> Investments in natural gas power plants would also be deemed green if they produce emissions below 270g of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour (kWh), replace a more polluting fossil fuel plant, receive a construction permit by Dec. 31 2030 and plan to switch to low-carbon gases by the end of 2035.
It wasn't that long ago we used to worry about whether fuel was renewable or not, and about particulate pollution, acid rain, habitat destruction and other environmental externalities in general, not just CO2.
This global warming-driven definition of "green" ignores all of that.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/banking-and-...
And yet the existing battery facilities that could keep a smallish region (or a single city) supplied for 15 minutes or more are exceedingly rare.
Maybe they aren't as cheap as you claim. Australia is recently building a 1200 MW battery in New South Wales for 2.4 billion dollars - a cost comparable to a new nuclear reactor.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/05/world...
Even the battery factories are in their early stages right now.
Do you have a reference for the storage capacity of that NSW battery? Because every newspaper I’ve found talking about it, only talks about megawatts (power) not megawatt-hours (energy), and it’s the latter which is expensive for batteries, not the former.
"The 300 MW / 450 MWh battery will consist of 210 Tesla Megapacks covering an area smaller than the football oval at Geelong’s GMHBA Stadium"
20 million cars in the UK are parked on peoples drives overnight. Vast majority don't need a full charge for the following day and people will be delighted to buy electric during the day for 10c/kWh and sell it overnight for 20c/kWh
If they were all electric with 60kWh of storage and can drop to 30kWh that's 600 GWh of storage. The UK's grid usage overnight is about 20GW from memory, so over 16 hours is in the order of 300-400GWh of overnight storage.
Assuming Germany has similar car and demand characteristics, as long as there's enough power during the day to cope with demand and recharging, there should be plenty of storage for overnight usage.
It is doable, yes, but I cannot concur with the OPs idea that it is cheap.
The other problem with using cars to feed the grid is that you need inverters large enough to do so in each house. That's not a cheap solution and it takes a lot of space.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/too-slow-too-expensive-why-nucle....
https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/sites/default/files/re...
"The spread of projected and reported capital costs is unsurprisingly broad. In Australia the most recent public assessment is provided by the GenCost2018 report by CSIRO and AEMO.10 It assumes the capital costs for SMR technology is $16,000/kW in 2020 (and experiences no major price decline over time). We note this number is more than double other cost estimates worldwide. We have sought additional clarification on the basis for this costing. Initial advice is that the number is based on a GHD estimate for AEMO of costs for a future Gen IV reactor to be constructed in 2035 and not for the type of reactor which would most likely be deployed in Australia."
Anyhow, that 16k estimate is for power, not for energy... It's unclear over which timespans comparisons are being made (since a lot of it depends for how long power plants will be kept operational... A huge cost is the initial investment).
I've seen energy estimates as low as 30$ per MWh, for Nuclear energy plants built with interest rates of 3%
Further north and solar get displaced by wind as the primary source of energy, and wind do not have a day cycle. It has weeks/months long period of low and high amount of wind. A battery solution that last hours is just a drop in the supply bucket. At the same time, rather than being discharge (and thus generating profits) each day, a wind battery solution will only generate profits a few times each year depending on how large the capacity is. The only way that will be profitable is if it several order times cheaper than the batteries for solar, or if the cost isn't directly linked to capacity. The technology that Germany and other "wind" countries is constantly talking about here is green hydro, but which is yet to be economical viable.
One alternative is to build massive transmission lines from Africa and use solar power + batteries from the Sahara desert, through there are political, technological, and economical problems over designing such energy grid for EU.
Thus for now the political winds are blowing towards natural gas and wind, despite the ecological issues of burning a fossil fuel.
Would you sell your setup for 10k euros, or is the value of your setup possible worth more than the cost of doing it yourself. 10k to be free of the electric company for all future seems like a very good deal if purchasable at that price, and if offered I think there would be quite a few homes willing to take you up on it.
Oh, you do not heat with electricity? I hope you counted that heat source in CO2e...
Although battery storage may still be located close to generation. One benefit of this is that you get more benefit from your grid connection. Without batteries you can just export for a part of the day. With batteries you can export when it is sunny/windy, export when it is dark/not windy, and even import energy when wholesale prices are cheap. The expensive grid connection is better utilised.
That claim is baseless.
