For anyone wondering why gas, it's gas only in specific cases.
> 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.
When did "green" get co-opted to mean low CO2 emissions?
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.
You can make methane from carbon capture/sabatier reactors. Although I'm not sure if that's any more efficient than desalination/hydrolysis for an H2 plant with fuel cells. In any case, I'm onboard with replacing coal with gas, if nuclear isn't an option. Gas is cheap and fast to build today, and can be supplanted by nuclear/renewable later on. A pragmatic middle ground to (hopefully temporarily) accommodate the nuclear skeptics.
Solar + Batteries/Storage are cheap to build today. No need to choose a worse technology in every way now, that only becomes less viable as time goes on.
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.
The facilities don’t yet exist in large numbers because batteries have only recently become cheap enough to do this cost effectively.
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.
My house uses about 500kWh/month, so a typical electric car parked on my driveway for 95% of the time can run it for several days.
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.
Switching the entire (Western?) car fleet to electric cars will be neither a quick nor a cheap process. It won't even be feasible on a timescale of less than some 20 years, because the necessary amount of natural resources just isn't mined in such volumes. You also have to massively upgrade the grid to handle such powerful currents.
It is doable, yes, but I cannot concur with the OPs idea that it is cheap.
Are you heating up your house with 16.6KWh per day? Seems low for an electrically heated home.
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.
"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%
Don't forget that all other plants except wind require constant fuel. Solar and batteries have negative fuel cost, since solar is free and batteries can store off peak electricity to sell for a higher price during peaks.
Solar + a few hours of capacity are economical viable to run on a day and night cycle. Each day they charge up, and each day they discharge, with a market price that goes up and down in a similar pattern. This is possible for the southern part of EU, but more so in the southern parts of that (Egypt and below).
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.
Not true. We have 10kw solar panels with 64x ,280ah LIFO batteries. Even in the winter we manage for 90% using only solar/battery power. We have a detached family house in the Netherlands using slightly above average.
Our monthly bill is about 20 euros max.
I build the entire setup myself for about 10k euros.
I know a person who built a house worth 600k euros for less than 100k euros.
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.
Well it's almost enough. we don't have gas. Everything in the house is powered by electricity. Either from solar, battery or grid. So 10% still from grid. I am going to solve that by putting another 20 panels on the Northside of the roof. Not efficient, but maybe enough to cover the last 10%
Battery storage is profitable if you can sell for more than you buy. It just needs to be connected to the grid and not necessarily connected to a particular generator.
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.
Solar dropped below 2c/kWh in the kind of places you should actually install solar. It depends on interest rates but that’s shockingly low. Batteries provide peaking power cheaper than any rarely used peaking power plant. (2,000 charge cycles on a 100$/kWh battery charged from 2c/kWh solar is ~7c/kWh whenever you need it.)
That’s all it takes for adoption to dramatically increase. Market forces will shift things around as ever more solar comes online, but as long as daytime rates are above nighttime rates solar is an obvious win for electric companies.
> 2,000 charge cycles on a 100$/kWh battery charged from 2c/kWh solar is ~7c/kWh whenever you need it.
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.
2000 cycles is 5.5 years at one cycle per day, though 2 cycles per day can also be useful at the cost of a very short lifespan. Even 5% interest rates above inflation only increase costs by around 14%.
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.
Those are the wrong units in two different ways at once.
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.
If 1kWh of gas is 6 cents, and a 1kWh battery is $100 and lasts for 10,000 cycles, that puts the price of the battery at 1 cent/kWh plus the charging cost (2c/kWh for solar)
In addition, for Europe, the key part of removing Russia from the energy equation is worth a hell of a lot of money.
I hate to say it. I am not pro Russia at all, but its mainly the US who wants Russia to be removed so they can sell their goods to Europe. There no other reason. Luckily we see a larger movement of people recognizing this annoying behaviour of the US.
Unfortunately the math is meaningless if it takes 10 000 years to get those 10 000 cycles. Batteries are currently competitive for short response times and short cycles. As price declines they become become useful for longer cycles, but there will be a point beyond which we need alternative solutions, such as bulk storage/gas, long transmission lines, and/or demand management.
I expect most (but not all) of the batteries in a PV+battery grid would be cycled (to whatever depth) every day, giving them a ~27 year replacement cycle not too different from other power plants.
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.
I can follow that, but isn't this problematic when there is a power needed when there is no wind/solar available for recharging and you still need more?
e.g. we would need a much larger energy storage, than for gas?
Germany currently generates 50TWh per year of solar
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.
> Although I'm not sure if that's any more efficient than desalination/hydrolysis for an H2 plant with fuel cells.
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.
The trouble is that these hydrocarbon will just be burned like all others, causing GHG release.
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.
If methane is manufactured from CO₂ and H₂O, there is no net GHG release, it's just storage, same as ammonia or pure hydrogen (though large methane leaks would be a problem).
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.
Methane is not manufactured from straight gases. Usually it is either mined or steam reformed from oil or coal. You can see the problem - mining with concomitant pollution and release of previously bound CO2 when it's burned.
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.)
I am well aware methane is not currently generated from CO₂, as we are still using fossil fuels, not generating enough surplus energy to make the reverse process economical.
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.
> It wasn't that long ago we used to worry about whether fuel was renewable or not, and about pollution and other environmental externalities in general, not just CO2.
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.
There will almost always exist solutions that are greener than natural gas. The practical reason to choose natural gas over those are costs, sacrificing the environment in order to save money.
> It only gets the label if it's greener than existing solutions. They're not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
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.
It's caused by an ever increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it's solvable by drastically decreasing that amount. Its origin is nowhere in that equation.
> 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.
> They're not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
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.
The threat is humanity. The amount of pollution that will ultimately be created by the gas plants is a drop in the bucket compared to humanity overall and will largely be offset by renewables.
There's 5.5 million tons of known uranium reserves. If you took our current reactor fleet and replaced it with fast breeders, this would supply it for 30,000 years. There's also 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater. Then there's thorium.
You're missing that.
Technically not renewable, but in the long run, neither is the Sun.
It's not that bad, currently at breakeven point for laser fusion and close to that for magnetic containment fusion. Half a century should be enough, but we lack the time.
Breeder reactors can create more fuel, but even without these, there is a substantial amount of uranium that this is a non-issue. By the same token, solar is also non-renewable since it requires real resources mined from the earth which are in finite supply and solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable). In this sense, nothing is renewable -- even hydro will run out eventually when the earth cools and plate tectonics comes to an end.
Anyway, nuclear is never included in the "renewable" bucket, because the fuel has to be harvested and doesn't renew on a human timescale. Nuclear is green, because its net emissions are almost zero.
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.
> Anyway, nuclear is never included in the "renewable" bucket, because the fuel has to be harvested and doesn't renew on a human timescale.
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.
Yes, and you can argue that coal and oil are currently being created... very slowly... from dead trees and what not. So renewable vs non-renewable doesn't make any sense anymore.
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".
Solar isn't something that can ever be replenished. There's a fixed quantity of fuel in the sun. Once it burns out, it's gone. That provides the input energy into the process for solar, wind and wood.
With breeder reactors the uranium in seawater would last us 15 million years at current nuclear power consumption levels. If that's not renewable...
I though it was already clear that we were talking human scale. And you still talk about 4,500 million years as non-renewable, but 15 million years (plus 100% magic ocean harvesting) as renewable. At no point anybody said "infinitely renewable", and you arguing it makes that a strawman argument.
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.
> solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable)
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.
Nothing is indefinitely renewable. In the end, the second law of thermodynamics is an immovable barrier. When we talk about renewable, it's never endless, it's renewable within reason.
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.
Nuclear is definitely sustainable [1]. There's at least four billion tons of Uranium dissolved in seawater, enough to power humanity until the heat death of the universe [+]. We just have to figure out how to get it out. [2] The amount in the ocean is constantly replenished through geological activity so one could even make the case its renewable too.
[+] 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.
> This global warming-driven definition of "green" ignores all of that.
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.
Because we have specific environmental problems right now, that are quite serious and worth focusing on?
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.
> If animals go extinct, that is obviously unfortunate, but it pales in comparison to the prospect that we do so.
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.
That is counter productive to keeping the earth habitable. This "considered middle ground" ideology is more dangerous than denial. Like MLK said about "white moderates".
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.
Maximally 10 extra years and waste of a lot of labor and money that could be put into building and developing nuclear power plants and more renewables.
It would take mere months to open back up those plants recently closed. Back in the 70s they could construct plants in 2-5 years. Chernobyl 1 began and completed construction in the same year!
Has our technology gotten worse since then? Or is it just permits and bureaucracy impeding us?
MLK’s problem with white moderates was not being a middle ground, it was that they urged delay and inaction.
> 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."
I have been gravely disappointed with the climate moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the planets great stumbling block in his stride toward salvation is not the Oil Industry or the Coal Barrons, but the political pragmatist, who is more devoted to "order" than to climate 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(Roadblocks etc)"; who arrogently believes he can set the timetable for preventing ecosystem collapse; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the wildlife to wait for "better economic conditions." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
The middle ground between inaction and violence (blowing up a pipelines & boardrooms) is not classifying gaseous hydrocarbons a form of "green energy.
That's a misrepresentation of what they did. They said it was OK if it replaced certain stuff temporarily, not that you could just keep on building gas plants for ever and ever.
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?)
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.
This is as close to arguing about what colour to paint the deck chairs on the titanic as I can imagine.
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.
> until we’ve averted the upcoming climate disaster
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.
The best strategy is to stop CO2 emissions as fast as possible. We already did enough damage that we'll need mitigation strategies in the future, every ton of CO2 we add to the atmosphere makes mitigation more expensive. Climate change is not some binary thing which you either prevent completely or don't. It just gets worse and worse proportional to how long we keep burning fossil fuels.
If it only went proportional... The results are closer to logistic with some stability islands, exceeding certain thresholds causes runaway changes moving the equilibrium up. And there are some terrible end game scenarios we do not want to ever reach, such as exceeding wet bulb temperature in most living and farming places - cooling requires huge amounts of energy in scale. Exceeding that would make many places unlivable without technological support.
Then there's the ultimate point where hydrological cycle stops, causing runaway drying.
I think that depends on what you count as “disaster”. Some stuff is certainly baked in, but we might yet be able to stop short of what I think of as a disaster.
I’m not certain we will — problem and solution are both exponential — but I certainly think it’s plausible.
In Germany "green" meant diesel with salad oil mixed in before our politicians started to focus on electric cars. Everything renewable qualifies as "green" even its worse for the environment.
> 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.
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
“Green” is a marketing term designed not to promote any particular source of energy but rather to paint existing sources as “not green” which implies bad.
