http://www.energypolicyblog.com/2011/10/20/europes-green-energy-chaos/
This is an opinion piece arguing that current EU energy policies are misguided and confused. Essentially the author claims that all current efforts in the direction of renewables, smart grids and market liberalisation will not work out as planned. Nuclear is expensive as well. Instead of focusing on these, we should simply rely on shale gas.
It is a good read if one wants to understand how criticism against modernisation of electricity infrastructure, communication and trade is usually raised.
I link to it because it is published on a EU policy blog which also featured commisioner Oettinger a couple months earlier. I do find however, that, similar as green optimists, the author is not able to make substantial points to underlie his personal opinions about what is right for society.
Consider this snippet:
"Rather little penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) in Europe’s car fleet would in fact be needed to make the goal of raising the role of renewable energy in electric power production and final end-user consumption even more completely unreal and impossible to achieve. At a penetration rate of 7 percent of Europe’s current 210 million car fleet, replaced by EVs each typically needing 5 kW charge for around 5 hours, up to 7 times a week, peak electric power demand in Europe
could easily rise by 50 000 MW at certain times of the week, such as Sunday evenings, when EV charging would be intense."
Here he makes a point for smart grids/demand response which he dismissed only few paragraphs before. The author rejects a world with dynamic prices for end-users, because he expects negative effects (price volatility). This is no ground for neglecting the possible
positive effects.
He has a point though that given the ongoing financial crisis, policies need better grounding as to what their benefits are and especially how they will integrate with other expected developments.
Finally, I have to note that he does not talk about environmental impacts of gas fracking (see for instance here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=safety-first-fracking-second),
just as nuclear proponents didn't do that until recently.