EU Legislation
Yesterday I attended an online lecture by Ms. Lenka Mynářová on the topic of EU Legislation. The whole thing was organized by Czechimplant and Jana Vykoukalová together with Magdaléna Veselíková. Who is Lenka Mynářová? Well, first of all, she is a “personality”, with an invasive presentation. When I heard her for the first time, even though I internally disagreed with her, she pulled me into a story that I would never have entered.
Her CV is roughly as follows:
Lenka Mynářová is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and has devoted her life to marketing science and research and innovations in the circular economy. She led the marketing team that launched the Nanospider technology on the global market in 2008. She leads innovative projects with global companies. She is the chief expert of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic on circular audit and the head of the Circular Economy working group in the Czech Business Council for Sustainable Development (Czech BSCD). Together with Vladimír Víšek, she founded the No Greenwashing initiative.
The mention of Nanospider tells me that it is from here, and that it has close ties to the company Elmarco from Liberec. And thanks to Czechimplant, I have already been there to take a look.
But when I return to that legislation, I get chills. It is known that the storm has been brewing for a long time. But the fact that the EU will be so intransigent terrifies me. And the quotes from the presentation?
- “Don’t waste time criticizing Brussels, study the laws and act.”
- “If you don’t adapt, you create an opportunity for others to replace you”
- “A digital product passport is the only way out of climate catastrophe”
- “If you don’t provide this data to your customer, they will be removed from the supply chain,” etc.
The problem is not, of course, in ESG reporting, after my experience with Navision, Microsoft AX 2012, QI, full automation of this process is possible, and with each completed order in the heat treatment shop, a carbon footprint can be printed on the delivery note.
The problem is in energy sources and prices. There is a fundamental difference whether we have an energy mix of 340 gCO2/kWh or zero. It has been stated that the energy mix in Slovakia is already almost zero. Slovak power plants publish a value for 2024 of 8.5 gCO2/kWh. That is, 40 times less.
https://www.seas.sk/o-nas/zivotne-prostredie/ochrana-ovzdusia/produkcia-emisii-do-ovzdusia/
Therefore, there are heat treaters that buy energy from Norway or Slovakia precisely to improve the data in the ESG report. Their digital product passport will therefore have excellent values and will be preferred on the market. We can agree with that, as Belmondo would say, a great trick.
But what is the price for it? If everyone does this, we can close our power plants and import everything. Or, on the contrary, do we have any chance of reducing our energy mix at all, when we have been arguing with the EU for twenty years about whether we can expand Temelín or Dukovany? The Slovaks managed to do it, and on top of that, with Russian VVER-440 technology from AtomStroyExport. First the EU threw a pitchfork at us for this completion, and then the French EDF.
Because the sun only shines here occasionally, and the wind blows as it pleases, then the only solution to move forward with the energy mix was precisely the completion of nuclear power plants. And we missed that, thanks in large part to the EU. The EU put the crown on it when it banned the definition of hydrogen production from nuclear electricity as green hydrogen. So, there is no way out of this either. Hydrogen simply does not exist and will not exist.
So, the result is what it is. We will continue to stagger in the energy mix above the value of natural gas. And even if we try our best, we will be less competitive than those around us. Meanwhile, there are now more than 400 operational reactors in the world, another 60 are under construction and another 100 are planned. We are only missing that one reactor among them, and it looks like it will be missing for a long time.
So what does this mean? This non-market pressure from Brussels will lead to an effort to buy energy from locations with a lower value of the energy mix. This applies to everyone and everything. This will continue until these resources are exhausted. The consequence will be positive in the short term for those who manage to do it, but in the long term it is a nail in the coffin of our energy sector. Even more so since a tax on cross-border transfers, i.e. exports, will come into force. This will lead to a further decline in demand for Czech energy and Slovakia, for example, will benefit from it.
Such a green deal in reverse. And preferred circularity? Yes, it will work, but like a boomerang against us. Even though Mrs. Lenka Mynářová is really good, this whole madness is based on the fact that CO2 is something that is harmful to us. But I still went to school, where they taught me that CO2 and H2O are the basis of photosynthesis, i.e. life. That’s why I find it hard to believe that too much life is the reason for us to turn off the economy, i.e. the furnaces in the heat treatment plants.
Jiří Stanislav
June 20, 2025