Ah yes Russia has limitless amount of money to control the EU despite having the GDP of Italy.
Putin is personally sabotaging the magical technology that can replace natural gas instantly!
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.
Intuitively 270g per kWh seemed high to me, but to put it in perspective a Tesla model 3 does about 100km per 11.9~14.9kWh (according to Google). So taking the larger estimate (and ignoring transmission etc losses) at 270g/KWh that gives emissions of around 41g/km.
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.
All very high numbers. The key to solving climate change isn't to do as before, just slightly more efficient. Electric cars won't solve anything, especially not if they are indirectly powered by fossil fuels.
Make cities walkable, bikeable and public transportable. That will have far bigger impact than people buying new electric cars.
> 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.
Please update your views of European urbanism (browsing Google's aerial photos should be enough). Urban sprawl is the defining key of the last 50 years.
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.
Urban sprawl is not a problem, and neither is a little country-side car dependence.
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.
Don't agree. While car culture is far worse in America, we're still far too dependent on cars here in Europe as well in situations where it isn't necessary. Almost all planning revolves around cars, and then some pedestrian stuff is tacked haphazardly on at the end.
What is “we here in Europe”? It’s equivalent to saying “we on planet earth do it this way”.
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.
I do wonder, how significant are inefficiencies in transmission, charging, and storage? With cheap lithium batteries I've bought (like phone power banks), I usually need to subtract about 25% from the rated capacity to figure out how many times it'll fill my phone's battery. Although hopefully cars are more efficient
Losses on the big high-voltage wires average about 2% in the US. Losses on lower-voltage distribution wires average 4% on top of that - so about 6% in total. [1] Lithium Ion batteries charge near 100% efficiency. [2] In terms of storage (specifically self-discharge), Lithium Ion batteries lose 5% in 24 hours, then 1-2% per month thereafter - but can be as low as 0.35% per month. [3, 4]
> Lithium Ion batteries charge near 100% efficiency
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.
Thank you for calling that out. I was going to say something about that, and budget say 10% to switching regulators. With car-scale charging systems I just didn't have enough data to ballpark efficiency.
Your right! I was just looking at it from the point of view of how efficient does this standard require power plants to be, since 270g of CO2 to run a 1kw heater for an hour seemed high.
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.
Yes, it's oddly specific but apparently intended to allow countries to classify energy from such plants as "green" and treat it as such when buying/selling or taxing it. That is important because a lot of companies that are interested in buying green energy in order to reduce their carbon emissions would care about their energy being labeled as green. There is a lot of book keeping that is happening related to this and some big financial interests across the EU. Demand for non green energy is going to be dropping as companies shoot for being carbon neutral and are incentivized to switch to green energy.
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.
> 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.
More so as it smells of politics. Germany was a thorn in Frances plans to label Nuclear green for while and does seem they wore down everybody and got thru a compromise that gets them off the hook by including gas. More worrying in this is how will this play into the whole gas drama with Russia.
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`.
The EU Taxonomy specifies which activites are green, which are transitional and those that are enablers for green activites.
Thus, it does describe activities that are not green, but are helping to move towards pure green.
---
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:
> If it emits carbon it isn't green, it really is that simple.
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.
Personally I’m not sure solar is a viable mass power production. I think it’s just a nice option for remote power production, as in “no one else in x miles” situation where x is an unsigned int.
Technically, the Sun send us orders of magnitude more energy that we will ever need.
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.
You're conflating CO2 from logistics and CO2 from electricity production. Logistics can be entirely converted to electrical in a decade with no special sauce needed.
Reference discusses power generation and plant maintenance. You can argue about words but only the net CO2 matters when you’re looking for a simple answer.
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.
Right now nuclear is the only green energy that is suitable for base load generation apart from hydro, and it takes a long time to build new nuclear plants, so I’m okay with a bridge solution that dramatically reduces emissions even if it doesn’t bring them to zero. The alternative is a dependency on much less green fossil fuel plants when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
Intelligent people shouldn’t quibble over an imaginary “green” line, but we should focus on minimizing emissions per unit power.
The point is that gas is not green, but it’s a whole lot greener than many alternatives.
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.
> 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.
Because it’s already a stretch to call gas green I don’t think it will be as easy to add worse things to the green label as it would be to add new labels to a ‘Colors similar to green’ pool.
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.
> What is the purely green alternative to gas that these gas plants will steal funds from?
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.
I can see how it’s offensive to call it green but honestly I think the politicians really did do their job here.
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".
> If gas is necessary then build it, but don’t claim it is green
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.
I’m not sure why this keeps getting regurgitated. Are you honestly arguing that the CO2 emissions in the production and operation of a solar plant are even remotely comparable to the emissions of a gas plant? If I have to explicitly spell all that out every time then we can’t have a conversation. It’s an absurd standard.
> Are you honestly arguing that the CO2 emissions in the production and operation of a solar plant are even remotely comparable to the emissions of a gas plant?
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.
It is absurd to be 100% dogmatic about solving this problem. Otherwise you look like a zealot, who refuses to talk to anyone who disagrees with you in.
> And they will be right. If it emits carbon it isn't green, it really is that simple.
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.
Oh please. Compare the CO2 emissions of a solar plant with those of a gas plant. Normalize for MWH produced. How many orders of magnitude is the difference?
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.
> That is such a minute amount of carbon in comparison to the energy produced by a gas plant in generating power
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?).
Yes, solar has emissions. But in your previous message you implied that it is larger than it is by making a deceptively long list of items. These are the number of total CO2 emited per energy produced (gCO2e/kWh):
> But in your previous message you implied that it is larger than it is by making a deceptively long list of items.
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.
The message I answered was to support that CO2 emited by solar, wind or nuclear are indeed minute compared with a gas plant, even including "short of a life, manufacturing, transport, installation, and disposal" emissions.
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.
Natural gas can be green and reduce global warming… in the specific case where you burn methane that would have otherwise escaped to the atmosphere. Garbage dumps are a very good case to burn natural gas, get energy, and slow help the climate. But these sources are limited.
The labeling matters because it influences funds allocation.
"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.
Because then Russian gas investments could get EU funding, that's why. Like a Russian owned gas terminal on German soil, to be more precise. That would actually take funding from nuclear or renewables and into fuelling another country's geopolitical ambitions.
Sure yeah. The politics of that (i.e. pretty much everyone seeing massive increases in their heating, electricity and fuel costs) would lead to a backlash and actually lead to less action over the longer term.
That's the theory anyway, and if we look at what happened in France with fuel taxes, it seems pretty plausible to me.
Surely any support available to projects that replace higher-emissions facilities with lower-emissions facilities would still be available if the lower-emissions facility is a zero-emissions facility, right?
You have a finite pool of resources. Market forces means that people will try to optimize for the best ROI (not really the full story, but generally true for a vast majority of the funds). Since natural gas is cheaper, you’re subsidizing a comparatively dirty source of energy which penalizes something like nuclear which is truly zero carbon.
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.
Isn't it kind of worse that it's not just a branding question?
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".
Why would this impact the colloquial meaning of "green" in any way? Do people usually adapt their informal language to be consistent with EU regulations?
> plan to switch to low-carbon gases by the end of 2035.
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.
I'm curious on why you're pessimistic on hydrogen. I agree that cars are likely not the best use of fuel cells (heavy vehicles are able to utilize H2's strengths much more), but in a future based on renewables hydrogen allows you to store energy in a very dense way. Lithium batteries are acceptably heavy/expensive at small scales, but how do you think will supply vary to meet demand in the medium-long term without a chemical fuel (hydrogen/ammonia)?
Firstly, the energy density of hydrogen is a lie. Yes, the fuel itself has the highest know energy content per mass, but it's nearly useless as a gas.
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.
A COPV has about 6% hydrogen by mass. At 33.3 kWh/kg, that’s ~2000 Wh/kg. This is far beyond the theoretical limits of li-ion batteries.
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.
A typical Mirai fuel consumption is 0.76kg/100km in similar driving conditions with a Tesla doing 15kWh/100km, so real world fuel density is 20kWh/kg - with a corresponding decrease in COPV density. You would then almost halve that density to take into consideration the whole electricity generating system, cell + cooling + the supercap or NiMH assembly that handle transients and regen braking etc.
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.
For the COPV alone. If we can ignore the associated hardware, a flask with some lithium could do 11kWh/Kg, if only it were to combust with the surrounding air in a spontaneous Li-Air cell.
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.
Even with everything included, that's still 600 Wh/kg or so. BTW, an EV with everything included really only has around 140-160 Wh/kg. It's still far short of what hydrogen can do.
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.
Indeed, but it does so by filling every inch of space. There's no front trunk, and the backseats and trunk are relatively cramped. Further improving on that pits you against the laws of physics: even if you could, say, safely double the pressure in the bottles, you waste more and more energy - compression is already a big part of the round-trip inefficiency of H2EV.
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.
It’s a modified Lexus in the end. It’s not optimized. If well designed you’ll get more room and range compared to a similar EV. The Hyundai Nexo is an example. Also, not every EV has a frunk, like the EQS.
Call it a solution in search of a problem. The best fuel cells today reach about 50% round trip efficiency. That's even a high estimate. That by physics defines the price difference between where you buy low and sell high. Without even counting the hydrogen storage, fuel cell itself and everything needed to make it function.
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.
Yeah I agree with what you say (especially your last part), that its use is likely to be much more for some industries than others; for eg. for Battery EVs particularly outside North America iirc a much smaller battery can do 95% of trips, so hydrogen makes very little sense for a family car. Though the person I was replying to was more pessimistic in general.
Well, Europe needs some way to store renewable energy in the summer for use in the winter. Especially if they plan to move all transport and heating off hydrocarbons, without using nuclear. And storing energy during summer for use in winter needs a battery 100x larger than storing it in the day for use at night.
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.
You need a large amount of electricity for a short term event - say a festival or a building site. You wheel in a hydrogen generator, powered by hydrogen from renewable electrolysis, job done.
There are new developments in the hydrogen field relevant to transporting it by converting the hydrogen to ammonia, which is routinely transported safely.
Perhaps it will be competitive with batteries or synthetic or carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels.
Efficiency is quite irrelevant to this subject when the cost of energy is nearly zero. Hydrogen will win out simply because it is cheaper and more sustainable than batteries.
The whole German agenda on decarbonization is based on Russian natural gas, so call me not surprised. If they had labelled H2 investments as green it would be a whole different thing.
Gas power plants are currently a cornerstone of the Danish green electricity plan. The idea is to base everything primarily on wind and solar, and to build an extensive direct current distribution network to exchange power with neighboring countries. Even with all that, there will still be periods where the sun does not shine and the wind doesn't blow. Gas power plants are then supposed to take over in those periods, which are hypothesized to be relatively short. It has been projected that all gas will be biogas by 2035, i.e. derived from food waste etc, and thus in theory carbon neutral.
