Europe’s energy crisis hits science

The director of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy was forced to focus on the electric bill after she took the job. Large computer clusters are used to process radio astronomy data. They consume 2000 megawatt-hours a year. She was surprised to find that costs had tripled from the previous year. If she doesn't get emergency energy funding from the Dutch government, she will have to scale back observations. If the price increases continue, it will be a crisis.

It is not just households that are feeling the impact of soaring energy prices. They may be coal mine canaries for the rest of science if they are struggling. The impact for science will be significant if prices continue to go up.

The crisis is caused by a rebound from an economic downturn. Jonathan Stern, who studies natural gas at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said that power generators that had been shut down could not ramp up in time. In February, Russia invaded Ukraine. European sanctions and Russian retaliation have caused the price of Russian natural gas to more than 10 times its average historical value.

Many of the country's universities and research facilities were forced to buy energy from the region's main supplier after Lumius, an energy contractor in the Czech Republic, declared bankruptcy. The 1500 users who used it for climate modeling and drug discovery were forced to wait because IT4Innovations was forced to run one-third of its capacity. The Czech facility that hosts high-power laser beams had to stop operating for a few weeks.

The Czech government agreed to bail out the facilities until the end of 2023, but their future is not certain. Roman Hvzda is worried that the government will declare a state of emergency and restrict the gas supply to the facility. The beamlines themselves are powered by electricity. If supplies are restricted, the facility may have to shut down for up to 6 months, which would curtail ongoing experiments for hundreds of users, and delay calls for future ones. You could be losing 12 to 18 months.

At DESY, there is a similar issue. If the German government imposes national energy restrictions, the center may not be able to use the supplies it has bought.

Leemans says that DESY is looking into running its machines at a lower energy level. For example, it could turn down the synchrotron so that it doesn't produce as much x-rays. That would allow it to serve some users. If the restrictions are severe, the two large linear accelerators will need to be shut down. Superconducting modules need constant power hungry cooling. Leemans says it can't be turned away. We can't say we're only going to run some parts of the machine.

Reducing operations would hurt research. During the H1N1 epidemic, BioNTech used the x-ray facilities at DESY to reveal the structure of the virus and how it works. Materials used in solar panels are studied by other researchers. It will have consequences for slowing down innovations when we need them the most.

Anke-Susanne Mller said that big legacy machines might be hard to restart after a shutdown. Older control electronics might not work again if vacuums are turned off, the flow of water in cooling systems is stopped, or the system is damaged. She says that if you switch a component off they might not come back.

The world's largest particle physics laboratory is keeping a close eye on the energy crisis. The organization buys energy from the French grid years in advance and now is concerned about supply. Serge Claudet is the chair of the energy management panel.

Roughly the same amount of energy is used by 250,000 households each year. The electric grid is not always stable during the mornings and evenings. Claudet says that the data output could go down depending on the number of requests. He says that the Large Hadron Collider may have to be shut down in order to keep it running.

Claudet says that the budget will be stretched to buy energy for the next few years because of the high prices. He says that the energy prices on the market are very high.

It will take at least two years for prices to return to normal levels. Peak prices will be determined by the severity of Europe's winter and whether Asian countries bid against Europe for global supplies of natural gas. It is not clear whether governments will keep research labs afloat. Smaller research laboratories could be left to fend for themselves.

That could have consequences in the real world. He shows an example of a program that would either need to be suspended, run at a loss, or run with their costs passed down to the local hospital. He says it will be difficult to get through. There will be a break in science programs.