike would continue until there was ‘demand destruction’, ie. when people and businesses simply cannot afford to buy gas anymore. Unfortunately for all of us that means the deep economic damage and unpredictable side-effects of factories shutting down, while those that accept higher costs will inevitably pass them on, causing inflation. It’s all a very stark contrast from the promises of
Prime Minister: “I am cancelling my decision to ban the moratorium on the extension of the nuclear phaseout. In short, we are building a nuclear power plant again!”
LTHOUGH I PROBABLY COULD HAVE written a column like this at any time, it feels truer than ever to say that energy issues are coming to a head. Nothing highlights ‘energy security’ more than a price shock, and Europe is doing some serious reckoning right
now. Is this finally the moment that policymakers will be emboldened to get fully behind nuclear?
12 | November 2021 |
www.neimagazine.com
renewable energy so affordable that, if not exactly ‘too cheap to meter’, was promoted as ‘the cheapest and only getting cheaper’. Cheap, that is, until it comes to the gas that partners it. Although we didn’t hear the renewable industry or its advocates saying it, they didn’t push back very hard when the likes of Norway’s StatOil marketed their natural gas as ‘the perfect partner for renewables’. To be clear, I am not anti-renewables and this is not an
anti-renewable message. The gas supply situation is not the fault of wind and solar. According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), renewables in the European Union generated about 25% of the bloc’s electricity, and saved it €14 billion in gas costs, between July and September 2021. However, we must acknowledge that what really matters is not the cost of individual energy sources, but the price of the delivered electricity. At the moment that is unacceptably high. The only way to really control these costs and the energy security risks they bring is to decisively get off fossil fuels, something that is not feasible right now if we use only renewables.
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