Status: 02/13/2023 4:20 p.m
France demands that hydrogen produced with nuclear power be classified as “green”. The EU Commission also supports this – under certain conditions. Germany is against it. Is there a new dispute about the future of renewable energies?
The European Commission has presented a Europe-wide standard definition of “green” hydrogen. Hydrogen should therefore “only be considered renewable hydrogen if it is generated from electricity from renewable sources,” the EU Commission said on Monday. Under certain conditions, hydrogen produced with the help of nuclear energy should also be considered sustainable.
France in particular, with its high proportion of nuclear power, wanted classification as “green” hydrogen – which is why there is a risk of a dispute with Germany. Because Germany is taking a stand against it. “We, as the federal government, together with other states, clearly reject this,” said a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Economic Affairs at the request of tagesschau.de.
Does “red” hydrogen count for the climate goals?
The Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) is currently being negotiated in Brussels. It is intended to promote the expansion of renewable energies. According to the Reuters news agency, ministers from France, Poland, the Czech Republic and six other member states of the EU Commission had proposed in a letter that so-called low-carbon or “red” hydrogen be included as a renewable energy in the EU climate targets. Both terms are used for hydrogen produced with nuclear power.
However, the federal government and the majority of other EU countries fear that this would slow down the expansion of wind and solar energy. “Nuclear energy is not a renewable form of energy,” said an EU official, who warned against “watering down” renewable energy targets.
However, the federal government previously agreed to a French demand that nuclear power should at least count towards the European decarbonization targets. Government circles in Berlin were therefore surprised at the new French initiative.
Paris threatens to delay pipeline project
The emerging dispute could now even affect the recently agreed cooperation in the construction of the planned billion-dollar hydrogen pipeline, which is being pushed by France and supported by Spain and Germany. It is to run from the Iberian Peninsula via France to Central Europe and cover around ten percent of the European Union’s hydrogen requirements by 2030. Against the background of the recent differences, however, France is now threatening to delay this project.
However, EU diplomats pointed out that France could certainly feed hydrogen produced with nuclear power into this pipeline. As with nuclear power, it is no longer possible to distinguish in a common European network how hydrogen or electricity was produced – whether it is, for example, “red” (atomic), “green” (wind, water, sun) “turquoise” (methane ) or “grey” (natural gas, coal, oil) hydrogen.
Not the first argument about forms of energy
It is not the first argument about the future of renewable energies in the EU. Last year, the so-called EU taxonomy dispute caused a stir. The background is that the EU wants to become climate-neutral by 2050. The EU Commission estimates that around 350 billion euros will be needed for this. The taxonomy is intended to categorize financial products according to their sustainability and to help investors invest their money more in environmentally and climate-friendly economic sectors.
However, many scientists, environmentalists and some investors criticize that the taxonomy promotes “greenwashing” – i.e. the classification of unsustainable technologies as sustainable – instead of preventing it. Because the EU Parliament voted in July 2022 to include both nuclear power and gas in the taxonomy. Both forms of energy have been considered climate-friendly since January 1, 2023, which is tantamount to a recommendation to the financial markets to invest in them. The federal government supported this with the argument of using a “bridging technology”.
“The EU Commission’s draft could therefore lead to a substantial misallocation of capital,” criticizes Karsten Löffler, sustainability expert at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. He was a member of the technical expert group that made proposals for the EU taxonomy. The environmental organization Greenpeace recently announced that it would file a lawsuit against this classification with the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in April. Austria and Luxembourg also want to sue. Germany does not join. In addition, France’s demand to classify hydrogen produced from nuclear power as climate-friendly could now cause the taxonomy dispute to boil up again.
“Separate Pipeline Expansion from Taxonomy Discussion”
In any case, the federal government does not want to be impressed by France’s threat to delay the pipeline project: “Several countries are involved here, not just France. Therefore, in our opinion, the pipeline expansion must be viewed separately from the taxonomy discussion,” according to the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Economics tagesschau.de. In addition, France has clearly committed to the pipeline.
However, sustainability expert Löffler cannot understand the argument that nuclear power must also be used in times of energy emergency: “The taxonomy does not specify what you can or cannot do. It’s about a label that should make investment decisions easier for the financial market hold true.” One can discuss which forms of energy can still make sense for a while, but one cannot label less sustainable energy such as nuclear power as climate-friendly.