Cool story, but it is a lie. Biogas manufactured from biowaste, even if done perfectly, is insufficient by a factor of 4.
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...
Germany is a powerful country in EU and they are going to buy more gas from Russia because they are closing their nuclear. Of course, it is ridiculous that gas is considered green…
About 400 to 500g of CO2 per kWh. That's everything but green. Plus as Norway and Netherlands production are in sharp decline, the proportion of EU natural gas coming from Russia, currently at 40%, is deemed to grow. That's mind-boggling stupid: let's get ourselves depending upon Russia and Putin, and let's replace are 15g/kWh nuclear plants with 500g/kWh gas plants! What could go wrong?
German Energiewende is criminal. Plain and simple. Shame on the Grünen, shame on the pseudo-environmentalists.
We in Norway have at least deluded ourself into believing that our oil and gas are cleaner than other countries', and we therefore should keep pumping fossil fuels out of the ground because it's better that we do it than someone else.. Smh
Nuclear investments desperately need to be recognized as green so you don't have oxymoronic policies similar to Germany's current plan where you're decommissioning nuclear to become more "green" yet producing much more carbon dioxide.
I'm really excited to see how China's 150 new reactor plan in the next 15 years[1] works out:
> China says its plans could prevent about 1.5 billion tons of annual carbon emissions, more than what’s generated by the U.K., Spain, France and Germany combined
Even if this is an overly-optimistic estimate it's still a colossal step forward!
Hopefully you don't believe it would be a step too far for the fossil fuel industry that has been responsible for wars and regime change and cartel behavior going back over a century to subvert or create fake environmental movements to keep their competition down.
It would be more outlandish to believe the fossil fuel industry isn't a major driving force behind the anti-scientific anti-environmental anti-nuclear movement. Follow the money.
Europe is small and densely populated. They can't afford to take the risk of having large swaths of land rendered un-inhabitable due to nuclear accidents. If there's one thing the last 60 odd years of nuclear experience has taught us, it is that Human organizations and societies cannot be trusted with maintaining high standards of safety in the long term that is required for fission power plants - even the Japanese who have developed a post-world war reputation for careful engineering and management couldn't manage it. Therefore, fission is simply not suitable for such densely populated countries. Japan and US learned this from failures. Germany smartly learned this from others failings. France will soon change their tune after their turn having a major accident (I sincerely hope they don't, but human fallibility is inevitable).
Now if you have millions of square kilometres of desert or uninhabited wasteland you are willing to sacrifice, sure you can plonk fission reactors there and take risks with the inevitable nuclear accident. US and Canada do have but are unwilling to sacrifice (aka NIMBYism). Russia does have but doesn't really need more nuclear power than it already has for it's fairly small population. China and to a smaller extant India do have such wastelands and the population to need nuclear power. If instead they plonk the new reactors in fertile populated areas, they in their turn will learn the hard way from their own accidents.
Now you can and modern reactors do design for "safe" failure. But frankly why bother when Solar and Wind have become so cheap that virtually no new coal plants are being planned in major economies in the last two years.
Japan's habitable area according to [1] is about 125k sq Km. Fukushima official Exclusion Zone is about 370 sq km [2] - so that's 0.3% which is quite a significant loss in itself.
However given the events, there's a lot of migration out of the surrounding towns and villages outside the exclusion zone due to fear of radiation amd a very marked population decline in the region. Young families don't want to risk raising children in such an area - so the population effects are significantly amplified and towns will go desolate as the older folks who stay pass away.
It's planned to reopen in 2030, although parts are open now I believe. Personally I think a better solution would be a nature reserve.
If I were choosing somewhere to live, I'd be more worried about the risk of another tsunami which killed 20,000 people than low level background radiation, same with Earthquakes in California, or Tornados in the middle of the US, or Hurricaines in the South East of the US.
Many places in the exclusion zone are about as radioactive as Cornwall, and people pay a premium to live there. There are far more radioactive cities in the world.
The fact remains that the coal plants that replace the German nuclear plants emit more radiation than the nuclear plants ever did. Nuclear isn't being abandoned because of economics, it's because of fear. Irrational fear at that, for many European countries.
There have been two serious nuclear incidents that have rendered land uninhabitable. One was a Soviet reactor that was already outdated at the time it was put to use, the other was the result of a tsunami. The entire field of research has been put on hold since Chernobyl, but the problems that caused the disaster have long since been solved.
Nuclear reactors have several advantages over solar and wind. Not taking up as much space, for one. There's also the ability to work during windless nights without having to install massive battery arrays.
The existing energy grid also isn't prepared for every house generating their own electricity. I know of several cities that simply refuse to connect more solar panels to the grid because the load cannot be distributed. The necessary expansion and reconstruction of the grid is planned to take about thirty years if work starts today.
Solar is great if solar panels are in constant use for over ten years, but advances in technology and deterioration of the panels themselves make many money wise consumers switch out their panels much earlier, sometimes even before they've earned back their production and transportation costs. We're just offsetting the environmental damage, moving it to mining and production facilities in China where we don't have to care.
Wind is the only green technology that I think is actually green enough not to be ruined by private economic incentives, but the NIMBY factor is huge. You're right that Europe is densely populated in comparison, and you need quite a lot of distance from the giant blades to not be affected by the many stressor such plants create, like the constant whooshing, the moving shadows and the constant low hums that come with most of them. Placing them at sea is a great solution for all of those problems, though.
There is no holy grail in energy. We'll go solar if price is more important than the environment, wind if availability is more important than the surrounding inhabitants, or coal and gas when we just need power without all the complaining.
Meanwhile, we'll always be planning some nuclear plants in Europe, because hospitals need radioactive compounds. The current ones are deteriorating but they have to keep operating because nobody wants to build new plants, but at some point we'll either have to build some at some point or not offer certain kinds of care in certain areas anymore.
Germany's carbon dioxide emissions have been going down steadily since they started switching off their aging nuclear plants. It's amazing to me how people can think they have a rational argument that's based entirely on fiction.
No, the debate I was having was about the explicit mention of "increasing CO2", which is just plain false. There are a lot of people that parrot this around the world, by just guessing in line with their beliefs, but the data is pretty clear.
> No, the debate I was having was about the explicit mention of "increasing CO2", which is just plain false.
In the context it seems pretty clear to me that "increasing CO2" is meant to refer to relative changes, not absolute changes. Playing semantics is a fairly pointless distraction from the actual argument.
So, as I asked before, how would these changes compare to projected decreases, if the nuclear plants were not switched off?
The word "increase" has a clear meaning, and it means that there is more of something than there was before. The word opposite of increase is called "decrease", and Germany's CO2 emissions have decreased since they started switching off nuclear power plants.
Calling a decrease an increase is something I would call playing semantics.
Language is full of ambiguities that are only resolved by context. Both a relative increase and an absolute increase are increases, so saying that it has a "clear meaning" is fairly pointless here.
And you're still ignoring my original question, which I asked from genuine curiosity. I'm getting a strong feeling you prefer to focus on a straw man, because if you look at relative changes your position falls apart. Do prove me wrong.
I hope you're enjoying the increase in air temperature from 30 degrees in the summer, to 2 degrees today. The temperature for today was projected to be -3 two weeks ago, so we have a relative increase there. Is that how you think relative vs absolute works?
Again, *by context* this is precisely how you would *not* interpret "increase" here.
You've basically taken my point and turned it to mean the exact opposite, so that you can give a smart-ass reply while avoiding the actual question I'm asking. Well done.
I have tried having a normal discussion, which is not something I can say for you. To see this, it's enough to check what was initially posted:
"...Germany's current plan where you're decommissioning nuclear to become more "green" yet producing much more carbon dioxide."
It says clearly "decommissioning nuclear, YET producing MORE carbon dioxide". It's not true, and there's no other way around it. I posted an explicit response to this wrong post because I have seen it many times (and unfortunately I am repeating myself here). A lot of pro nuclear people are shaking their heads in dismay because the CO2 numbers in Germany are going up. They are not! I have literally had this very same discussion three weeks ago somewhere else with another person that does not check data.
How you then managed to spin it into a comparison to a fictional parallel universe where the plants are still on and concluded that a decrease is actually an increase I don't know. But it's enough for me for today.
> I have tried having a normal discussion, which is not something I can say for you.
You have not at any point tried to answer my original question. At every point you deflect to a straw man.
> It says clearly "decommissioning nuclear, YET producing MORE carbon dioxide". It's not true, and there's no other way around it.
As I have quite clearly explained to you, this can refer either to absolute or relative changes. It doesn't take a lot of goodwill to decide that they probably meant relative changes, and then from there on you can address issues (such as pros/cons of nuclear) that actually matter, instead of splitting hairs and argue about language.
> A lot of pro nuclear people are shaking their heads in dismay because the CO2 numbers in Germany are going up. They are not!
They presumably are, relative to what they could have been, no? That seems a perfectly good reason to be upset, even if you don't agree with nuclear as the best option. If you immediately lambast people for not using language the way you think it should be used, you are inevitably going to lose a lot of credibility. Goodwill is necessary for a constructive debate, and you're not really showing that here.
> How you then managed to spin it into a comparison to a fictional parallel universe where the plants are still on and concluded that a decrease is actually an increase I don't know.
If you're having trouble understanding the concept of a relative change, perhaps this is not the best discussion to be involved in. Far too often I see people comment loudly and denounce their opponents as idiots, when it is in fact themselves that don't fully understand the nuances and complexities.
And they could be going down even faster by switching on the nuclear plants! But at least now Germany is prepared in case of a Fukushima style tsunami. Nobody claims that carbon emissions are increasing by an absolute number.
Germany is investing heavily in green energy, but green energy won't be able to provide the necessary energy for years to come. Switching to their objectively worse power sources, both in terms of carbon emissions and release of radioactive compounds to the surrounding environment, was a stupid move based on nothing more than FUD.
You are making a series of assumptions that are either debatable or not true. We don't know how the alternate reality where the power plants are still on looks like. The biggest reason is that most of the plants that were switched off were scheduled to be taken offline anyway because they were old. It was only sped up because of Fukushima. When people talk about Fukushima, they usually say "well it was old technology, it can't happen with the new ones", but when Germany takes the old technology offline (we're talking about some designed in the 60s), then it's criticized for political posturing and FUD.
Secondly, I posted somewhere else, but the German tax payers are since 2017 on the hook for an estimated $170B of costs for the disposal of old nuclear waste from the plants. Greenpeace has criticized the deal as inadequate since the costs will likely be higher. The way I see it, a lot of money was saved by switching them off, and that money can be used for something else. The problem of nuclear waste is unsolved in most of the world, including the US, where there are already reports that the temporary storage is leaking. Another thing to consider.
