What are low-enough-carbon systems?

What is it about?

Renewable energy technologies, including solar and wind power, can replace fossil fuels. Sometimes, however, new solar and wind power doesn't replace fossil fuels, but instead adds more power to the existing energy system. That can be great, but it's not the same, and it matters when trying to add up the greenhouse gas emissions benefits provided by new renewable power projects. Also, if a company wants to make its produce using renewable energy, is it enough to make a deal with a power producer to get credit for their renewable energy? Maybe not, if the result is all the other customers of the power producer get less renewable energy - that would be just changing the accounting but not changing the power production at all. If a policy is designed to provide benefits to products made with renewable energy, how can they make sure that accounting tricks aren't used to make claims about renewable energy that don't physically result in more renewable energy? Or, maybe we should be more relaxed about new technologies and not be sticklers about the details?

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Photo by Олександр Білоцерківець on Unsplash

Photo by Олександр Білоцерківець on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It's a challenge to build a hydrogen production system using water electrolysis. The market for "green hydrogen" is still developing. And, it takes a lot of electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen; if the electricity used to do this is made from coal or natural gas, the greenhouse gas emissions used to make this hydrogen will be quite high; as a fuel, hydrogen made by using coal or natural gas to electrolyze water will be more polluting that regular gasoline or diesel. And, on the other hand, arranging to both make hydrogen by electrolysis and to procure wind or solar power for the necessary electricity is challenging. Maybe we should support companies to make electrolytic hydrogen and work on making the low-pollution electricity later? Or, maybe not. We might get stuck with a fuel system that is worse than what we have now.