Frederick Bott
2 min readJul 7, 2023

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Will this looks like a pretty good analysis of things until we notice you failed to take into account that Europe, especially Germany, has gone much further down the road to transitioning to solar, due to domestic and community solar not being counted in discussions of where the energy of Europe now comes from. This is because utilities energy still does not (and can't!) count domestic and community solar. They have to incorrectly claim they still supply all utilities energy when actually they don't, and have not done since around 2005, when domestic and community solar began to scale up.
This leads to an overestimation of gas used, it was nowhere near as much as the figures you quoted.
What is true, reading other accounts as well as yours, is that Norway was one of the few countries in Europe to have gained at the expense of Russia, and arguably of Europe, as a result of Russia's supply of gas being cut.
Further, solar is nowhere near as appealing to Norway, as it is to Europe in general, because it is at the Northern extreme of Europe, so of course its challenge of becoming solar powered itself apoears greater than most other countries in Europe.
But there is the rub, they more than make up for that slight disadvantage by having much more than average access to fossil fuel reserves, therefore making up for their geographic disadvantage for solar. They are not short of the investment resources needed for transition to all solar.
The challenge they have is how to use as little of those reserves as possible, to get to 100 percent solar power, backed by hydrogen, as we will all need to be, whilst not oil-starving or gas-starving the supplies of the other countries of Europe, such that we all manage to make the transition.
It will never be easy to do this, as long as we do not put any credit towards domestic and community solar, yet this is by far the dominant sector of solar energy, which draws into question all conventional estimates of future solar supply, it is invariably heavily overestimated, to discourage redirection of investment towards that area, because like you say, it isn't as profitable in the conventional sense, as fossil fuels etc, but it is much more profitable in terms of what we and the planet ultimately get out of it.
The most difficult part of this to understand, is that the real value of it isn't about profit, it is about making abundant what was a previously scarce resource to such an extent it becomes difficult to make profit by it at all.
This is the real reason solar is unprofitable by the conventional means of calculating EROI for solar, which requires putting an artificial lifetime on the life of a solar installation, when actually revenue created by solar is more than adequate to maintain the solar installation forever, implying mathematically the ultimate EROI of solar is infinity.
Of course that is never a sales case acceptable to investors, hence why solar investment is grossly misrepresented.

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Frederick Bott
Frederick Bott

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