May 1, 2018
EXPRESS #1
Ireland to face stiff EU fine for not meeting renewable energy targets
May 1, 2018
The EU could slap a huge fine on Ireland for shorting fall of its energy pledges, Irish and British media have reported. The country’s European Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan has pleaded with the government to take action to develop wind and wave energy in a bid to dodge the mammoth bill.
THE EU is set to fine Ireland £530million (€600m) a year for not meetings its renewable energy targets.
Speaking to the Dail Public Accounts Committee recently, Hogan said: “The 2020 target must be adhered to. “We all know exactly that there is no free pass post-2020 in relation to the Renewable Energy Directive and we will be running into trouble with infringement proceedings if this does not happen.”
Fine Gael Senator Michelle Mulherin said the Irish Government should step up its renewable energy projects. She said: “Offshore wind power has up to now often been deemed unduly expensive. But given the controversy and frequent objections to wind turbines on land, this issue should be re-thought.”
The European Court of Justice will impose the fines. Ministers from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Portugal and Luxembourg have recently pushed within the EU to increase climate change targets, although Germany may also not achieve its 2020 targets.
Jerry Mac Evilly, policy coordinator of the Stop Climate Chaos coalition of Irish NGOs, said: “It is hugely positive that more and more EU states are demanding much greater climate action to make the Paris Agreement a reality. Given Ireland’s poor and worsening climate record on the one hand, and this positive leadership being shown by our EU neighbours on the other, it is critical that Ireland joins with this coalition and supports efforts to increase the EU’s climate commitments.”
EXPRESS #2
Big Business says goodbye to Big Oil
May 1, 2018
Big Oil used to be synonymous with Big Business, but no more.
Not so long ago, of the 10 biggest corporations in the world, five or six were oil companies, usually led by ExxonMobil andShell –both at one time the biggest companies in the world.
As Bloomberg notes in a recent article, “from leading the S&P 500 Indexa decade ago, [ExxonMobil] has dropped to the ninth-largest in a top 10 now dominated by technology giants. Its rivals Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron aren’t faring much better, with investors demanding unusually high dividend yields to hold the stocks.”
Overall in the S&P 500, the most important corporate index in the world, the weight of energy stocks has halved in just one decade:
Beyond the S&P, “Big Oil’s weighting in global equity indices is now at a 50-year low, Goldman Sachs Group said in a March report. Of the MSCI World Index’s 100 biggest stocks, only six are oil producers.”
The reason, according to Bloomberg, is “fear that long-term demand will flat-line as electric vehicles and renewable energies grow, and climate change policies proliferate.”
Thanks to the current high oil prices, the oil companies are able to pay big dividends, “but no one believes it’s sustainable,”said Kevin Holt, who helps manage $934 billion at Invesco in Houston. “That’s why the stocks haven’t worked even though the commodity has gone up. Everyone’s saying they don’t believe it.”
In fact, investors don’t believe that oil prices will stay high, as this chart of Brent futures shows:
One trend that must be of concern to the oil companies is big investors increasingly putting their money into renewables and other technologies and divesting away from fossil fuels. The latest convert is Wells Fargo & Company, a big U.S. bank, that has announced plans to provide no less than $200 billion in financing towards sustainable businesses and green projects by 2030, as Business Green reports.
The US banking giant said “more than $100bn of its commitment was earmarked for clean technology, renewable energy, green bonds, low emission transportation and other projects that directly support the transition to a low carbon economy“.
The remainder of the financing “will go towards supporting companies and projects on sustainable agriculture, recycling, conservation, and “other environmentally beneficial activities“.
In addition to the financial pledge, Wells Fargo announced its commitment to “sector leading transparency” around its sustainable financing, accounting and inclusion practices, annual impact reporting and its reporting on progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
It also plans to report on its progress towards implementing the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFDs), as well as boosting its engagement with peers in the industry on sustainable finance.”
Ironically, today’s biggest corporations, technology giants such as Google and Apple,are also committed to achieving 100% renewable energy.
Soon, Big Business may not need Big Oil anymore.
EXPRESS #3
Revolution: renewable energy in U.S. now too big to fail
January 9, 2018
“The daunting math of climate change means we’ll need carbon capture”, writes James Temple in a recent edition of MIT Technology Review.
The author citesJulio Friedman who “has emerged as one of the most ardent advocates of carbon capture technologies.”
Friedman “oversaw research and development efforts on clean coal and carbon capture at the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy under the last administration. Among other roles, he’s now working with or advising the Global CCS Institute, the Energy Futures Initiative, and Climeworks, a Switzerland-based company already building pilot plants that pull carbon dioxide from the air.”
