Jerome à Paris

A lot of rather unusual things have been happening in the Germany power sector lately, from negative prices, to utilities closing down brand new power plants and, naturally, a ferocious debate as to whether to cut support for renewable energy (as has already been done in Spain).

The final outcome and cost of the nuclear accident at Fukushima are yet to be determined but the obituary of the nuclear industry has already been written, and one competing source of power has already been declared the absolute winner by the Serious People: natural gas. Renewables are nice, but unSerious (not “reliable,” too expensive) so we need to rely on the big boys. Coal is a bit too dirty to be pushed openly, so gas is it. Cheap, abundant, clean and quick to be ramped up. Case closed.

Or is it? Let’s take all of these arguments in turn.

The industry is rapidly becoming a major industrial sector of its own. It is rapidly transforming from an experimental sub-sector into one of the largest infrastructure building activities in Europe, with a soon-to-be-macro impact on energy geopolitics. The regulatory process drives everything. First, the economics need to make sense. Second, the permitting process needs to be understandable and stable.

I’m usually known as one of the doomers’n’gloomers on the blogs, with diaries and comments on the economy heavily leaning towards negative views. And to a large extent, I still stand by these positions and fully expect (i) the economy to dive again and (ii) an even worse financial crisis coming our way.

I’m also part of the peak oil / peak resources crowd, and do not consider our current civilisation, especially as hundreds of millions in emerging markets rush to embrace it, to be sustainable. … But, surprisingly, I also have a number of arguments to be optimistic for the medium term, i.e. that let me hope that I will not spend my late years in poverty and/or in the middle of societal collapse.

The dirty secret of wind: utilities don’t like wind not because it’s not competitive, but because it brings prices down for their existing assets, thus lowering their revenues and their profits.

I went on a visit of the port site in Zeebrugge where the foundations for the Belwind offshore wind farm (the financing of which I worked on) have been stored before their installation and wanted to give you a glimpse of the kind of logistics that entails and what kind of problems can happen (and how they are solved).