That’s all it takes for adoption to dramatically increase. Market forces will shift things around as ever more solar comes online, but as long as daytime rates are above nighttime rates solar is an obvious win for electric companies.
Well - no.
The $100 is up front capex. Add interest rate over 10 years and the price doubles. This is just the module/pack price, and you need to add installation, cabinets, fire suppression, AC/DC and controllers. Which probably add 50% to 100%.
Like wise the headline 2c/kWh is probably for ideal projects with ideal land/transmission/regulation/geography. It is also 70% generated in summer, and only 30% in the winter months.
Renewable energy is important, getting cheaper and accelerating and This-Is-Good (TM), But real physics and economics still matter.
At scale batteries are effectively a fuel that needs continuous replacement, though related equipment can last much longer. Also, module/pack prices dominate installation and operating costs as PV operates on DC and therefore needs a DC/AC converter etc.
Summer vs winter depends on geography, it’s largely meaningless between the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. It does become increasingly important further north, though offset by the relative need for AC. By the time you’re seeing such wide production swings from summer to winter you are simply in a bad location for solar.
PS: Actual charge vs discharge cycles of course vary widely as to various other costs.
1 KW Gas is 0,0639€ 1 KW Lithium Battery is ~105€
There is an incoming lithium shortage which means either the price will rise sharply, or you have to build other types of batteries.
KW = power, kWh = energy = integrated power over time
Batteries are reusable. I see claims varying from 2,000, to more than 10,000 times. That reduces the battery cost to between €0.0525 and €0.0105 / kWh.
It's not illogical to compare a battery with the production it's supposed to replace.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Isn't my comparison totally wrong on all levels?
I compared batteries, which are storage(or "power plants") with the price of the thing the gas power plant uses.
A better comparison would be the cost of battery storage, cost of filling it up, versus building a gas power plant and then producing the same energy.
If I find a good article on that I will link it.
In addition, for Europe, the key part of removing Russia from the energy equation is worth a hell of a lot of money.
In principle I prefer antipodal transmission lines for the grid and batteries for transport — grid is cheaper and a trade opportunity — but at global scale, such a grid will take a while to build.
On average that's 136GWh per day, lets assume that was spread so that it's say 36GWh per day in winter and far more in summer.
It consumes 500TWh a year.
Lets assume consumption is 1,400GWh per day evenly across the year. Consumption is higher in the day, so even with shorter days in winter lets make that half during daylight and half at night, 700GWh each.
If Germany increased its solar to 50 times as much as it currently has to generate 1800GWh a day in winter, it would require 700GWh of storage and a total of 1400GWh during the day.
There are 48 million cars in Germany, lets assume that 65% of them are parked overnight and connected to the electric grid, making it 30 million cars. Make them all electric, with with about 30kWh of "flexible" capacity for draining overnight (50% capacity) and filling up in the day per car. That's about 1,000 GWh of storage available overnight, enough to provide for the entirety of German electric consumption overnight.
During the summer when solar capacity would be three times as much, that excess capacity could be used to generate green hydrogen through electrolosis, used to do things like aluminium production, could be exported to neighbouring countries.
Now sure switching cars to fully electric would increase total usage of energy, about 2,000 kWh per car per year, say 100 TWh a year extra, but then there's a lot of wind generation in Germany (>100TWh) now which would offset that.
One can make more than methane. Heavier liquid fuels like methanol, which is a great gasoline analogue, can also be synthesized.
Theoretically speaking, the most efficient way to split water is thermal decomposition at really, really high temperatures, with a catalyst. I've seen a variety of proposals to split water into hydrogen and fix the H2 as a hydrocarbon, with direct heating from both concentrated solar and nuclear. I don't know about the practical economics, though.
If you want something actually green, try ammonia via electrochemical methods, from hydrogen.
This is also why these gas investments are a trap. We're already generally low on gas for winter and increasing the intake will not help, plus any operational emissions is too much and has to be optimized. 270 g CO2e is a plenty in a series of small deployments to ruin the targets.
IMO, methane is good, if we are actively transitioning to manufactured methane. It's a plug-in substitute with existing distribution networks, storage and consumers, easy and cheap to handle. Though efficiency is pretty bad, so it's mostly good as cheap bulk storage.
Attempting to do pure electrochemical reforming is extremely energy intensive, and requires rare metal membranes. As well as a way to concentrate CO2 from atmosphere reliably. (The Sleipnir problem.)
