kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: nprofile1q…2kzkp It’s the same argument as we heard a lot in 2011-2022: “okay, ...

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It’s the same argument as we heard a lot in 2011-2022: “okay, maybe PV requires Russian gas but at least gas is cleaner than coal”.

How much of a fallacy that is was brutally demonstrated in 2022 when the Russian gas had to be replaced by coal and then more expensive gas from US and Norway.

But gas from Norway and US is more expensive specifically because none of these countries had a history of blackmailing EU with cutting gas supplies, which Gazprom routinely did. By sticking to the “cheaper” gas from Russia, we developed a strategic dependency (see the 2015 slide below) that had hit us hard in 2021 and I would argue it has actually enabled the Russian invasion on Ukraine .

And we’re just stepping into the same river now. Chinese PV, is cheap specifically because it’s manufactured not only in denial of all the EU values but also highly subsidised with the sole purpose of obtaining a practical monopoly in the supply chain and create a strategic dependence.

But more importantly, this supply chain also includes Chinese inverters that nobody talks about but which control the actual electricity output from any PV and can be disabled remotely, this is just asking for another “Gazprom 2021” repetition.

And PV specifically is probably the worst possible example for “replacing fossil fuels”, at least at our longitudes - in Germany, PV is the largest single source of electricity in terms of installed (potential) power, at around ~90 GW but its actual electricity output is rather miserable 14.5%