Freezing Homes and Soaring Bills - Europe’s Energy Folly | Deep Dives

Across Europe, families are cutting back on heating, dreading their next energy bill. How did we end up here?

In this episode of Deep Dives, John O’Brien speaks with energy expert James Woudhuysen about his latest report: Lights Out: Is the EU Failing on Energy Policy? They unpack how Europe’s obsession with wind and solar has left households vulnerable, while nuclear, gas, and coal are sidelined.

Are we heading for an era of permanent energy rationing? Has the EU swapped one dependency for another by outsourcing green tech to China? And is the push for ‘sustainability’ just a new form of austerity?

From spiralling costs to policymakers who seem utterly detached from reality, this discussion lays bare the failures of Europe’s energy strategy—and what must change before the situation worsens.

Read the full report here: [https://brussels.mcc.hu/publication/lights-out-is-the-eu-failing-on-energy-policy-1]

How are rising energy costs affecting you? Share your thoughts below.

Transcript

they did the usual sort of old stalinist leftwing trick that if you disagreed you were a Nazi uh and after that it all became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and a cycle and to do with it also was their hatred of human [Music] beings hello I'm John O'Brien I'm head of communications with MCC Brussel and welcome to another edition of deep Dives deep Dives the series where we take a more in-depth look at the reports produced by MCC Brussels today I'm delighted to bring to you a report called lights out is the EU failing on energy policy and I'm delighted to be joined by James woodh Housen good morning I recently visited Ireland I was visiting my father and he lives in the countryside he scared to put on the lights he is cutting um his heat during the day um because he's fearful about the next um Energy bill my brother lives in Dublin he's got two young kids a young family he goes an hour into the countryside every couple of weeks to pick up logs because he's scared to turn on his gas because he's scared of the energy bill the situation that's affecting my family in the Republic of Ireland is affecting families right across Europe how come the eu's energy policy James according to your report brought us to such a situation well that's very chastening uh we have occasional uh outages for power in the UK uh so brexit didn't protect us from that uh I think the first reason is that the you know I I tweeted a little time ago you know why can't kir starma or it could be the commission read the room and the answer is they're not in the room they're somewhere else they have no no conception no experience no traveling to your your brother or your dad and so they're unaware of these conditions the most they can must is an EU report on poverty or possibly even fuel poverty but the real life of real people is something they're totally separate from so is the EU prioritizing environmental ideology over energy security for the citizens well it would it would claim it isn't it would claim the two go together and one of the most ridiculous but uh frequent tropes of the authorities is that if you rely on the sun and in particular the wind you'll be able to get energy security uh and like all of these things it has a superficial appeal uh just as the doctrine that when you install a wind turbine all the costs are free from they're not and it doesn't seem to occur to them because they don't have a background in engineering most of them uh even if they do they'll just sort of wave it aside that if you have uh solar and wind it's not only intermittent which is widely observed but uh it's dominated by China the the the manufacturing of all of that and uh solar uh so you know you're not independent from uh the world in and the world market for energy and as a result you have lost your energy Security even on those grounds that you think where it's strongest because any country can get sun and wind most of the time so uh they miss the point about security they miss also how they talk about clean energy um uh it's hundreds of tons of steel and hundreds of tons of concrete that go into a wind turbine is that clean it's certainly not anymore than uh electric car battery is clean it's not clean so what would a more pragmatic energy policy look like well it's got to be a combination of things I'm not ruling out wind and solo I just don't want pipe dreams about them uh obviously gas is important it's relatively cheap quite a lot of the time it doesn't have to come from uh Russia to uh to use it I think nuclear PS been widely neglected and closed down except for France and it takes time to build build too much time because the regulations are ornate and Barack uh so you've got to have gas you've got to have coal uh providing you take certain measures about it uh you've got to have nuclear you should be looking forward to small modular reactors which are the machines that go into submarines you should be intensifying research on Fusion even the nuclear fusion Not Just Fishing even though that's more for the medium to long term you've got to you know master all the barrels you can can Europe balance sustainability with energy abundance