Do you have any numbers on synthesis energy efficiency? It is inherently energy intensive, as it is storing energy. Rare metal membranes may be current state of the art, but Nickel catalysts seem a popular alternative.
With good reason, I might add. There is a climate emergency caused by greenhouse gas emissions after all.
These are the same thing in common parlance. High CO2 emission plants are fossil fuel driven, and those are of course non-renewable.
Wind, solar and nuclear are renewable, sustainable and low CO2. Nuclear in particular also produces very little waste as a function of power generated and extraction of uranium from seawater could fit the renewable definition.
That sounds very idiotic to me. One of the biggest environmental threats is global warming, which is caused by reintroducing carbon into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels. It makes no sense at all to label fossil fuel usage as green just because they manage to come up with an arbitrary line in the sand for unrelated pollutants and in the process ignore carbon emissions.
> and in the process ignore carbon emissions.
Natural gas is the best of the worst, and it contributes to the solution in the specific case where it replaces even worse options (like coal plants). I'd argue that <270g CO2 per kWh is far too high of a threshold, but that's still at least a half of what even the "cleanest" coal plants produce per kWh.
It's not the best solution and nobody is arguing that, but it is a solution in very specific circumstances.
The best you can do sometimes, its just to be less bad. If you can replace coal or diesel powered power plant into modern gas powered plant, you will emit a lot less CO2 for equivalent power.
Solar and wind are not enough jet. We need something that can produce electricity 24 hours a day, or on demand. The "greenest" such tech are nuclear and gas.
I have high hopes of geothermal, maybe replacing a lot of gas, but we are not there jet.
I saw no reference to origin or source or type of gas.
All I saw were references to low emissions.
It seems they decided to redefine "green" as "not coal".
Am I missing something?
You're missing that.
Technically not renewable, but in the long run, neither is the Sun.
OTOH burning wood is renewable, but not green, and also not sustainable. So nothing inherently good about being renewable.
It's pointless to have a practical classification to then come with "technically..." and some weird and unpractical reason.
You can make the case that it does - if you count uranium in seawater. Theres enough dissolved there now to fuel all the reactors on earth for 60,000 years. Geological processes continually replenish the dissolved uranium.
Lets make another name: "energy which source can get replenished in less than 100 years (a life time), as wood, or less, as solar, wind, waves, and can be practically harvested with current methods i.e. not fussion or matter dissolved in the sea". That's the whole phrase you should use from now on instead of "renewable".
With breeder reactors the uranium in seawater would last us 15 million years at current nuclear power consumption levels. If that's not renewable...
There's no such thing as infinitely renewable.
Renewable is defined, like it or not, as a source that replenishes in a finite human scale (roughly, 50-100 years). Sun, waves, hydraulics and wind "replenish" everyday. Wood takes about 30 years. If you find yourself saying things like "15 millions years" or "60,000" years, it's not renewable.
While I can believe that we don’t have a current recycling chain set up for these, I absolutely do not believe that they are genuinely non-recyclable.
We make both of these out of a variety of literal rocks, extracting trace elements and purifying them greatly in the process of manufacture. Even in the worst case, it’s easier to start from the end products than from rocks.
When it comes to nuclear though, the people claiming it's renewable usually refer to the presence of uranium in seewater, which is leeched from the ocean floor. That fits within the "renewable within reason" frame I talked about before. The issue with making that case is that collecting uraium from seawater is experimental reearch at this point ; it's definitely not an industrial process. Other examples of people conflating research with established industrial standards include people claiming we can get rid of nuclear waste with new reactors, or people claiming that we can recycle wind turbine blades.
A reasonable case to be made is that, while nuclear is not renewable, the reserves we have is enough to let us buy another century of research and a reasonable chance to find more long-lasting solutions, whether it would be a great storage technology, fusion, new fission technology, a smart grid or whatever.
[+] There's 5.5 million metric tons of known uranium deposits. Switching to breeder reactors, which produce more fuel than they consume, would allow that supply to match current generation capacity for 30,000 years. Then there's the 4.5 billion metric tons in seawater. That'll get us 15 million years worth of power.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-nuclear-cle...
No, it just shows that one needs to read more than the headline. It does take all that into account as well, hence all the "if"s and the "transitional" label.
