Yet another European country is turning its back on fossil fuels – or at least talking a good game about it. Britain hopes to begin reducing its dependence on natural gas in favor of renewable sources, especially wind and solar power, around 2025, according to Bloomberg.
- Any move away from gas will be slow to begin with. It currently provides over half the UK’s energy, and National Grid national control boss Julian Leslie envisions intermittent no-gas periods of just half an hour per day around the middle of the next decade, gradually increasing over time.
- The move away from fossil fuels like gas and coal requires new technology to store and distribute energy, as renewable energy sources are far less reliable (as discovered by Germany, which famously had to increase its use of abundant but dirty lignite coal after ditching nuclear power, because renewables couldn’t provide a steady supply of energy). Possibilities here include flywheel technology and supercharged capacitors.
The timing couldn’t be more convenient for the UK, as its own natural gas production from the North Sea continues to taper off. It would also be good news for anyone worried about European dependence on Russian natural gas. But it might not be such good news for much-ballyhooed plans to increase U.S. exports of liquid natural gas (LNG) to European buyers, including the UK. In 2018 American LNG exports to the UK came to 51.3 million cubic feet – a promising start but still modest in comparison to British domestic production and imports from Norway and Russia via LNG tanker and pipelines. Maybe America got to the party just as it’s ending? On the other hand, green energy projections often have a way of turning out to be a tad, shall we say, over-optimistic (see German example above).
