Page 58 - bne IntelliNews magazine February 2025

58 Opinion
bne February 2025
COMMENT
The EU’s Green Deal is a “policy disaster”
bne IntelliNews
Energy analyst Dr Tom O'Donnell has issued a stark critique of the European Union's Green Deal, describing it as a "policy disaster" that requires radical reform to prevent further industrial decline and to bolster energy security.
Speaking at the "Energy Security in Central & Eastern Europe" conference in Warsaw, O'Donnell highlighted significant technological shortcomings within the EU's current all-renewables energy model.
"Several of the stated key technical requirements for the model to succeed have failed," O'Donnell stated, pointing to the lack of universally applicable, long-term, grid-scale storage technology as a critical flaw.
He traced the origins of the EU's Green Deal to the German Energiewende, itself influenced by American physicist Amory Lovins' "Soft Energy Paths" concept from the 1970s.
“In 2019, Dr. Lovins, an American physicist and futurist, was decorated by the German government, recognized as the father, in effect, of the plan that has become the German national energy transition policy. He is also credited with coining the phrase “energy transition”,” Donnell said.
The initial reason for advocating this soft-energy-paths transition had very little to do with climate change. Climate change was a minor issue at the time. Rather, it had to do with how, in order to use hard energy paths, you need big industrial facilities run by big corporations. So, it was said that to undermine these corporations’ power, we have to use only renewables, says Donnell.
At that time in Germany, an anti-big business movement
had grown up against the arbitrariness of large project decisions by government and corporations, without any local consultations with citizens that was a backlash against the rapid post-war re-industrialization.
In addition, neo-Malthusian ideas, first popularized by the
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The EU’s Green Deal is based on a renewable only solution to emissions reduction and relies on technology that doesn’t exist, argues energy analyst Tom O’Donnell, an advisor to several governments in Europe. / bne IntelliNews
Club of Rome, had popularized predictions of the extinction of each mineral resource, including oil and gas, as well as another looming overpopulation crisis.
“These deep-seated concerns were the bases of what, in Germany in particular, coalesced into a new movement
for replacing so-called “hard energy paths,” fossil fuels and nuclear power, as a path to preserving the environment
and killing the economic and social dominance of large corporations,” says Donnell. “Climate change, as an issue,
as a driver of this all-renewables program, came along later.”
O'Donnell argued that, despite decades of research and development, essential technologies such as advanced grid- scale storage and smart grids have not materialised at the necessary scale.
Two core ideas of the soft energy paths were smart “mini- grids” and developing effective power storage. Mini-grids are democratic energy, set up to serve a community and run by the community. From the start it was clear the drawback with renewables is the intermittent nature of its energy – there is only power when the sun shines and the wind blows. Smart meters attached to the mini-grid would tell housewives when they can run the washing machine or a factory's machinery. Essentially, communities would sync activity to the weather.
Even then it was clear from the start that in addition is the need for grid storage of power to deal with demand that will inevitably run above renewable energy supply in peak periods of the day and to deal with what the Germans call “Dunkelflaute,” the days when the sun doesn’t shine and winds lull. Battery technology has come a long way in the last forty years, but today it can cope with an hour of poor weather conditions but it is still nowhere near being able to cope with Dunkelflaute at any kind of scale.
Other than batteries the best energy storage technology is pumped storage hydropower that currently accounts for 93% of all grid-scale storage capacity. But pumped storage is only suitable for countries with large mountainous