If someone has better ideas how to progress and unite 27 countries with different levels of transition challenges and different views on nuclear and other sources, please submit them.
Otherwise, being pedantic and negative about non-perfect solutions while not taking into account the complexity of getting a consensus with 27 members is not helpful to anyone.
You do this stuff because you want to accomplish something. If animals go extinct, that is obviously unfortunate, but it pales in comparison to the prospect that we do so.
The EU isn't trying to accomplish some type of perfect environmental justice, they're trying to keep the world habitable.
I agree with the global sentiment of your comment, but let's not forget that animal extinction is 1/ well on its way and 2/ a direct precursor of human extinction.
The required reduction is 99.9% of greenhouse emissions for the next millennium. No institution has ever had that power, few have lasted that long, and even those few which have lasted that long underwent significant policy changes in that time. If we can’t make saving the planet cheap enough that even the greedy and selfish prefer to do that, then we can’t win at all.
But half-arsing it now gives us more tomorrows in which to create the better solution.
Possibly also batteries, but that’s harder for me to estimate — we’ve got the price down, but we need way more volume.
Has our technology gotten worse since then? Or is it just permits and bureaucracy impeding us?
> I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
Indeed, he himself was charting a middle ground between inaction and violence:
> You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
The middle ground between inaction and violence (blowing up a pipelines & boardrooms) is not classifying gaseous hydrocarbons a form of "green energy.
The recent attention that "the environment" has been getting is a direct result of this, and you mustn't confuse it for a general interest in green politics.
Frankly, I really do not care about "the environment". I care about people, and they obviously have a need for the environment. But the reason we have to take climate action is that it would be unpleasant for people's lives if we did not, not because it would hurt the trees.
If you suggest to reduce people into poverty so that they do not suffer extreme weather, is this really an improvement? Or are some people to be reduced into poverty, so that some other people do not suffer extreme weather?
If the trade-off is that I do not have a job, a place to live, heating, electricity, etc, but the weather is normal, I think I would prefer to have wildfires and flooding but otherwise a normal life. Most people would sooner live in California or Florida or Australia than Belarus or Moldova, no?
(That's not to say all action on climate policy looks like this. But when you have people talking about "degrowth" or blowing up oil pipelines, that very much seems to be the ethos. Lebanon had to make an unplanned transition away from oil on short notice. Should we strive to be like them?)
What percentage of GDP did we spend trying to steal oil from brown people since 2001
Citation needed on the massive claim that we can be carbon neutral in 10 years without massive riot-causing disruptions to people’s lives.
Its energy is "greener" than that of coal, or heavy oil: more energy is released per a CO₂ molecule produced. Also, unlike coal, it does not produce radioactive ashes.
But it's not carbon-neutral, of course. I'd call this "olive" or "lime" energy: greenish but not wholly green.
A non-carbon neutral source of energy is not any shade of green, until we’ve averted the upcoming climate disaster. And then maybe we can debate about how to spend our limited carbon budget.
Realistically, not going to happen. We might be able to mitigate it, but not avert it. The best strategy is to plan it live with it rather than trying to avert it.
Then there's the ultimate point where hydrological cycle stops, causing runaway drying.
I’m not certain we will — problem and solution are both exponential — but I certainly think it’s plausible.
From these points natural gas is relatively good, its main problem is CO2 emissions. I worry that focusing on CO2 would lead to going back from natural gas heating to biomass/wood heating, which could be CO2 neutral[1], but brings particulate pollution and other environmental externalities.
[1] although often is not due to extraction and processing steps
The real reason why we're dependent on gas is because the eco warriors shut down coal powerplants and nuclear has been dead since 1987. Don't blame Russia for our own incompetence.
Comparatively though my 2021 Camry hybrid has emissions of 96g/km.
So, assuming the plants are primarily being used to level out variable renewable production, I guess that is a reasonable standard for bridging a technology gap.
Make cities walkable, bikeable and public transportable. That will have far bigger impact than people buying new electric cars.
Not going to happen in time. And city traffic is only relatively small part of all of our CO2 emissions. Truck and delivery trucks emit more CO2 than most other cars combined, and even in walkable cities, you will still have those.
And even if we somehow to get all our cities completely carbon neutral, we still have industry, cargo, food production and lest not forget all the militaries, that themselves emit enough CO2 that they will cause climate disaster.
