Comment by audunw

There’s a huge difference in relying on others for daily fuel/fertiliser supplies for your survival, and relying on them for parts for vehicles/infrastructure that can run for decades.

There’s also the fact that EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled. Once the transition is complete I expect larger regions (ie Europe, but maybe not an individual European country) will be self sufficient in their materials.

> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale.

You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need. What’s more, if you switch to electricity for industrial heating, metal production and fertiliser production, you will have ALL the buffers you need to absorb fluctuations in renewable energy and more. Especially for heating solutions - storing energy for months is trivial. Most people aren’t aware that just dumping excess energy in geothermal wells in summer has become fairly common in the Netherlands. Especially Americans live in this bubble where they have no clue about solutions that have become commonplace and widespread in other countries.

> Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned.

No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance. The only thing that’s hard to replace is the longer hydrocarbons. But we’ve been forced to do deal with that anyway due to better vehicle fuel economy (the amount of bitumen you get when refining enough oil to drive a car X km is going down, giving you less bitumen to pave those X km of road).

> Oil is a must in military.

I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller. Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?

I suspect advancements will reduce need for oil there as well over time. We can already synthesise jet fuel.

> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.

It’s not the magic bullet people think. There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.

The main issue that nuclear isn’t cheap enough to be a part of a full decarbonisation solution. We need the dirt cheap intermittent excess electricity from renewables to make decarbonisation of fertilisers and various industrial processes viable. We have started to get the first local self sustained renewable ammonia production plants for fertiliser recently - and they’re generally tied to local renewable electricity production. The cost of the electrolysis and storage solutions for making hydrogen keeps going down, so it’s increasingly viable to produce hydrogen intermittently and store it to use when electricity is more expensive.

I like nuclear. But it’s not essential, and will probably not be competitive barring a huge breakthrough. And no, SMRs are not it. The way to get the cheapest nuclear is to build the biggest reactors. Same as with wind turbines. The scaling laws favour bigger designs (energy production scales with volume, costs roughly scale with reactor vessel surface area)