EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green
reuters.com
reuters.com
> 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.
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.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/banking-and-...
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/feb/05/world...
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.
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.
That claim is baseless.
1 KW Gas is 0,0639€ 1 KW Lithium Battery is ~105€
There is an incoming lithium shortage which means either the price will rise sharply, or you have to build other types of batteries.
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.
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.
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.
With good reason, I might add. There is a climate emergency caused by greenhouse gas emissions after all.
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.
Am I missing something?
You're missing that.
Technically not renewable, but in the long run, neither is the Sun.
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.
[+] 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.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-reasons-why-nuclear-cle...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
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.
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.
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.
I’m not certain we will — problem and solution are both exponential — but I certainly think it’s plausible.
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
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.
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.
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.
Here is a starting point, miles and miles away from the historical centre of Toulouse: https://www.google.fr/maps/@43.537841,1.2268468,2639m/data=!...
Now it is not only happening around cities, around big towns, around small towns, it also happens at unprecedented speed around the tiniest villages.
A site that puts side by side aerials from now and from before urban sprawl: https://remonterletemps.ign.fr/comparer/basic?x=1.212446&y=4...
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.
If they are not indirectly powered by fossil fuels then they will solve the problem.
[1] http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...
[2] https://www.powertechsystems.eu/home/tech-corner/lithium-ion...
[3] https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-802b-what-does-elev...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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`.
Thus, it does describe activities that are not green, but are helping to move towards pure green.
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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:
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 simple.”
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.
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.
Intelligent people shouldn’t quibble over an imaginary “green” line, but we should focus on minimizing emissions per unit power.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Nuclear power it's climate but but environment/human friendly. So I can understand that.
But natural gas isn't green however I look at it.
It's clearly better then cush l coal, but but green.
So it shouldn't be allowed to be labeled as such.
Instead we should add a label for better but but really good tech, like yellow or so.
That's what the EU Taxonomy does: it labels activities and specifies precise criteria.
"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.
That's literally the entire problem.
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".
If it's just about such aspect you could give it some arbitrary EU regulation number and say it's compatible with that.
By basing it around the term "green" it's very much focused around marketing and what people will perceive as "carbon neutral".
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.
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.
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.
It was never meant to succeed, much like Apple's concessions to right to repair, it's just a distraction designed to buy time
Perhaps it will be competitive with batteries or synthetic or carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels.
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...
And no amount of money can make the bureaucracy work faster. It's been tried.
German Energiewende is criminal. Plain and simple. Shame on the Grünen, shame on the pseudo-environmentalists.
> 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...
https://environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuclear
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.gdrc.org/uem/footprints/tokyo-fprint.html
[2] https://blog.japanwondertravel.com/report-of-fukushima-exclu...
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.
Data: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...
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.
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.
Data: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38... (coal is represented by brown and gray)
It's the classic outsource stuff to other nations and claim victory tactic that helps nobody.
Data: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...
There seems to be quiet bimodal distribution of CO2e estimates for carbon. Some are like 5 other >100 in the same unit.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Nucl...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://wiki.energytransition.org/the-book/policies-for-clea...
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-12-germany-nuclear-reactors...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...
[1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/ueber-fraunhofer...
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?
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?
These are cash grants not deductions (as they should be! They are covering a one-time cost!)
This is for single family detached homes (which are almost invariably owned)
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.
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
is this something new? i have been renting in London for almost a decade and I have never heard of a landlord or agency offer to pay my bills.
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.
Still, I think a share of decent, predictable base load makes everything easier, and that's where nuclear can shine.
If Germany used more nuclear, then more houses would probably start heating with electricity (or at least newly built houses), like in France.
But Siberia is not Eastern Europe, is it? It lies fully in the Asian part of Russia. Why are you labelling this an East/West thing?
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.
Propaganda.
But this is pretty much connected. If you have cheap electricity, you can easily use it for heating instead of natural gas.
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.
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.
Fast Breeder Reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Nuclear reaction is naturally occurring in nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Until people start valuing the waste more than the original products, and waste production become the goal: https://farmersjournal.ie/will-milk-be-the-byproduct-of-manu...
yes, but the document mandates that the gas has to be from renewable sources by 2035
Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normally. So there must be more to this.
I guess the goal is to phase out coal in Germany and Poland by any means necessary..
Which will of course not be enforced, besides the fact that biogas as a “green energy” has huge caveats.
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.
We should repaint radiation warnings in green, to indicate that.
> Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normally. So there must be more to this.
Nord Stream 2.
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.
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.
Still a bad choice.
Framing it as a contest versus fossil fuels is building a strawman nowadays.
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.
Nuclear is the greenest realistic option.
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.
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.
Bangladesh Nuclear Power Plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooppur_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Generation IV reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
BREST reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)
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...
Jeez that's a lot! what's your salary?
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.
[1]: https://www.transportnews.co.uk/2020/08/14/new-international...
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Problem is safe storage of hydrogen[2] and problematic relationship with Russia[3]
[1] https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/why-hydrogen-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage [3] https://www.politico.eu/article/nord-stream-2-gas-energy-pri...
> 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].
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/europes-gas-firms-prime...
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.
https://www.livekindly.co/norway-ban-palm-oil-biofuel/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-palm-oil-deforestati...
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/
It also avoid all kinds of social/human problems.
And even if it's not not climate friendly it's not much worse either.
Solar and pumped energy storage are great, but we need fusion power ASAP too.
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
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.
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
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
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…
The “bad grade” takes a lot into account and between all the exceptions it is primarily aimed at new constructions.
As for your second paragraph, I have no idea what you’re smoking. We’re Europe’s largest exporter of electricity, thanks to our nuclear power.
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.
In 2020, it was Germany who was the largest electricity exporter on the planet [0], must be thanks to our nuclear power?
[0] https://www.worldstopexports.com/electricity-exports-country...
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/electricity-balanc...
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-electricity-...
Additionally: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-fuels
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.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear-idUKKCN0VP...
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.
you re welcome
https://ec.europa.eu/energy/topics/markets-and-consumers/EU-...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/food/plants/pesticides/approval-active-...
I guess the logic was that plants in greenhouses are pollinated manually, without any help from bees. /s
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-had-to-turn-on-coal-power-plan...
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."
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-bu...
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.
It's almost as if most people have budgets that can't so easily handle a doubling of their bills.
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.
Green parties across Europe are a pathetic joke.
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/taxonomieverordnung-bundes...
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.
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.
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
So all the talk of green tech is still just that - talk. Any reductions in emissions have been eclipsed by other people's emissions expansions.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Also, that whole state has a gambling problem and that kind of culture is much more of a turn-off than a little nuclear waste.
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.
Calling gas green though? Screw that, unless it's got 100 percent carbon capture or something.