this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Right now the EU has half a winters worth of gas supply in storage. So unless there is a massive cut in imports due to some sabotage of the gas pipelines from Norway or in the Med it should be fine.
Other then that high gas prices are great to move towards more green technologies.
First problem is that this is a short-term issue, and there is going to be no major changes in power generation over the next few months.
The second problem is that two major low-carbon-dioxide-emitting power generation methods, solar and wind, are intermittent. That is, they are not reliably available. To deal with that, you need to either store power generated when they are working or have a ton of capacity to generate power via other means to fill in for when they are offline.
Power storage is expensive. So what normally happens is that if you do wind, you also do natural gas or similar, and fill in the "gaps" in wind generation by burning natural gas.
So it's not really an either-or proposition.
Why not just go nuclear
Because politicians love short term thinking. Seems to be changing lately, though. At least about nuclear power.