Because it will cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere.

If you have 300 froblets per month being shipped to you, and suddenly you have only 200 froblets arriving and you have to spend £5 billion building a froblet factory, then you're both going to be short on froblets and high on expenses at least until the factory is built.

And yes, in the long run you'll have built the factory, will be getting a safer supply of froblets, and everything will be sunshine and roses, but while you're building it all that's an extra expense that you have to find the money for.

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RandomLensman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Investment costs money but why would investments hurt? What hurts is the loss of supply.

The money is spent on something and comes (hopefully) with a positive RoI and NPV. And you could borrow to build to reduce own capital outlay.

I don't think there was a lot of new energy production was put into place, though.

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AndrewDucker 2 hours ago | parent [-]

RoI isn't instant. If it takes you 20 years to build as much supply as you need then you're spending money over that time to try and get back to where you were.

And spending money on one thing means you don't have it for something else. Even if you're borrowing, you can borrow less for other things, unless you want to break your credit score, which would also hurt.

	▲	RandomLensman an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Your first paragraph is describing the effect of the loss of supply, not the investment. I don't think Europe was anywhere close to borrowing capacity, so plenty of scope there.