IEA chief: gas producers are responsible for energy crisis in Europe

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“The deliberate policies of energy producers” are to blame for soaring gas and electricity prices in Europe, the head of the International Energy Agency said at an industry event this week, in another boost against fossil fuel producers in general and Russia in particular. .

Moreover, not for the first time, Fatih Birol of the IEA insisted that Europe’s energy crisis had nothing to do with the transition to renewable energies. As before, Birol did not explain why he believed the crisis had nothing to do with the switch to renewable energies. It was “wrong,” he said, quoted by Bloomberg, to say that the price spikes were the result of this change.

Strikes against energy exporters – and Russia – have become a regular occurrence for Birol. Earlier this year, he said that Russia could send more gas to Europe and thus “underline its credentials as a reliable supplier in the European market”. By the way, in that same statement, Birol also didn’t miss the opportunity to say that renewables had nothing to do with the energy crisis.

“The recent increases in global natural gas prices are the result of multiple factors, and it is inaccurate and misleading to dismiss responsibility for the clean energy transition,” he said in October, again. once without providing any reasoning behind this statement.

This is interesting because one of the world’s largest turbine manufacturers, Denmark’s Vestas, slashed its financial performance outlook for this year earlier this month, citing persistent supply chain constraints, higher costs. high and slower wind speeds which have resulted in lower power generation from wind farms. .

Vestas wasn’t the only one either. His colleague, Turbine Major Ørsted, also warned about the 2021 financial results, also citing “additional charges [that] resulting from below average wind conditions at onshore wind farm sites in Northern and Central Europe. “

In other words, the world’s two largest wind turbine makers openly “blame” the decline in wind farm output for their annual profits, but the head of the International Energy Agency does not appear to see any connection between this drop in the production of wind farms and the energy shortage in Europe. since September.

Incidentally, ElectricMap data, which is constantly updated, showed in September that production from wind farms across Europe was indeed very low. Currently, at the time of writing this article, Germany, UK, France, Spain and Romania produce significantly more electricity from wind power than from wind power. natural gas. Why does the crisis continue then?

Solar energy production across the continent appears to be zero. Indeed, winter is not the most productive season for solar farms. There is usually a lot less sun during the winter months, and there is also the snow cover factor, which greatly compromises the efficiency factor of the solar panels. These can be cleaned, of course, but not immediately and not quickly if we are talking about large-scale solar power plants.

In other words, although the IEA’s Birol would hear nothing negative about wind and solar, they appear to be playing a role in the energy crisis hitting Europe. Indeed, reason and common sense suggest that they would do it naturally, just like natural gas, to put it very simply, the more resources you have, the better. The fewer resources you have, the worse it is. This seems like an issue that no one wants to draw attention to in renewable energy circles.

“The recent spikes in natural gas prices have not received high marks from millions of consumers around the world, including in Europe,” Birol said in a thinly veiled reference to Russia. “I am not sure that current gas prices are to the advantage of gas producers.”

Yet if current gas prices are not beneficial to “gas producers”, then Birol – and Europe – should rejoice as excessive natural gas prices would likely accelerate the build-up of power generation capacity. renewable. Oddly enough, the IEA chief seems to have missed out on this huge advantage of high gas prices, unlike Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects, who wrote in an editorial last month for the FT that we should embrace higher oil prices. high because they would motivate the acceleration of the transition to low carbon energy.

Forbes energy contributor Llewelyn King put it more bluntly. “If Russia is to blame – which at first glance appears to be the case, as Europe gets half of its natural gas from Russia – then Europeans are to blame as well,” he wrote earlier this week. “European gas buyers and their political masters are betting that Russia needs their market more than Russian gas. It was a bet and Europe lost.

One of the reasons why these buyers may have thought that Russia needed Europe more than Europe needed Russia might simply have a false sense of security stemming from the massive wind power capacity. and solar energy from the EU. After all, what were the chances of a draft? In this case, in this case, they were one hundred percent.

Now is the low season for the sun, and Europe would need every last MW of wind capacity to make up for the sluggish solar farms. It should have become clear that the EU cannot expect Russia to increase its gas supplies whenever it wants and only because it wants to. If renewables had nothing to do with the crisis, then a rapid increase in capacity should eliminate the chances of this crisis repeating itself. In addition, it would reduce the EU’s gas dependency on Russia, which is the source of so much resentment in the Union.

By Irina Slav for Oil Octobers

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