Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-03-Speech-3-040"
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"en.20080903.4.3-040"2
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Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, fossil fuels are finite. Demand is increasing, pushing prices up – we see that every day at the petrol station. The expectation that oil, natural gas and coal will run out in the future is one reason for the rising prices. Therefore, we need to start immediately to investigate technologies that could replace fossil fuels in the future.
Other questions also arose. At the end, perhaps, I will return briefly to the question of hydrogen filling station infrastructure but for now, I am looking forward to the lively discussion and am eager to hear what you have to say.
One of these alternatives – and the Commissioner quite rightly emphasised that it is only one, but it is an alternative – is hydrogen technology. Naturally, hydrogen vehicles are not yet ready for the market, but a variety of projects are under way to change that. The EU ‘highways’ project has just been completed, with an encouraging report.
EU research ministers set up a long-term public-private partnership in February with the aim of getting hydrogen and fuel-cell technology ready for the market between 2015 and 2025. It is planned to invest a total of approximately EUR 940 million in this research programme in the next few years, with public authorities and private investors contributing half each.
We see that the stage is set for hydrogen vehicles to be ready for the market. The fact that the price of fuel cells is still high cannot be used as an argument against hydrogen technology, as that is the way with all technologies of the future. The first 0.5 megapixel digital camera was developed many years ago for space travel and cost around EUR 10 million, but nowadays, almost everyone has a digital camera.
The present regulation will, in the future, provide harmonised technical regulations for the approval of hydrogen powered vehicles throughout Europe for the first time. Unified criteria are essential if this technology is to be promoted and a high level of safety and environmental protection maintained.
Hydrogen powered vehicles are not included in the EC type-approval system at present, so Member States can issue one-off permits for this type of vehicle. This is done in some Member States, but in others it is completely unknown. With permits being issued in this way, there is a risk that each Member State will set its own permit conditions and the internal market will be disrupted. This would lead to high costs for manufacturers as well as to safety risks.
Hydrogen is one of the energy vectors of the future. Therefore, our task, which we are fulfilling by adopting this regulation, is to establish the political framework conditions for the use of this technology of the future by creating unified approval criteria. I am glad that, across the parties, we have managed to achieve agreement at first reading, and that the cooperation with the Council and the Commission was so good. My thanks for the excellent cooperation go therefore to the shadow rapporteurs; I would also like to mention Mr Bulfon and Mr Manders by name. That is what made agreement at first reading possible. Our focus was on the issue of labelling hydrogen powered vehicles.
Hydrogen powered vehicles are just as safe as passenger cars powered by diesel or petrol. Under the regulation, they will have to pass safety tests that are just as strict as those for all other vehicles. However, it makes sense for rescue services to know if they are dealing with a hydrogen vehicle when they arrive at the scene of an accident, so that they can take certain details into account. This should not mean that hydrogen powered vehicles are viewed adversely because, as I have already said, they are just as safe as vehicles that run on other fuels. That is a very important point that I want to get across today.
We therefore suggest that hydrogen vehicles should bear discreet labels on the components that contain hydrogen. Working with the Commission and the Council, we made further improvements to the Commission’s text and substituted ‘identification’ for the word ‘label’, because in the long term, this label should and could be replaced by electronic identification that involves an intelligent emergency call system called ‘eCall’."@en1
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