Europe’s Energy Crisis Is Just Getting Started

Despite successfully filling its gas storage ahead of winter this year, Europe’s energy crisis is far from over. The situation for Europe could, in fact, be worse next winter when Russian pipeline gas supply will be down to a trickle, at best.

European households and businesses have already seen a rise in total energy costs by $1.06 trillion (1 trillion euros), according to estimates by European economic think-tank Bruegel published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to Bruegel’s analysts, if governments in Europe do nothing except offer financial support, and if they cover the price increases, this sum would represent a massive 6% of the annual GDP of the EU.

“Massive government support could delay adjustment to a new price equilibrium and create the need for even more support,” Bruegel’s experts say.

Instead, the EU needs a “grand bargain” to encourage savings and increase supply at the same time.

The next 12 to 24 months will determine whether Europe will be able to cope with the energy crisis without having to resort to mandatory rationing or without losing too much industry competitiveness.

Europe’s energy systems were already put to the first real test this month amid an Arctic blast that swept through most of northwestern Europe, bringing freezing temperatures, snow in the UK, and depressing wind speeds in Germany.

Natural gas storage sites in the EU started to drain, with storage at 84% as of December 17, according to Gas Infrastructure Europe. Inventories are higher than at this time last year, but the true test for Europe will come next year when it will have to refill gas storage sites adequately enough to meet the 2023/2024 winter demand.

This is where the planning becomes trickier, depending on how low inventories will be after this winter and whether the EU has the capacity to haul in continued record volumes of LNG and continue outbidding Asia, especially if demand in China rebounds after a reopening from strict Covid curbs.

With lower gas consumption and not much Russian gas flowing via pipelines, the EU has continued to cut its dependence on Russia, from around 40% of imported gas supplies before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to less than 9%, according to EU figures from September.

However, the significant drop in Russian gas supply this year occurred only in June.

Ahead of winter 2023/2024, the gap in gas supply in Europe will be much wider without Russian gas. Europe will not be importing much Russian gas—or none at all if Russia cuts off deliveries via the one link left operational via Ukraine and via TurkStream—compared to relatively stable imports from Russia in the first half of this year before Moscow started gradually cutting volumes via Nord Stream in June and then shut down the pipeline in early September.

According to a recent report from the IEA, if Russian gas supply drops to zero and Chinese LNG demand rebounds to 2021 levels, the EU could have a gas supply-demand gap of 27 billion cubic meters in 2023.

With the plunge in Russian pipeline gas deliveries, Europe will need “huge volumes” of LNG next year, commodity trader Trafigura said earlier this month.

“Looking forward, we expect gas and LNG markets to remain volatile,” Trafigura said in its annual report for the year to September 30.

“While Europe should avoid a blackout this winter by drawing on inventories and cutting demand, it will need to import huge volumes of LNG in 2023 given the massive reduction in flows from Russia,” Trafigura said.

Natural gas prices in Europe will have to remain elevated so that the continent can continue to attract most of the LNG cargoes in competition with the other key demand centers, according to Trafigura. The commodity trader expects Europe to prioritize the security of supply “through next winter and beyond.”

Huge uncertainties with weather and the EU’s ability to compete with a potential increase in LNG demand in Asia will determine how Europe will fare next winter.

“Behind us now are two months of ‘buyer’s market’ with peak inventories, warm weather, a long queue of LNG ships, and depressed TTF prices,” commodity analysts Ole Hvalbye and Bjarne Schieldrop of SEB Bank said in early December.

“Ahead of us is the huge Q1 uncertainty and at least 12 months of ‘seller’s market’ as the race is on to fill EU nat gas inventories to a satisfying level by October 2023.”

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Europes-Energy-Crisis-Is-Just-Getting-Started.html ?

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The Cold, Windy Voyage to Alternative Energy

This column has been making the case that replacing efficient forms of reliable energy with politically favored intermittent power sources is not as easy as it looks. Some jurisdictions seeking to replace fossil fuels and/or nuclear plants with wind power may not have adequately considered the costs and benefits.

Perhaps no political class outside of California has been as hostile to cost/benefit analysis as the elected officials of Massachusetts. Now Jon Chesto reports for the Boston Globe:

In September, chief executive Pedro Azagra said Avangrid would postpone construction of Commonwealth Wind, which could eventually provide enough power for up to 750,000 homes, by pushing its completion date out to 2028, and would need to rewrite the contracts because of a sharp increase in commodity costs. With Friday’s move, Avangrid has given up on those renegotiation efforts.

