The media response was tremendous when the Commission presented its REPowerEU package last Wednesday. On the other hand, the consultations for several important legal acts began on Friday without much fuss. One of these is the financing of the €300 billion project, including the controversial auctioning of CO2 certificates from the market stability reserve.
After months of delay, the Commission also published the two delegated acts for the Renewable Energies Directive (RED II). No less than the questions of what exactly green hydrogen is and which climate criteria should apply to synthetic fuels are at stake. Manuel Berkel analyzes what significance the legal acts have for regions with a lot of renewable energies and what role CO2 storage plays.
In France, Emmanuel Macron has appointed the members of his new government. After his re-election, the president had announced a fresh start. However, the cabinet offers fewer new names than many had expected. Macron is apparently banking on continuity ahead of the parliamentary elections, as Tanja Kuchenbecker describes. Several ministers with good connections to Germany are in his cabinet.
Today and tomorrow, the EU finance ministers will meet in Brussels. There will likely be a debate, but no uproar, on the Commission’s recommendation, expected today, to extend the exemption clause of the Stability and Growth Pact until the end of 2023. Also on the agenda: economic aid for Ukraine. The G7 countries had already pledged billions on Friday. There could also be movement on the minimum tax for multinational companies – in the run-up, there were indications that Poland could abandon its blockade stance.
The two delegated acts are of paramount importance not only for the transport industry but also for the energy industry and the mechanical and plant engineering sector. After all, they deal with some of the most important products for the hydrogen economy: liquid or gaseous renewable fuels of non-biogenic origin (RFNBOs) and recycled carbonaceous fuels from waste treatment and industrial processes.
With the first legal act, the Commission defines the criteria that apply to the renewable electricity used to produce RNFBOs. This is to prevent hydrogen electrolysis from boosting fossil-fuel electricity production and causing additional greenhouse gas emissions.
With the second legal act, the Berlaymont wants to regulate the methodology according to which the CO2 savings are calculated for both fuel types. There is a detailed annex on this. On the other hand, the minimum value for CO2 reduction is set for recycled fuels in the first place.
For RNFBOs, it is at least 70 percent, according to the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II). With the delegated act, this value is now also adopted for recycled carbonaceous fuels.
There is to be one advantage for hydrogen vehicles: Emissions that occur during distribution and compression of the gas are not to be included in the CO2 balance.
In addition, negative emissions are to be credited for all fuels if they are permanently stored geologically using CCS technology. Only emissions from the production process of the fuels themselves will be counted as avoided. However, the greenhouse gases produced during the transport of the CO2 and during storage operation are also included in the calculation as emissions.
Criteria for renewable electricity to produce the RNFBOs are additionality and temporal and spatial connection. In Article 3 cases, the electrolyzer is directly connected to the green power plants via a line or both are parts of the same plant. The wind and solar plants may additionally feed electricity into the grid, but it must then be proven with a smart metering system that no grid electricity is used for hydrogen production.
In this way, the Commission has found an elegant solution to the technical problem that electrolysers must be used to capacity as continuously as possible and therefore do not actually get along well with the fluctuating renewables wind and photovoltaics. If no green electricity is available at the time, the electrolyzer can continue to run, but the hydrogen produced can no longer be sold as renewable.
Because Brussels is well aware of the delays in permitting, especially for wind farms, the Commission wants to allow a three-year period in which the new or repowered green power plant can begin operating after the electrolyzer is built.
Article 4 covers all constellations in which there is no direct connection to renewables, but the electricity is taken from the grid. In the first case, the hydrogen is considered green if the electrolyzer is located in a bidding zone with at least 90 percent renewables. For the foreseeable future, this could apply to Sweden, where there are already close to high renewable shares and several electricity price zones within the country, or perhaps to the EEA countries of Norway and Iceland. Not explicitly mentioned is the theoretical option of splitting existing market areas in the long term – which is highly controversial politically, especially in Germany.
As a second constellation, the article regulates the purchase of green electricity via Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). Renewable plants that went into operation up to three years before the PPA and have not received or will not receive any other support – with the exception of repowering projects – are eligible for PPAs. The Commission also launched a separate consultation on PPAs on Friday.
