If I hear again that the Greens are “ideological,” I will no longer guarantee anything. Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck is throwing his old beliefs overboard. First with the LNG terminals, now with CO2 capture and storage (CCS) – even if he offends some of his own clientele.
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There has long been a widespread consensus that it is a good idea to capture “unavoidable” emissions and deposit them underground. Such emissions arise chemically, for example, during cement production. In the carbon management strategy he has now presented, Habeck goes one step further: the exhaust gases from gas power plants should also be captured.
It is better to have a gas power plant with CCS than one without
This led to outrage from some environmental groups because this option would reduce the pressure to phase out fossil fuels. The BUND spoke of a “dam burst” and a “Pandora’s box”; German Environmental Aid is talking about a “roll-back into the fossil past”.
Gregor Honsel has been a TR editor since 2006. He believes that many complex problems have simple, easy-to-understand but wrong solutions.
Chamber. Personally, I don’t think that just a gas power plant will run an hour longer because of CCS. The process is far too expensive and energy-hungry. And even if it is, I would still prefer a gas power plant with CCS than one without.
Of course it would be better if we could do without fossil power plants as soon as possible. And of course you can calculate what would be technically possible: Take so many gigawatts of wind power, so many gigawatts of photovoltaics, so many terawatt hours of storage, plus sufficient grid expansion, efficiency and savings measures and load shifting: Voila, it works.
However, it is not engineers who decide on the expansion of the electricity system, but politics and administration. And they are already overwhelmed with much simpler things, as can be seen, for example, in the solar package that is repeatedly postponed. After these experiences, please don’t let anyone pretend that a completely rational and thoroughly optimized energy supply is even a realistic option. She won’t come like that. Not with this government, not with the next one and not with the one after that. So pragmatic muddling through à la Habeck is the best we’ll get.
(grh)
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