> The key to solving climate change isn't to do as before, just slightly more efficient.
You want big changes. You wont get them, until its too late. Because politics and people.
The best we can hope for is that enough of this kind of small improvements will add up over time, and we will find out good mitigations.
Here is a starting point, miles and miles away from the historical centre of Toulouse: https://www.google.fr/maps/@43.537841,1.2268468,2639m/data=!...
Now it is not only happening around cities, around big towns, around small towns, it also happens at unprecedented speed around the tiniest villages.
A site that puts side by side aerials from now and from before urban sprawl: https://remonterletemps.ign.fr/comparer/basic?x=1.212446&y=4...
Back in huge cities. The city of Paris is much less populated than one century ago. Now it represents only 1/6th of the population of its urban area, an ogre which has swallowed almost 2000 municipalities (two thousand!).
Elsewhere in the country, you see urban areas from cities multiple dozens of miles apart joining in a continuous sprawl. Heck, even in my deep and remote area disconnected from any city or even town, there is now 5 miles of sprawl joining the 3 villages of the valley in continuous strips along the roads; before the sprawl, population of my municipality was 50% higher, and yet 80-90% of the now occupied space was free.
The problem with total car dependence arises when you only create "big", pedestrian unfriendly shopping "stroads" that are 6 lanes wide, where even going to the adjacent store is a car trip, and crossing the road takes unreasonably long or is flat out impossible on foot. In these places, driving is your only option even if you can see the store you want to visit from where you live.
This is in stark contrast to the highly trafficated European cities, which are car friendly. Take Copenhagen for example. There are of course 6-lane arterial roads going through in various directions, but stores are back-to-back and the destination is rarely ever the arterial road itself. If you're going outside peak hours you might be able to find some street parking down some side street, but otherwise you'll have to locate one of the low-footprint multi-story parking basements/garages and then join the pedestrians from there.
In less densely populated cities (say, Lyngby), some shopping areas might have a shared 40-car parking lot associated - not a parking lot for hundreds of cars per store.
Should you live out on the countryside and want to go to the city (say, for shopping), you might use a car to get to a central parking area and then join the pedestrians for the actual access - the dense shopping streets are pedestrian-only anyway.
People in the outer city are more likely to just use a bicycle or take public transportation, as it's usually faster, cheaper and more convenient - especially for restaurant visits or party, as you might want to drink alcohol.
The TL;DR is "car friendly != car dependent". This applies to most European cities I've seen.
It’s 30+ completely different countries with different infrastructure, different views on how things should be done and different decision makers.
Your experience in X is different to Y.
E.g. as far as I know, no one in Netherlands “haphazardly tacks some pedestrian stuff at the end”.
Of course you’ll be more dependent on a car if you live in some parts and of course some will have cars where it isn’t necessary.
What we all do know and believe we can agree on, is that public transport (mainly trains and buses) in all of Europe is miles ahead and puts United States to shame.
There’s a reason why we don’t really have drive through ATMs and cities with towns are walkable and pedestrian first, while cars are second or even third behind bikes.
If they are not indirectly powered by fossil fuels then they will solve the problem.
[1] http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...
[2] https://www.powertechsystems.eu/home/tech-corner/lithium-ion...
[3] https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-802b-what-does-elev...
The power electronics to charge the battery also have losses. Although they are getting really good, my guess would be something better than 95% efficiency in the battery charger. There are some really great improvements in power transistors recently though, so this number will still have some room for improvement.
If you look at the whole energy supply chain though the picture is probably a lot worse for both, in particular when you account for things like methane leaks or the emissions from transporting + refining oil.
The Germans are going to have to build a lot of new capacity until 2030 because their new government just committed to closing all their coal plants by then. Inevitably, that's going to involve building some new gas plants. And those won't be green unless they meet those criteria. So, that construction permit end date is interesting here. This clearly is a stop gap solution so Germany can get rid of coal and build some "greener" replacement plants without creating a demand problem for energy produced by those new plants. If they weren't green, lots of companies would end up buying their energy from other suppliers.
After 2030, the attention will shift to getting rid of natural gas completely; hence the further restriction of having a plan for switching to something else. Natural gas is already a bit on the expensive side and lowering the carbon output won't help with that. But it's going to take a bit longer.