In addition, there must be a temporal connection. Renewable generation must be synchronized on an hourly basis with the production of hydrogen or with the charging of a storage facility at the site of the electrolyzer. Alternatively, hours with electricity prices of €20 per megawatt hour or less are to be permissible, i.e., if there is a lot of renewable electricity in the bidding zone anyway.
Extensive exemptions apply until the end of 2026. For the temporal connection between renewable generation and electrolysis or storage, an allocation on a monthly basis is sufficient. In addition, the restrictions will not apply to subsidized plants, and PPAs can also be concluded with plants that were built more than three years ago.
A third relevant possibility to obtain the label renewable is the use of the electrolyzer in the context of a redispatch. In this case, the grid operator uses the electricity consumption of the electrolyzer during high renewable feed-in to compensate for bottlenecks in the grid.
For the locations of electrolyzers and permissible renewable plants, the member states are to be able to define further criteria to coordinate the locations with the expansion of the electricity grid and the development of a hydrogen grid.
Shortly before the parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19, many observers had expected major changes in the government. President Emmanuel Macron is hoping for his own majority there so as not to have to cooperate with a prime minister from another political camp. The French press commented on the formation of the government with “continuity”, “risk avoidance”, and a “sense of déjà vu.”
In the important areas, the ministers remain. Above all, Bruno Le Maire guarantees stability as Minister of Economy and Finance; he knows Chancellor Olaf Scholz well. The minister has been in his post since Macron’s election in 2017, which is unusual in France. But the 53-year-old has also proven himself in the pandemic with his economic policy.
Gérald Darmanin continues to head the Ministry of the Interior and Éric Dupond-Moretti the Ministry of Justice. The new Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs is Catherine Colonna, an experienced diplomat who was ambassador in London and Minister for Europe under former President Jacques Chirac.
The new defense minister is Sébastien Lecornu, only 35 years old, a close confidant of Macron who was previously responsible for overseas territories. He takes on a responsible post in the middle of the Ukraine war but has the experienced Colonna at his side.
Clément Beaune, the state secretary responsible for Europe, has been promoted to minister; he is a specialist in Franco-German relations. The 40-year-old has played a key role in shaping Macron’s European policy to date.
A surprising number of ministers specialize in Europe and relations with Germany. In addition to Beaune and Le Maire, who speaks German well, these now include Colonna and the new Environment Minister Amélie de Montchalin. She was previously Secretary of State for European Affairs and Commissioner for Franco-German Cooperation, and most recently Minister for the Civil Service.
However, the issue of climate change is also a matter for the prime minister. Macron had set this example with Élisabeth Borne. Moreover, eight of the 17 ministries are headed by a woman – a government based on parity. There are also other indications of the direction Macron wants to take politically.
For example, the Ministry of Labor is now also responsible for “full employment and inclusion”, which sounds a bit like a socialist planned economy. However, Macron is thus continuing his plan from his first term in office to reduce unemployment. Another focus is the environment; there is an Energy Transition Ministry, and the Environment Ministry is called the Ministry for Ecological Change.
The only real surprise of the new government is the nomination of Pap Ndiaye, a 56-year-old historian with Senegalese roots, as Minister of Education. Until now, he has headed the French Immigration Museum and is known for his work on colonialism.
The right-wing political parties criticized the appointment, while the left-wing parties praised it. The Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, who comes from Lebanon, also has an immigrant background. The government is thus appealing to everyone in France because right-wing and left-wing politicians are receiving high posts, women and men have an equal say, and now the banlieue, where many young people voted left, also has its representatives.
The cabinet formation was criticized overall by the opposition. “A right-wing government that makes fun of the environment and social issues,” wrote Green Party leader Julien Bayou. The daily Liberation also spoke of “lightweights in the environment”, although Macron has actually described the issue as an important concern.
The far-right Marine Le Pen stressed that the government represented “Macron’s incompetence and arrogance”. Those who failed would have kept their posts. Left-wing populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon is convinced that the majority will change anyway in a month’s parliamentary elections. However, polls suggest that Macron will be ahead again.