But those are mostly just opinions and what ifs. Crucially however, you are assuming that green energy can't provide for years and that they switched to an objectively worse power source. It's just not true: they rely less on coal now then they did 10 years ago, and have increased the renewable part to 45% (from 30% just five years ago). The amount of coal in use now is at a historic minimum both in terms of the percentage and the absolute amount.
Yeah, and the amount of power they export has about halved in the last year. They're just turning stuff off without a way to replace it which will bite us all in the ass in the long run.
It's the classic outsource stuff to other nations and claim victory tactic that helps nobody.
The amount of power they export peaked 2015-2018, at more than twice the previous record. Most of the nuclear plants were switched off before that. It is currently still above what they exported prior to the "nuclear exit". Please check data before drawing conclusions.
Nuclear Energy becomes decidedly less green (but still greener than out of the ground Methane) when building, maintenance and decomissioning as well as fuel transports are included. [1] But once the fix costs are accounted for making it run longer seems smart.
There seems to be quiet bimodal distribution of CO2e estimates for carbon. Some are like 5 other >100 in the same unit.
OK, but the same applies to wind turbines. I don't see a lot of Teslas hauling wind turbines down I-80. Let's not set up double standards just for nuclear.
There's already large contemporary investment in wind and solar relative to the past, not quite the same for nuclear. A lot of processes are inherited from very old projects back in its heyday.
Also owing consideration is the many advances to those processes that could occur with more substantial investment in nuclear power.
However the primary benefit to nuclear, beyond its acceptable carbon emissions, is that functioning as a base load removes a lot of the difficultly with building enough battery infrastructure to enable solar power to power peak load and through the night. This is particularly the case for service based economies whose peak load is often after dark.
What Germany did was very quickly turn off all nuclear power plants without any plans on replacing them with sustainable alternatives. Now they're offline, what's done is done. France still has nuclear power plants, and they're really pushing for nuclear energy to be considered green.
This is about investing and creating incentives. So IMHO Germany shouldn't build new plants and France shouldn't get EU funding for their existing ones and everyone, but especially these wealthy countries should focus on truly sustainable energy.
Every euro spend on a "transitional" does not go towards the truly sustainable technologies.
> Every euro spen[t] on a "transitional" does not go towards the truly sustainable technologies.
We won't have many euros left if we need to fight climate change effects while we wait for new technologies. We need to use the technology we already have. In addition to that, in parallel, we also need to find enough land owners that are willing to have a wind turbine in their proverbial back yard. And in parallel install solar panels on available surfaces. And introduce (pumped, battery, etc.) energy storage. We need all of it.
Renewables don't have a money problem, it's a political and humanitarian problem. It literally costs money to have money (ask your bank), so the big money owners want to invest it. It's well known that solar panels and wind turbines pay for itself easily and are very low risk (lower even than an index fund if you operate more than a single device).
Nuclear isn't so simple, but has unique advantages. We don't have the luxury to play politics around whether nuclear is renewable or not, it's low on greenhouse gases and doesn't require a lot of land per MWh. No point delaying further while we debate for another five years about whether we should really fund this not-truly-renewable technology.
For gas, I mostly agree with you because that's an ongoing emission source with much higher greenhouse gas emissions. Building new gas plants isn't going to get us very far (even if its merits vs. alternatives need to be weighed on a case-by-case basis).
But nuclear is different from gas: it's a calculable emission source for the initial construction, and over its lifetime will be orders of magnitude lower, in the same ballpark as wind and hydro.
I'd love to go with only truly renewable sources (not that "renewables" like wind and solar have renewable or long-lived hardware, but it's a good start). I just don't see that as an option in densely populated western Europe. I'm happy that the EU looks at merits here rather than ideologies.
>Nuclear isn't so simple, but has unique advantages
Its advantages are dwindling compared to solar/wind/battery/pumped hydro/demand shaping.
It requires gargantuan subsidies to even exist.
For instance, the nuclear industry in the US has barraged us with propaganda about how really incredibly safe it is and how overregulated they are but insurers will still refuse to insure a nuclear plant unless 99% of the liability for accident cleanup is placed on taxpayer shoulders.
Its main advantage is that it can mitigate some of the costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal. This is realistically why the US, UK and France keep it but Germany doesnt think it's worth it.
These three elephants in the room: cost, accident liability and nuclear arsenals are invariably absent from media discussions about nuclear power in the US largely because of who drives the discussion.
While Nuclear is not cheap, it will be cheaper than the effects from un-softened climate change.
While Nuclear is difficult to maintain and if an accident happens it is bad, but the damage and affected area can be easily calculated.
While Nuclear waste storage costs money and has to be secure for a long time, the chance that we as humans will be able to recycle the nuclear waste in 200-500 years is fairly high. On the other hand once shit hits the fans with climate change shit really hits the fan but with the quantity of New York City's total sewage from the last 5 decades.
The thought that we will be able to recycle nuclear waste in 200+ years is more reliable than any promise Elon Musk has ever given.
>While Nuclear is not cheap, it will be cheaper than the effects from un-softened climate change.
Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question.
As far as I can see that answer may be yes in one specific circumstance - when you already have a nuclear plant with another 5+ years of life left. i.e. when the insane capex is a sunk cost.
In all other instances it only really comes close if you assume the risk of nuclear disaster is close to zero or if you pretend that the precipitous fall in solar/wind/battery prices didnt happen yet.
> Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question.
I believe that’s the wrong question to ask.
We need nuclear to be cheaper and more attractive than coal and oil (and later natural gas).
If grid scale batteries ever become a viable thing and cheaper than nuclear then that’s just great and eventually the nuclear plants can be phased out in favour of those.
In the meantime however we need to get rid of coal and oil, because that’s where the overwhelmingly most emissions are.
>If grid scale batteries ever become a viable thing and cheaper than nuclear then that’s just great
Ok. So, what if that already happened?
>In the meantime however
The meantime is past. Arguably it lasted until latest 2020 which was the last time grid scale batteries were expensive. 2014 was the last time solar or wind were expensive.
Meanwhile, if you tried to commission a new nuclear plant now it wouldnt be running until 2030 earliest and possibly later (hinkley point C will take 20 years).
A new battery/wind/solar farm usually takes a year and theyre still plunging in price.
If that already happened then that's great. It's the first I'm hearing about it but I don't work in the sector so that's fair.
Nevertheless nuclear energy is a steady and reliable source of large amounts of energy, just like coal and oil.
By having a few of those, the grid operator can greatly decrease their need for grid-scale batteries, thus enabling more grids to deploy them faster, paving the way for more solar/wind.
This is not a competition between renewables and nuclear. They aren't enemies.
CO2 is the enemy, we must focus on that.
Point well taken about how long the nuclear projects take, that's why natural gas a bridge is important.
I want purely renewable energy just as much as you but I'm highly skeptical that it is possible or even desirable to build out all the capacity we need in just solar/wind/hydro in the short amount of time we have. Everything that helps, helps. Until the point where it doesn't and then that's the time to address that.
>This is not a competition between renewables and nuclear. They aren't enemies.
They kind of are. They are competing for limited investment and they are not complementary.
Nuclear power is not a "battery". It's an extraordinarily expensive way to produce a fixed amount of power whether it's needed or not.
You trade ~20% extra reliability for 3x the cost.
>I'm highly skeptical that it is possible or even desirable to build out all the capacity we need in just solar/wind/hydro in the short amount of time we have
Nothing can do it in the short amount of time that we have to save us from 2C.
Diverting limited resources to nuclear won't speed the transition up though, it'll slow it down.
I guess we just disagree then. I think we have plenty of resources to do both.
Government might better focus on clamping down on frivolous waste of resources such as cryptos (both waste of hardware, energy and most valuably talent).
>Is it cheaper than demand shaping/wind/solar/grid-scale batteries though? That's the real question.
Hmm, I think one should also add other factors.
Space Requirements for Wind and solar. To generate the same amount of energy as a nuclear power plant a lot of space is needed for Wind and Solar.
Resources to Produce Batteries, Solar Panels and Wind mills. Battery production requires a fuck ton of water. With impeding Water shortages this is suboptimal.
How many Solar Panels and Wind mills can we produce daily?
Not just construction and installation on site, but also mineral mining for the Solar panels.
And then how many factories can produce these, and can that be scaled up?
How many construction workers are there and how many on site installation can be completed.
We need 1200 wind turbines to replace an 30year old nuclear power plant. Windturbine = 3mW, Nuclear power plant = 1.2GW
Just to cover our current demand of electrical energy we need a ton of wind turbines and solar panels. Than add to that every other industry that needs to switch to electricity, Transportation, Chemical Industry, Steel Industry, heating etc. This would quintuple our electrical energy consumption.
>We need 1200 wind turbines to replace an 30year old nuclear power plant. Windturbine = 3mW, Nuclear power plant = 1.2GW
Hornsea two provides as much as a nuclear plant, with vastly lower cost and built about 15x faster. It's 165 x 8 MW turbines.
It was planned, executed, built and brought online before Hinkley point C even laid the first brick at ~45% of the cost and a load factor of about 65% (to nuclears 80) due to the greater reliability of wind with large turbines.
> Its main advantage is that it can mitigate some of the costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal
With such arguments, there really is no point having a discussion. You know that's not the advantages I was referring to (since they're in the very next sentence you're quoting) and you're ignoring that completely.
I bring it up because while it looms large in the minds of policymakers and is a large factor in their decision-making it almost never gets discussed in the media.
The question of who insures nuclear plants (always taxpayers) is likewise something else that is always curiously whitewashed out of American media.
Most of the advantages other than the nuclear arsenal one, on the other hand, are repeated frequently and are very well known.
> What Germany did was very quickly turn off all nuclear power plants without any plans on replacing them with sustainable alternatives.
This is not quite correct.
The first decision to phase-out nuclear was made around the year 2000 [1]. Its initial date for the shutdown of the last nuclear reactor was set to be 2022. The plan was agreed upon by the owners of these plans.
Around 2010, this first decision was taken back, and a few months later, Fukushima happened. This led to the second decision to phase-out nuclear.
Only then, eight of 17 reactors were turned off quickly. But this had no major impact, because the switch to renewables was already under way for ten years.
Compare Germany's coal consumption after Fukushima with Japan's, and you'll noticed the difference.
Which will increase the pressure upon Gas demand at a time that is probably one of the worst for a long time, let alone the usual winter pressure.
Shame nuclear didn't get that green EU label years ago when, as France could of green lit it's updated nuclear plant program instead of stagnating in limbo at a time in which many of their existing plants are entering end of life and with current timescales, would at best see a few pushed past that or some serious shortfalls in energy production.
