There is no "sudden" lack of truck drivers, we had a small shortage of truck drivers due to a combination of Brexit removing those called "Slopodan" and the end of the covid-19 pandemic, it was causing a few problems over the summer while companies worked out how to make things more efficient, then the political party conference season started and the main opposition party started a newsworthy rumour that people couldn't get fuel because of a lack of truck drivers, so everybody started filling their fuel tanks, so the fuel ran out, and then there really was a shortage of tanker drivers, plus a shortage of tankers to be driven, but of course people can only fit a limited amount of fuel into their tanks, so the fuel shortage soon became a fuel excess because many people now won't need to buy any more fuel for ages while this week the governing political party is having its annual conference so they have got the army delivering extra fuel to the filling stations this week!
The trigger for that rumour was the completely unrelated gas shortage, created by a long term lack of wind for the wind turbines over the summer along with several nuclear plants shutting down and emptying the gas reserves used as backup, which resulted in the gas price skyrocketing and several of our gas resellers going bankrupt. But now the wind is back, that should also be over, in fact we are using so little gas now that the gas price should soon tumble... Target is to get our electricity below 100 gCO2/KWh by 2030, already doing far better when the wind blows:
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Until the supply and reserves of green hydrogen can meet demand, gas prices are going to become very volatile, especially with nobody investing in new gas fields or storage now!
Don't forget that many of the solutions to the environment issues are actually good for those other more pressing matters too.
Cheapest source of electricity is now offshore wind, and once supply meets demand, hydrogen from offshore wind should become cheaper than fossil fuels such as natural gas. It will continue getting cheaper as installation is scaled up, and there is a long way to go yet.
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