How Invisible Waves Have Changed the World
2026-03-25 [Petri]
The “America First” approach is again in stark and disingenuous contrast to what the rest of the World is doing.
As the Brent Oil still hovers around $100 per barrel and vital oil and gas deliveries are halted at the Hormuz Strait, even the US gas guzzlers are starting to feel the pain.
Of course, the price is still way below what is a “normal level” for example in Europe, but as mileage per gallon has never been a target for the US market, it brings imminent pain at the pump.
Meanwhile, countries like Spain, which have invested in renewable energy sources, are openly bragging how small the impact on this latest war is on their energy environment.
Renewable energy got a major spike after Russia openly announced their plan of “Freezing Europe”. First, the shock was reduced thanks to a milder winter, ironically most probably due to the Climate Change caused by the excessive burning of fossil fuels, but the key result was the huge investment to alternative energy sources that followed.
Based on available information, since 2022, Europe has spent in the range of 400 billion euros various types of renewable energy projects, and about a trillion euros if the necessary grid upgrades and storage is taken into account.
This is multiple times the investment that was in the plans prior to 2022.
The undisputed world leader, of course, is China, which installed more renewable energy in 2025 than the rest of the world combined. But their problems in energy demand are also on a very different level.
This revolution is global: countries like Pakistan have seen a major uptake in solar panel installations, and some African countries are re-designing their power grids into an array of independent micro-grids, building inherent resilience to the system.
Whereas this kind of grid rethinking is voluntary in many parts of the World, it is becoming mandatory in Ukraine, as the reliance of a few huge generator facilities can cause pain and grief for millions when Russia keeps on bombing the civilian infrastructure.
Overall, this kind of re-design is not just optional, it is mandatory: the producer-consumer model that has been prevalent since Edison and Tesla days is facing a major rethink.
Recent commodization of energy generation on the grassroot level is part of this transition: already 25 of the 27 EU countries, the laggards being Hungary (unsurprisingly) and Sweden (surprisingly), have allowed “plug-in balcony panels” to be added to the national grid.
You buy a panel with a standard power plug, put it on a sunny balcony, and start saving in your energy bills immediately. Instead of taking energy from the grid, the panel is feeding in the range of 1 kW into it.
The UK just mandated that all new buildings starting from 2028 must have a heat pump and solar panel array that is proportional to the living area of the building. With the current energy costs, I doubt that the builders will wait for two years for this, now that the regulatory hurdles are gone: having this in place is a great selling point.
Contrast all this with the current US administration, with their Don Quixote-style hate on “windmills”.
While the Iran war is still ongoing and hurting also the US consumers, the Trump admin just agreed to pay billion dollars to a French company to NOT build two offshore wind farms in NY and SC. Yes, really. A billion to NOT have renewable energy sources available to the US consumers.
So the French company behind these farms, Total Energies, gets a nice boost to build wind farms somewhere else, as there is no shortage of demand. Merci beaucomp!
The US government is still hell-bent to make the US overly dependent of oil for years to come, throwing an absolute whopper of free money to foreigners in the process.
You know, “America first” or something, resulting in another advance in renewable energy somewhere else, as the rest of the world moves on.
Permalink: https://bhoew.com/blog/en/162
Earlier entries
The UK acted immediately upon the latest energy crisis [Colin McKay@Pixabay]
You can purchase A Brief History of Everything Wireless: How Invisible Waves Have Changed the World from Springer or from Amazon US, CA, UK, BR, DE, ES, FR, IT, AU, IN, JP. For a more complete list of verified on-line bookstores by country, please click here.
Earlier entries:
You can purchase A Brief History of Everything Wireless: How Invisible Waves Have Changed the World from Springer or from Amazon US, CA, UK, BR, DE, ES, FR, IT, AU, IN, JP. For a more complete list of verified on-line bookstores by country, please click here.
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