The European Commission unveiled a plan on Tuesday to drop the EU’s effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035 after pressure from the region’s auto sector, marking the bloc’s biggest retreat from its green policies in recent years.
The move, which still needs approval from EU governments and the European Parliament, would allow continued sales of some non-electric vehicles. Carmakers in regional industrial powerhouse Germany and in Italy had sought easing of the rules.
The EU executive appears to have bowed to calls from carmakers to keep selling plug-in hybrids and range extenders that burn fuel as they struggle to compete against Tesla, opens new tab and Chinese electric vehicle makers.
The crash in the cost of Renewables is taking care of that.
There are 3 main kinds of energy use in the West:
Only the first one gains from the current trend for ever cheaper electricity from Renewables which is ongoing: for example only a few years ago Gas Power Generation was cheaper than Solar, but now its now anymore.
So to fully take advantage of that trend, as much as possible of power usage in the Economy needs to be Electricity use rather than other sources of power (other renewables too are useful, but it’s in electrical power generation that we are seeing the stronger and most sustained fall in costs).
What you’re seeing in Electricity prices in many countries in Europe still being high is the inertia due to installed infrastructure (I bet Belgium still has lots of Gas Power Plants and buys lots of power from French Nuclear Power Plants) delaying things like fully taking advantage of, for example, very low solar panel costs. Also the installed generation industries are trying to delay the march of renewables - for example France has been for ages blocking the construction of power connection bringing cheaper power from renewables from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe because it would compete with their own sales of Power generated by their Nuclear Power Plants.
Still, for some there are ways to go around it, though depending on one’s own condition - for example if you have your own house, and your car is there for at least part of the time of the day when there is daylight, getting solar panels to help charge that EV makes a lot of sense because one can feed the other directly and that power is at cost (which is basically just the cost of buying and installing the panel) rather than being the 4-times more expensive than wholesale power you get from a retail electricity supplier.
Anyways, the trend in Electricity is for it to get cheaper. The trend in Oil is for it the get more expensive (as the easier to get to reserves get depleted and harder and more costly to extract or process stuff such as tar sands gets used) and the same for Gas but slower (since there are far vaster gas reserves than oil), so it makes some sense in the mid and long term to get the biggest power consumers at home to be using Electricity.
2024 reports in Belgium say 42% nuclear (53% import, indeed from France), 17.3% gas, and 17.9% wind, biofuel at 3%, and solar at 11.9% (probably mostly from residential feedback).
So gas is pretty much being eliminated. It dropped from 30% in 2020 to 17.3% in 2024.
And prices have only gone up with those savings. But that probably has to do more with extremely corrupt scammers that we have as energy companies. For example in the oil crisis at the start of the Russian invasion, gas exploded in price (3x more expensive) in November. My gas company (Mega) tried to say that we used 99.7% of our gas in November and December only. We apparently only used the equivalent of a single hot shower through the rest of the year. We work with a monthly “estimated usage” payment and then the difference between actual usage is paid at the end of the year. This resulted in us having a 3500€ bill at the end of the year.
Luckily we had a (now standard) smart meter so we could prove via a 3rd party that they were flat out lying and scamming us, but then it was “oopsie poopsie, how could we know??” Anyway, they get record profits every year, so that is probably a lot of the reason
Yeah, that’s also what I see in my home country - Portugal - which even though it has a ton of electricity generated from renewables (outside draught years, the average is now around 75%, down to around 45% in draught years because so much of it is hydro) but electricity prices aren’t really down much.
The local scam, set up by the totally corrupt politicians we have around here, was to increase “connection to the network” fees and “administrative” costs, so for me who was an early adopter of things like LED lights and even chose the components of my PCs based partly on power consumption hence tend to use a below average amount of power, outside the Winter months (were I use a lot of power for heating, as houses here are shit in terms of thermal isolation), most months half my electricity bill is those costs and only half is the actual cost of the power consumed.
So even that way I described to work around the electricity providers in my last post is only partly useful around here because one pays quite a lot merelly for being connected - I suspect that’s the way politicians together with the largest power companies (the biggest of which being the privatized state power company, which “curiously” employs in highly paid positons lots of politicians from the two main political parties here and is suspect in at least one large corruption case going through the courts) came up with to make sure than in a country with a lot of sun people didn’t just move en masse to self-generation with solar panels: unless one can generate enough to satisfy one’s needs the whole year, day and night (which means not just having more panels, but also sufficient power storage), one still needs a connection to the grid for times when self generation is not enough, and merelly having that connection is expensive.
Unsurprisingly solar self-generation in Portugal - the country in Europe whose capital has the most hours of sunshine of all European capitals - is way below even countries with far worse conditions for it, like Germany.
This is part of what I meant when I talked about the “inertia” in the system: in countries like Belgium and Portugal there’s also a lot of “bought laws”, “bought politicians” and other forms of entrenchment of such big businesses that have nothing to do with free markets and are used to the delay the transition so as to protect the profits of those businesses (and the board memberships and consulting fees they give the politicians).
Normal people then suffer because they’re still paying a lot for something that’s way more cheaper to produce than before.
Compare this with for example Finland, were you can actually get paid (I KID YOU NOT!) for using power at certain times of the day during Summer because there is so much power generation due to renewables that wholesale market prices turn negative and consumers with the kind of contract that fully exposes them to those prices will thus even get such extreme upsides of renewables as getting paid for using power.
This shit will eventually at least partially correct itself one way or the other (for example things like balcony solar will add further pressure for change) but it might take decades and meanwhile the gains of cheaper power generation due to renewables will keep being mostly captured by a handful of people which indirectly does things like delaying EV adoption because people who like you try using EVs (I don’t even have a car because I refuse to get one and can live without one) don’t really gain from having an EV instead of an ICE.
The consequences of the rot at the very top of politics in the Neoliberal age have far more widespread and long-lasting impacts that the it had back in the times when its was merelly people in the city hall getting a brown envelope with money for “expediting” some building license.