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Ask Slashdot: Minimizing Oil and Gas Dependency In a Central European City?
An anonymous reader writes I live in a big city in central Europe. As most of you know from recent news, most of Europe's (and quite a bit of China's) gas supply comes from Russia and is very likely to be cut off several times during the next few winters (China's time will come in later years). What many might not know is that not just our natural gas supply, but also our petrol ('gas' for the Americans in the audience) often comes partly from Russia and some of our electricity comes from gas powered stations. Most of our leaders, at least in Germany and Hungary, are in bed with the Russians and likely won't do anything about fuel security. I live in an building with a south-facing roof and I own the roof space but I don't have enough land here to put a wind turbine or something similar on. Can anyone make good suggestions for ways to cut down my dependence on unreliable power supplies? Extra points for environmentalism, but I am even willing to pay more to be sure the heating is there in winter and my server keeps running.
Europe isn't going to get cut off this winter — at least not for more than a symbolic period of time. Putin is dealing with sanctions and low oil/gas prices and his oligarchs are getting angry; he and they need what oil/gas revenue they can get, so they won't be eager to cut off paying customers. Also, European leaders aren't entirely oblivious to their vulnerability and have been stockpiling fuel since summer, so there should be some margin for error.
The future? Yeah, Europe needs to elect some grownups and develop traditional energy sources independent of the perpetual Russian kleptocracy. Nothing will mess up the green agenda faster than millions of first world voters shivering through winter because of uncompromising greentards.
Don't.
You Europeans never had any gas problem with us Euro-loving Russians. All the problems are dying rabid psychotic entity lying over export pipelines and your Brussels bureaucrats galvanizing this cadaver. The North Stream would give you enough gas but it isn't allowed by them. The South Stream would give you enough gas but it isn't allowed to build. And it's YOU who elected them into Brussels. And you know who bribes them to accept an ephemerid LNG from that side of the pond.
You may buy a really big UPS to survive a short term outage. And I advice you to have some fuel heater (preferably propane one) and some fuel for short term outage. You shall throw them out of Brussels before the long term outage.
I also recommend a PV panel, heat insulation, triple heat-reflecting windows, etc. But it's secondary.