The Group of Seven Nations agreed Friday to release 100 million barrels of oil from its stockpiles—following a desperate plea from the White House.
The G7 held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss global energy costs. The discussion came in the wake of a pressing call between Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, during which the U.S. leader asked for assistance amid the current oil crisis and floated the idea of banning U.S. diesel exports, according to CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan.
Donald Trump announced after the meeting that “Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately.”
The European barrels are expected to hit the market over the next four months.
A lot. EU has fairly shit power generation. For example if France and Spain citizens had access to window air conditioners it would have overloaded the grid by like 2x. Now you want to plug in a hundred thousand cars that are way worse?
Time of day matters a ton for electrical generation capacity.
Didn’t both countries generate an energy surplus large enough to export energy?
Spain’s a lot mostly due to solar and wind generation: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Spain/electricity_exports/
And France even doubles that due to relying in Nuclear power as their backbone:
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/electricity_exports/
I know that without the energy France sells to my country, Italy, we’d be fucked. And much of our goods are (idiotically) transported on the road via semis, so no diesel would be a disaster. And making new railways is an… interesting challenge in a country that’s mostly mountains.
What’s the source for this? I didn’t realize the power grid was so fragile in the EU. I thought most EU citizens with cars these days drive EVs already.
Of course I can’t speak for the entirety of Europe, but EVs have not taken over. They are more common in some places rather than others and they’re slowly getting more popular, but they’re not the majority.
Also, at least at a local level, the power infrastructure is not really a problem and is improving. In my particular city, where it used to be confortable enough during the summer to not require AC, people have been installing AC units en masse some years ago, creating a sudden load on the network and causing outages. Over the past few years they’re getting less and less frequent. This summer the power didn’t go out once. Now the cost is another matter entirely, due to idiotic decision by several incompetant politicians.