There are no blackouts in Europe. There's no energy shortage. This is not Texas. There's a cost problem, however. With gas specifically. And that reflects in th

There are no blackouts in Europe. There's no energy shortage. This is not Texas. There's a cost problem, however. With gas specifically. And that reflects in the electricity prices currently because there are quite a few gas plants. Until recently, nuclear was the undisputed king of cost. There was nothing more expensive in the market. And that's before you count the cost of long term storage, security, and decades of government subsidies. I guess, for this year it might look quite alright compared to gas. But that is probably a temporary effect before it goes back to its undisputed status as being the most costly thing in the market. Replacing an expensive thing with an even more expensive thing is not a solution to reducing cost. It doesn't make sense. Europe needs cheap power, not expensive power. And it's getting plenty of that from renewables. It's far ahead of most other places in the world in terms of deploying wind and other renewables. The nuclear phase down in Germany is actually happening without any disruptions to energy supply. The grid seems plenty resilient (again, rolling blackouts are not a thing here). Also, there's a healthy growth of other capacity and it's a very competitive market with lots of innovative companies making lots of money. Nuclear was always a relatively minor part of the energy economy in Germany. We're talking about some 20GW of capacity in total of which some 8(?) GW remains which is on track to disappear later this year. Compared to the new capacity that has been added in (mainly) wind and solar form since the nuclear phase out started 12 years ago that is nothing. About 3x the amount of nuclear capacity Germany ever had was added in wind energy alone since then. Probably in the next few years more will come online than Germany ever had in nuclear capacity. People probably have more solar on their roofs than ever existed in nuclear capacity. That was growing at a pace of almost 0.5GW per month last summer apparently. The reasons electricity prices are high is because the EU is overly dependent on natural gas, which until recently was vastly cheaper than nuclear (and coal plants). The current geo-political situation with particularly Russia is disrupting oil and gas prices. Not because there is a shortage but because Russia is trying to pressurize the EU to do what it wants. The cheapest solution to that is diplomacy. And given that apparently gas prices dropped 11% or so after Russia kindly started providing gas through Ukranian pipelines again, that seems to be working. The likely long term effect will be an acceleration of replacing gas with other things. That was already happening anyway. Higher prices will make it happen faster.