This is a continuation of my remarks in Warsaw, on 18 November. Part 1, which posted on 19 December, reviewed failures to develop critical tech elements required by the EU Green Deal, a program modeled on the German Energiewende. I argued that, after decades of R&D efforts, these technology failures indicate the systemic failure of heavily renewable models, pointing to a need for “radical reform” of the Green Deal. I advocated for the historically proven Messmer model, which succeeded, some 40 years ago, in decarbonizing French electrical generation using nuclear power, without any need for new grids or long-term grid-scale storage tech.
Below, Part 2 (edited for clarity) focuses on the political intransigence of the new Von der Leyen commission, which is doubling down on the Green Deal’s renewable model. I argue this is not “reindustrializing” Europe or making it “more competitive” as claimed, but rather driving it into deindustrialization. This mirrors the process underway in Germany via its continuing push for new “green tech,” on the theory this should spark a broad new European industrial competitiveness. From an historical perspective, this is theoretical and practical nonsense – or so I argue. Critiques are welcomed. (PS, Happy holidays!)
Leon (moderator): So, I’m going to turn to Thomas again. You argued that that some form of radical overhaul is necessary, you know, with regards to the EU Green Deal, if I understand it correctly, and you’ve cited one of the issues is the complexity of the fact that there are certain technologies that haven’t emerged over the last 30 years that have just been growing incrementally rather than rapidly to meet our needs. But at the same time there’s seems to be some sort of political rationale for why this sort of revolutionary approach. How would you respond to that?
Tom: Yes, politically, I do think the new Commission presents a big problem for European competitiveness, for energy policy and security.
The new commission is anti-energy-policy reform
Firstly this is because Ms. Teresa Ribera, from Spain, is President Von der Leyen’s new chief executive vice-president. She is in charge of attaining both the Green Deal and has also been given responsibility for “industrialization of Europe,” for making it competitive again.
The problem is, Ms. Ribera is a true believer in all-renewable energy systems, I would say a career-long renewable fundamentalist.
For example, she’s said to be so good at negotiating that she managed to get the Spanish nuclear industry and civil society to agree on a timetable to close all the Spanish nuclear power plants, and she’s very proud of this. This is politically and ideologically identical to what Mr. Robert Habeck, the German Green Party leader, who is energy and economics minister, carried out with the approval of Chancellor Scholz of the SPD-party. Habeck closed Germany’s last three nuclear power plants during a wartime, Russian-instigated, European energy crisis.
The fact that Von der Leyen fought hard to appoint Ribera and then put her in charge of the Green Deal and of European industrialization, and made her the most powerful commissioner, the executive vice president of the commission, shows that Von der Leyen, a member of the German conservatives, the CDU, has no interest in reform of the renewables model despite its suffering technological failures on several key aspects.
The problem is not that Europe has not had an industrial policy. Europe has had an industrial policy, one that has failed
Now, there is a lot of talk here that Europe needs an industrial policy. However, even back during the Junker administration Europe had an industrial policy, an industrial strategy, and it continues today with Von der Leyen and Ribera. It is that renewable energy, the green transition, will spark a European-based “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Do you remember this? Futurists were invited to come talk to the Junker commission about this plan. First it was popular in Berlin, driven by the Greens and then the Commission took up this techno-optimism.
This assertion was simply wrong. I taught seminars repeatedly, since the early 2000’s, in the US and Germany, critiquing these ideas about energy-transitions supposedly sparking industrial revolutions. Historically, this is not how industrial revolutions have taken place.
[Aside: To see what I am talking about, see this post. Video overview of my class: Energizing Europe. A critique of the German energy-transition model from September 5, 2021, recorded in Fall, 2020 during lockdown giving an overview of my course for prospective students. I’ve taught this course twice per year since 2016. This is a longish video, here. — I also taught a seminar at U. Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA) from about 2002 till 2008 on the history of technological change and industrial revolutions, and others on tech evolution of the Information Revolution]
The Green Deal model is driving EU deindustrialization
Is there anybody who still dares to promise, given Germany’s present energy-sector dysfunction and deindustrialization process, that the Energiewende will spark a European 4th Industrial Revolution? Of course not. Not if it is asked in this manner.
However, you absolutely will find, regularly, Ms. Von der Leyen proudly tasking Ms. Ribera with pushing forward Europe’s industrial revival on the basis of pushing to win the global competition for so-called “green tech” – which she now carefully calls “clean tech.” Von der Leyen, Ribera, and the commission generally, clearly say that innovation in Green tech is the road to regaining EU competitiveness. But this model of over-dependence on renewables is ill-conceived and is failing. The EU has lost the fight for leading innovation and development in green tech, and even if it had won, it would not have significantly returned Europe to competitiveness, much less sparked a new EU-centered 4th Industrial Revolution.
But, Von der Leyen’s administration has no new ideas on this, and is instead simply changing names of things from “green” to “clean” and doubling down on the technologically failed Green Deal Model, based on the German Energiewende Model.
Europe’s misguided lack of basic research
Notice, in Europe, you haven’t focused research work on quantum devices, or on developing AI. You don’t have 14 national laboratories like the Department of Energy in the United States, doing basic research and applied research on every conceivable topic you can imagine, covering all bases.