As for Germany building new plants, with the public opinion, I would suspect that Germany's nuclear production is something they are happy to offshore to France and buy in that green energy cheaply without any of the political fallout/protests on it's doorstep.
There needs to be clearer terminology and labels for “green”, “sustainable”, “renewable”, “climate neutral” energy.
I’d also like to throw in “democratic” in the mix. Because energy and foreign policy can’t be separated. The EU energy mix is going to be geopolitically very important in coming years.
We also need to make it very clear what the goals are for each kind and where the tradeoffs are. I think right now the important focus must be to be climate neutral and I dependent of eastern natural gas. And if that means not being sustainable for a couple of decades that seems well worth it.
This seems to be about biogas plants which are allowed to run on natural gas for the first years. Not great, not terrible.
But the EU should stop basing policy on fuzzy goalposts that are easily moved like this.
No one can draw a line between economics/politics/science. The line drawn is that politicians like to leave researchers alone while researching. Once the result leaves the researcher it’s not separable from politics and economics.
It's interesting how trade relationships that are centuries old, are now seen in a negative context solely on a foreign policy basis that's often dictated from across the Atlantic. Particularly when they go completely contrary to the other stated goal; Climate change.
Western Europe has been dependent on Eastern Europe's resources for a very long time, as Siberia is the largest concentration of natural resources on the continent and one of the largest on the whole planet.
It's not something anybody has much choice over; These resources are where they are, that geographic proximity also lead to their use being integrated all over the continent.
We can't replace that with wishful thinking, we can't just wish metal ores and minerals into existence or gas for industrial manufacturing.
Case in point; Germany's gas dependence, which is commonly framed as "Germany now uses more gas because it shut down nuclear reactors", when in reality only 14% of Germany's gas consumption is for electricity production [0].
The biggest chunk of German gas consumption is for industrial applications, like heavy smelting for the car industry or the chemical industry to create high demand chemicals like ammonia. Another huge chunk is household use for heating and kitchen appliances, together these two sectors account for 67% of Germany's gas consumption.
Nuclear reactors do nothing for that demand, at least not without taking a detour trough hydrogen, a detour that traditional renewables can also do [1]. While trying to supply that demand with imported American NGL would be the complete opposite of "Think of the climate!".
That's why declaring Eastern Europe's resources just as "taboo" is not a solution that will get us anywhere useful. Fighting climate change also means making the supply chains more local, you can't do that in Western Europe by declaring the largest collection of resources, in proxmity, as "off-limits for political reasons".
At some point we have to decide what's more important; Fighting climate change as a species or instrumentalizing it for these kinds of foreign policy games that usually leave everybody worse off, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
Not sure what your point is: once no fossil fuel is used to heat Europe (which has to be very soon), something else will. The replacement could be anything but it seems unlikely to be coming from Siberia.
Europe need a to take some quick and uncomfortable decisions here. It can’t be acceptable to have homes heated with fossil fuel anywhere in the rich part of the EU at least, even just a decade from now. This was just a climate issue up until the annexation of Crimea. Now it’s a question of what western democracies can and can’t do (such as: would if Finland wants to join NATO and Russia threatens Germany with gas shortages unless they veto).
The grants for switching fossil burners for heat pumps in single family homes have existed (at least in Sweden, Finland etc) for what, 20 years now? What’s happening on that front on the continent? Are there no grants? Are they not attractive?
Theway government grants work in UK is, the richer you are, the more you get from the government. They freauently are offset against your taxable income, so they are most effective if you are in highest tax bracket.
Conversely, poorest people rent the shittiest and least efficient homes, but they don't have the choice to replace the heating system - that's the landlorsa decision. But he doen't pay the utilities, the tenants do, so why would he care?
Retrofitting is going to be much more than the cost of the unit itself though. You can't just replace an on-demand gas boiler with a heat pump. The rest of the heating system is completely different between the two, it just wouldn't work. It's especially problematic in apartments where there is limited space.
But we (Nordics) replaced all our oil pans. I naively thought it was the same thing just oil instead?
A boiler makes hot water in a tank in the basement and showers, radiators and taps use that hot water?
I have seen (In Scotland) some extremely weird contraptions where water was heated in the shower by what I can only assume was an flame in a box on the wall. But surely that’s not what Germans and others on the continent are using? They do have a central hot water system?
How else is water coming to the radiators? I guess my question is: are there gas lines around a typical home to any other place than the boiler and possibly stove? Why?
The main issue is that a heat pump takes a lot longer to heat up water on demand than a gas boiler. A gas boiler as used in the UK typically has a heat output of 25 to 50kW. Where as a heat pump for the same sized home can produce maybe 8kW of heat - given the right outside weather conditions.
The gas boiler can directly heat up cold water and provide sufficient flow for a hot shower, but the heat pump cannot. Because of this you need to buffer the heat in a hot water tank, usually something that's a few hundred litres, and heat it up over time. I believe boilers using heating oil work somewhat sim
In the UK houses heated with gas usually don't have a hot water tank, or even anywhere to put it. You can get all-in-one heat pump units that are the size of a large fridge which have a built in tank, but I've lived in places where there wouldn't even be space for that.
The boxes in the showers used in the UK are electric. They work pretty well (esp. considering most homes in the UK are single phase), but I am always concerned by the fact that an electric wire carrying 30kW of power is running right next to running water :-) Other than a gas boiler older homes may have a gas fireplace, but they are not so popular now.
There's also issues of the flow temperature for the heating system. Traditional central heating usually has a temperature of 70-80C, where as underfloor heating systems using a heat pump usually have a max of 35C. With a heat pump the efficiency drops with the temperature delta, so they are optimised to produce lower temperature water. But traditional radiators work better with higher temperatures.
Yes by heat pump I mean one of those fridge size things. They include hot water tanks. I have one of those and it’s around €4-5000 eur so within the grant money from a scrapped oil burner. Mine produces both 50deg water for radiators and 35deg for underfloor via an electronic shunt (about €500 extra) because I have underfloor heating on one floor and radiators on the upper floor.
It also connected directly to 4 pipes hot/cold tap and hot/cold radiator water making an easy swap.
Are you saying the space requirement of 60x60x180cm would really be the problem?
> But he doen't pay the utilities, the tenants do, so why would he care?
When you talk rent in London the first question asked tends to be "bills included?". This suggests to me that a non-trivial number of landlords would be interested in efficiency. Anecdotal, I don't have the data for the whole UK.
> When you talk rent in London the first question asked tends to be "bills included?".
In my entire life I have only seen bills included in properties that were rented room by room, i.e. each room has a different tenant. I have never seen that for entire property rented to a single tenant
> Not sure what your point is: once no fossil fuel is used to heat Europe (which has to be very soon), something else will. The replacement could be anything but it seems unlikely to be coming from Siberia.
Thank you for putting this more clearly than I could.
Europe's got to move to more heat pumps and more industrial use of electricity to be greener. Then the question becomes: where is the best source of that electricity?
Maybe some of it can be very efficient natural gas plants-- especially if power-to-gas provides viable to eat up solar surpluses during the day. But nuclear is a good thing to have in the mix, too.
I am curious how well the new Lithium free batteries CATL is working on will perform at 10% extra volume and half as expensive they could be enough to make power-to-gas to expensive.
Yup, battery improvements may neutralize power-to-gas --- though there's a lot of reasons to consider it as useful (in addition to gas-to-power there's a whole lot of users of natural gas and not all may be easily retrofitted).
Still, I think a share of decent, predictable base load makes everything easier, and that's where nuclear can shine.
> Case in point; Germany's gas dependence, which is commonly framed as "Germany now uses more gas because it shut down nuclear reactors", when in reality only 14% of Germany's gas consumption is for electricity production [0].
If Germany used more nuclear, then more houses would probably start heating with electricity (or at least newly built houses), like in France.
I'm not labeling it as an East/West thing, the comment I replied to did, I replied in their context.
In practicality it's not an "East/West" thing as Eurasia is one continental mass, the colloquial distinction between Europe and Asia isn't one based on geography, but mostly politics.
That why "It's not in Europe but Asia" might be an interesting technicality, but doesn't change the geographic proximity, or how we are very much still talking about Russia.
> when in reality only 14% of Germany's gas consumption is for electricity production. ... Another huge chunk is household use for heating and kitchen appliances, together these two sectors account for 67% of Germany's gas consumption.
But this is pretty much connected. If you have cheap electricity, you can easily use it for heating instead of natural gas.
> on a foreign policy basis that's often dictated from across the Atlantic.
So Russian sabre rattling is actually the US? There is a long and complicated history between Western Europe and Russia, but the time when one is selling gas to the other is just the final 20 years. It is not in the EU’s interest to depend on an unreliable partner that is trying to destabilise it. Even more so for something as vital as energy production.
> Particularly when they go completely contrary to the other stated goal; Climate change.
How is getting rid of gas contrary to the climate change related goals? These call for the end of all fossil fuel generated electricity.
> Western Europe has been dependent on Eastern Europe's resources for a very long time
Some references would be useful here. I don’t really doubt it but as you wrote it, it sounds too much like hand waving.
> Another huge chunk is household use for heating and kitchen appliances
Electricity is perfectly fine for these uses. Transitioning is expensive but mitigation if we don’t will be even more.
> While trying to supply that demand with imported American NGL would be the complete opposite of "Think of the climate!".
It would also be contrary to the EU’s long term interest. We love the Americans, but we’ll be wary that another Trump could tear down treaties and agreements way too easily. Some companies are already importing shale gas from North America and nobody is pleased.
> That's why declaring Eastern Europe's resources just as "taboo" is not a solution that will get us anywhere useful.
It’s a good thing nobody is doing that, then.
> At some point we have to decide what's more important; Fighting climate change as a species or instrumentalizing it for these kinds of foreign policy games that usually leave everybody worse off, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
Cute. Now, in the real world, we’re not going to fight climate change with gas either. Also in the real world, the EU is not the US.
What does Assange have to do with this area of geopolitics? I’m talking about how the gas supply risks limiting the room for maneuvers of European democracies. For example if the EU wants to strengthen relations with Ukraine, or if Finland wants join NATO then the question of energy supply can’t get in the way.
We need to build fast breeder reactors which burns up the nuclear waste that we have created through older reactors. Ie in normal nuclear reactirs only about 1% of nuclear fuel is converted into energy, the rest is waste. Breeder reactors can take the nuclear waste and convert it into useful energy.
BioGas which is methane gas extracted from waste is also very green.
The article states that a Gas power plant would only be labeled green if it emits less than 270g/kWh, replaces a previous fossil fuel plant, construction starts before 2030 AND plant plans to switch to low carbon gases (biogas?) by the end of 2035.
