For years, the central criticism of renewable energy was a single word: intermittency.
The sun sets. Fossil fuels, the argument went, are reliable in a way that weather-dependent power sources can never be. That argument shaped energy policy debates on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.
Three months into the Iran war, it is being turned upside down. What Nordic energy leaders said in Helsinki and why it is directed at Americans On the sidelines of the Eurelectric Power Summit in Helsinki, Finland, the chief executives of two of Europe’s largest energy companies told CNBC that the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed something the energy industry has been reluctant to say out loud: fossil fuels have their own intermittency problem, and it is called geopolitics. Markus Rauramo, CEO of Finnish energy company Fortum and President of Eurelectric, was direct when asked about the comparison. “It’s a different kind of intermittency, but absolutely,” he told CNBC.