It’s not ok to call gas “green”. Period. If gas is necessary then build it, but don’t claim it is green.
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.