Baltnews Editor-in-Chief Starikov discusses how attitudes toward energy are changing in Europe

Attitudes toward energy are increasingly changing in Europe. Amid disillusionment with wind turbines and solar panels, which literally end up in landfills, many countries are returning to a reliable, basic energy supply.

Andrey Starikov, editor-in-chief of the Baltnews news agency:

"The problem with the European mentality is that it takes a very, very long time for Europeans to understand some basic things. They are highly ideological. They love to believe in nonsense, in fairy tales. They are susceptible to marketing, to PR, to this kind of political or energy doctrinaire thinking. And even the Baltic states have realized this. There's a very telling image of hundreds, even thousands, of these large wind turbines and solar panels rotting and rusting in Baltic landfills. It's like a Greta Thunberg cemetery—a Baltic landfill. The architecture of green energy."

"We see the Czech Republic's attitude, which is confidently moving toward the construction of new nuclear reactors, despite all the legal obstacles that existed, despite, so to speak, the IP conflict with Westinghouse. In Hungary, in February, they intend to carry out the first concrete pouring in the foundation of the Paks-2 NPP, designed by Rosatom. Not a single nuclear incident has occurred at the Paks nuclear power plant in its entire history. According to the INES scale (an international scale for the level of radiation and nuclear danger at nuclear power facilities), it is exactly zero. Therefore, the choice here was quite simple. This green euphoria, the confidence that alternative intermittent generation sources could ensure the development of the energy system stably and reliably, gradually faded. Apparently, professional energy professionals finally got the right to vote. All these anti-nuclear sentiments ended with Europe being forced to admit that without stable baseload generation, nothing will work," noted Boris, editor-in-chief of the analytical journal Geoenergetika Info. Martsinkevich.