Some readers may feel like they’ve been hearing about how close wind power is to commercial viability for virtually their entire lives. Regardless, this seems to be another reminder that the desires of politicians cannot change the underlying physics and economics. The Boston Globe report continues:

This move just adds to the pressure on policy makers. Offshore wind power is considered crucial for Massachusetts to meet its ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 from 1990 levels. Representatives for the Baker administration and Governor-elect Maura Healey expressed disappointment with Avangrid’s decision.

This broad spectrum of disappointment brings us to another lesson: the fact that an idea is bipartisan does not mean it will work.

Another lesson that must constantly be taught to policy makers is that every method of producing energy brings with it some kind of environmental footprint, some costs along with the alleged benefits. There is no free lunch.

Even before the team behind Commonwealth Wind acknowledged their problem with economics, some of the locals were focusing on the footprint. Heather McCarron reported last month for the Cape Cod Times:

To the residents of Osterville, Dowses Beach is perfect: A place of refuge for people, a sanctuary to a variety of wildlife and a delicate landscape that needs to be handled with extra special care. The beach, with its sweeping view of Nantucket Sound, is also perfect for offshore wind developer Avangrid Renwables... Avangrid is eyeing the beach to land three power cables – that will transmit a total of 1,200 kilowatts of electricity – from its Commonwealth Wind project, one of several commercial-scale, offshore wind projects with a lease to harness the winds south of Martha’s Vineyard.

... Meanwhile, a number of the residents are circling their wagons, worried about the impacts the project could have on Dowses Beach – an estuarine environment they think is too fragile to carry such a large project... The group pointed out that the Dowses Beach estuarine system shelters at least two species of vulnerable birds – plovers and the least tern.
As for the economics, Commonwealth is not the only wind project under scrutiny. Alex Kuffner reported last month for the Providence Journal:

Rhode Island utilities regulators are considering suspending Mayflower Wind’s application for transmission cables that would run up the Sakonnet River to the former site of the Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset after the developer raised questions about the financial viability of the first phases of the $5 billion offshore wind project it has proposed off Massachusetts.

The state Energy Facility Siting Board has ordered the company to demonstrate why the proceedings shouldn’t be stayed until the questions surrounding financing of the first 1,200 megawatts of the project are resolved.

It’s beginning to seem like replacing cheap and reliable energy production is complicated and costly. But politicians have made promises and of course not just in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The Garden State’s liberal electorate has been choosing politicians promoting allegedly green policies for years. Therefore purveyors of alternative energy might have expected nothing but warm greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

Yet down the shore many residents aren’t eager to have massive metal virtue signals rising out of the water, even if they are 15 miles offshore. Amanda Oglesby recently reported for the Asbury Park Press on local opposition, including among residents of Long Beach Island:

... Save LBI, a group that opposes offshore wind farms close to shore, said wind turbines off New Jersey would harm endangered North Atlantic right whales. Ocean surveying, installation of wind turbines and the noise created by the operations would create unacceptable levels of noise for the whales, according to a Save LBI news release issued Monday.

The population of North Atlantic right whales has declined to fewer than 350 members, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The whales are vulnerable to ocean noise pollution, vessel strikes, shifts in prey locations, and habitat degradation, according to NOAA.

In October, NOAA released a draft strategy aimed at reducing harm to North Atlantic right whales from offshore wind development, while advancing the Biden Administration’s goals of expanding ocean wind development. The draft calls for species observers and acoustic monitoring to try and build the projects quietly and avoid noisy work when endangered species are nearby.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cold-windy-voyage-to-alternative-energy-11671487811

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How Billionaires Fill the Media With Climate Fear and Panic

The popular prints are flooded with climate and weather misinformation. Net Zero, seen by increasing numbers of people as a looming disaster, is lauded to the skies. Few journalists investigate the ‘unsettled’ science behind unproven claims that humans cause most, if not all, changes in the climate. To point out that there are not enough minerals in the ground to make batteries to power humanity’s basic transportation needs, let alone store the energy required to keep us all alive in the cold when renewables go on strike, is simply not allowed.

Needless to say, as we have seen in a number of recent Daily Sceptic articles, this absurd state of affairs is partly the product of a carefully-curated public discourse targeting cash-strapped news rooms and funded by a vast supply of dark, green money.

Recently I reported that the Mirror had run a nonsense story about much of London disappearing beneath the waves within 80 years. I noted that this was not the handiwork of a crack team of investigative reporters, but rather the placed work of a U.S. green activist group called Climate Central. This operation specialises in ready-to-publish climate change material highlighting local landmarks allegedly due to disappear beneath the waves.

