Three years have passed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine upended the assumptions on which European energy policy had rested for a generation.
The acute crisis phase in the winter of 2022–23 when governments feared genuine gas shortages is behind us. The chronic phase, characterised by structurally higher energy costs is very much ongoing.
European industrial electricity prices remain roughly double those in the United States. For energy-intensive industries this is not a temporary inconvenience but an existential competitive challenge.
Chemicals, fertiliser, and just-about-everything-else-that-needs-energy-to-produce giant BASF’s ongoing pivot of investment toward the US Gulf Coast and China is a direct consequence of these high energy prices. So is the gradual hollowing-out of European heavy industry that underlies Germany’s persistent stagnation.
The policy response has been inadequate. Accelerating renewable deployment helps at the margin, but intermittency means renewables alone cannot provide the reliable, affordable baseload energy that industry requires.
The ideological resistance to any form of energy that would provide such reliability remains an obstacle of the first order.
France, ironically, is best positioned here: its nuclear fleet, battered by maintenance backlogs in 2022–23, is now largely restored and producing at low cost. The rest of Europe would do well to study the French model rather than continuing to pretend that the energy transition can be achieved without it.
Macro Aggressions 
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