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Essay Energy Politics Minor Hanzehogeschool
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Essay Energy Politics Minor Hanzehogeschool
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Energy PoliticsEnergy, when you think about it, it is very normal to have energy, to use energy and you can't
imagine a society without energy. When you think about energy, think about fossil fuels and
nowadays you also going to think about sustainable energy. But you also can relate energy to politics.
Energy politics are related to energy security, environment and the energy transition. Energy is
playing an increasingly important role in politics. Voters have always been interested in reducing
their energy bills, but as climate change awareness has increased, voters and the general public have
also increasingly expressed support for clean, renewable energy sources. (Power-Technology, 2019)
Energy security consist of three elements: reliability of supply, affordability of resources, and
friendliness to the environment. Environmental friendliness and security of supply are not provided
by the market. This means that the state will need to stay involved in crafting energy security
policies. The market does not create the diverse sources, infrastructures, or storage policies that can
enhance security of supply. The market does not know how to fashion wider political relations in a
way to foil use of the energy weapon.
Security energy demand and supply
To secure the demand and supply of the energy market, the first thing that needs to be secured is
the energy infrastructure. The energy infrastructure needs to be arranged by the government. The
demand can not be controlled by politics, the demand is of course growing and can not be stopped.
But the supply of energy can be easily controlled by the government. The government needs to
secure the supply energy. The government can do this by arranging contract with companies who
supply energy and can secure this by arrange these contracts with energy companies form the own
country to prevent the government gets depended of another country.
Security energy price
One of the most important subjects of energy security is the energy price. The kWh price is the price
you pay for your power consumption. The purchase price for energy suppliers changes every day.
The energy price is influenced by supply and demand, but also by the weather, economic
developments, exchange rates and political unrest. For example, there are still power plants that
generate electricity through coal combustion. If the production or supply of coal does not go well,
this will affect the electricity price in the Netherlands.
The energy supplier charges a margin on the purchase price of energy. Each energy supplier can
determine this margin itself. The total kWh price that is ultimately calculated by the energy supplier
and consists of almost 70% taxes. These taxes are storage of sustainable energy, energy tax and VAT.
(Independer, 2020)
Dutch climate policy has an impact on the Dutch energy market. Climate negotiations between
environmental organizations, businesses and governments lead to the following measures: Natural
gas will become more expensive (due to taxes), electricity cheaper. (Total-Energie, 2019)
To keep control of the energy prices, an country needs to make sure they are not depended of
another country, because when you are energy depended of another country, this country can up
, there energy prices and you need to keep buying because you depended of this energy. So, to keep
control of the energy price, the best thing to do is to be in depended of energy from other countries.
Also, because sources of fossil fuel are running out, the price of these fossil fuel are very slowly rising.
So, to prevent the energy prices rising the politics should do investments in sustainable energy
sources to keep control of the energy price. Also, a country needs to avoid that there is an energy
monopoly where one energy company has a monopoly on the energy market and can control the
energy prices. (DeEnergieGids, 2018)
Security energy in relation to the environment
All energy sources have some impact on our environment. Fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas
do substantially more harm than renewable energy sources by most measures, including air and
water pollution, damage to public health, wildlife and habitat loss, water use, land use, and global
warming emissions. However, renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and
hydropower also have environmental impacts, some of which are significant. (Ucusa, 2019)
Opinions are divided on how long there will be fossil fuels. It depends on how you calculate. The
relatively easily accessible reserves of oil and natural gas will run out in about 50 years. Including the
hard-to-reach reserves, fossil fuels are still available for a slightly longer period. So, when the politics
of a country wants to secure the energy in the future it needs to consider that there won't be a lot of
fossil fuels left and they are not planning to use this energy source in the future. So, for the politics to
choose a secure energy source for their countries they need to think of the environment. For
example, they should decrease the use of fossil fuel, because they are running out. Also, if the
politics should choose energy source who do not burden the society, for example wind turbines.
Wind turbines may be a sustainable energy source, but the placement of the wind turbines can
burden the society and there could come political pressure when those wind turbines are getting
placed wrong. (Essent, 2019)
Fossil fuels
The main energy sources are at the moment fossil fuels. Although the society is in the middle of an
energy transition from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, but this transition needs a lot of time to
happen and we cannot deny that fossil fuel remains the most important energy source in the coming
decades. This why countries with a lot of energy sources of fossil can create the most political power,
because they can control the energy distribution to other countries who don’t have their own fossil
energy sources. To explain this more, here example of the fossil gas in Europe. Because gas has
changed our lives so much, people got depended of gas. Gas is used a lot in the modern households.
That means that countries who doesn’t own gas fields to get their gas from, needs to buy gas from
countries who has gas fields. This makes countries without gas fields very depended of countries with
gas fields to take the gas out, this also gives countries with gas fields a very strong trade position
(Overgasgesproken, 2016). An example of this is in Europe, some of the countries of Europe are now
very depended of the gas from Russia. That gives Russia a very strong position, because Russia can
easily close the gas tap to the countries from Europe and that will mean those households from these
countries don’t have gas anymore. Now countries who are depended of gas from Russia are affright
Russia will close the gas tap to those countries during a cold winter like Russia has done to Ukraine,
this is called pipeline politics. That’s why one of the energy strategies of the European union is to get
less dependent from the gas from Russia (Volkskrant, 2019). One of the moments Russia used their
power was in the winter it was at its coldest both in 2006 and 2009, Russian gas in transit across
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