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Is the European green deal achievable?

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Abstract

Technologies evolve under the impact of several factors starting from the progress of science and innovation. Usually driven by market forces, the evolution is slow. With regard to energy, the time unit is roughly a century. Concerns about climate change add a new element: political decisions. The EU committed itself at the end of 2019 to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, mainly through the implementation of wind and solar energies. A comparison between past data and forecasts related to the change sets the difficulties clearly in evidence. The paper discusses the requirements for the European Green Deal to be successful.

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Notes

  1. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria.

  2. One must observe that other major oil and gas companies do not adhere necessarily to the BP outlooks fierceness or are more ambiguous on these prospects.

  3. Eurelectric data for the 27 EU Member States.

  4. See ‘Nuclear Power in the European Union’, World Nuclear Association, 2021.

  5. Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Bulgaria.

  6. Intermittent gives more the idea of an on–off behaviour than variable which expresses more changes over time. Wind and solar energy are both variable and intermittent as we will see with detail.

  7. We use capacity factor for units producing energy and load factor for those using energy.

  8. Stable Salt Reactor-Wasteburner.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Michel Giot and an anonymous reviewer for several suggestions and remarks that have improved the quality of the text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Samuel Furfari

  2. FNRS, Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium

    Ernest Mund

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  1. Samuel Furfari
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Correspondence to Ernest Mund.

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Furfari, S., Mund, E. Is the European green deal achievable?. Eur. Phys. J. Plus 136, 1101 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-02075-7

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