Similar tactics are used by another activist group spreading fear and alarm called Covering Climate Now (CC Now). This operation is run out of the Columbia Journalism Review in New York, and is backed by the Nation and the U.K. Guardian. Both operations rely heavily on large gifts from Left-leaning U.S. foundations.

CC Now was started in 2019 and claims to feed over 500 media operations with written stories and climate narratives. Its “partners” include some of the biggest names in news publishing such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse (AFP), CBS News, ABC News and MSNBC News. Leading journals are said to include Rolling Stone, Huff Post and Teen Vogue. The founders seek a “reframing” of the way journalists cover climate change. What this means in practice is amplifying an invented ‘climate emergency’ by constant story catastrophisation, while denying any inconvenient science. The political aim is the promotion of the command-and-control Net Zero agenda.

There is plenty of advice for tame journalists aiming to ramp up climate hysteria. “The fastest way to catch up is to emulate outlets that are already covering climate change well. You can’t do better than the Guardian,” CC Now suggests. But what to do about the problem that paying readers tend to disappear when fed a diet of spun political messages? “Foundations like Knight, Ford, McCormick and Emerson Collective are rightly increasing their support for local news organisations,” it adds.

Relentless catastrophising of individual weather events is the favoured weapon to spread climate fear among the wider population. Using the recent experience of the Covid pandemic, activists have been emboldened to spread panic and alarm in controllable media to achieve their wider political aims.

Despite oft-made claims, it is impossible to use models to ‘attribute’ single weather events to long term changes in the climate. CC Now skirts this obvious problem by providing a number of helpful explanations for gullible journalists to copy-and-paste. “Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but… it stacks the deck against us… it’s baked in with our weather and often a key ingredient in the outcome… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.” Journalists are told to emphasise the human impacts of extreme weather, noting that it affects “the poor, communities of colour, and indigenous groups first and foremost”.

All this sterling work, of course, deserves prizes. The 2022 CC Now Journalism Awards “honoured” writers producing the “strongest coverage of the onrushing climate emergency and its abundant solutions”. Winners are said to have come from the Guardian, AFP, Al Jazeera, PBS NewsHour and the Los Angeles Times. Journalist of the Year was Time Senior Correspondent Justin Worland. The judges singled out for particular praise an article he wrote ahead of COP26 titled, “The Energy Transition in Full Swing. It’s Not Happening Fast Enough“.

Billionaire-run foundations are spending enormous sums promoting junk alarmist science, in addition to funding on-side academic institutions and other influential bodies. Both Climate Central and CC Now are funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, while Climate Central takes support from the Grantham fund. This latter foundation is connected with the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, and also partly funds three U.K. university institutes. At the LSE, this operation provides material that supports the Net Zero initiatives.

Jeremy Grantham is a long-time promoter of Net Zero and a future based on renewables. But it is not only journalists he has in his sights. Speaking in 2019 to a group of business people in Copenhagen about the approaching apocalypse, he asked rhetorically, “What should I do, you say”? His suggestion: “You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.”

The science writer and climatologist Dr. Judith Curry has become increasingly concerned about the effect of all this propaganda on children. In a recent essay, she wrote that it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that children are being used as tools in adults’ political agenda surrounding climate change. This is having adverse impacts on the mental health of children, she warned. The apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the climate ‘crisis’ has numerous victims, she added. “Children and young adults rank among the victims of greatest concern.”

Children and young adults are being used as tools in national and international political campaigns, continued Dr. Curry. “Blaming this unfortunate situation of psychological stress on a changing climate is incorrect, and the use of the situation to achieve political goals is reprehensible behaviour that is acting to reinforce the children’s psychological injuries,” she charged.

Your correspondent’s advice: When you next see an identikit climate Armageddon story in the mainstream media, just laugh. You will be the sanest person in the room.

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/12/20/how-billionaires-fill-the-media-with-climate-fear-and-panic/

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Green Britain: Brits face forced entry to their homes by energy firms to fit prepayment meters

Energy firms are being handed the right to force their way into thousands of customer homes without justice officials knowing why the warrants are being granted, it can be revealed.

An investigation by i has discovered how magistrates are batch-processing hundreds of warrants in just minutes to allow debt agents acting on behalf of suppliers to force entry into homes to fit controversial prepayment meters.

The Ministry of Justice has now admitted it has no record of why access to homes has been sought, whether to forcibly install the meters or for other reasons.

It also said that, once inside a customer’s home, the energy firm could “exercise any other right of entry while there”.

The admission has raised further doubts about the level of oversight for warrants being issued by courts to energy firms to force entry into properties. It has also prompted accusations of a legal “wild west” leaving some of the UK’s poorest families at risk of having no gas or electricity this Christmas.

