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The challenge of decarbonising Europe

While EU energy experts unsurprisingly agreed the leading role renewables and energy efficiency will play in the move to a clean energy economy, speakers at a European Commission conference had widely differing views on what else should be prioritised.

The conference organised by the European Commission, the EU executive body, was billed as a discussion of the EU’s vision of a modern, clean and competitive economy. A clear consensus emerged from it that renewables and energy efficiency can together go a long way to reducing emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement, but beyond that the vision was decidedly fuzzy with each and every lobby group pushing its ideas as vital to solve climate change.

Held in Brussels in July 2018, the event kicked off a three-month public consultation aimed at informing the EU’s plans to decarbonise its economy by 2050. In March 2018, EU heads of state and government had tasked the Commission with presenting a decarbonisation strategy out to the middle of the century. The strategy will be published by November 2018, ahead of the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN climate convention, which this year will take place in Katowice, Poland. It will include different pathways to reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century at the latest or a target compatible with the internationally agreed goal of keeping warming well below 2°C. “There has never been a better time to speak your mind and describe your vision for Europe,” said Maroš Šefčovič, the EU energy commissioner. And this is what lobby groups did, at times describing a somewhat bewildering array of potential solutions to climate change, with regulation, public finance and civic engagement as recurring themes.

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Efficiency and renewables

Ramping up energy efficiency and renewables can achieve the majority of the necessary long-term emissions reductions, underlined Dave Turk from the International Energy Agency (IEA). He cited the agency’s Sustainable Development Scenario to 2040, which envisages a global reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 44% thanks to energy efficiency measures and a 36% reduction thanks to increases in the deployment of renewable energy. “Renewables and energy efficiency can deliver the transition on a global scale,” echoed Dolf Gielen, director of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). He referenced the agency’s REmap Global Energy Transformation Case that sets out an energy-related emissions reduction of 85% by 2050 with 40% of the anticipated cuts coming from energy efficiency, 41% from renewable energy and 13% from electrification via renewables. The EU could cost effectively double the share of renewables in its energy mix from 17% in 2015 to 34% in 2030, says IRENA. Falling costs and technology innovation mean these targets are likely to be revised upwards in the coming years, said Gielen. While the theory looks good, only a handful of technologies, including electric vehicles, lighting, data centres and networks, and solar PV, are, however, developing sufficiently fast to meet the emissions reduction targets, said Turk. He singled out carbon capture and storage as the least-developed emissions reduction technology.

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A citizens’ project

“We are blessed with choice for decarbonising electricity,” said Jim Skea from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s mitigation working group. But warned “big social choices” would have to be taken if deeper emissions cuts were to be made in other sectors. With this in mind, Johannes Teyssen, CEO of major utility E.ON, called for the transition to a clean energy economy to become a “citizens’ project” and greater attention to be paid to those 60% of emissions generated outside the power generation sector, from heating and cooling, transport and agriculture, for example. “Transport is now our single biggest climate problem,” said William Todts, executive director of NGO Transport & Environment. Road transport contributes about 20% of the EU’s CO2 emissions and is the only major sector where emissions have significantly increased since 1990. Emissions from other sectors fell by 15% between 1990 and 2007, while transport emissions increased by 33% over the same period and have only recently started to fall because of high oil prices and more stringent fuel efficiency standards.

This is not about utopia, but about what we can realistically achieve in the next two decades

The economic case for a mass shift to electrified transport is strengthened by Europe’s high oil import dependency, accounting for almost two-thirds of its energy imports, said Todts. “This is not about utopia, but about what we can realistically achieve in the next two decades.” The Commission’s decarbonisation strategy must not simply be focused on the future, but also inform decisions and actions that can be taken today, he said.

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New models

“It is about creating new business models, incentives and regulatory models…and aligning climate and growth policies,” said Jyrki Katainen, European commissioner for jobs, innovation and competitiveness. Indeed, speakers at the conference made repeated calls for long-term stable regulatory frameworks to send the appropriate investment signals, but there was also acknowledgement of the current political situation and the difficulties in introducing such frameworks in the face of rising populism and nationalism in the EU. “The rules-based international order is being much challenged,” said commissioner Šefčovič, while Monica Frassoni, co-chair of the European Green Party and president of the European Alliance to Save Energy, underlined the “decreasing appetite for common rules”. Discussions around decarbonising Europe’s economy should be much more than “a number-crunching exercise,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation. “It’s about what kind of future, what kind of society we want.”
What are net zero emissions?
The concept of net zero emissions goal is expressed in different ways by different organisations, and the European Commission will have to define in its 2050 strategy exactly what it understands by this term. It is generally understood to mean that emissions can continue at signifcantly lower levels than today, but must be balanced by negative emissions technologies, ranging from tree-planting to technological solutions that would draw carbon from the air and store it.

Writer: Clare Taylor