Nuclear is in there because lots of countries in the EU are still building new nuclear plants and they don't actually emit carbon. So, calling that green is a lot less controversial.
So, odd but I can see the logic. I don't necessarily agree with it though. If it emits carbon, it's a problem and as a consumer I would not want to be tricked into buying "green" energy like that. People are going to notice this and call bullshit on that.
And they will be right. If it emits carbon it isn't green, it really is that simple.
By giving themselves this loophole the EU is undermining the market forces that will make green energy viable. We don't need to find economical energy sources anymore. We need to dump money into green energy now and last month and a decade ago. The price doesn't matter, just build true green energy and subsidize it until it becomes economical.
Overall, it avoids a lot of awkward moments which would of seen both Germany and France fall short upon the EU's green regulations for energy usage/production. Whilst personally I feel it is a fair thing and well needed for France, I can't help feel that Germany took advantage of this and tailcoated their needs onto this and why we see gas labeled as `green`.
Thus, it does describe activities that are not green, but are helping to move towards pure green.
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Activities that in and of themselves contribute substantially to one of the six environmental objectives
Transition activities: These are activities for which there are no technologically and economically feasible low-carbon alternatives, but that support the transition to a climate-neutral economy in a manner that is consistent with a pathway to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, for example by phasing out greenhouse gas emissions
Enabling activities: activities that enable other activities to make a substantial contribution to one or more of the objectives, and where that activity:
Producing solar emits CO2 over the full lifecycle. Even during the generation and maintenance phase, it’s above zero. There’s no zero until we remove CO2 from the environment.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf
Should we stop using solar until we find the zero-CO2 tech?
Obviously not. And obviously we need net-0 asap, but it’s not “really that simple.”
So, yes, I agree with you that today, efficiency of solar panels is not enough for really big scale. But results are already impressive and furthermore, we have yet an infinity of optimizations to research to extract more energy from the sun.
In fact, while absolutely not probable in the coming decades Solar could even be one of the « magic solutions » alongside the fusion. Because we know the energy is there, we just don’t get her how to extract it.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. We need net-0 but if you only have a binary 0-not-0 ideal we’ll leave a lot of intermediate options off the table. A Tesla isn’t net-0 but it’s better than a gas truck.
I’m arguing against oversimplification, because if we want to take that to extremes we have no net-0 options right now. We need to build them. Every KG of CO2 we don’t emit now is one less we need to bury in decades to come. So do a Manhattan Project on emissions but make easily-adopted changes in the near term.
Intelligent people shouldn’t quibble over an imaginary “green” line, but we should focus on minimizing emissions per unit power.
Replacing a large coal plant with gas is much better for our future than opening a same size solar plant (and not closing the coal plant).
Of course greener still would have been to build a solar plant instead of the gas plant. But solar is intermittent and coal isn’t so that wouldn’t be sufficient.
All of this is true so long as the gas plants are treated as temporary solutions and this does that.
I guess technically it could have been labelled ‘purple’ and a new rule made that all allowances made for ‘green’ also apply to ‘purple’ but honestly that sounds to me more likely to be abused in the future.
How would this be abused?
The problem is that the EU talks a big game but can’t actually deliver. Calling gas green is moving the goalposts.
If gas is necessary that’s fine, just don’t pretend we are on track to be carbon neutral (or negative) in time for it to matter.
These gas plants are taking funds that could be used on actual green energy. If people don’t peek behind the curtain the numbers will say “all our energy is green”. That makes the problem look smaller than it is.
What is the purely green alternative to gas that these gas plants will steal funds from? Intermittent energy doesn’t qualify.
The numbers to care about aren’t the ratio of green to non green plants, but actual CO2/MWh and those won’t be hiding the problem.
Nukes are greener than gas, at least in terms of our continued existence on this planet. If we don’t curb greenhouse gas emissions yesterday nobody will be around to die of radiation poisoning.
Energy storage can be solved, it just has to become necessary. Building gas plants today means we will be burning fossil fuels until 2080. We need to have these problems solved decades before that.
My objection is not necessarily to building the gas plants, it is to calling it green so some politicians can claim they did their jobs.
Nuclear is a great option and should have been chosen 40 years ago but since it wasn’t we must take what we can get today. If I decide today I’m going to replace coal plants with nuclear, that means I’ll be burning coal for at least 20 years until the nuclear project is complete.