it seems as though the message we get um in Europe in places like Germany is you have to consume less you have to use less is it possible to have sustainability and energy abundance well the person who first publicized and popularized sustainability was Margaret Thatcher in 1988 in a speech to the Royal Society in London I remain confused as to what it means uh a lot of the time it's just uh sustainab you put the adjective sustainable in front of everything sustainable wood logs for your relatives uh and sustainable consumption Styles and it doesn't mean they thing all it means is it's got a seal of approval from Brussels and you can bask in a sort of solar powered Halo you know about your your goodness and your moral rectitude so uh I don't think that there's any evidence to suggest that sustainability and particular the resort to green technologies cheapens energy bills on the contrary all the evidence is to show that they get more expensive that's what my dad would tell you because a lot of the um the energy increases in the bill that he's experienced is because of green tax yeah well that that that's true and it's much more labor intensive everything you have to do in the green world is about efficiency in resource utilization not in efficiency in labor utilization so you have to run around turning those lights off even though uh lights consume very little electricity you know compared with central heating for example but nevertheless you've got to build that sort of sustainable mindset into every minute of your day always wondering how you could do less consume less uh be a better scissors and so on rather than making a great work of our art or a great scientific breakthrough it's some level of energy austerity inevitable in making this sort of transition towards green I think if you ban nuclear and you are ban gas and coal pretty much uh it is there's no doubt about it you know uh these are really the 21st century uh with the exception of coal the 21st century sources of energy Supply uh you know wind turbines often called wrongly wind wind Mills but you know you're going back you're going back to feudalism back to the clerical world view uh and you know that that is uh backward philosophically backward politically and economically it's going to take you to the cleaners no doubt about it so that brings us on to a big question what role should nuclear energy play in Europe's future well it's very important for medicine something that's uh often forgotten uh it's obviously important for understanding particle physics uh because of all the things that go on in and around a reactor and all the expertise that's built up around that but energy Supply is something that it ought to be doing a lot more of uh it's no substitute for gas because gas you you want it you can get it with nuclear as you will know with the rods and all the things that go on inside a reactor it takes time to switch on and off it's not as dispatchable that's the name for it or the adjective uh as gas it's becoming more dispatchable more flexible uh but you know what is often forgotten in all of this John is that uh it's invidious to select any particular source of energy right the energy that we have in Europe as elsewhere is a system so the cables are important the grid is important uh the use if you like uh of direct current is important which suffers far fewer transmission losses so it's not just the reactor that we need we need the whole system uh to work together from a variety of sources which you and each individual Source the cost of it cannot be computed by itself right so when people say you know wind power is nine times cheaper than uh gas I have to laugh because you know what they're using is a thing just for your viewers the levelized cost of electricity lcoe that in includes land costs interest rate costs and many other things so right away you're not dealing with a price per megawatt or megawatt hour you're dealing with government policy you know and whether it connect up to anything uh the the particular source that you're using so the answer is that we need a lot more nuclear power everywhere in Europe uh not next to big cities if we can avoid it it could be floating you might have to go to the Russians uh for that I'd rather not uh it it needs a systematic approach because energy is a system and we need everything to make it happen over long distances what are the main obstacles to a nuclear Resurgence in Europe well it's regulation regulation regulation right in the UK for example we have uh maybe 20 sub Regulators looking at every installation you've got the inspectorate you've got all kind about four or five major regulators and then they got the Scots the Welsh the department for the countryside or whatever it is so you know it's jobs for the boys like so much of what happens nowadays now you do need regulation but the scale of Regulation you have at the moment is delaying things and then the greens turn around and say you know nuclear power you used to say it would be too cheap to beater uh James but actually is very expensive well it's expensive because of all planning inquiries the demonstrations uh you know the boycotts and uh the green mindset of many Regulators so and the