“Why didn’t I become a classic lawyer? They like to argue too much and have to represent their clients’ points of view in court that they wouldn’t represent themselves,” explains Steffen Weiß. It’s different for him. Although he is also a lawyer, as Legal Counsel Data Protection at the Gesellschaft für Datenschutz und Datensicherheit (GDD) (German Association for Data Protection and Data Security), he represents a goal that he stands behind: “We advocate for sensible, defensible and technically feasible data protection.”
Sensible, in Weiß’s view, means: not too granular and feasible in practice for the more than 3,800 GDD members. “You should be able to break everything down to the basic principles without getting lost in small details,” the 40-year-old thinks. If the data protection association’s members, mainly companies and data protection officers, have questions about implementing current rules, they can turn to him. “That advice is my job. But I also do politics.”
Goal: pragmatic data protection for Europe
In Brussels, Weiß and his GDD colleagues are lobbying to prevent the rules from becoming too complicated in the first place. “In consultations with politicians and supervisory authorities, we have to tell them that what you have in mind doesn’t work in practice.” However, Weiß admits that he also finds the complexity of data protection exciting. “Even if you’ve been dealing with it for more than 13 years, as I have, you still come to areas where you think: Oh, it’s not that simple.”
When it comes to the General Data Protection Regulation, Weiß only talks about “the General Regulation”; the other half of the word is part of his everyday life. His fascination with the topic began during his studies. Weiß was born in the Black Forest town of Lahr. After his second state examination in law, he added a master’s degree in information technology law and intellectual property law, part of which he completed in Buenos Aires. One of the things he took away from his studies was a knowledge of Spanish, which he can still use today.
This is also the case at present, as Weiß, as a member of the GDD’s Executive Board for International Affairs, is currently concerned with international understanding in European data protection. In 2022, the GDD will hold the presidency of the European data protection organization CEDPO, in which ten national European data protection organizations are organized. Until now, CEDPO has been more of a loose association, which is now to be transformed into an association under Belgian law. And then? “We no longer want to just react, but to approach the EU institutions even more actively.” Paul Meerkamp
The media response was tremendous when the Commission presented its REPowerEU package last Wednesday. On the other hand, the consultations for several important legal acts began on Friday without much fuss. One of these is the financing of the €300 billion project, including the controversial auctioning of CO2 certificates from the market stability reserve.
After months of delay, the Commission also published the two delegated acts for the Renewable Energies Directive (RED II). No less than the questions of what exactly green hydrogen is and which climate criteria should apply to synthetic fuels are at stake. Manuel Berkel analyzes what significance the legal acts have for regions with a lot of renewable energies and what role CO2 storage plays.
In France, Emmanuel Macron has appointed the members of his new government. After his re-election, the president had announced a fresh start. However, the cabinet offers fewer new names than many had expected. Macron is apparently banking on continuity ahead of the parliamentary elections, as Tanja Kuchenbecker describes. Several ministers with good connections to Germany are in his cabinet.
Today and tomorrow, the EU finance ministers will meet in Brussels. There will likely be a debate, but no uproar, on the Commission’s recommendation, expected today, to extend the exemption clause of the Stability and Growth Pact until the end of 2023. Also on the agenda: economic aid for Ukraine. The G7 countries had already pledged billions on Friday. There could also be movement on the minimum tax for multinational companies – in the run-up, there were indications that Poland could abandon its blockade stance.
The two delegated acts are of paramount importance not only for the transport industry but also for the energy industry and the mechanical and plant engineering sector. After all, they deal with some of the most important products for the hydrogen economy: liquid or gaseous renewable fuels of non-biogenic origin (RFNBOs) and recycled carbonaceous fuels from waste treatment and industrial processes.
With the first legal act, the Commission defines the criteria that apply to the renewable electricity used to produce RNFBOs. This is to prevent hydrogen electrolysis from boosting fossil-fuel electricity production and causing additional greenhouse gas emissions.
With the second legal act, the Berlaymont wants to regulate the methodology according to which the CO2 savings are calculated for both fuel types. There is a detailed annex on this. On the other hand, the minimum value for CO2 reduction is set for recycled fuels in the first place.