I guess the goal is to phase out coal in Germany and Poland by any means necessary..
You can get great g/kwh for gas plants if you don't account for all of its stray methane emissions, and the accounting for that is rather pitiful nowadays.
The 2035 "low carbon gases" thing is just ridiculously unworkable and will be repealed later as unrealistic.
So at best, they'll just trading ~10 years of coal power for ~5 years of coal power followed by 40+ years of fossil methane power. That's a terrible trade.
And instead of comparing nuclear to a magical zero-pollution/emission, flawlessly safe, always-available power source, we should compare it to what it actually gets replaced with.
If you include the deaths that nuclear waste will cause during the tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive it wouldn't be so positive.
But of course we can't look into the future. But we do know safe storage for such durations is not yet figured out. It's externalising the problem to the future. Just like CO2, but on a much longer timeframe. Still not very ethical though IMO.
> If you include the deaths that nuclear waste will cause during the tens of thousands of years it remains radioactive it wouldn't be so positive.
isn't that a common misconception though? Relatively the waste amount by volume is incredibly miniscule. I'm sure by 3022 we can figure out how to shoot it into space or something - that's a very very long time.
Given that we have maybe 10 years at best to make sure there will still be livable conditions for humans on most of the world's land area 100 years from now, worrying about radiation that could kill people thousands of years from now is simply absurd.
What led us to climate change is going for short-term benefit and leaving the problems to the future. We shouldn't repeat that mistake even though we'll be long gone by the time the problems come to light.
And really we're already too late to prevent most of climate change. Especially because we won't replace fossil with nuclear in 10 years time.
> What led us to climate change is going for short-term benefit and leaving the problems to the future. We shouldn't repeat that mistake even though we'll be long gone by the time the problems come to light.
That's how anything works, though. You replace the giant bleeding wound with a bandaid, and then you take it off and there's a scab, and then the scab goes away and you have a scar. It's always about replacing something with a lesser problem. For the past few years people have been trying to replace fossils with imaginary clean power, and it hasn't exactly gone great.
> There's nothing interesting (e.g. terrorism, bombs) you can do with nuclear waste, and it's not especially poisonous.
LOL. Nuclear materials, including waste, are extremely dangerous in evil hands. It regularly kills people by accident or due to negligence. Chornobyl was an accident. Just imagine what a team of motivated people with evil intent can do with a nuclear station or nuclear waste. Last attempt to use nuclear waste in war was in 2015: Russia-backed terrorist planed to use radioactive waste (Kyshtym) to throw a dirty bomb at Kyiv.
This is really not true at all. One risk is actually the overreaction folks might have. Ie, a big focus of the "dirty bomb" type plots are really around trying to drive big reactions. Chornobyl was a worst case scenario. My guess is someoen could go to the area they have closed off and find plenty of plant / animal life thriving in the "nuclear wasteland".
Most waste is processed so its for example sealed into some kind of material prior to burial. So recovery of the radioactive portion, concentrating and refining it etc would be a pretty major undertaking.
You may also be confusing the long radiation stuff with high radiation stuff.
Nuclear materials yes, waste no. Chernobyl was an active reactor, for example.
There's an inverse relationship here with the half-life. The most dangerous waste is stuff that burns up in a few decades, the type that lasts for millions will emit very little radiation per unit time.
You clearly have no idea what we are talking about, but I will not write about the issue with nuclear waste on a public forum. I don't want to inspire somebody.
Not really. A single dust particle of lead in your lungs isn't going to kill you. A particle of plutonium is. It's not comparable to lead on terms of dangers.
Also, the problem with radioactive materials is that they damage the containers they're stored in over time. It's called radiation embrittlement.
Those "millions of years" comments always seem rather out of place, considering that the Earth naturally contains enough radioactive elements that literally kept it warm for 4.6 billion years. (And they come with several billion years of half-lives.)
When you see volcanoes, earthquakes, and hot springs in action, that's the power of radiation. All of it.
It's only radiation power in the way of the sun being our main heat source which slows our planet's cooling. Which is of course one huge fusion reactor. And if you were outside the protection of our magnetosphere and atmosphere its radiation would actually be pretty dangerous even at this distance.
The earth's core is just still hot from when it was formed. It's not being heated by an internal nuclear reaction.
This is a very bad comparison. Radioactive heating is only significant because the earth is very large. Soil has a very low background activity of a few hundred Bq/kg. High-level nuclear waste has 2 TBq/kg after 100 years.
Go on, then, compare away. Both in terms of deaths/kWh and CO2/kWh, nuclear is equivalent or better than most renewable you could name. There are arguments against nuclear, but these aren’t them.
Yep. So close you can call it equal, unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen from leakage. So lets discount that and focus on the side which allocates capital and brings projects to completion. The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH.
> unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen
Surely you have a risk assessment for this, or can point to holes in the existing ones?
No industry is clean by definition and at the moment both wind turbines and solar panels depend on local industry in China, which is quite bad even by European standards and also runs on coal. And then there is the insanity of cutting down forests to put solar panels.
> The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH.
They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. But that’s not really relevant as I am not arguing against renewables. Both renewables and nuclear have different profiles, different advantages, and different use cases. And a combination is much cheaper than using only either.
The thing is, though, that by saying that nuclear is as bad as fossil fuels, we contribute to expanding our use of fossil fuels in the future, which is orders of magnitude worse than all the nuclear accidents that ever happened or are likely to happen. There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity.
> They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage.
Hey, nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by government, and it badly needs batteries for storage too.
For example, insurance for nuclear stations is provided by government for free, because its price is sky-high. If we include cost of insurance into the price of nuclear energy, its price will be too high for economy.
Nuclear can support base load only. For day-to-day management, a hydro, gas, coal, or batteries are necessary. Nuclear is not an option to reduce CO2 emissions substantially without hydro or batteries. We use nuclear power for decades already.
> There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity.
It can be as long as this plan is not realized: gas is good for storing renewable energy over longer periods of time.
Germany needs some way of compensating fluctuations of renewables over longer periods of times
Nuclear can't seem to be built anywhen, it seems to take decades and cost an order of magnitude more per kWh than offshore wind.
It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests (personally I'd rather have a nuclear plant than a coal plant a few miles away, but for some reason people don't like that idea)
This seems to be pure incompetence on our collective part. The Chinese do it on time without much trouble. If you take the EPRs, all the delays are supply chain and contractors issues, and a moving regulatory target. Nothing about that is specific to nuclear.
> cost an order of magnitude more per kWh than offshore wind.
Not quite, but a bit more. I don’t have the data offhand, but EDF Energy’s offshore wind farms have a similar cost per kWh compared to Hinckley C. Also, in an all-intermittent grid, you need to add the cost of storage, which is far from negligible. The true advantage of wind is that you can scale the project in a much finer way (you can’t build half a nuclear reactor).
> It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests
This is a problem in all cases. People are not thrilled about wind turbines or solar farms in their backyards either.
And yet fossil fuels are still funded, and even subsidized, instead of nuclear.
By all means try and get 100% of power from wind and solar, but we're not there yet. And until we are, and they can provide the required baseload power, it's not a strawman at all.
Yes, fossil funding and subsidies should have been removed some 30 years ago. At least. Can't argue with that.
Baseload as a term does not exist on the producer side. Simply by chance the cheapest sources of energy were the most inflexible ones. This is coal and nuclear, they therefore got coined as "baseload" power generation. Today they aren't cheapest anymore and unsurprisingly suffer.
On the other hand, a base demand exist on the consumer side, that is true. But due to electricity being electricity it does not matter how it's met. Nuclear doesn't produce any other better kind of electricity. That's the gear strength of it, it is fungible.
Electricity transmission is costly, and that's assuming there's the infrastructure in place to do it, which, more often than not, is not the case. This idea that electricity exists as a fungible resource on a global market is totally false.
In practice, switching too quickly to reliance on renewables has resulted in poor people seeing their electricity bills skyrocket and greater demand on coal plants when renewables fall short and nuclear plants are no longer running to provide base power.
> Yes, it's better than coal and perhaps even gas, but....
There aren't greener alternatives that will produce all the power we need -- yes we can invest in wind power etc., but that won't produce enough power for a modern society.
Whoever builds nuclear plants because of this, I hope they get more bang for their buck than South Carolina. Years and years of planning and building, $9B spent, only to cancel the project with nothing to show for it.
Also as a German resident and tax payer, I'm pretty pissed off that I'm on the hook for about $150B for the disposal of old nuclear waste from nuclear power plants. If this is now a green solution, I hope at least the disposal has to be a part of the business plan, instead of pretending it doesn't exist and dumping it on the public first chance they get.
Bangladesh is building a power plant now and seems to be getting more bang for their buck than South Carolina.
Construction began: 30 November 2017
Commission date: 2023
Construction cost: $12.65 billion
What today is considered nuclear waste will be fuel for generation IV reactors.
The main aspect of Gen IV is using closed fuel cycle for the reactor. This year Russia started building first test Gen IV reactor BREST-300. It is planned to be operational by 2029. I believe that most effective business plan of dumping today's nuclear waste is using it as fuel for Gen IV reactors.
Yes that should have been part of the commissioning plan. But then Germany also killed the plants early meaning any lifetime plans for the material to be slowly removed had to be massively accelerated due to political posturing...
But then I forgot Germany built all it's reactors on fault lines and in the path of tornadoes or other natural disaster paths rather than places closer the the rheinland...
It's because the EU is almost entirely controlled by France and Germany.
If this were up to the people of the EU (or their representatives in the EU parliament), it wouldn't stand a chance. They'd never declare gas green. But this decision was taken by the European Commission, a group that's not elected. And who leads the commission: von der Leyen, a German.
It's like when they forced truckers to continuously return to their home countries. [1] Romania has basically no competitive advantage in the EU, except a cheaper workforce. When eastern European truckers started dominating transport in western Europe, Macron forced the EU to change regulations and mandate that drivers must go home every 4 weeks, wasting fuel, and thus being less competitive.
Explain how a commission of 27 commissioners, one from each member state (so 1 person from Germany and 1 person from France and 25 from the other 25 member states), with at the head a person who was elected to that position by the European Parliament, which is the group of 705 MEPs who each are in turn elected proportionally by the population of the EU, amounts to "France and Germany basically control the EU".
The laws proposed by the European Commission still need to be accepted by the European Parliament as well, indeed the commission is basically fully subordinate to the parliament, so even if the European Commission was somehow "unfairly controlled by France and Germany", which I find highly suspect considering the specifications of it, the parliament is responsible in the end, and that consists entirely of elected representatives.
This sounds more like typical Brexit-style anti-EU propaganda than a valid summarisation of the politics of the EU.
> Romania has basically no competitive advantage in the EU, except a cheaper workforce.
