People just don’t realise how energy intensive a manufacturing economy is.
Which is fine if your fantasy includes offshoring all of that and shipping the finished products in to the local market.
Which, no matter how you slice it, has to be more energy intensive than manufacturing locally.
I’d like to add construction materials to the list of energy intensive products. Glass, bricks, rockwool and cement.
nothing stops them from also using swarms of solar panels on their roofs to at minimum offset the energy needs, localized power plants to save on transmission costs, raw high voltage power.
Hetzner does this!
The globe looks radically different when presented in transport-energy-cost-distance.
Bulk container ships are crazy efficient. It makes more energy sense for a nation like France to trade with the eastern US than it does with Hungary.