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.