POLAND'S 2022 ENERGY CRISIS AS A RESULT OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE AND YEARS OF NEGLECT TO CARRY OUT A GREEN TRANSFORMATION OF THE ENERGY SECTOR

Abstract

The article describes key aspects of the impact of the ongoing war in Ukraine since February 24, 2022 on the Polish economy with a particular focus on the energy crisis caused by this war. When in 2021 the economies of many countries began to recover from the covid recession of the 2020 economy, the prices of various categories of industrial and energy raw materials also began to rise. Then immediately after when Soviet troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, fossil fuel prices additionally began to rise rapidly on energy commodity exchanges. Increases in fuel and energy prices became further factors in the rise of food prices, which ultimately also accelerated inflation. As a result, as early as mid-2022, forecasts appeared suggesting that there would be a serious energy crisis during the autumn-winter 2022/2023 heating season. The aforementioned energy crisis was particularly deep in Poland. It has been caused by years of blocking and restricting the development of renewable and zero-carbon energy sources, as well as large-scale government financial state aid given to the financially deficient, unprofitable coal and lignite mining sector and the dirty coal-burning power generation sector. The result is still a situation where more than of electricity and heat in Poland is generated from dirty coal-burning energy. In this area, too, misguided, anti-climate, anti-environment, anti-social economic state interventionism has been carried out for many years, ignoring the need for a green transformation of the economy and the realization of sustainable development goals.