You don’t have an EU-wide, at-scale cyber security research center, an applied and basic mathematical research institute or an informatics and communications research center anything like the big European center at CERN for experimental and theoretical physics. You should have10 to 14 of these CERN facilities, huge EU-supported joint laboratories for different fields of basic research and technologies. With this sort of basic research ecosystem you could compete. But, that is not EU strategy. EU strategy, as Ribera and Von der Leyen repeatedly remind us, is to use green tech development to regain EU competitiveness. But, that battle for Green tech supremacy has already been lost. You know the story vis-à-vis both the USA and especially China, and anyway it would not have sparked any industrial revolution. Notice that it is winning money and influence for China, but it is not sparking any industrial revolution there.
And so, there was, and still is, a wrong theory, a flawed model, and it is now contributing to the deindustrialization of Europe, to its competitive failures. The plan was authored by Green populists, by people that believed that swapping the energy system to a renewables-only one would spark a 4th Industrial Revolution, and oh, by the way, destroy the various large European energy and heavy industry firms they despised. (Aside: I am not of course saying that these corporation were saints, that’s not my point here.)
So, these ideological and policy programs, the Green Deal and Fit for 55, have to be changed from the root. Europe has to go back and be honest with itself and critique these concepts. You also have to look at what the French did under Messmer and his model some 40 years ago. There is no lack of required nuclear tech. In fact, there are new, Generation 3+, large-scale nuclear reactor designs that, after huge efforts to build the first several of their kind, have now been successfully built. And, after strenuous efforts and learning from failures, the cost is dropping as it is iterated. The Americans, the South Koreans, and of course the Chinese and the Russians too, all have this tech capacity today, to varying degrees, ready to be rapidly scaled up.
Leon: Thomas. I’m going to press you on a solution in the next round.
Leon: … Thank you, Sam. I’m going to pick up on one particular point there because you’re sitting next to Tom. I know he’s burning to talk about nuclear energy . He’s been an advocate of it for many years and recently. Several of the leading tech companies in the US, particularly the ones focusing on AI, you know, have been promoting the idea that some of their data centers now require more energy than small cities. So we’re seeing this massive revolution in AI and a growing need for more energy while at the same time facing all these other crises. So, I would be keen to hear from you as someone who’s been advocating for nuclear energy. How do you see it in the context of Central and Eastern Europe and this discussion?
Thomas: Yes, there’s a lot there. So, the current path you’re on, the Green New Deal and Fit for 55, and now a new, accelerated goal or “ambition” as the commission calls it, is very problematic.
90% carbon neutrality by 2040 is now fantasy
I had an interview in the Polish press, I called it “fantasy,” the idea that you’re going to have, under this same model, what is it, 90% carbon neutrality by 2040?
If you continue on such a path, there will be a deindustrialization of Europe. There’s Germany’s deindustrialization already, a process which mainstream economic institutes there are warning about, it’s already on a roll. This presents an acute economic and national security threat for Europe. The German industrial decline – we as yet do not know how far it may go – will pull everybody else down, especially their CEE and Baltic neighbors. Bloomberg already analyzes it this way, saying that no matter what smart decisions you make, here in Poland and in the CEE region, it’s going to be very difficult. Germany is your number one market, and it is just so large an economy. You can develop your internal markets more to compensate, and this is what has lately happened, but this is limited as the German economy is the size of your entire region.
So, one thing I can say for sure, I think you have to strenuously avoid Germany’s national-energy-model mistakes, its energy-transition model that has achieved hegemony in Brussels as the Green Deal, you have to resist it just exactly like you resisted going along with its Nord Stream pipeline dependence on Russian gas as the regional energy-security plan Berlin had insisted upon.
One cannot be “ecumenical” about energy models
The EU needs a plan where you have a massive amount of nuclear energy, as the former prime minister said kicking off this conference. Poland and the 3 Seas Region need a Messmer plan. It’s the old French model, and it worked.
However, you can’t be “ecumenical” about models. You can’t say “we’ll do both.”
You’ve already have developed supply networks, supply chains, the capacities of ports, the capacities of many firms and of ministries are taken up by huge projects to install renewables offshore, to install them onshore, to rebuild all the grids, to try all sorts of ideas for massive storage to back it all up. And now, if you want to start a nuclear industry which takes a whole additional supply chain, training, finance, state capacities, and so on, this will not work in parallel. A dual path, going all out for renewables and going all out for a nuclear supply chain and construction program, one simply cannot have such a dual capacity, at least not efficiently. One has to have strategic focus.
Pragmatic balance
So, I think Poland and the 3 Seas Region need a plan that’s massive nuclear, like 80% of the grid capacity, plus 20% of renewables backed up by short term batteries if feasible and longer term by natural gas or whatever can be cobbled together to do that, but definitely not renewables at a percentage-level where the grids need to be massively rebuilt and, in the end, an entire parallel natural gas system, always standing at the ready, is required as the backup.
Leon: Thomas, I’m going to kind of close this off for the last question very briefly. How do you think the European new deal could be restructured to better address the concerns of businesses?
(other speakers …)
Leon: Thank you. Thank you. And I do apologize, but it looks like we’ve run out of time. But if you do have more questions, our panelists will be here. So, feel free to come harass them. It’s been a tricky panel because they all come from different backgrounds. But I think you’ve all done a stellar job. Thank you so much for engaging our audience today. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.
Tom: Thank you for the wonderful moderation by Leon.
The Global Barrel 