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Portuguese here. Of course we are still exposed to higher prices. Most of our car and truck fleet still runs on fossil. Notwithstanding all of the effort we made with renewable energy and barring the odd month where it reaches almost 100%, my typical invoice says that it is still just barely over 50% of the energy mix, so the other half will drive prices up. Moreover, we've had a ton of political pressure against building more dams, which would not only help increase our renewable mix, but would also help control the floods and prepare us for the droughts. Ironically, the pressure against dams has come from the left, which I've always felt to be lunacy. Finally, too many families still haven't transitioned from gas to electricity for water and home heating and, AFAIK, industry still relies a lot on gas for industrial energy (maybe, to your point, because electricity is still too expensive). Having that said, I half agree with you concerning nuclear. I don't think we should have bet on nuclear as an alternative to renewable energy. In the long run, renewable energy will be more sustainable. For one, nuclear fuel is a limited resource, so we'll eventually run out of it. (Yes, kicking the can down the road sometimes is actually the best solution, but still). For another, since Portugal isn't uranium rich, we'd be trading one set of external dependencies for another. However, I am completely against the ideologically driven anti-nuclear political attitude that have and the fact that we've downright refused to accept any kind of nuclear energy projects whatsoever, regardless of whether those projects would be competing with renewable energy projects for investment. In fact I think that nuclear is the perfect companion to renewable energy, not a competitor. The more renewable energy we have, the less uranium we'd be importing, thus shrinking external dependency. Yet, at the same time, nuclear power plants would be a cheap, carbon-zero, solution to renewable energy's greatest problem, intermittency. Just one final point. Unlike, for instance, Germany, with a large amount of territory with very low seismic risk, we would need to be very careful with where we'd build the plants. It would be complete recklessness to build a nuclear plant in Lisbon, for instance. |