Part of that advantage is that Romanian labor laws are less restrictive (the minimum wage is a third of the french one, for instance). So France had a choice between repelling labor laws to keep worker competitive, tell all french truckers they could kiss their job goodbye, or introducing some protectionism.
I'm usually in favor of free trade, even when it costs jobs, but in that case I think free trade would be a direct race to the bottom. Jobs performed in a country should respect that country's labor laws, otherwise companies will just shop around for the country with the least restrictive labor laws without even having to move their operation. Unrestricted european trucking went against that.
I find it's insightful that this the measure basically just about the wage, not about safety or any other standards, which they might actually apply to the whole EU.
> tell all french truckers they could kiss their job goodbye
This was likely the correct option. It is okay in these cases to give these people substantial funds to ease this transition: the cost of saving-jobs in the broader economy is usually many times worse than paying off the replaced workers directly.
For instance, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the annual cost to the US economy of a job-saved by either Trump or Biden "Buy American" policies averages about $250,000/job/yr. This is several times what the job pays. In the case of steel tariffs, the cost of a saved job is $900,000/yr.
Better to allow the foreigners to work, tax the economy, and pay the French truckers the amount of their old salary to do literally anything else of value. Of course, this will never happen. It makes too much sense.
However Germani is producing < 6% of power from gas even if the capacity is already much bigger. (heating is other story)
> But this decision was taken by the European Commission, a group that's not elected.
The members of European Commission are proposed by their member state governments, one from each. Do you elect directly minister or most of the posts in government?
Commission and Council are appointed by national governments while only European Parliament is directly elected by citizens. Reason for this is that no national government want to lose the power.
I think Germans hope that new generation gas plants could be powered by hydrogen in the future[1]. The idea is that once we have cheap energy from wind and solar, it can be stored in hydrogen.
Problem is safe storage of hydrogen[2] and problematic relationship with Russia[3]
> 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.
This is about keeping infrastructure in place that can be retooled for a hydrogen economy [0].
I think the idea is to do it only run such plants when there is massive overproduction from solar/wind that makes the price of electricity zero or negative.
Basically storing what can't be used at that moment. It does not matter if it is at 10 or 100% efficiency as if such storing methods did not exist the only other option would be to turn off those panels/wind turbines.
Negative prices means they simply refuse to sell electricity, rather choosing to shut down the wind turbines instead. This BTW, also causes retail electricity prices to soar despite the cost of generation being close to zero.
Initially, Europe was thinking that biofuels would be a good way to support some counties, but the result was far from good.
Wind and solar are the best sources of energy, but lack of good grid scale energy storage make them impractical. Once we have good and cheap batteries to store energy, than solar and wind from Africa could resolve Europe energy needs. https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
Using palm oil for biofuel sounds like the worst idea ever. I thought biogas was normally produced from wastewater treatment and trash. Sweden does around 2TWh a year of it that way which isn’t a lot (2-3% of total energy use perhaps?) but it’s, for example the only gas used to heat stockholm.
Not a good choice, in many cases using the same space for (human) food or just a forest is a more environments friendly, more subtainable and due to the use of fertilizer sometimes more climate friendly choice (at least in the EU/Germany)
It also avoid all kinds of social/human problems.
And even if it's not not climate friendly it's not much worse either.
The same space as what? Biogas is produced by rotting in wastewater plants (or that’s what I thought until someone mentioned the idea of growing stuff to make biogas but that sounded like a bad idea as you point out).
There is only that much rotting close by bio wast, so I don't think natural bio gas makes a dent on the larger picture (but is nice for some use-cases without question).
So when Germany started subvention Bio Gas it didn't took long until people started growing stuff with the intention of having "a lot of was for bio gas"
(as far as I remember).
Similar, probably worse, thinks happened in some "3rd world" countries as far as I remember.
So, replace fossil fuels with renewables + batteries, such as salt water battery. Moreover, batteries will improve usable performance of nuclear power stations a lot: from 1/3 of peak demand (known as base-load) up to 3/4 of peak demand, or by 2x.
Nope. Nuclear is very land efficient, and you can build them in the desert far away from civilization, and the new reactors are much safer than the Chernobyl reactors.
Nuclear stations are efficient until they leak or blow up.
We cannot build a nuclear station in a desert, because it needs a river or a lake with fresh water for cooling. Nuclear station is the huge steam machine. It cannot work without water. Fresh water is a scarce resource. For example, nuclear station near to me (Rivne Nuclear station, North Ukraine) is at edge of closing since 2015 because of drought. It competes with the city for drinking water. The same situation is at Khmelnyck Nuclear station, Western Ukraine.
New reactors are better protected from mistakes, but they are not protected from evil intent. We are at the war with RF since 2014 and this is THE problem. We already had issues with drinking water in Dnipro river, which supplies lots of cities including capital, and food after Chornobyl, but Chornobyl was just a mistake, not an act of war. Potentially, a nuclear station has enough uranium to cause environmental damage equivalent to 1M of Chornobyls.
Not really true - France was the loudest voice but they were representing a lot of other EU countries. E.g. Slovakia (50% nuclear today, 70% nuclear production next year) was also a big proponent, or Czech republic...
The interpretation of the policy reads like "It's not greenwashing, I promise." It comes across as more delay to assist profiteering on dirty, extractive FFs and distract from the climate change emergency by not addressing net carbon negative energy production.
Solar and pumped energy storage are great, but we need fusion power ASAP too.
The quoted level, 230g CO2/kWh is actually very good, and far better than most other gas turbines, even the latest combined cycle systems. I wonder how they achieve that? Perhaps burning biogas (where the carbon doesn't count?)
in france gov passed a law that will give a bad grade to gas heated houses (if the grade is bad you cant rent your house) and a good one to electricity.
oh and because of europe we import electricity from germany that is burning coal for it. we are really in the middle of a green idiocracy
> oh and because of europe we import electricity from germany that is burning coal for it
This is a gross over-simplification. Most European countries are both importers and exporters at any point in time, but France is a notable net exporter, and actually stabilises the German grid.
The French government is inconsistent and unbelievably short-sighted, but not because it wants more electric heating. We need to get rid of gas as soon as possible for any uses that does not absolutely require it. Electricity and heat pumps are safer and better for domestic uses.
> The French government is inconsistent and unbelievably short-sighted, but not because it wants more electric heating. We need to get rid of gas as soon as possible for any uses that does not absolutely require it. Electricity and heat pumps are safer and better for domestic uses.
you mean fossil gas
gas can be used very well for storage, i.e. compensating renewables by storing its energy for long periods of time
gas is owned by russia and now thanks to biden germany. of course the french government wants gas to go away and electricity to be seen as green as we dont have any... why do you think germany pushes for labelling gas as green . net exporter or no as long as france imports electricity we shouldnt be able to say it is green and push people to move away from gas. especially when we see our nuclear reactors aging and being phased out. it is not overly simplified its just simple.
now that russia push for gas all western media (beside germany that broke a deal with them) see it as evil. i remember not that long ago a nobel prize winning american president praising himself and being praised by journalists for pushing gas. I guess it,just proves energy,is political first
> why do you think germany pushes for labelling gas as green
What makes you think I don’t know? ;)
> as long as france imports electricity we shouldnt be able to say it is green
Sure, the current system of certificates is a complete joke and utterly unfit for purpose (you can sell “green electricity” in the middle of winter if you also buy a document showing that the same amount was produced last summer in any other EU country). Under the current system it is mostly irrelevant because certificates are cheap. Hopefully the rules will be tightened in the next couple of months and then the green labelling will be a bit more meaningful (and electricity produced from coal in September won’t be “green” anymore).
> especially when we see our nuclear reactors aging and being phased out.
I think the French government realised at some point the shitshow it would be. They started walking back earlier promises about plant closures and words I’ve heard say that the life extensions won’t be a political problem. Now, new builds will be the problem of the next government. Please vote responsibly…
There was a EU program 3 years ago where it covered 30% of the cost to install a gas heater at your house, so that you’d be more environmentally friendly ffs
If they want to go green, why are they even allowing new homes to be heated by burning fossil fuels? Especially France where you have electricity with such a low CO2/kWh.
In Lithuania you can no longer build new homes heated by gas. All new homes have to be classed as a zero energy building, heated by renewal sources, which natural gas from Russia is not. If it works there, it can work everywhere else in Europe too.
> We’re Europe’s largest exporter of electricity, thanks to our nuclear power.
None of your relevant stats actually show that, France only shows up in total production, and there it ranks lower than Germany.
It's also a bit odd to now move the goalpost to fossil fuels, when your original point was about electricity exports, and how France can allegedly only export so much due to nuclear power.
But over the years France has been constantly trading places with Germany for top electricity exporter on the planet due to Germany's huge renewable sector.
A renewable sector that has the advantage of not having massive long-term costs associated with it, most of which are not covered to this day [0];
> France, which operates Europe’s largest fleet of nuclear plants, is heavily underfunded. It has earmarked assets only worth 23 billion euros, less than a third of 74.1 billion euros in expected costs.
Quoting the original post I was replying to: "we import electricity from germany that is burning coal for it"
Reality: We're a top exporter of electricity (I'll give you that we're not THE top exporter all the time), and Germany's exports are thanks to its "huge renewable sector" (quoting you).
There are no goalposts to move. This is just a bunch of nonsense. People who want to complain can use whatever stats and values they want to make their point, I guess. retinaros' other posts tells me I should just have flagged and moved on from the beginning, but that leaves the risk of misinformation spreading anyway...
before shouting misinformation you might want to inform yourself
first paragraph
I never said having gas was exclusive of getting a bad grade. however gas is now considered a bad energy and will reduce your grade. and it is one of the key factors. when your investment is six digits or more and a stupid law destroy it you know it. and no it is not for new constructions. in paris a huge chunk of the old apartments have a bad grade. people won t be allowed to put their apt for rent on the market, they will sell, which will reduce the nbr of apartment available and increase rent prices.
second paragraph:
you should look at how electricity works. it is a european market not a french one. per wikipedia « In 2020, France retains its position as the leading exporter in Europe with a total exporter of 43.2 TWh, down by around 13 TWh compared to 2019; commercial export volumes decreased by 7% to 77.8 TWh, while import volumes increased by 22% to 34.6 TWh. The balance of trade remained an exporter every month except September, which is usually a very exporting month; this anomaly is explained in particular by the sharp drop in the availability of nuclear power plants«
and it was same for 2021
> France retains its position as the leading exporter in Europe with a total exporter of 43.2 TWh
with this:
> because of europe we import electricity from germany that is burning coal for it
?
