Tag Archives: Green energy

Our TRT-London: Europe is playing dice with gas storage ] Renewable over-installation is wrecking EU energy security

First video is the entire show. Second video has only my comments.

I just watched our show from about two weeks ago and, I must say, it is quite informative, both in the near term European gas sector risk analysis, and in our discussion of the long term persistent failures of European energy policy to change course from still-increasing, heavy renewables dependencies and the high prices and weather dependency, unreliability and high complexity over dependence on renewables continues to cause. This “green” and “clean” policy fixation not only fails on national and energy security, but also has done far too little to address long term carbon dioxide emissions in comparison to what a nuclear-centric energy policy can do, as France has amply demonstrated over the past 50 years.

My fellow experts and our Roundtable TRT World London host were:

  • Malcolm Grimston, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Center for Energy Policy and Technology, Imperial College, who was in London.
  • Chris Wefer, Founding-Partner, Macro Advisory, Eurasia Strategic Consultancy, who was in Moscow
  • myself: Dr. Thomas W. O’Donnell, Energy and Geopolitical Strategist, Founder GlobalBarrel.com, who was in Berlin
  • And Edna Brady, TRT-London host

My Al Qahera, Cairo: Germany’s VW auto crisis, Green Energy Errors & Deindustrialization (English/Arabic)

English audio here. Arabic video is below.
Arabic video here. English video is above.

Al Qahera, news TV in Cairo, asked me questions on Germany’s VW crisis. VW announced yesterday it will close at least two facilities and move to break the long-term agreement with its workers’ union for no layoffs till 2029. This is serious in that 1) VW, since its founding in 1937, has never shut any plants, and 2) it’s not just VW. and it’s not just the German auto sector.


I told Al Qahera that the same story can be told about Germany’s steel industry (i.e., Thyssen-Krupp), or its chemical industry (i.e., BASF).


German energy intensive industries are facing not merely the creeping uncompetitiveness long decried in the country, but outright deindustrialization.


I described to Al Qahera how this decline of German industry reminds me of USA deindustrialization (the “rust belt” collapse) during my years working in the USA auto industry in the mid-1970’s to early 1980’s (both at Chrysler and Ford, in Detroit) and USA Railways (I worked on the Michigan Central when it was consolidated with other railways, by the federal government, to form Conrail). I remarked how it took the USA some 15 or more years to restructure and again become a modern, digitalized manufacturer. There is no guarantee Germany could pull this restructuring off, and there was no guarantee the USA would either, but that was a special case of a mammoth economy,

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