Comments by "Paul Aiello" (@paul1979uk2000) on "Putin Tried to Blackmail Europe... it failed" video.

@jhunt5578 It depends, it can be as easy or as hard as we make it. I'll give you an example, we insulated the house over the summer, now we hardly even need to use the heating at all and only did so when it was -9c for about a week and half, it's never got -9c here since I moved here 15 years ago, so that was rare, anyway, as long as the temps are around -3c or warmer, it's warm enough that we don't need heating now, it's remarkable how much of a difference insulating your home can do in reducing your heating use. As for renewables, we've not done that yet but if I was doing it, I would have more solar panels than I need, I would have battery storage with the aim of storing as much for the night which isn't that much in my case and it should reduce my energy bills a lot, but it's not perfect, if it was, I would go gridless, but it's good enough to reduce the energy bills a lot, anyway, the real problem isn't solar, it's the battery tech to store that energy, that isn't cheap.
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It just shows how resilient western countries can be when pushed, most analyse thought it was impossible for the EU countries to do what they've done so far and yet they did it and they underestimated what the high cost of energy actually does with improving the entire energy system, which means becoming a lot more energy efficient and that is likely going to continue this year and these are long term benefits that will benefit the economy once energy prices stabilize and are lower because a lot of those improvements are here to stay. Then we have the gas storage, looking at the numbers, it peaked at 95%, it's currently at 83.5%, throughout winter, it's been dropping around 1% every 2 or 3 days, over the last week or so, it's been going up a few percent, many analyse banked on these reserves being very low at the end of winter, making it more difficult to fill them up for next winter, but we're already halfway through winter and the reserves are holding up better than expected that before the last week when reserves were going up, I would say by the end of winter, there would be around 50% left, now that's it's stable and even creeping up, it might be a lot more, basically, speculators are in a real panic at the moment because they predicted that EU countries would find it hard to fill them back up for next winter but the reality is painting a different picture that they are not going down as much as they thought. It's also likely that energy efficiency is going to improve this year by another 10-15% and it's already 26% lower, so less demand for gas, efficiency improvements and more renewable deployments as well as gas storage holding up much better than expected, it's highly unlikely that next winter is going to be an issue and it wouldn't surprise me if things are more stable next winter than this, a lot of people underestimated the will to change and how fast people can change when there is a need to change, we're basically seeing changes that would normally take years, even decades, happening a lot faster, hence why the threat to energy is being reduced a lot in the EU. Anyway, the side effect of Putin's actions is that it could kill the fossil industry a lot sooner than expected, it's also a boom for renewable energy because now a lot of countries want energy security by generating as much back home, renewables can help on that a lot, there's also going to be a big drive to improve energy efficiency across the entire economy and the irony is, gas could end up being the first to get killed even thought it's one of the cleanest fossil fuels, simply put, economics comes first and gas isn't easy to transport, so unless they find a way to make LNG a lot cheaper, Europeans are likely going to shift away from gas to other energy sources, hence heat pumps are skyrocketing in installation, consumers will always gravitate to the cheaper energy source and that's unlikely to be gas in Europe unless there is a much cheaper way to transport it.
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