If you are such a keen observer on the electricity market, then surely you know that France is always importing from somewhere, and as its biggest neighbours, it is logical to see Germany there? There was indeed some bad timing with the maintenance of some of the reactors. It is not the decision of the government, but if the operator (EDF) and the regulator (ASN). And the EU has fuck all to do with it.
we do import electricty and 22% more in 2020 ,a trend that continued this year. and we import from germany that is burning coal. so I dont see what you missed here. our electricity is not green because we import german coal based electricity that is a fact.
i know that france export some. but you know trade also means importing for different reasons like price for instance?
and europe has to do with it because in france prices for electricity are not related to our infrastructure and us being fully nuclear but dictated by the european comission.
> but you know trade also means importing for different reasons like price for instance?
Price has no first-order effect on electricity imports. We just import what we need, otherwise we have a black out. We cannot “not import” when production is below demand and we cannot “over import” when price is low because we don’t have any meaningful storage.
> and europe has to do with it because in france prices for electricity are not related to our infrastructure and us being fully nuclear but dictated by the european comission.
France has never been fully nuclear. Some EU rules are bonkers and obviously there because of the agenda of some vehemently anti-nuclear countries, sure. But a lot of the stupidity also comes from the French government (see ARENH). Still, as I mentioned, price is not directly related to imports. Higher prices actually result in some industry stopping some plants, and a reduction of both use and imports.
> when your investment is six digits or more and a stupid law destroy it you know it.
Rule #1: Investing does not guarantee you will get back more than you put in. Your capital is at risk.
Honestly, you’re complaining that you’ll lose a bit of money because you have to modernise “your investment” due to the fact that we’re in a GLOBAL FUCKING CLIMATE CRISIS. Think about how privileged and out of touch that is.
well if you knew markets better you d know that my investment will be fine,ill just sell it to someone else which will remove the apartment from the renters market. now multiply this by 2million appartments and see the impact. rent will go up.
the cost to renovate an apartment will take decades of emissions to pay off. knowing also that three years ago EU was giving money,for switching to gas heated houses, maybe in three years they will find out that electric cars need harvesting of rare minerals from literal slaves in china or congo and that emissions of a new electric vehicle will never pay off compared to buying second hand. you can be woke and think there is a climate crisis - which is true- but it doesnt mean everything the,government see as green is… just look at macron after four years he decided that nuclear was ok. obama was praised for pushing gas.
There was an insecticide ban (Neonicotinoids) not so long ago, i.e a "complete ban", but then I saw that it didn't apply to greenhouses - where it had more than 80% of its use prior to the ban.
After that alot of the directives that come from the commission, especially involving climate change, if you look at it properly is just greenwashing. France is maybe about the only country that is genuine about it.
Given that bees are the biggest likely victims of neonicotinoids, isn't restricting their use to greenhouses exactly what we want? Let bugs outside be, keep bugs inside under control?
Should not matter that much though, since the small amount of insects that penetrate should be a far far lower number than the ones outside the greenhouse. Overall, it passes the sniff test for me.
It means that in countries that over-invested in unreliable renewables, and under pressure from dogmatic renewable advocates, under-invested in reliable sources of energy, like Brazil: "The poor .. are choosing between paying for food or electricity."
Oh, this has probably nothing to do with the major energy deficit Europe is now experiencing. Sorry for the sarcasm, but people living here without a secondary source of heat are suffering ice cold houses because they have to choose between heat or food. The deficit has lead to record prices here in Norway, in the middle of winter, because power for 5 mill people is almost completely drained in order to meet the demand of 450 million EU citizens. It's... I have no words. Guess it's great all these power companies are getting rich.
Sounds concerning that the famously good social safety net there is not protecting people from starving and freezing, is heating not covered by welfare programs?
Norwegian electricity appears to be maybe 1.50 krone per kWh including taxes this winter? Or about 0.17 USD per kWh? That’s not especially high, although it looks to be about double last year.
That's less than half of what I pay in Germany, are you sure that figure includes taxes and other fees levied on the end consumer? It sounds extremely cheap. The only other reference I have is the Netherlands which is a bit cheaper but not much.
Just the pure kWh cost here is like upper 20s eurocents per kWh, plus about 10 euros per month fixed fee for metering and stuff (average household will consume a few hundred kWh per month, let's say 200, so ten euros adds about 20% to the price). Total cost per kWh for me personally is .33€/kWh or, to put it in comparable units, 3.3 NOK.
Yeah, imagine that! Thing is, Norway used to have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, due to population centres being situated right next to a lot of waterfalls. It's still some of the cheapest and most "green" to produce. Add to this that due to power and building policies, i.e. politics, most people use electricity for heating over here (yes, in Arctic Norway...). On top of that heating with wood stoves, or even oil, is highly disincentivized these days. (Also coal isn't a thing in Norway.)
For most Norwegians, the electricity has been considered "ours" and indeed it was mostly state run until the general privatization that started around and after the 90's. So for that reason most people didn't consider it risky to have electricity-only heating in their houses. I bet a lot of people regret that decision today, though.
For the same reason, the newly built cables made to ensure power export to the EU are extremely unpopular over here, as it's hurting people's income directly through electricity bills being doubled overnight. Most people consider it yet another appeasement to the EU, despite Norwegians having voted against joining it twice.
It really depends on how significant the bill was before. Just for example, electricity is about 3% of my monthly mortgage. If it doubled, it would not substantially impact my budget.
Not even close. I pay almost 4 kroner per kWh this month. Granted it varies a bit depending on the deal you've got. Mine's a monthly price. Some have hourly spot price, and some have a locked-in price.
That's pretty high. OTOH I bet Hawaiians don't need as much heating during the winter. Most homes in Norway are electricity heating only, due to the building policies of the last 50 or so years, which makes the individual bills pretty insane at the moment.
Gas is included because the German """green""" party has heavily lobbied for it. The Belgians """greens""" announced that its okay for them to use gas, because overall, in Europe, other countries will offset it. Greenpeace lobbies for it because they, themselves, sell gas. Nuclear had to be defended tooth and nail for over a year, with active rejection from the Germans for its inclusion in that list.
Exactly this. Including gas as green energy looks like a joke. Even 270g of CO2 per kWh is an awful number. No idea if that's lobbyists work but "if you have no idea what something is about, then it is about the money".
This is the untruth. The German Green Party has never done this. The current Green government has clearly opposed it. The Green government in Austria also opposes it.
It's weird how the risk of another Fukushima was successfully downplayed so much.
Obviously it's the sole world leader with a PhD in nuclear physics who is only one miscalculated the costs and risks. /s
Obviously the fact that 0 insurers would touch a nuclear plant without pushing liability for 99% of the cleanup costs onto the taxpayer doesnt mean it's not 100% safe. Right?
If the US nuclear industry's aging plants really were getting safer like they claim wouldnt they be happy to prove it by raising their liability cap a little bit above 0.1% of the cost of fukushima?
If you want to change thing you need to stay realistic.
For example only very clean gas power plants are included.
Through I can't deny that the German Green party is kind a joke.
They have been founded a movement heavily manipulated by the DDR to destabilize the BRD. Which is where their absolute-no to nuclear comes from (through most, probably ask nuclear plants in Germany are older less safe designs which IMHO should be shut down, there are other things too).
They have for years tolerated, sometimes supported certain groups of people for votes. Exactly this groups which are now one of the driving forces behind "unreasonable" anti-vax movements.
They have multiple times shown they are quite a bit affected by corrup (but potential legal) lobbyism.
They are known to sometime push idiologic things which aren't fully thought out. Which in the first view might look good, but if you look into it they have the opposite effect on the larger picture or other major negative effects outwighting any benefits.
I am an EU citizen. While this decision seems controversial to ones and downright stupid to others, I do think its the only possibility to provide cheap energy to industry and the citizens without further increasing inflation due to rising energy costs.
We need to go green and further utilize solar and wind energy and what not, its kind of hard in times of increased demand (e-cars) and rising overall energy costs.
We would have done so much better to invest in times when inflation was low for a decade.
Part of the rationale for labeling certain gas power plants as "green" is that they solve the problem of uneven supply from wind and solar. As far as I understand it, these plants are intended to supplement renewables and make them a more viable primary source.
Nuclear sure, although I don't think they are practical any more given the cost and time to build vs renewables
But Gas? Europe should be setting a plan to have no gas imports by the end of the decade, not shutting down nuclear power plants and increasing reliance on Russia
how can gas be green since it produces co2 throughout it’s lifetime?
how can nuclear, solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars be “green” when we’re polluting the planet while producing them? shouldn’t the focus be on zero pollution during manufacture or are we not there yet?
And now we likely hear from the "nuclear bad, buy into silicon and rate earth hell with solar and short lifetime battery" crowd...
Gas obviously isn't green but this looks like political maneauvering from the bloc to get backing. Not that I'd ever accuse the EU of being slow or overly bureaucratic...
I guess gas is green if it comes from Putin. I mean those retiring German officials need some new jobs in gas trading companies.
Meanwhile we still have a huge "green diesel" problem with Germans dumping their polluting, smelly, carcinogenic used up engines into newer EU countries. I am so fed up with the whole green politics thing in EU. It's just for show so it benefits the biggest players.
It's absolutely crazy, but in line with what's going on with energy demand out of control due to cryptocurrencies sprouting everywhere: some countries banned non green energy sources, so we redefine the word green. Bravo! That's exactly what one can expect from corrupt politicians.
I would accept to go back to nuclear only in one case: whoever is pushing for it will build their house within 10 Km of either a nuclear plant, or where nuclear waste is stored.
I’m in favor of the eventual phase out of nuclear fission power but we have to be pragmatic about the situation we are in.
Reaching 1.5 degrees of warming is all but impossible by now because we’ve waited too long. We no longer have the luxury of making choices between approaches. By now we have to do everything we can, and doing so we will still fall short. There’s a nuclear industry ready and willing to be a part of the (temporary) solution, and that’s why the IPCC’s evaluation a few years ago of 85 plans to reach 1.5 degrees of warming noted that nearly all involve nuclear energy and on average a doubling of the nuclear energy share to around 5%. Since that report we are even further from where we need to be. So we need to put the nuclear industry to work and I think everyone looking at the climate crisis pragmatically can see that this is necessary.
Other pragmatic choices are replacing coal with gas in the short term (because it can be built rapidly and produces far less emissions) and globally outlawing proof of work crypto.
By that token -- if you advocate of, for example, EVs then I trust you'll be more than happy to move to an area where the freshwater has been diverted to support lithium extraction. Or if you're a fan of solar power, you'd be delighted to send your kids off to the DRC to work in a cobalt mine.
checks map. I live within 10k of a nuke. Never really think about it tbh. Happy to take more nukes over global warming, though more wind/solar plus storage would beat either, so whatever works really.
Calling gas green though? Screw that, unless it's got 100 percent carbon capture or something.
> 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.