Look at who advocated to define natural gas as green in EU. The political block that has done the majority of advocating against fossil fuel industries were also the same block that advocate to maintain existing fossil fuel in the power grid. Those same parties are also the one advocating the need to maintain and expand thermal power stations in order to enable more renewable energy, and a increase in energy transmission between nations in order to address the intermittence problem of renewables.
The other block in contrast are advocating in favor of fossil fuel industries, but are mixed (some in favor, some against) in regard to thermal power stations, and primarily promotes nuclear for the grid. They are also those that usually bring up national security and energy independence, with reduce dependencies on energy trading to maintain the grid. That block voted against the decision to define natural gas as green.
So the political state in EU is that one block promotes fossil fuel in the grid, and the other promotes it in the industries and transportation. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe, but no side is really willing to give up on what those fossil fuels enable, and that is despite the now many years of wars that have major impact on economy and security.
Most of the worlds bio fuel that we use to reduce emission in transportation comes from crops farmed to be turned into bio fuel. How will the increase in LNG then do to the price of bio fuels?
Very simplified: farming and distillation is so extremely energy intensive, it's not clear whether producing one ton of bio ethanol fuel consumes more or less than one ton of diesel (or equivalent).
So producing bio ethanol is not a sustainability/ecology thing, it mostly gives farmers something to do.
If you wanted to save CO2 you'd slap solar panels on the fields instead of growing corn or whatever. Plants are rather bad at capturing solar energy and they need fertilizer and pesticides to grow and diesel to be planted and harvested. Then you lose a good part of the energy the plant captured until you have a product that you can burn in an engine.
With solar panels you get like 20x the energy out and you can have a meadow with high biodiversity around the panels. Growing a nice little forest, maybe with a couple of wind turbines in it if the location is windy, would probably also save more CO2.
That will depend country to country. The US doesn't use urea to the same degree that Brazil, India, and China do. And Brazil (just like the US) doesn't rely on NatGas from the Gulf.
It's mostly China and India that are impacted, but both have the Russian option.
This isn't our first rodeo with elevated urea and NatGas prices - the same thing happened during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (and is reflected in the same dataset OP linked).
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
Yes, this is why you get on average single digit output from solar in Sweden during the worst winter months while consumption doubles. The math comes down that on average, the expected amount of solar that can be used for consumption is around 25% for an 100% capacity installation. The period with highest production is the period of lowest consumption. Average grid prices also follow this trend, with the highest point being winter and the lowest point being summer.
Germany has slightly better numbers from being a bit more south, and they also primarily use gas for heating rather than electricity, which reduces seasons effects on consumption.
How similar is the climate of Australia with northern Europe? Countries which spend more energy on AC than heating has a much better utilization of solar.
Not terribly. Australia is located about 7km from the surface of the sun, with people crackling audibly as the walk down the street and dogs bursting into flames if they don't get to shade on time, at which point the dropbears kill them. Europe gets decent summer sun but it's pretty cloudy in winter.
In places where unisex bathrooms is the norm, it not that uncommon to see men's only bathroom while the other rooms are unisex. Is that discrimination?
I'm rather curious where this is actually the case, particularly as you claim it's not uncommon.
My experience has been the opposite, though I'd hardly claim it to be representative. My prior employer had all single-occupant, unisex bathrooms originally, until one woman high up the management chain demanded there be women's only bathrooms. So, a women's only placard was placed on a couple of the unisex bathrooms, and suddenly, guys had to semi-frequently wait on for the remaining available unisex bathrooms during the day.
It was very clearly discriminatory, and I have no problem claiming the reverse would be just as bad.
If I generalize a bit for Sweden, small restaurants and shops generally only have a single bathroom. Fast food restaurants, schools/universities, work places, and train stations tend to have one or two large single-occupant unisex accessibility room and several smaller single-occupant unisex rooms. Airports, high-end restaurants and shopping malls tend to use US style of single-sex bathrooms. Tourist areas, venues for people to drink, larger gas stations, and bus stations often come with a urinal room for men-only, an unisex accessibility room, and one or two smaller unisex rooms.
The larger accessibility room is also for parents with small children.
For actual generation over a longer time period, in February 2026, 48% of energy used was generated from renewable sources, of which the vast majority (41% of energy use) was wind:
With 75% in 2023, it means there are still headroom for expansion without hurting the economics too much of existing wind farms. Denmark had a very clear growth of wind farms up to about 100% of demand during optimal weather, and then a very clear stop in growth afterward. On average it still only produce about half the energy consumed in Denmark, so over time I do not expect to see Ireland to go much higher than 50%. It might get a slight advantage given the improved wind farm technology to utilize low wind conditions.
