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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 t

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.

mulmen 5y ago
> 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.
- richardw 5y ago
  > 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 https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf Should we stop using solar until we find the zero-CO2 tech? Obviously not. And obviously we need net-0 asap, but it’s not “really that simple.”
  - numpad0 5y ago
    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.
    - pjerem 5y ago
      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.
      - seunosewa 5y ago
        Solar panel tech extracts energy efficiently enough, actually. The problem is storage.
  - willis936 5y ago
    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.
Bombthecat 5y ago
There is already a demand /production problem with, even without gas plants.. No idea what the plan is here..

mulmen 5y ago

> 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.

richardw 5y ago
> 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 https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf Should we stop using solar until we find the zero-CO2 tech? Obviously not. And obviously we need net-0 asap, but it’s not “really that simple.”
- numpad0 5y ago
  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.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    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.
    - seunosewa 5y ago
      Solar panel tech extracts energy efficiently enough, actually. The problem is storage.
- willis936 5y ago
  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.

Bombthecat 5y ago

There is already a demand /production problem with, even without gas plants.. No idea what the plan is here..