It’s not only just-in-time supply chains that made the world smaller. The environmental movement played a solid part too.
By listening to it without much critical thinking, large parts of the West shut down perfectly functional nuclear plants. The result? Europeans now pay through the nose for electricity – even in the middle of summer. Without reliable, predictable baseload power the system doesn’t just get expensive. It becomes fragile and ridiculous.
Case in point: France just had to shut down three reactors at Gravelines, one of Western Europe’s largest nuclear plants, because a massive swarm of jellyfish got sucked into the cooling system and clogged the filters. (Reactor 1 was cut to 50 percent as a precaution. One unit was already offline for maintenance. Only one reactor is running at full power.)
Since Europe runs a deeply integrated electricity market in all but name, this isn’t just a French problem. When several gigawatts suddenly disappear from the grid, Central Europe feels the shortage. France and Germany start hoovering power from the Nordic market via the interconnectors. And just like that, prices in Swedish electricity areas 3 and 4 – southern Sweden – go vertical.
Am I the only one feeling a grudging flash of gratitude toward those French jellyfish? At least they’ve given me a solid excuse to postpone the vacuuming.
What do you think – is this the energy system we deliberately chose, or just the one we sleepwalked into?
I was already grumbling about this exact problem in 2022, when the high prices and blackout risk were obvious to anyone paying attention:
Neither one nor the other feels obvious.
— from my old blog, 2022