European energy market: historic opportunity
As September comes to an end, Europeans are looking forward to the arrival of autumn and the long, harsh winter in several countries with significant drops in temperatures with a certain amount of trepidation. In Spain, at least, Teresa Ribera, Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, repeatedly guarantees that "whatever happens, Spanish families will not suffer gas or electricity cuts in their homes".
The situation is complex in the face of Putin's war in Ukraine with all the well-known collateral consequences, and here in Europe we are beginning to feel the serious effects on our pockets.
The emergency in the European Union (EU) is to find as quickly as possible a way of squaring the circle for the European energy market, which is practically dependent on gas and oil imports.
Europe has left its energy viability in external hands. This is nothing but a huge irresponsibility because it is a vulnerability that not only threatens its present and future energy security, but also, of course, puts its production plant at risk. How can it produce without the necessary electricity, gas and oil?
I don't say enough, the necessary ones that run factories, companies and industries on a daily basis. The big question is, how did the international strategists and advisors, always eager to create futuristic risk scenarios, not see such a weakness for the EU right under their noses?
Russia has finally crystallised it by launching its attack on the Achilles' heel of the Europeans, who have before them a major challenge and at the same time a clear historic opportunity. Never more so than now has the EU had the chance to reformulate its energy model.
The fractious Europe is called upon to come to terms with the energy challenge out of necessity, strategy, survival and viability. It is not merely a passing issue, nor a temporary one; the decisions must be structural in nature.
Right now, its main problem is Russia. But in one or two decades' time it could be Algeria or another African country or even the United States; its transatlantic ally has spent four years adrift from globalisation during the administration of Donald Trump, whom it is politically too soon to consider dead in the run-up to 2024.
It would be a serious mistake to move from Russian energy dependence to energy dependence with other politically unstable countries with which issues such as democracy and human rights are at stake. One cannot look down on dictatorships just for the sake of a persistent energy interest, without maintaining the coherence that the EU itself demands for such sensitive issues.
The EU paid 195 billion euros for imported oil and 63 billion euros for gas in 2021, a total of 258 billion euros. In that year, the total bill paid to Russian energy companies was 160 billion euros (gas and oil combined), a hefty sum.
We have an EU club that, year after year, on average buys 92% of the oil it needs and 84% of its gas. The present challenges must impose themselves on some countries' stale ideas about the use of nuclear energy, but the EU needs to invest more in deep-water exploration and to link Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe with pipelines.
Diversifying the energy mix will not happen the day after tomorrow because there is much to invest in order to generate a boom in wind, solar, hydrogen alternatives and biofuels, which hardly anyone is talking about and which could generate a new industry around them. Alternatives to achieve energy independence exist, what is lacking is vision, will and leaving selfishness in the wardrobe.
Spain has a historic opportunity to be at the heart of this structural change if it manages to consolidate its alliance with Germany for the gas pipeline through the Pyrenees that has caused so much suspicion in French President Emmanuel Macron, who is reluctant to the project on ecological grounds and is interested in not opening a debate on the matter in his country because he lacks a majority in Congress.
France has been a traditional supporter of nuclear energy. To date it has 56 reactors and has managed to avoid the impact of the price of electricity that, for example, is already being felt by Spanish consumers and others in Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Nor is there a broad policy of subsidies that could be promoted from Brussels to make it easier for communities to install solar panels. Some subsidies are available in dribs and drabs and the systems are still very expensive. I insist: the window of opportunity has been opened by Putin, it remains for Europe to make the most of it.