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Published 24 September 2021

·  Many of Our Current Problems Will Pass, but Our Energy Crisis Just Gets Worse

·  U.S. Says Europe Energy Crisis Raises Manipulation Concerns

·  Europe Is Wrapped around Putin’s Little Finger

·  Successive U.K. Governments Have Neglected Energy Security—and We Are Now Paying the Price

·  The Smarter Way to Avoid Energy Crises: Use Less

·  Biomethane as a Sustainable Solution for Irish Farmers and Energy Security

·  U.K. in Talks with Westinghouse over New Nuclear Power Plant in Wales

·  Energy’s Digital Future: Book Review

Many of Our Current Problems Will Pass, but Our Energy Crisis Just Gets Worse  (Charles Moore, The Telegraph)
As Boris Johnson tries to get the wind behind Cop26 at the UN, here at home we are all paying the price.

U.S. Says Europe Energy Crisis Raises Manipulation Concerns  (Gerson Freitas Jr., Yahoo Finance)
Surging natural gas prices in Europe have raised serious concerns about supply reliability in the region and should prompt a response by the U.S., according to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

Europe Is Wrapped around Putin’s Little Finger  (Con Coughlin, The Telegraph)
Our increasing reliance on Russian energy has placed the tyrannical leader in an impregnable position.

Successive U.K. Governments Have Neglected Energy Security—and We Are Now Paying the Price  (Nick Butler, Prospect)
Fossil fuels may not be popular, but they are still essential, as the current gas price hike and food shortages are demonstrating.

The Smarter Way to Avoid Energy Crises: Use Less  (George Hay, Reuters)
Europe’s leaders need an energy intervention. The factors that caused the continent’s gas prices to treble, pushing the cost of electricity through the roof, are not going away. Yet fixing the problem requires finding ways to use less power, not just cranking up other sources.

Biomethane as a Sustainable Solution for Irish Farmers and Energy Security  (PetrolPlaza)
Ireland has the highest potential for biomethane production per capita in the EU according to the European Commission.

U.K. in Talks with Westinghouse over New Nuclear Power Plant in Wales  (Reuters)
Britain is in talks with U.S. nuclear reactor company Westinghouse on building a new atomic power plant on Anglesey in Wales, The Times reported.

Energy’s Digital Future: Book Review  (Chris Bronk, Small Wars Journal)
More than anything else, economists seek to understand equilibrium, however, societies often face wrenching difficulty when points of equilibrium shift. When these shifts occur, analysts of intelligence must make every possible effort to open themselves to the reality that their fundamental assumptions on the phenomena at hand may change, possibly quite significantly. In her Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security, Professor Amy Myers Jaffe provides us with a stacked set of indicators of change regarding the geopolitics of energy, which for roughly a century involved access to oil and gas reserves, often distributed far from the consumers for those fuels, resting beneath the soil and sands of some of the planet’s tougher neighborhoods.
Professor Jaffe has written a book that takes a stab at the question, “What replaces oil?” Today we have all sorts of trendlines on emerging technologies for the energy sector. Once curiosities, renewables such as solar and wind are seen as vital, ecologically safe sources of electricity. These technologies may grow to matter a great deal, but what’s especially novel about Prof. Jaffe’s thesis is her emphasis on the enormous role that information and computing technologies will assume in global energy systems.