Stock vs flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_and_flow

Solar panels and batteries are a stock. Oil is a flow. This leads to a very different dependency situation.

If you're concerned about energy sovereignty, just buy more solar panels now. If you're still concerned, buy even more. Keep buying them until you're not concerned anymore.

Yes, scare mongering for panels and batteries which last 25 - 50 years or forever with zero input fuel needed after the install. Yay to fossil fuels which are needed continuously, billions of tons per year.

Nobody can prevent your country/region from developing own solar or battery supply chains. Alternatively, buy from other countries that are not China for a little bit more.

> resulted out of depending on an adversary

being from a 3rd world country and having lived in Europe & the US.

you quickly learn there's nothing called an adversary when adopting technology.

you adopt what works - ruminating about where something comes from, is a luxury.

then after you can either work towards self-sufficiency or keep being vulnerable.

Europe has been kept in this loop of talking about problems while not solving them.

the US - knowin' about the problems, but actively ignoring them due to politics.

Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.

In a snap of a finger, Big C will absolutely cut your fingers off and the technology you love off in order to fuel its imperialistic whims. Anything bordering the South China Sea is in their mind, already theirs, you know because of ancient empires or something.

I'm happy the OP was able to take advantage of the current prices, cheap technology, and the amicable perfidious relationship. I would avoid anything internet-connected for good reason, and of course, burying anything in our infrastructure.

> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.

How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.

You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.

This really seems like straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Sure, it's great to be independent when you can, but of all the groups you depend on, and all the ways you depend on them, this doesn't rank high!

This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.

Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.

Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.

This is _completely_ different.

If Russia stops gas deliveries you are immediately without energy.

If China stops exporting your PV and battery while just continue to work for 20 years.

it would be pretty straightforward to match up panels from any source to controllers free m local national sources

What exactly can China do after you buy their solar panels and batteries? Tell you that you should stop using them to turn sun into electricity and batteries to store them?

By all means, it would be great if EU countries ramp up their own production of batteries and solar panels. But this is worlds apart of depending on fuel from Russia.

How about you focus on increasing your own cheap production first instead of focusing on whether depency is problematic?

Dependency is only problematic if you lack an alternative, and nobody is developing alternatives.

My gawd, lots of people in Netherlands want to contribute to the green ecosystem but govt can't even get permitting straight and everything is gridlocked. The electric grid is full and new houses and companies can't be connected to the grid, wnd if you want to install a heat pump or an AC then there are thousands of rules and anybody else in the neighborhood can block you for the slightest thing.

Less talking and more doing. The Chinese at least are all do and almost no talk.

sodium, unlike oil, is availible everywhere, along with silicone/sand which ,thanks to China for showing the way!,can be bootstrapped into a fully fosil fuelless grid. lets be clear, this is not like setting up a city on mars, this is in the determined hobbiest in there garage level tech so buy from China TODAY, heck, they will even sell you a turn key factory to build your own stuff!, also, TODAY!

The fearmongering around China is truly wild.

If you buy a solar panel, it produces power for the next 20-50 years. It doesn't require constant flow from China. If China suddenly decides to stop buying solar panels (why would they?) then what? Nothing. Your solar panels still produce power.

It's particularly bizarre when the alternative is supply lines to countries like Russia and the GCC countries. Russia tried to use Europe's natural gas dependency to invade Ukraine. That's still ongoing.

And what has China done that warrants a similar kind of fear? Absolutely nothing other than the US has declared China an enemy for some reason.

All Europe has to do is let young people become billionaires with limited liability and an unencumbered team selection.

I know it sounds like satire, but there is a good reason tech exploded in the US 30 years ago while Europe is still making cars like it's the 1960's.

Mine can go until -25c they say: https://www.nibe.eu/en-eu/products/heat-pumps/air-water-heat...

We don't ever get those temps so I should be fine.

My biggest issue is not cold but mist. I live near a river in a valley and have underestimated how much mist hurts performance around ~1c outside.

It needs to defrost often, because of the high moisture content in the outside air where I live.

