EU Energy Policy Blog

As the Copenhagen Accord makes emphatically clear, developing countries are not accepting emission caps. This will make passing a strong national cap more difficult. Economically cap and trade is a carbon tax with the tax rate set by the permit market to make sure the cap is met. This results in a highly volatile tax rate, which slows investment, makes it more costly, and will likely create political problems as the price of carbon increases over the years.
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Financial markets may be depressed and unemployment high but investment keeps pouring into GreenTech field – loosely defined to include renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency including in-home automaton and energy management systems, smart meters/smart grid, electric cars, storage, batteries, biofuels and a host of supporting technologies.
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Being now the largest CO2 emitter in the world, China’s actions toward climate change are particularly important to reduce GHG emissions at the global level. The recent announced target to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40 to 45% by 2020 seems rather more difficult to achieve than first calculations would suggest.

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Both our energy use and CO2 emissions can be reduced by using and producing energy in different ways. Implementing these improvements is associated with changes in our technology and energy use. It has been shown that the public is, to a large extent, unaware of the essential role played by energy in society, of the challenges that we face with our energy supply, and the steps we can take to increase energy efficiency.
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Google has a habit of surprising its competitors. The fast moving company is known for launching into new forays not always knowing where it may end up. In this sense, it is not only the competitors who are trying to read what the company’s latest move may entail.
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On January 1st, 2010, the Spanish Government took over the presidency of the European Union. Shaping the future political agenda at a European level is especially important in the field of energy and sustainability. The current unsustainable energy models, both European and global, and especially their consequences on climate change, need an urgent action on this field, which must be agreed at a European level from a long-term approach.
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Whether you like it or not, for the time being the most important product of the December meeting in Copenhagen of the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the “Copenhagen Accord”. Continue reading »

A survey by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that the top 50 US purchasers bought more than 12.5 TWh of green power in 2008 with Intel Corporation holding the top spot, again.
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California has been leading the rest of the US in many areas, but the one area the policymakers are most proud of is that the state has managed to keep its per capita electricity consumption virtually flat for 30 years – a feat that is the envy of the rest of the country.
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Part 1 and Part 2 of this series explained why caps have been rejected by developing countries, why offsets can’t do the job, and why we need to expand from caps to carbon pricing. This part 3 outlines Flexible Global Carbon Pricing, a plan for re-orienting the Kyoto Protocol toward international cooperation.
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