alternatives are often so much worse we all know that Germany is reliant on lignite which one of the smelliest dirtiest uh uh sources of energy of a particular kind of coal that they used to mainly get from Czechoslovakia so you know you can say nuclear power uh brings with it nuclear waste if you actually look at the size of the waste I think all the nuclear power in Britain that's ever been used generates about seven or 11 floors of canary Warf the skyscraper in uh the city of London so are we really saying in the 21st century we can't deal with a whole large Warehouse full of 70 years of nuclear waste we can't deal with it just too much so in the Public's mindset indeed um fostered by those who are exclusively green and want to be exclusively green is fear mongering about nuclear energy um going back to Long Mile Island Chernobyl um is it the case that many people involved in nuclear tell me that there's been a revolution in the type of technology that you'd find at a nuclear plant these days that it is much safer than it was before has that translated into to the Public's understanding of nuclear today as opposed to nuclear yesterday well it hasn't translated it's three m Island you're mixing up Long Island and and Three Mile Island uh well nobody died in Three Mile Island nobody died because of nuclear power in the um Fukushima explosion but it sent Angela Merkel round the bend and if you look at uh chernobil there's no golf ball protection device around it before it exploded it was a stalinist confection uh subject to stalinist experiments and in fact green pieace thoroughly overestimated the damage caused to human beings and Flora and forer you all have seen the documentaries with the animals running around in in in what's left of chabel so the original uh history of nuclear power uh since really the 70s which is when all the green stuff really took off has always been fearmongering as you say now if you look at the advances since only the Chinese have pretty much achieved what's called a generation 4 nuclear reactor Generation 4 nuclear reactor is uh characterized by the fact that it has passive safety around it what passive safety means is if something goes wrong it does all the mechanisms to fix it it can't really go wrong you don't need any experiments thank God like they did at chernil you don't need human intervention people can be asleep at night and it will still switch itself off now as far as I'm aware last time I looked uh the Chinese have got one of those active at the moment so uh you know there's no grounds for complacency nuclear power is heavy staff and not about it uh so there needs to be a lot more progress but an enormous amount has been learned since uh the' 70s and uh you know the uh expertise is is out there one of the problems is particularly uh in Germany if they wanted to revive it and even in Britain the workforce and the expertise handson isn't there it's dying because the old nuclear Engineers are fading out they're in their 70s their 80s and so on so we have to equip a new generation of Youth not just with the Outlook that says you know we want abundant cheap plentiful 24hour 365 days a year uh electricity and nuclear is a great way to get it but we have to equip them with subatomic physics uh and everything that goes on in the nucleus has the EU truly reduced its dependence on Russian energy or is it just shifted the problem uh I I think it's done a little bit of both uh you know the Russian gas is entering the EU in considerable quality quantities it's going through India I suspect it's probably going through the Middle East uh you know there's all kinds of ways of getting round the sanctions and the boycots so the you know the overall complacency of EU Elites and particular the uh fondness that the Germans in in the upper echelons have for for Russia for historical reasons quite misguided and replaced in my view uh that continues you know it's it's Backdoor Man as the blues singers used to have it so you make the appearance of being free of Putin but in fact you're still pretty much in Haw to it when you look at the European green deal does it balance environmental go goals with economic and employment realities or do you think that the a blind spot when it comes to the EU Elites pushing a deal that could have negative consequences for the citizens of Europe well it's not a blind spot it's complete myopia right it's not that they kind of missing the full picture the whole picture is wrong and there's a very simple way of uh demonstrating this I think you know have you ever seen a green job have you ever seen thousands and thousands of of people in a factory wind turbines in Europe there's one or two you know seamons has caught a big cold on it Gesa is in some difficulty uh other Nordic manufacturers have problems and the amount of jobs created is very very modest you know that's so when it the New Deal of Roosevelt in the 30s created a lot of jobs there's no doubt about that it was a thoroughly Keynesian policy I don't like kees very much but he knew that the fact is is uh you know through the Tennessee Valley Authority and everything else thousands and thousands millions of jobs were created that's not happening in Europe you know do