What is interesting about the interview is that Friedman not only makes a plea for carbon capture and storage, but he also argues that “the technology is approaching a tipping point: a growing number of projects demonstrate that it works in the real world, and that it is becoming more reliable and affordable. He adds that the boosted US tax credit for capturing and storing carbon, passed in the form of the Future Act as part of the federal budget earlier this year, will push forward many more projects and help create new markets for products derived from carbon dioxide(see “The carbon-capture era may finally be starting”)”.
With regard to the tax credit for CCS that has been adopted in the U.S., according to Friedman this is a major breakthrough, because “it says you should get paid to notemit carbon dioxide, and you should get paid somewhere between $35 a ton and $50 a ton. So that is already a massive change. In addition to that, it says you can do one of three things: you can store CO2, you can use it for enhanced oil recovery, or you can turn it into stuff. Fundamentally, it says not emitting has value. As I’ve said many times before, the lack of progress in deploying CCS up until this point is not a question of cost. It’s really been a question of finance. The Future Act creates that financing.”
Friedman notes that he “identified an additional provision which said not only can you consider a power plant a source or an industrial site a source, you can consider the air a source. Even if we zeroed out all our emissions today, we still have a legacy of harm of two trillion tons of CO2 in the air, and we need to do something about that. And this law says, yeah, we should. It says we can take carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into stuff.”
Friedman observes that CCS “today is already cost competitive. CCS today, as a retrofit, is cheaper than a whole bunch of stuff. It’s cheaper than new-build nuclear, it’s cheaper than offshore wind. It’s cheaper than a whole bunch of things we like, and it’s cheaper than rooftop solar, almost everywhere. It’s cheaper than utility-scale concentrating solar pretty much everywhere, and it is cheaper than what solar and wind were 10 years ago.”
With regard to direct air capture, which ClimeWorks is working at, this is a technology for the future, according to Friedman. The cost today, “all-in costs, is somewhere between $300 and $600 a ton. I’ve looked inside all those companies and I believe all of them are on a glide path to get to below $200 a ton by somewhere between 2022 and 2025.And I believe that they’re going to get down to $100 a ton by 2030. At that point, these are real options.”
EXPRESS #4
Dutch government downgrades CCS, Deloitte sees bright future for solar in Netherlands
May 1, 2018
The Dutch coalition cabinet led by prime minister Mark Rutte has come out with a final version of the preliminary climate accord that it had presented in October last year shortly after the new government had been formed.
Back then, the climate policy proposals had been more ambitious than many had expected from the centre-right coalition. The new proposals (source in Dutch) do not change the target of 49% reduction of CO2 emissions in 2030 compared to 1990, but they do contain some changes in how the target will be realized.
One important change is that the role of CCS (carbon capture and storage) is more limited in the new plan. Originally, the aim was to achieve 18 Mt of the total of the 56 Mt reduction with CCS. This has now been reduced to 7.2 Mt.
At the same time, the total amount of CO2 emissions to be reduced has also been lowered, from 56 MT to 45 Mt. This difference, of 11 Mt, is ascribed to the fact that the energy transition is going faster than was assumed, even without any policy measures. In particular, solar and wind power are replacing gas power plants more quickly than previously modelled.
For this reason the estimated costs of the transition have also been revised downwards: from €3.5-5.5 billion per year to at most €3 billion a year.
In the new proposals, industry will only have to reduce its emissions by 14.3 Mt (was 22 Mt), half of which will be done through CCS. The transport sector will have to reduce emissions by 7.3 Mt (was 3.5 Mt), the built environment 3.4 Mt (was Mt), the power sector 20.2 Mt (was 20 Mt) and agriculture 3.5 Mt (unchanged).
In 2030, if all the plans are realized, industry will be the highest emitting sector in the Netherlands (35.7 Mt), followed by transport (25 Mt), agriculture (22.2 Mt) built environment (15.3 Mt). The power sector will have the lowest emissions at 12.4 Mt.
In separate news, a recent report from Deloitte shows that “solar panels could provide half of Dutch electricity demand”. This is demonstrated“through data analysis as part of Deloitte’s State of the State program.”
The Netherlands currently has a total of 9 million buildings of which only 4.4 percent have solar panels; a total installed base of 33 million solar panels in 2017. They supply less than 2 percent of the total Dutch electricity demand.
Deloitte found that 892 km2 of roof surface in The Netherlands is suitable for solar panels, which is the equivalent of 125,000 soccer fields. “In the optimal scenario where all available surface is used, 270 million panels could be installed, with a maximum yield of 217 petajoule. Currently only 2 percent of Dutch electricity demand is generated through solar energy. That could be increased to up to 50 percent of the total demand by fully solar roofing The Netherlands.”