For RNFBOs, it is at least 70 percent, according to the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II). With the delegated act, this value is now also adopted for recycled carbonaceous fuels.
There is to be one advantage for hydrogen vehicles: Emissions that occur during distribution and compression of the gas are not to be included in the CO2 balance.
In addition, negative emissions are to be credited for all fuels if they are permanently stored geologically using CCS technology. Only emissions from the production process of the fuels themselves will be counted as avoided. However, the greenhouse gases produced during the transport of the CO2 and during storage operation are also included in the calculation as emissions.
Criteria for renewable electricity to produce the RNFBOs are additionality and temporal and spatial connection. In Article 3 cases, the electrolyzer is directly connected to the green power plants via a line or both are parts of the same plant. The wind and solar plants may additionally feed electricity into the grid, but it must then be proven with a smart metering system that no grid electricity is used for hydrogen production.
In this way, the Commission has found an elegant solution to the technical problem that electrolysers must be used to capacity as continuously as possible and therefore do not actually get along well with the fluctuating renewables wind and photovoltaics. If no green electricity is available at the time, the electrolyzer can continue to run, but the hydrogen produced can no longer be sold as renewable.
Because Brussels is well aware of the delays in permitting, especially for wind farms, the Commission wants to allow a three-year period in which the new or repowered green power plant can begin operating after the electrolyzer is built.
Article 4 covers all constellations in which there is no direct connection to renewables, but the electricity is taken from the grid. In the first case, the hydrogen is considered green if the electrolyzer is located in a bidding zone with at least 90 percent renewables. For the foreseeable future, this could apply to Sweden, where there are already close to high renewable shares and several electricity price zones within the country, or perhaps to the EEA countries of Norway and Iceland. Not explicitly mentioned is the theoretical option of splitting existing market areas in the long term – which is highly controversial politically, especially in Germany.
As a second constellation, the article regulates the purchase of green electricity via Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). Renewable plants that went into operation up to three years before the PPA and have not received or will not receive any other support – with the exception of repowering projects – are eligible for PPAs. The Commission also launched a separate consultation on PPAs on Friday.
In addition, there must be a temporal connection. Renewable generation must be synchronized on an hourly basis with the production of hydrogen or with the charging of a storage facility at the site of the electrolyzer. Alternatively, hours with electricity prices of €20 per megawatt hour or less are to be permissible, i.e., if there is a lot of renewable electricity in the bidding zone anyway.
Extensive exemptions apply until the end of 2026. For the temporal connection between renewable generation and electrolysis or storage, an allocation on a monthly basis is sufficient. In addition, the restrictions will not apply to subsidized plants, and PPAs can also be concluded with plants that were built more than three years ago.
A third relevant possibility to obtain the label renewable is the use of the electrolyzer in the context of a redispatch. In this case, the grid operator uses the electricity consumption of the electrolyzer during high renewable feed-in to compensate for bottlenecks in the grid.
For the locations of electrolyzers and permissible renewable plants, the member states are to be able to define further criteria to coordinate the locations with the expansion of the electricity grid and the development of a hydrogen grid.
Shortly before the parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19, many observers had expected major changes in the government. President Emmanuel Macron is hoping for his own majority there so as not to have to cooperate with a prime minister from another political camp. The French press commented on the formation of the government with “continuity”, “risk avoidance”, and a “sense of déjà vu.”
In the important areas, the ministers remain. Above all, Bruno Le Maire guarantees stability as Minister of Economy and Finance; he knows Chancellor Olaf Scholz well. The minister has been in his post since Macron’s election in 2017, which is unusual in France. But the 53-year-old has also proven himself in the pandemic with his economic policy.
Gérald Darmanin continues to head the Ministry of the Interior and Éric Dupond-Moretti the Ministry of Justice. The new Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs is Catherine Colonna, an experienced diplomat who was ambassador in London and Minister for Europe under former President Jacques Chirac.
The new defense minister is Sébastien Lecornu, only 35 years old, a close confidant of Macron who was previously responsible for overseas territories. He takes on a responsible post in the middle of the Ukraine war but has the experienced Colonna at his side.
