European Renewable Energies Federation

Although more than twenty years ago experts were raising concerns that increasing industrialisation and human activity may have negative impacts on the global climate, the fact is that “climate change” and its link to human activity has only met comparatively recently with broad acceptance of politicians and citizens around the globe. Fortunately, this consensus on the need to take timely action already yields results, even though the harvest is not always as fruitful as desired.

As one of the front runners in the battles against climate change, the European Union (EU) has two major instruments at its disposal: emission trading and renewable energies. So far, the latter has clearly prevailed over the former in terms of effective emission reduction.

Cutting Emissions

Under the Kyoto Protocol the EU had to cut CO2 emissions by 8% between 1990 and 2012, a period of 22 years over all. The new adopted climate protection goal also requires the EU to cut emissions by a further 12% in only eight years, namely between 2012 and 2020. At the beginning of 2007, the EU-25 managed to only achieve approximately 1% of the 8% agreed in Kyoto. It seems obvious the contribution of the European Emission Trading scheme (ETS), the largest greenhouse gas emission trading scheme worldwide and operational since 2005, has so far been rather limited. The first years of emission trading also showed several other shortcomings and undesired developments such as huge windfall profits for some big electricity suppliers to the detriment of the electricity consumer. The currently ongoing revision of the European ETS, and in particular the envisaged auctioning of emission certificates, is therefore highly necessary. It remains to be seen whether the revised concept of ETS will be an efficient instrument in the future.

In contrast, the continuous promotion and deployment of renewable energies (RES) in Europe has had a considerably more significant impact over recent years since their contribution to cut climate damaging emissions is twofold. On one hand, the amount of energy produced from RES replaces the equivalent amount of energy produced from conventional sources. On the other hand, emissions which result from the process of energy production from wind, water, sun, biomass or geothermal energy, are insignificant compared to emissions from energy production from conventional sources. In Germany, for example, around 115,000 tonnes of CO2 could be avoided in 2007 by using RES. It is expected that, in Spain 39,000 tonnes CO2 can be avoided until 2020 with the use of PV Solar technology.

Trading versus renewables

From a global perspective, RES have the advantage as they are available for exploitation in every country worldwide. Their deployment can be easily driven forward by adequate national policies, which are much easier to create and implement than multinational agreements as the negotiations in Kyoto and Bali have shown. A well designed emission trading scheme can be an important instrument to combat climate change, but given the political reluctance of some governments of high emitting countries, it is not a global solution in the short term.

In contrast, switching from a conventional energy supply to RES is a real alternative that can be implemented worldwide: RES development does not require complicated international agreements and, apart from its positive effect on the climate, it becomes even more attractive when considering the many other advantages. It is a fact that the world sooner or later needs to deal with a change of its energy system – not only because of climate change, but for many other reasons such as resource constraints, energy security, economic growth and poverty.

Many of these challenges can be tackled by switching from (a mostly centralised) conventional energy supply to a decentralised energy supply system based on RES. Focusing on national RES development and production will:

• contribute significantly to the decrease of a country’s dependency from fossil fuel imports increasing at the same time national security of supply,
• support less developed rural areas in terms of job creation or simply electrification, in particular in developing countries, and,
• boost national economy by creating new, highly qualified jobs in RES companies and their supply industry.

Many countries in the European Union under clear leadership of Germany and Spain, but also India and China, and some progressive states in the United States, show that these effects will turn into reality when helping RES into the market by adapting adequate policies. In all committed countries RES turned into an industry that became a serious economic factor for the benefit of the overall economy and the global climate.

W: www.eref-europe.org