But it also has a normal, resistive heating 9kW backup. But for financial reasons this is considered 'emergency only'.

Keep in mind that heat pumps have a limit how much they can pump (it also depends on temp., there is less heat in 35F air). If your house is not well insulated, at a lower temperature it would be loosing more energy and eventually it would reach the threshold where it's performance is not enough to keep up.

That depends on the refrigerant, the new Mitsubishis are effective at that and lower temperatures.

We got a heat pump in BC Canada, it’s rated down to -30C.

We also got solar, our entire power bill (all heating, cooking, lights, computers, etc) is $500 for the year. Best decision ever.

And it's so much easier to clean too. And, when you're not cooking it's flat so you can just use as counter space.

And then there's the flammable gas in your house. I had it for 20 years, it works fine when installed properly but the risk is never 0.

It's this one: https://balansenergie.nl/

They're a startup trying to get to the minimum amount of MWh to become a 'virtual power plant'.

It seems it's 48kwh, apologies. And it seems the cheapest batch is already sold out: it's now €6500.

Exactly. And it wasn't a secret either. He shouted 'drill baby drill' at any opportunity.

And then the Americans elected him in a landslide.

They gave up.

AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.

Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.

You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.

Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.

That used to be true, but things have really settled down. Notice the lack of rushing to start more fracking or refining projects during this crisis.

Typical commodity cycle...most commodities work like this

The US president will be gone and the Republicans will have to replace him. I dont know if Vance is up to the task of being "The New Trump."

Our dependence on China for cars is even scarier.

India has huge surplus capcity of solar panels. Sadly Trump put 100-200% tariffs on Indian solar panels. Its very easy and cheap to produce these outside China.

wonder when they’re gonna remove the dictator of Texas. that would be a win for everyone, hoorah!

We can thank the big oil and western governments for that. For years they have been working against stable democratic governments in these places, because it's easier to get cheap resources from corrupt governments than from stable democratic governments with functioning legal systems and limited corruption. It's something we can see all over the world, pretty much all resource rich countries in the world have been destabilised systematically.

It's because the peaceful places where they're also found don't make the news.

This is 'survivor' bias, I think. Or some other fallacy.

Oil is found in a lot of regions but the non-violent ones were obviously exploited first. They are now just emptied out, like the North Sea in Europe.

Did horses need to be banned for them to become irrelevant? The next car I buy voluntarily won't be ICE.

Heating is slower to change, but new homes and buildings could come with solar walls and ceilings.

> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period

Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.

Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)

[1] https://www.loriferber.com/amp/research/presidential-facts-s...

He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?

Doesn’t the term “fuel” imply they are burnt? Genuine question, I’m not native speaker

This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.

You won't find it in the mainstream press. This administration is about "pivoting to China" (i.e., controlling China more). Elbridge Colby, who is a main China hawk, is undersecretary of defense now.

Here is a write-up on the China part:

https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/iran-strike...

For broader geopolitical chess games the "Path to Persia" and "Extending Russia" papers are all time favorites.

The EU part isn't that explicit. It is a mixture of the US wanting to take the Greenland Arctic Sea route, sabotaging energy deliveries from Russia and making the EU dependent on US LNG. Now the EU is even more dependent on the US and there is no sign that the US wants Hormuz open. It is stalling, in my opinion deliberately.

It's clear the net effect is a subsidy to the North American hydrocarbon sector at the expense of Europe and China and India. Oil prices were falling, now they're not. Places like Alberta were going to run a deficit because oil prices were low. Now they're not. People were buying from the middle east. Now they're less-so.

Stated goals and whether this was accidental is a whole other question.

I'm not sure why people as a whole don't seem to have absorbed the fact that North America is an energy exporting economy now, not a net importer.

The question is whether North American consumers really like that they're paying so much more at the pump (and, shortly, for food prices) on account of oil executives making off like bandits.

maybe the all died of windmill cancer

I never said HC economy is not without externality. However I do believe forcing HC substitutes before nature (depletion) forces them may be a net utility loss. The evidence is very thin a little sea level rise and a little temperature rise is worse for humanity in net than losing tecnological society.