depending on the penetration level and the scenario considered wind and solar technologies allows for a reduction of c emissions in the short term this reduction on carbon emissions however is not always confirmed in the long term introducing renewables into an electricity system whose baseload technology emits c such as coal will definitively reduce the c emissions from the electricity sector in both the short and the long term however this will not hold when the baseload technology displaced by renewables does not emit c as is the case for nuclear energy in this case instead the electricity produced by fossilfuelled technologies tends to increase and c emissions will be generally higher than in the reference scenario without renewables in other words nuclear energy is more efficient than variable renewable energy in limiting c emissions as it will not induce a shift towards carbonintensive peakload technologies