Thread by @HansWorldTravls

What should a discussion about #energy in context of #Ukraine🇺🇦, #Russia🇷🇺 and #Europe🇪🇺 be?

I can tell you; it should not be a decade's old rhetorical debate on #German 🇩🇪Nuclear Power Plants☢️ and North American 🇺🇸🇨🇦Pipelines.

A thread🧵on that here..

#RussianUkrainianWar

There is a dominant narrative on energy in Europe, more than a decade old now, that focuses critically on German nuclear power and their deployment of renewable energy and North American pipelines "hindering" Canada's ability to free Europe from Russian energy.

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They, German NPPs and 3 🇨🇦 pipes needing access to "tidewater" (the oceans), are intertwined and both are used to bolster the other's position, while diminishing any justified criticisms or discussion that they are but small cogs in the overall global energy jigsaw puzzle.

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Now with Europe's dependency on Russian energy front and center during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German NPPs and Canadian Pipeline rhetoric dominates any conversation on the European energy conundrum.

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I will call it what it is... a bunch of Armchair Energy Experts dominated by Nuclear Advocates and Pipeline Solutionists, pontificating about how a few NPPs in Germany and a few pipes in Canada and America are the linchpins to the global energy calculus.

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We do not need "energy experts" that only speak about nuclear that will drown the normal listener with nuclear sob stories and cannot see outside the perimeter fence of the nuclear plant.

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Just like we don't need to know the intimate, mind numbing details about how the entire world conspired against a single pipe, thus implicating the global energy markets being upset worldwide.

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No one is proposing that Ukraine can win this war by only talking about tanks and that tanks alone will win the war.

Tanks, like nuclear power plants, are important, but they are not the entirety of the solution or any sustainable outcome.

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The same would be true about talking about railroads in a vacuum where roads or waterways do not exist.

We need to see the overall picture, the overall system, the overall strategy.

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In warfare, we talk with generals, admirals and the like.

We put focus on logistics and overall system dynamics, and we value those that speak with expertise on logistics and strategic operations, as much if not more so than the details about range on a shell or rocket.

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And we have that in the energy sector - specifically, the electric sector.

These military-energy equivalents are the grid operators, transmission and power system engineers... who see every power plant (regardless its fuel source)...

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... as a cog in the machinery that has advantages, disadvantages, constraints on X, Y & Z and very reactive capabilities on A, B & C.

All of these are dynamic, some more than others, but all need to be considered with neutrality and without bias.

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And increasingly we (grid & PP operators and system experts) are moving from dials & levers to keep the system operating reliably, to AI/ML with digital connectivity able to perform thousands of actions simultaneously in near real time which were never conceivable before.

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So, I suggest we have THAT conversation, not the endless rhetorical discussion about whether nuclear power or specific pipelines ARE the solution[s] or has no part to play in our energy future.

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Energy systems are anything but binary, discussions that attempt to turn pipelines or NPPs into binary choices deprive the listeners and interested parties of valuable points and counterpoints for consideration.

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Let's have the conversation about how electricity, indifferent to how it is produced, can displace Russian oil and gas through technologies such as EVs, Heat Pumps (space and water heating), geothermal/heat pumps...

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... to replace European district heating systems, a significant source of NG consumption, which we don't have in North America to the extent deployed in Europe.

Ukraine, for example has DHS in 10 of its cities and they have been targeted by RU forces.

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Have the conversation about how the transmission networks need expansion against NIMBY opposition instead of entertaining opinions how X, Y & Z pipeline was stopped bc pipelines, like NPPs, are "the solution" to decouple EU's energy needs from dependence on Russian energy.

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Let's have the conversation about energy outside the bubble of German NPPs and NorAm Pipes, as reality is...

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Ukraine itself is a posterchild for a complex energy puzzle with NPPs, an advancing grid, hydroelectric power and pumped storage capacities, pipelines, ambitions for renewable energies, oil and gas resources to be developed as an alternative to Russian oil & gas, etc.

/end🧵