you know anybody have any of your friends apart from working for green NOS then they may not be your friends John but uh you know apart from uh desk jobs how much can we really say that there are even Germans you know uh installing maintaining repairing uh and taking home a nice salary with green technologies you just don't know people like that most of the time you know it is not a big job generator so the whole promise of yeah you know Green Technology is actually a source of economic growth if there no jobs there unless it's all being done by robots and robots are coming to win turbines for maintenance and so on but not in the quantities that uh you know would really make a difference to prices to growth to you and me James could you tell us what role should natural gas play in the eu's energy transition well first of all I contest the whole idea of an energy transition right that you know the this the amount of energy that is generated by renewable sources is always quoted at sort of 40 or 50% but what they're talking about is the energy throughout the electricity throughout the whole year what they don't talk about is the Dunkle flow uh periods you know when there's no wind no sun it's called Britain uh uh and you know there's no energy generated whatsoever and unless you can get it like that if you're in a hospital you're going to die so the question of dispatchability as I described it of intermittency which is the opposite of that is a life or death question mhm now natural gas is the most dispatchable energy source there's a lot of it uh just been discovered in Britain which is not part of the EU but there's plenty of it in France there's supposed to be a fair amount in Poland but they gave up uh and there's probably a lot more that we're not allowed to explore for right because to explore for it suggests that you might use it and to use it would be the end of the world well what happened James though that it you know I don't think you're against the idea of wind I don't think you're against the idea of solar but what happens that we can't have this balance where we'd use natural gas that we'd use nuclear as well as using these um new energy sources it seems to me as though coal for example that people have said that coal is over we want the end of coal but as I understand it coal is necessary for manufacturing you cannot make things without coal what happened that we became so imbalanced in our view well I think uh it's not just coal it's more gas that we need for making glass making cement making steel it's heat industrial heat well if you take the view as the European commission does and so many people do really since the 60s that we live in a consumer society and you measure GDP as it is measured uh by by cons consumption then you will take the view that the these industrial processes are not important they will be out of sight and out of mind and you'll also take the view that it's fine if China does them and as a result you know everything becomes about the household uh and its consumption and therefore uh sources of electricity and of heat that are of industrial strength tend to go out the window now the other thing about it is is that you know since the end of the Cold War uh Elite quarters needed something to orientate themselves they used to orientate against the Soviet Union against the trade unions and that for all its faults at least put their feet on the ground then they reached an era when they didn't know what was happening they were always worried that Russians would penetrate uh uh Europe with nuclear suitcases that was how mad they got and then they thought well look what can we do to inspire the youth to get our feet back on the ground to give us a platform for the future we'll save the planet uh and of course it would be wrong to deny that there weren't some nasty moments in environmentally uh then and indeed now but they then turned it into a whole religion and they did the usual sort of old stalinist leftwing trick that if you disagreed you were a Nazi uh and after that it all became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and a cycle and to do with it also was their hatred of human beings love the planet hate humanity and you know if you look at people like the fellow Dutchman like NE Fran timans his whole being radiates contempt for the masses and therefore the masses as consumers have got to put up shut up I'm in charge I know things well he's you know very ignorant and uh therefore they must low their consumption adopt the hair shirt turn the lights off and uh as Jimmy Carter said back in the 70s put on a sweater you know that this is the sweater theory of progress you're cold don't organize new energy just you know add another ler for the birds James woodhen thank you very much for coming in to talk to us today your report um lights out and people can find details of the report um in the notes below the this podcast and it's well worth a read thank you for the education you gave us today and raising some of these questions I know that people are concerned about energy want to understand it more and I think this reports help us get there this is John O'Brien signing off for MCC Brussels join us on another edition of deep Dives