Clément Beaune, the state secretary responsible for Europe, has been promoted to minister; he is a specialist in Franco-German relations. The 40-year-old has played a key role in shaping Macron’s European policy to date.
A surprising number of ministers specialize in Europe and relations with Germany. In addition to Beaune and Le Maire, who speaks German well, these now include Colonna and the new Environment Minister Amélie de Montchalin. She was previously Secretary of State for European Affairs and Commissioner for Franco-German Cooperation, and most recently Minister for the Civil Service.
However, the issue of climate change is also a matter for the prime minister. Macron had set this example with Élisabeth Borne. Moreover, eight of the 17 ministries are headed by a woman – a government based on parity. There are also other indications of the direction Macron wants to take politically.
For example, the Ministry of Labor is now also responsible for “full employment and inclusion”, which sounds a bit like a socialist planned economy. However, Macron is thus continuing his plan from his first term in office to reduce unemployment. Another focus is the environment; there is an Energy Transition Ministry, and the Environment Ministry is called the Ministry for Ecological Change.
The only real surprise of the new government is the nomination of Pap Ndiaye, a 56-year-old historian with Senegalese roots, as Minister of Education. Until now, he has headed the French Immigration Museum and is known for his work on colonialism.
The right-wing political parties criticized the appointment, while the left-wing parties praised it. The Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, who comes from Lebanon, also has an immigrant background. The government is thus appealing to everyone in France because right-wing and left-wing politicians are receiving high posts, women and men have an equal say, and now the banlieue, where many young people voted left, also has its representatives.
The cabinet formation was criticized overall by the opposition. “A right-wing government that makes fun of the environment and social issues,” wrote Green Party leader Julien Bayou. The daily Liberation also spoke of “lightweights in the environment”, although Macron has actually described the issue as an important concern.
The far-right Marine Le Pen stressed that the government represented “Macron’s incompetence and arrogance”. Those who failed would have kept their posts. Left-wing populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon is convinced that the majority will change anyway in a month’s parliamentary elections. However, polls suggest that Macron will be ahead again.
“Why didn’t I become a classic lawyer? They like to argue too much and have to represent their clients’ points of view in court that they wouldn’t represent themselves,” explains Steffen Weiß. It’s different for him. Although he is also a lawyer, as Legal Counsel Data Protection at the Gesellschaft für Datenschutz und Datensicherheit (GDD) (German Association for Data Protection and Data Security), he represents a goal that he stands behind: “We advocate for sensible, defensible and technically feasible data protection.”
Sensible, in Weiß’s view, means: not too granular and feasible in practice for the more than 3,800 GDD members. “You should be able to break everything down to the basic principles without getting lost in small details,” the 40-year-old thinks. If the data protection association’s members, mainly companies and data protection officers, have questions about implementing current rules, they can turn to him. “That advice is my job. But I also do politics.”
Goal: pragmatic data protection for Europe
In Brussels, Weiß and his GDD colleagues are lobbying to prevent the rules from becoming too complicated in the first place. “In consultations with politicians and supervisory authorities, we have to tell them that what you have in mind doesn’t work in practice.” However, Weiß admits that he also finds the complexity of data protection exciting. “Even if you’ve been dealing with it for more than 13 years, as I have, you still come to areas where you think: Oh, it’s not that simple.”
When it comes to the General Data Protection Regulation, Weiß only talks about “the General Regulation”; the other half of the word is part of his everyday life. His fascination with the topic began during his studies. Weiß was born in the Black Forest town of Lahr. After his second state examination in law, he added a master’s degree in information technology law and intellectual property law, part of which he completed in Buenos Aires. One of the things he took away from his studies was a knowledge of Spanish, which he can still use today.
This is also the case at present, as Weiß, as a member of the GDD’s Executive Board for International Affairs, is currently concerned with international understanding in European data protection. In 2022, the GDD will hold the presidency of the European data protection organization CEDPO, in which ten national European data protection organizations are organized. Until now, CEDPO has been more of a loose association, which is now to be transformed into an association under Belgian law. And then? “We no longer want to just react, but to approach the EU institutions even more actively.” Paul Meerkamp
