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EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

reuters.com

151–160 of 451 posts

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#151
post #127

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.

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 th…

> 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.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#152
post #35

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.

> 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…

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.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#153
post #72

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 dema…

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.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#154
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, jus…

> 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. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf Should we stop using solar until we find the zero-CO2 tech? Obviously not. And obviously we need net-0 asap, but it’s not “really that s…

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.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#155
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about instead of "radiation bad", we look at more objective metrics, like deaths/CO2 per kWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy 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.

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.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#156
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about instead of "radiation bad", we look at more objective metrics, like deaths/CO2 per kWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy 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.

Nuclear is on par with solar as far as safety. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#157
post #153
post #72

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 dema…

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 not especially high, although it looks to be about double last year.

It's almost as if most people have budgets that can't so easily handle a doubling of their bills.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#159
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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, jus…

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:

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#160

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!

1 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

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