Much better then to, sure start building the nuclear plant, but also switch over to gas today, then complete the switch 10-30 years later.
And if the gas plants remain in operation until 2080 I’m optimistic enough to believe they’ll have been made to install CCS sometime in the early 2040s.
And as helpfully explained by the top post you are replying to nobody does that.
It is labeled as a useful transitional tool towards green energy (when obeying lots of additional restrictions) and thus deemed eligible for subsidies/investment. The headline shortens "eligible for subsidies/investment aimed at promoting green energy, but only if meeting lots of other requirements and ..." to "green".
Except the title of the article :)
Green is a spectrum, and a subjective one at that. Even if we limit ourselves to CO2 emissions, an absolutist stance eliminates solar and wind for the emissions in their erection.
No, just that pretending one or the other is universally accepted as “green” while the other is not is absurd.
Gas isn’t emission free. But “green” has no requirement to be zero emissions. It is in the process of being defined; this is that process and discussion. (Hybrids were once green.) “Green” should move us towards a zero-emissions future. If that happens with gas, that’s better than sitting around getting hysterical about definitions while baseload runs on dirty power.
Then we have no green energy sources at all, which makes it sort of useless as a description.
Manufacturing and installation of the energy source always has to be included. For something with as short of a life as solar panels, the manufacturing, transport, installation, and disposal is a critical piece in the CO2 emissions that has to be amortized over the kWh it’s expected to generate over its lifetime.
The argument that solar emits carbon is counting the carbon emitted in construction and plant operation. That is such a minute amount of carbon in comparison to the energy produced by a gas plant in generating power that it isn’t even worth talking about for the purposes of classifying gas as “green”.
Getting the construction and logistics of anything carbon neutral is orthogonal to the carbon emissions in the production of power.
Bringing up construction CO2 is a red herring at best. I asked for numbers to illustrate how ridiculous the argument is.
Citation needed. A gas plant dwarves solar in energy output.
The whole point is that solar does have an emission and burying your head in the sand does no good when we are comparing solutions that don’t emit during generation but do to make (solar vs wind + batteries vs nuclear?).
- Nuclear and eolic, 4.
- Solar, 6.
- Gas CCS, 78.
- Hydro, 97.
- Coal CCS, 109.
Citation, as requested:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9
Implying that solar, nuclear or wind have emissions nowhere near gas or coal is not fair play.
No I didn’t. Your reading comprehension did that. I was simply pointing out that a dipshit stance like “no energy source can have any emissions and be called green” actually rules everything out and destroys the nuanced discussions between green energies. The statement I replied to was literally “It is as simple as I originally stated”.
> Implying that solar, nuclear or wind have emissions nowhere near gas or coal is not fair play.
Wanna try that sentence again? I think you meant to say something else because solar, wind, and nuclear absolutely have emissions nowhere near gas or coal.
Because someone reading that long list of items could get confused and think that those things added so much emissions that they could be near fossil emisions. It seems that it was not your intention, but I felt a clarification and a citation was needed.
Nuclear power it's climate but but environment/human friendly. So I can understand that.
But natural gas isn't green however I look at it.
It's clearly better then cush l coal, but but green.
So it shouldn't be allowed to be labeled as such.
Instead we should add a label for better but but really good tech, like yellow or so.
That's what the EU Taxonomy does: it labels activities and specifies precise criteria.
"green" in this sense just means it's eligible to receive funding/tax status that is otherwise not available. It's not a judgement on whether the technology is carbon neutral.
That's literally the entire problem.
That's the theory anyway, and if we look at what happened in France with fuel taxes, it seems pretty plausible to me.
So sure, net you might achieve a reduction. However, that could mean that after 30 years you aren’t as decarbonized if the investments in natural gas prevented nuclear and renewable build out.
I don’t know if that’s the actual case, but my prior based on how the FF industry operates leads me to believe that to be a reason natural gas is being framed in this way. Sure, it only covers construction before 2030. However these plants easily last 50+ years and inflation means that a nuclear plant starting in 2031 will have a much harder time competing with a natural gas plant making its economics worse. I’m always open to having my mind changed with data and a compelling counterargument, but I’m more sympathetic to the position that’s extremely concerned with natural gas being included.
The emissions limit should probably be 10x lower than what was set to allow natural gas.
