Scientifically right but economically wrong? As the EU Commission tries raising the bar to 45% emission reduction by 2030 (see the Juncker 2018 speech ), business is shuffling its feathers. When EU’s automotive is barking at the speed of EU Parliament’s emission reduction efforts, Greenpeace kicked off the last fossil fuelled decade on September 18, 2018 with a DLR study that gives us another 10 years of fossil “full” driving until sales of these vehicles need to stop to not overshoot 1,5C.
“We are very concerned by the direction taken by the Environment Committee,” stated ACEA Secretary General, Erik Jonnaert. “The extremely stringent reduction levels adopted are totally unrealistic, as they would require a massive and sudden shift to electromobility. The framework conditions for such a seismic shift are clearly not in place, and consumers are just not ready to go fully electric at this stage.”
As the hydrogen sector is repositioning its efforts towards sector coupling starting with big industrial demand for green hydrogen, the market for the highest value for hydrogen, transport, seems to be increasingly around the corner if not for ….. As became clear at the final event of the successful first large European fast charging project, UltraE, supported by the EU CEF program on September 19, 2018, electromobility is facing similar car “scarecity” headaches as the FCEV sector.
The two zero emission technologies should therefor team up, as from tomorrow, in facilitating a 10 year EU wide TRransition of Urban Mobility Plan (TRUMP!), including massive interconnected green hydrogen production, distribution and demand networks, to show the world where the (climate) action is! If Europe’s automotive is crashing out of global markets for zero emission transport and choses to only slowly wake up to this “sudden shift” to electromobility, we can start looking elsewhere; a “silk route“, still powered by diesel locs though, is working its way into Europe’s corridors, carrying the EV’s and PV’s to help clean up EU’s climate act.
Scary? Un-European? Unrealistic? Are we European consumers, increasingly fed up with fossil fumes in our cities, just not getting “very ready” for full zero before the end of this decade?
Photo: traffic jams in Brussels