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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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This is a ridiculous stance to take, not really that far removed from 'you survived the last round, therefore you should continue to play Russian Roulette'. No less ridiculous because European governments went to unprecedented lengths to shield households from energy price increases, instead choosing to borrow money to subsidize energy imports and, when they weren't enough, putting the squeeze on heavy industry.

Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.

None of which matters - you need electricity to flow all the time. Of course electricity demand is low right now - it's 20 degrees outside and the sun doesn't set until nine pm. Renewables are nice to have to supplement the grid, but that's all they do. The fact is that the diminishing returns on building additional wind-solar capacity increase the more you have of it, because you're getting more energy on days like today (when you don't need it) and nearly nothing on days when you actually want it.

I guess this reinforces something like "seasonal industry", where you can scale your production up and down with the power price. Might take a decade to adapt to this.

The thing is that this doesn't really work that well either. Heavy industry is big on capital costs - machinery and the like. It simply doesn't make economic sense to put these machines or factories in countries that only have the energy supply to run them 50% of the time. In addition some heavy industry really doesn't like being turned off. A blast furnace, for example, basically runs 24 hours a day, and can never be turned off or allowed to cool - which would basically turn it into a vast lump of iron. Even leaving these aside, European manufacturing cannot compete if it runs at 50% capacity.