If this is a jobs thing to provide an off ramp for the industry, I’m more sympathetic to that as long as we’re honest and transparent that that’s why we’re doing it (the political and economic ramifications are just as important as the goal of decarbonization). Just don’t spit in my face and tell me it’s raining.
After all the idea is to incentivise truly carbon neutral energy.
Obviously there's pragmatism and gas is better than coal but I think an independent body would say "burn gas if you must, but don't expect to get off freely with closing the nuclear plants".
If it's just about such aspect you could give it some arbitrary EU regulation number and say it's compatible with that.
By basing it around the term "green" it's very much focused around marketing and what people will perceive as "carbon neutral".
It's a handout to the dying hydrogen industry of which EU was a huge supporter of. The electric revolution killed any chances of hydrogen powered cars, and the new hype in the industry is using excess renewable electricity to store in hydrogen batteries, which would then supply process heat or residential heating with zero emissions.
This is all a bunch of crap that will never be economic, since transporting, handling and using hydrogen is a nightmare and generating it via electrolysis is expensive and ineficient - to the point where the only economic source is to crack methane and release CO2. But that does not seem to stop the hydrogen hype, and it will likely continue in Europe for a few more years, until die it must, as prescribed by the laws of physics.
To reach any useful volume density you need a high pressure COPV tank that weights an other of magnitude more than the fuel it contains. To generate electricity you need a bulky fuel cell with low efficiency, which in turn requires a very beefy cooling system, larger than the one used on an ICE vehicle since the fuel cell is so much sensitive to overheating.
If you add it all up, you get something that's comparable with a battery in terms of energy density, but with half the round trip efficiency, expensive and dangerous refueling, larger upfront costs and lower lifetime.
It's no surprise then that the range record for a hydrogen car is actually lower than the corresponding BEV car.
The only genuine advantage of fuel cells is faster refill, but with advances in battery chemistry and ubiquity of charging spots, this becomes less of an issue.
As for the mineral scarcity issue, fuel cells have it much worse, each requiring a small fortune in platinum or other rare minerals. The lithium content for batteries is dropping and a somewhat lower performance sodium ion chemistry is available, with practically limitless supply.
Platinum is not a critical component, only necessary in current PEM fuel cells. Future fuel cells should eventually do away with platinum altogether. As hydrogen is effectively limitless too this is never going to be a resource concern.
So the density advantage of Hydrogen is limited, half to a third the battery mass with comparable volume. Not a game changer in 2010, and certainly not now, when everything else is against it.
The much improved and high performance fuel cells have been just around the corner for two decades. In the meantime, BEV sales have outstripped H2EVs one thousand to one, growing exponentially every year. How could anyone even consider buying a H2EV when the reliability of infrastructure is a joke even in the most mature US market [1]? Considering electric chargers are becoming ubiquitous and anyone can install one in their own home?
I think one needs to smell the roses, it's not a festive occasion for H2EVs.
[1] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2021-toyota-mirai-long-te...
Aside from mass, volume is fundamental on a terrestrial EV, it reduces storage capacity, comfort and range at highway speeds. That's why a Tesla can have two trunks, while the Mirai is limited to just 5 Kg of fuel.
The Mirai also stores around 186 kWh of LHV energy (220 kWh HHV). It's storing a fundamentally larger quantity of energy than comparable EVs.
Meanwhile, EV already exist today with similar range - Model S or Mercedes EQS, with something like 90% solar cell to wheel efficiency, and battery chemistries are only getting better.
That number also defines the arbitrage marginal any other solution has against hydrogen. Be it batteries, over built renewables or geographically coupled networks.
Hydrogen as a feedstock for industry?? Definitely.
Hydrogen for airplanes? Likely synthetic hydrocarbons but we will see, the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. Same with long distance ocean transport.
Emergency reserve of power for a nation state? Just use fossil fuels.
I don't know what solution our leaders have in mind for this - but I can imagine the costs of gas and battery storage scale differently.
It was never meant to succeed, much like Apple's concessions to right to repair, it's just a distraction designed to buy time
Perhaps it will be competitive with batteries or synthetic or carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels.
You need some way of manufacturing stored energy in accessible form. These plants should be already in development and being built to hit that target...
And no amount of money can make the bureaucracy work faster. It's been tried.
German Energiewende is criminal. Plain and simple. Shame on the Grünen, shame on the pseudo-environmentalists.