Europe is collapsing. This is partly because of taxes and regulation far beyond the Laffer limit (the entrepreneurial elite is fleeing Britain en-masse) and partly because energy is expensive. Your standard of living is, to a good approximation, the amount of energy put to good use for each person. When you see standard of living statistics that differ significantly from this ranking, they are usually obviously fraudulent, though climate extremes require more energy usage for a given standard of living (Qatar), and some industries, in particular data centers and aluminium refining, just inherently consume a lot of energy without that necessarily resulting in a higher standard of living. But if you correct for these uses of energy, a good measure, and one far less easily gamed than GDP.
A few years ago, green energy was useless scam. You need energy when you want it, not when the sun shines and the wind blows. However, China, for urgent national security reasons, has been advancing the technology of green energy — windmills, batteries, and solar panels, and has now advanced it to the point where solar power is actually useful for some countries. Wind power is useful in a few special locations where the wind blows steadily, but just about everywhere else, it remains a scam.
China is dependent on foreign oil, and very much does not want to be dependent on foreign oil, because foreigners might turn China off.
And yet, in Europe and much of America, still useless, in Europe because of lack of state capacity — because Green energy in Europe is entirely organised and built by green scammers, crooks, and frauds, and because in America Trump is reluctant to be dependent on Chinese technology for reasons of national security similar to the reasons of national security that China does not want to be dependent on imported coal and oil.
Near the North Sea, there are powerful winds that blow steadily, so this should be one of the special locations where wind power makes a lot of sense. But by and large, people do not actually want to live where strong winds blow steadily, so you need to transport the power a long way, using high voltage direct current lines. And Europe lacks the state capacity to distribute the power that it is currently generating near the North Sea, so most of these expensive windmills are turned off most of the time.
If the sun shines on suburbia year round, and you have a whole lot of people living in single story housing (Australia) then you can avoid grid costs using distributed solar panels, and distributed energy storage. Which is a very libertarian solution: local power, local power storage. Grid costs tend to dominate energy costs, because the grid is doing the heavy lifting of ensuring that power is available where you want it, when you want it. If you can generate and store power where you want, saves a lot of money and administrative costs.
Because Chinese tend to live in big multi story blocks, it makes sense for the Chinese to produce solar power in big centralized solar farms in the desert, and store much of it in giant batteries in the desert, distribute it from the desert to the city substations in high voltage direct current power lines, and also store some in giant batteries in the city substations.
For Europe, however, it makes no sense at all, because their summers are dim and dark, and most of their energy consumption happens during their long winters, which are dimmer and darker. North sea wind would make sense, if they had the state capacity to build some good high voltage direct current power lines, but they don’t.
For Europe what makes sense is North Sea wind power, nuclear power and Russian gas. With battery costs continuing to fall, what will make sense in the near future is nuclear with batteries handling power consumption peaks. But even if they had the will to implement a sensible and practical solution, they lack the state capacity, as demonstrated by the North Sea wind debacle. North Sea wind energy would make sense, if they had the state capability to build a grid capable of moving the power from the shores of the North Sea to where it is needed, but their grid is a legacy from their ancestors, it is falling apart, and as the last of the boomers retire, they are losing the capability to maintain it. Similarly, France and Britain are losing their capability to build, maintain, and operate nuclear reactors.