Jonathan Holslag teaches at the Free University of Brussels. He is the author of From wall to wall: world politics since 1989. He writes an essay every four weeks The morning.
European government leaders agreed this week in Ostend to quadruple the capacity of offshore wind turbines by 2030. This, they suggested, should make us less dependent on imports and generate affordable energy for families. Belgium is a pioneer in this field due to its know-how and it is good that our country is taking the initiative. The problem, however, is that North Sea wind is being turned into a political hype in Ostend and that even with the extra capacity we are barely getting rid of our current dependencies. Political leaders must inform citizens more honestly.
I don’t want to pretend to be an energy expert here, but the statements in Ostend leave me with a lot of doubts and questions. The wind turbine capacity in the North Sea will therefore be increased from 30 to 120 gigawatts. In very optimal conditions, these mills run 4,000 hours a year and supply 480 terawatt hours of electrical energy. The annual energy consumption of the North Sea Club (Benelux, Denmark, Germany, France, UK, Ireland and Norway) however, is almost 10,000 terawatt hours. If that consumption were to drop to roughly 9,000 terawatt hours by 2030, as prescribed by RepowerEU, then North Sea wind will provide 5 to 6 percent of the energy requirement.
This also applies to Belgium. At best, the wind from our part of the North Sea supplies 5 to 6 percent of our needs. By 2030 we would generate approximately 32 terawatt hours of North Sea wind, compared to 8 terawatt hours today. But the energy consumption will be around 540 terawatt hours if we assume the RepowerEU scenario. The expansion of the North Sea wind, good for 24 terawatt hours, will at best be able to accommodate half of the capacity of the nuclear power plants. In recent years, this amounted to around 48 terawatt hours.
The North Sea project naturally opens up possibilities for importing electrical power from other countries. New cable networks will allow this. However, the demand for the North Sea current will also be high in the partner countries. Above all, we must ensure that we can afford those imports. The import of energy, be it electricity, natural gas or whatever, will weigh increasingly heavily on the trade balance due to the transition. So we will have to find a lot of energy elsewhere anyway and that will cost money.
Fossil fuels
However, the main point remains: dependence on imported fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas still represent 53 and 28 percent of our energy supply. That’s huge. Industry, transport and heating in the houses remain the big guzzlers. We cannot emphasize this enough. The discussion about energy is often narrowed down to electricity, but electricity only makes up 17 percent of our total energy mix. Fossil fuels remain the main energy sources, accounting for 65 percent of the need. According to the National Energy and Climate Plan, that share would also remain very high by 2030.
The war in Ukraine has forced us to adjust the supply of oil and gas. The initial assumption in the Energy and Climate Plan to partly replace nuclear energy with natural gas is untenable. For now, we have replaced dependence on Russia with new dependencies on America and the Middle East, especially as far as oil is concerned. Although Europe still imports very significant quantities of oil, indirectly, via Azerbaijan, for example, or via India and the Gulf States, where the cheaply bought Russian oil is simply mixed in storage tanks and sold as a mix worldwide.
Russia remains an important supplier of natural gas. In 2021, according to Eurostat, Belgium imported 7 million cubic meters of Russian gas. That equates to 46 terawatt hours of energy, about 8 percent of our total energy supply and 12 percent of gas imports. In the first three months of this year, no less than 18 percent of the gas imported by Belgium came from Russia; part of this is exported to neighboring countries. Even when the Excellencies signed their North Sea treaty, a Russian gas tanker was anchored in Zeebrugge a stone’s throw away and two were on their way. So we still need Russian gas and the oil embargo is not very effective. After all, the energy market is a global market and Russia still has plenty of partners in that global market.
Transition
We can and must look for alternatives, but the fact remains that we will continue to be very dependent on imported fossil fuels in the coming decades. For energy generation, green hydrogen, a so-called carrier, generated with renewable energy, is eagerly being eyed. However, the roll-out of hydrogen will be slow. By 2030, the EU is aiming for 10 million tons of imported and 10 million tons of self-produced hydrogen. This corresponds to about 13 percent of the energy value of the imported oil. We will largely have to import that green hydrogen and the argument that this will increase our energy security is largely negated by the fact that the Middle East is likely to become the most likely major supplier for the foreseeable future and that China may become one of the cheapest producers of hydrogen.
An important revolution will have to take place in our industry, today an extremely important sector in our country. There are many scenarios on the table. Circular economy could reduce the consumption of petroleum for chemical products such as plastics. Biomass, as sugar, can also serve as an alternative. Rotterdam, for example, is emphatically profiling itself in that area. But biomass is often at the expense of valuable nature and food safety. Once again, the road to a chemical industry that is less dependent on fossil fuels will be long and its success will in any case also be determined by competition with the chemical clusters in Asia and America.
The most significant progress in the medium term is probably in households, which account for 20 percent of total energy consumption in Belgium. Insulation, solar panels and electric driving can quickly further reduce energy consumption in that sector. The downside is that this confetti of individual projects is very expensive and weighs heavily on less wealthy families. Moreover, bad policies sometimes cancel out progress on one front on the other. The gains we make by insulating houses, for example, are partly neutralized by still building too scattered, which means that energy distribution can be less effective and that more transport is generally required.
Burgers
In short, politicians must be honest with their citizens. A good news show like in Ostend can be useful to stir up enthusiasm for the transition, but it also creates a distorted image. The contribution of the North Sea wind farm to our energy security or energy dependence remains modest. In the case of Belgium, it will be canceled out by the closure of the remaining nuclear power plants. That closure may have been postponed, but it is still not clear what will happen to the remaining plants in the long term. Perhaps our energy security will be further tested in the coming years, if only because the cables in the North Sea are just as vulnerable as the pipelines in the Baltic Sea and we will still be importing a lot of energy from unstable areas.
The question is whether our country can still develop an energy strategy, given the fragmented powers. If you have too much time, give it a go the national energy and climate plan try to read. This can count as an example of unclear policy. The government should dare to tell those uncomfortable truths, but actually hardly makes the effort to present a clear energy strategy to its citizens. And then she should not be surprised that citizens, like the undersigned, are suspicious. A very long and expensive adjustment awaits us. Instead of suggesting that things will work out, the government should transparently analyze the options and quantify their costs. Citizens are entitled to that.
