Gökçe Mete, Leonie Reins

Carbon & Climate Law Review, Volume 14 (2020), Issue 3, Page 210 - 231

This article analyses the European Commission's Hydrogen Strategy with a focus on its broader implications for EU energy law. Given the specificities of the technology itself, existing regulatory instruments are not always apt to accommodate the wide-scale introduction of hydrogen into the energy mix. Indeed, from a legal perspective, hydrogen faces a vast number of challenges, which can be clustered into three main categories, namely challenges related to (1) the creation of an internal market for hydrogen, (2) the creation of new lead markets for hydrogen, and (3) infrastructure for hydrogen. The aim is to answer the question to what extent the regulatory challenges are already acknowledged and covered by the Hydrogen Strategy, and to the extent they are not, how the future steps in the hydrogen-related policy making process can effectively address them.

Leonie Reins, Sarah Van Eynde, Katelijn Van Hende, Anton Ming-Zhi Gao

Carbon & Climate Law Review, Volume 9 (2015), Issue 3, Page 256 - 269

This contribution focuses on the challenges that China is confronted with in the energy area and how existing energy policies and strategies are designed to address climate change, especially in the context of the upcoming UNFCCC COP21 in Paris and China’s submitted INDC. This article discusses the need for two essential policy shifts in the energy and climate change area: (i) the shift from a purely quantitative targeting approach to a more diversified approach and (ii) the intrinsic challenge of moving to a coherent institutional and legislative approach. The article illustrates those challenges by presenting four low(er)-carbon technology case studies: solar PV, wind energy, shale gas and nuclear power.