MPs have urged the Government to halt the forced installations this winter, telling the Commons in a two-hour debate they fear a “conveyor belt” of warrants is leaving vulnerable customers in the cold and dark – including terminally ill people returning home to die.

Caroline Lucas MP said: “These court warrants en masse are being carried out with disgraceful lack of due diligence and care.

“Ministers have serious questions to answer. What specific reasoning is behind each of these forced-entry warrants, why they’re being rushed through at breakneck speed without proper verification and how on earth they have been allowed to happen in the first place?

“These court warrants amount to a mass exploitation of the vulnerable and the voiceless – and they must be banned immediately.”

Simon Francis, co-ordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Campaign, said: “It is deeply concerning to hear there is confusion at the heart of Government and the courts about what these warrants are for and why they are being secured.

“The Government needs to very quickly get a grip of this legal wild west, which is spiralling out of control while companies are continuing to force the poorest people in society onto these more expensive meters.”

Industry insiders have told i the process has gone “beyond rubber stamping” as thousands of warrants are “nodded through” each week in “huge batches” of up to 700 at a time.

The College of Policing has issued new advice after some police officers doubted the validity of the “extremely sparse” warrants, which are being granted over the phone by magistrates in a digital format with “wet ink signatures” no longer required.

A new system allowing firms to request these digital warrants over the phone was introduced in 2019, with the college telling officers: “The reasoning is to allow companies to produce the warrant on a tablet or other device if needed, instead of having to possess a paper copy.

“The original digital warrant was extremely sparse and stated only the very barest essentials, leading to some officers to doubt its validity. It has now been updated.”

i told earlier this month how magistrates at one court in northern England granted 496 utility warrants in just three minutes and 51 seconds as a debt agent representing several major energy firms dialled in by telephone.

Prepayment meters are controversial because they are a more expensive way to buy energy and can leave customers facing a choice between self-disconnecting their gas and electricity or being pushed deeper in to debt.

One woman has described how her daughter awoke with cold hands and had the worst asthma attack of her life as she struggles to feed their prepayment meter to keep it going.

The Ministry of Justice told i in a Freedom of Information response in November that courts had issued nearly 500,000 entry warrants in England and Wales since July 2021 specifically to allow firms or their agents to forcibly install prepayment meters.

But in an apologetic updated response after i‘s investigation was published, it has admitted it holds no data specifically on warrants granted for the installation of the meters.

It said: “The figures provided are for warrants of entry granted on behalf of energy companies but the reason for each cannot be broken down further.

“Warrants do not record the purpose of the entry, so we do not have recorded information as to the purpose of the warrant or the purpose for which the provider wishes to enter – and in any event the provider might enter with one intention, but could exercise any other right of entry while there.”

Industry sources, however, insist that the vast bulk of all domestic forced entries are for fitting a prepayment meter.

One industry source with knowledge of the warrants system told i: “The court system is centralised. They are done in huge batches. There are hundreds if not thousands a week from different suppliers. The courts are stretched. I’m not sure there is significant scrutiny of the cases. If there are no objections, they are just nodded through.

“The worry, the big risk, is that the people in the most debt who do not engage with the process, who don’t open that letter about the court case, are usually those who are the most vulnerable.”

Another source said uncontested cases are being heard hundreds of miles from where people live, adding: “It can be four hours away. Literally, a warrant officer picks up the phone and says, ‘I’ve got some warrants’ and the magistrates say ‘OK’.

“They used to pull some out of the file and quiz the warrant officer. Now, it’s done over the phone and it’s even worse. It’s gone beyond rubber stamping. They don’t even stamp them anymore. Warrants are sent out electronically without even a signature and are not even printed out.”

Glasgow North East MP Anne McLaughlin urged the Government to halt self-disconnection for people on prepayment meters in a Commons debate she tabled on the issue last week, adding: “I am desperately worried that people are going to die - people who would have lived had this awful practice been outlawed.”

Ofgem says forced entries “should only ever be a very last resort” and “suppliers’ obligations are clear”. It is urging customers to check they are on their suppliers’ priority services register.

Energy UK, the industry trade body, says suppliers face “difficult decisions” in dealing with customers in debt and the warrants are a last resort after “exhausting all other options” and after vulnerability checks are carried out.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice said: “Energy companies are required to provide evidence on whether customers are vulnerable under oath when applying for a warrant and there are penalties for giving false information.”

https://inews.co.uk/news/prepayment-meters-energy-crisis-poverty-court-warrants-2037815

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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