EU is going to have to either

- embrace nuclear

- embrace North Africa, admitting them as member states, and doing massive solar there, and doing massive grid expansion to carry it north. And then in top of that, will their way to sufficient storage like the rest of us.

We'll see what they choose :D

Why do you say "embrace nuclear" when the EU has substantial existing and planned nuclear plants? (Current gen is something like 24% nuclear in EU, 20% in wider Europe, 18% USA, 4.4% China)

And anyway, alongside that world leading nuclear already in existence why wouldn't they just install lots of cheap solar and wind, and heat pumps and EVs and reduce their imports of energy from their current high levels (about .6 Trillion euros in 2022, down to .35 in 2024 though that seems mostly a change in price, volume has declined only slightly)

EU does have trouble with solar seasonality, but wind is seasonally anti-correlated with solar, and the geospatial correlation between different wind turbines drops off more than linearly with distance, and the EU covers a very large land mass as-is. You can also over-build solar inside Europe to have reasonable collection during winter.

I also see no reason to admit North African states into the EU before an agreement can be reached about transporting solar. The geopolitical risks have always been about other states severing the link during a conflict with you, and less about the parties to the deal reneging. So whether Morocco or Algeria is part of the EU is quite immaterial to the risk profile.

This kind of thing really does need simulation modelling to be reasoned about properly. The one thing I am confident in saying is that these single sentence just-so stories about what is and isn't a good idea are going to be wrong, because the fundamental principle is statistical diversification, which needs to be approached through simulation rather than through words.

The EU has plenty of solar and wind resources.

Conquering North Africa should be easier.