I do see in the political goals for Ireland that they, like Germany and many other countries in EU, are relying on the idea to turn wind into green hydrogen once they hit that 100% during optimal weather. Peoples faith in that strategy has gone down significant in the last 5-10 years.
Easier to name it null, not giving it a postal code, using non-ascii characters, two names within the same language, giving the park two addresses, giving the park an address without a location, or just not giving it a name at all.
It is not that complicated. When the energy crisis in EU happened a few years ago, it demonstrated clearly that people and industry is willing to pay a years worth of energy bills for a single month to keep lights and machine operating. What this mean is that you could in concept give people free power for 11 months, and then increase electricity prices by 12x for the remaining month, and people would still pay it.
This also demonstrated through most countries in Europe that citizens will vote to have government that fix the energy market. Citizens do not want a free energy market that can raise prices to any degree, and its their tax money that fund grid stability.
This all mean that the cheapest form of producing energy do not result automatically in reduced energy costs for consumers and companies. The product that people pay for is not energy in a pure form, it is energy produced at a given time and given location. Make the energy free but the time and location expensive, and the total cost will still be expensive.
Transmission can help Ireland, but it can also hurt it by linking it to a larger market that can create a even higher demand spikes than exist in the current local grid. If the linked grid has locations which has higher energy costs than Ireland, then Ireland will subsidize those people by linking the markets together. Rules like highest price regardless of source sets the price, and higher amount of transmissions, also tend to result in more companies getting paid to maintain operations and thus more parties getting paid that is not linked to the marginal cost of producing energy.
The goal of net energy exporter assumes that energy produced at one time can be exchange for energy produced at an other time for the same price, and that assumption has not been true in Europe for decades. You can be a net energy exporter and still be dependent energy imports for more than 50% of the energy a country consumes, as has been demonstrated by Denmark.
I will happily trade 10 unit of energy for just a single unit of energy, assuming I get to decide when I give the 10 units and when I can demand the 1 unit. A lot of profit in the European energy market can be made by such a "bad" deal.
The date when a country energy grid is free from fossil fuels, like coal, is when the grid has no longer any demand during the year for producing or importing energy produced by fossil fuels.
I think FOSDEM had a talk a few years ago about that solution and their tang server. It is very similar in concept. They use McCallum-Relyea exchange, and we use PGP encryption, but the basics are the same in that you need information stored at the server and information stored in the unencrypted initramfs in order to be combined and turned into the encryption key. If my understanding of the McCallum-Relyea exchange is correct, they also combine the key creation and perfect forward security of the transaction into a single protocol, while we use TLS and client keys for the perfect forward security aspect and PGP for data at rest.
With tang you need to verify the hash of the tang server in order to prevent a MITM threat from extracting the server side part during the key creation process, while with Mandos you configure it manually with configuration files.
Tang uses REST and JSON. Mandos sends a single protocol number and then sends the data. Both operate primarily through local LAN, through Mandos client also support as an option to use global reachable ip addresses.
Outside of those design differences, there are some packaging aspects. Tang was designed for Redhat/Dracut, while Mandos was designed for Debian and initramfs-tools (Today Mandos also support Dracut, but it is not packaged for Redhat). Redhat packaging has been requested multiple times for Mandos, but neither of us two developer are Redhat users.
To add some historical context, I recall a Debconf BoF by the developers of initramfs-tools about if they were going to continue developing initramfs-tools or giving up and port everything to Dracut, and the silence was fairly deafening. People did not want to give up on initramfs-tools, but everyone recognized the massive duplication that those two project are. Similarly, the reason why Redhat had chosen initially to develop Dracut rather than just port initramfs-tools is also fairly big mystery, and is generally considered a Not Invented Here syndrome. Today there are however some distinct difference in design between the two systems.
clevis and tang do currently work seamlessly on Debian and Ubuntu using initramfs-tools. So while the initramfs-tools/dracut discussion is valid, it seems mostly orthogonal to this topic.
I was unaware that they no longer depended on Dracut and now support initramfs-tools, which also seem to be the earliest clevis version that got packaged in Debian. That makes the initramfs-tools/dracut distinction a historical aspect of the project.
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