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EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

reuters.com

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

#321

Post by disiplus »

joelbluminator wrote: post #319
locallost wrote: post #309

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 ho…

> I'm pretty pissed off that I'm on the hook for about $150B for the disposal of old nuclear waste Jeez that's a lot! what's your salary?

~$150B less

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

#322

Post by paul_f »

mulmen wrote: post #104
throwaway894345 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

This doesn't have to be binary. There are shades of green.

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

#323

Post by nameisname »

fivea wrote: post #272
arcticbull wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only gets the label if it's greener than existing solutions. They're not letting perfect be the enemy of good.

> 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…

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.

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

#324

Post by paul_f »

mulmen wrote: post #135
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#325

Post by iso1210 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #226
gibolt wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Batteries/Storage are cheap to build today" And yet the existing battery facilities that could keep a smallish region (or a single city) supplied for 15 minutes or more are exceedingly rare. Maybe they aren't as cheap as you claim. Australia is recently building a 1200 MW battery in New South Wales for 2.4 billion dollars - a cost comparable to a new nuclear reactor. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/f…

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.

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

#326

Post by rob_c »

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...

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

#327

Post by iso1210 »

bpfrh wrote: post #311
ben_w wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are absolutely right, I somehow remembered it as the same. Isn't my comparison totally wrong on all levels? I compared batteries, which are storage(or "power plants") with the price of the thing the gas power plant uses. A better comparison would be the cost of battery storage, cost of filling it up, versus building a gas power plant and then producing the same energy. If I find a good article on that I will link…

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.

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

#328

Post by rob_c »

locallost wrote: post #309

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 ho…

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...

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

#329

Post by iso1210 »

onethought wrote: post #190
arcticbull wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Nuclear is not renewable… right? Ie there is a finite amount of nuclear material on earth and it’s not overly abundant either. Am I missing something?

Solar is not renewable, at some point the sun will die.

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

#330

Post by ClumsyPilot »

porkbrain wrote: post #90
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

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