Europe’s clean technology industry lambasted the European Commission’s energy roadmap for 2050, published today (15 December), for omitting policy recommendations and interim targets.
Julian Scola, a spokesperson for the European Wind Energy Association, described it as “a roadmap without direction” and a “wasted opportunity” for omitting any carbon reduction targets for 2030.
“It sets out various scenarios but disappointingly doesn’t make any policy recommendation as to how to reach the objective of decarbonisation of the energy sector in 2050,” he told EurActiv.
“The roadmap acknowledges the need for investor certainty but it simply does not deliver on this,” he said.
His concerns were shared by Christine Lins, the director of REN21, an international renewable energy policy network.
“We will only achieve the needed decarbonisation of the energy sector by 2050 if a coherent framework is put in place post-2020,” she said. “There is a need for 2030 commitments and the lack of reference to that here definitely misses an opportunity.”
Decarbonisation scenarios
Rather than weigh targets and policy options, the roadmap instead mulls the potential merits of five ‘decarbonisation scenarios’ on the way to 2050, namely:
- A High Energy Efficiency scenario, with more stringent commitments to energy savings, particularly in the building sector, leading to a decrease in energy demand of 41% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels.
- A Diversified Supply Technologies scenario in which all energy sources compete on a market basis, and decarbonisation is led by carbon pricing, nuclear energy and the introduction of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
- A High Renewable Energy Sources scenario with strong support for renewables leading to a 75% uptake in the European energy mix by 2050.
- A Delayed CCS scenario, leading to higher shares for nuclear energy with decarbonisation driven by carbon prices rather than a technology push.
- A Low Nuclear scenario, assuming that no new nuclear reactors are built beyond those already commissioned, resulting in around 32% of power being generated using CCS.
The scenarios show that “decarbonisation is possible and can be less costly than current policies in the long run,” the roadmap says. It foresees substantial rises in renewable energy, an increasing role for electricity, and substantial cost savings after 2030.
But in the period between 2011 and 2050, it notes that cumulative grid investments alone would amount to between €1.5 trillion to €2.2 trillion.
Scenario separation
While broadly welcoming the roadmap, Arne Mogren of the EU’s ad-hoc expert advisory group and author of a consultation document used in drawing up the Roadmap, told EurActiv that it had been a mistake to separate the Renewables and High Energy Efficiency scenarios.
“In reality you will have to do both in combination,” he said. “That’s what we need because there will never be an ‘either-or’ choice. If you combine those two scenarios, you will perhaps be able to decarbonise earlier.”
Many of the ad hoc group’s recommendations were ignored in the final report – most notably, advice that the EU provide interim targets for carbon reduction in 2030.
Another bone of contention comes in the roadmap’s referencing of the debate on carbon leakage and the short-term economic effect of Europe unilaterally reducing its emissions.
“There is a trade-off between climate change policies and competitiveness,” the paper says.
Scola described the statement as “certainly contentious.”
“The roadmap itself shows that system costs are the same for decarbonisation or business as usual, and decarbonisation options are cheaper in the impact assessment,” he said.
Nuclear hackles raised
The perceived prominence given to nuclear power in the EU’s document also raised hackles in some quarters, as the highest nuclear share of the energy mix noted in the roadmap’s various scenarios by 2050 is 18%.
The roadmap says that nuclear energy “remains a key source of low-carbon electricity generation” and that it will “be needed to provide a significant contribution in the energy transformation process” in states that currently have nuclear reactors.
But REN21’s Lins noted that countries such as Germany, Italy and Switzerland had recently moved to abandon it.
Critical gas
Perhaps the most important short-term energy source identified by the European Commission in the roadmap is natural gas.
“Gas will be critical for the transformation of the energy system,” the roadmap states, foreseeing a role for it as either a “low-carbon technology” – should CCS be applied to it from 2030 onwards – or as a “flexible back-up and balancing capacity”.
Environmentalists believe that planning for the widespread use of gas without the use of CCS after 2030 could imperil ambitions to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celcius.
But François-Régis Mouton, chairman of the Gas Naturally initiative, welcomed the Commission’s emphasis said that the EU executive itself had recognised that its scenarios for gas might be “too conservative”.
“The success of renewables without gas is hard to imagine and if Europe is serious about significantly cutting CO2 emissions today, replacing higher carbon fuels with gas is the cheapest and fastest way to achieve this,” he told EurActiv.
Source EurActiv.com
