The EU Energy Crisis 2022

The energy crisis stresses me up.

Mom's taking shorter showers - she didn't shower at all yesterday, as we were at at an all-time-high on the kWh (8 SEK/hour), and I think her stress levels are carrying over a bit.

Fortunately I don't need to pay for electricity at home, but often these days I feel bad if I sit by the computer with less important tasks, cause it runs on electricity too. I feel bad if I use my cellphone unnecessarily. I feel bad if I charge my electric toothbrush - I could use the regular one instead. I feel kinda bad during my morning showers too but not so much so I don't take those showers anyway cause after the cold finale I feel GREAT. And they raise my mood and productivity for the rest of the day.

The house is a little darker than usual too.

We still have advent stars in our windows - as tradition necessities. It brings a little merriment to a season of otherwise just overall gloom, but we don't turn on ceiling lights unnecessary now.

My room's dark.

I rummaged around my desk for an old cellphone with a flashlight yesterday, instead of flicking on the light switch for just a moment.

Little things like this all have an impact, and when they say on the news that 'they don't want to cause a panic, but we really are nearing a crisis, so please save electricity when you can'... it does get in your head a bit.

Wouldn't be good if the grid fails mid-winter.

Wouldn't be good when our house is heated electrically, and the cold wind billows outside, and we're already rationing radiator usage as to lower the bill...

Practical ways to save on electricity without it impacting your life and leisure too much though:

1. Don't heat up more water than you need to. If you're making tea, just make enough for you, no need to fill the whole kettle.

2. Eat cold food, or use alternative appliances to heat said food. The stove's a major power-hog, and I assume the microwave is too. How about a sandwich? How about some salad? Maybe not for every meal, but some. It'll make a difference.

3. Don't iron your clothes with an electrical iron, don't clean the house with a hoover - try a mop, and don't get any smart appliances.

4. Don't get an electric car.

I wonder if that last item in particular might be a largely contributing and/or root cause of the mess we're in, with too many people suddenly switching over to 'green energy' even though we don't have a power grid that can handle it - motivated by bad-conscience-fueling commercials and green government incentives that only truly benefit the rich...

Things the state COULD be doing to make things better:

1. Hook up all gym-related machinery to generators, even if it's just to power the lighting within said gym said machinery is housed in.
Make something useful of all that excess exercise energy.

2. Temporarily kill the cellphone grid, or at least less used frequencies.
We don't need neither grid nor excess frequencies. Cellphone towers consume a LOT of energy - more important we can all keep warm than connect on the ethereal plane.

There'd be some health-related benefits to this too.

3. Lower fossil fuel taxes - they're ten times as high here as in say the US - and stop giving EV purchase grants until our energy issues are sorted.

4. Change the way the energy market works, and have long-term goals rather than short-term auctions where suppliers sell energy at their cheapest available bid, with a price that fluctuates on a daily basis and contributes to this financial chaos.

You'd think going by the cheapest bid would be the best way to get cheap electricity too, but unless there's a surplus of energy it's not so. Instead the energy companies are currently able to make higher profits the smaller a production margin they have - the bigger the demand for the energy they sell the more money they can make from it.

This does not benefit us, nor proper power grid expansion and architecture that'll long-term make sure we don't get in these kinds of shortage situations again.

5. If possible just stop exporting electricity entirely.

Kill the international energy market too. It causes further uncertainty and fluctuation. At the moment we're thankfully getting some extra energy via Norway, but we're still exporting to Germany too... it doesn't make sense.

How this trouble all came to be in the first place?

Our biggest nuclear reactors were shut down intentionally to make way for greener energy a few years back. Another one was taken offline just recently for generator maintenance - it'll be back 18/12. There's a Finnish reactor that was active until just recently, but is now offline until the end of February, and in France multiple reactors are down for maintenance as well. The winds aren't blowing enough for local turbines to produce energy, and there's something going on with our hydroelectric plants.

They're on ice.

Considering we need just a brief dose of sunshine to power everything in the world for a full year... why can't we get solar energy working instead?

Why rely on nuclear relics and wind turbines, that are not only a highly unstable energy source but also continually slaughter birds and insects at an alarming rate, give people insomnia and inertia and are built in the least eco-friendly materials you can think of? When they're discarded they can't be recycled, so they're just buried in gigantic landfills, and will remain there for probably hundreds of generations (not years, generations) to come.

Our current 'green' energy sources are not green at all.

Apparently NASA are working on some less explosive lithium batteries, so that's cool though. Maybe they'll help get the solar panel business expanding then. Maybe when we get our constantly impending and ongoing energy crisis sorted out we can also start focusing on hydrogen gas for cars too - which seems to be in terms of environmental impact the perfect solution - the only issue is that it requires energy to produce.

Currently said energy goes straight to batteries instead, which is more productive, but lithium production's a dirty business, so if there was a surplus on electricity the extra energy required to produce said hydrogen gas would be a better way, I say.

Just need to get a surplus.

And if we have giant electricity/gas/etc pipelines going all over the continent already - even along the bottom of the Atlantic ocean - can't we import solar energy too? Where's the weak link? Where's the shortage on that? Is storage the issue there too?

I do hope we get this shizzle sorted soon, cause I want to take looong showers, and charge multiple appliances at once without having to give a second thought as to the energy consumption thereof.

I want to get back to my simple but all-things-considered still relatively luxurious lifestyle once again.

Just need some more energy to do so.