Nearly two months into the crisis, the troubles for Gulf oil and gas exports are far from over. And the world is so dependent on fossil fuels that these problems will continue to deepen and create economic shock waves whenever tensions flare up again in the Middle East — and they will.
In Europe, this makes it a good moment to think of waters quite unlike the Strait of Hormuz: dams and reservoirs. Indeed, they may be the future of European energy security — or at least part of it.
Dams have controlled river waters for decades, generations even. The larger ones also produce energy and feed water into reservoirs. Now dams and their adjacent reservoirs can take on an additional role helping Europe become more energy independent.
Let’s consider, for example, Norway’s reservoirs: Though one may think of Norwegian energy as mostly oil and gas, the Scandinavian country is also Europe’s leading producer of hydro power, with 88 percent of the electricity used in the nation itself coming from hydro power. (Another 10 percent comes from wind power.)
Sweden, too, produces great amounts of hydro power. Vattenfall, the government-owned hydro-power giant, owns some 100 hydro power plants, and the country has other operators too. (Vattenfall, incidentally, means waterfall.) France, Italy and Germany produce a lot of hydro power as well.
But if hydro power is to become a viable alternative to fossil fuels more broadly, we will need hydroelectric reservoirs that can store the energy they generate, just like traditional reservoirs store water. Renewable energy has traditionally been harder to store than oil, which can be put into a container of any size.