Europe Struggles to Set Renewables Target for 2020

BERLIN, Germany, January 21, 2004 (ENS) - The European Commission is hampering moves to set an EU renewable energy target for 2020, it has emerged at the European Conference for Renewable Energy now underway in Berlin. Environmentalists have blamed Energy Commissioner Loyola de Palacio, accusing her of "stubbornly blocking" progress.

Co-organized by the Commission, the German government and the industry group European Renewable Energy Council (EREC), the Berlin meeting is meant to help prepare Europe's contribution to a wider meeting in Bonn in June. This in turn is aimed at producing a global renewables target as follow-up to the 2002 Johannesburg sustainability summit.

Last year Commission officials suggested the Berlin conference would be a vehicle for launching a 2020 EU target and when the conference opened on Monday EREC called for the EU to aim for 20 percent renewable energy by then.

The Wulfshagen wind farm in Schleswig Holstein, Germany has six Micon 2000/72 machines, among the largest wind turbines in the world. (Photo courtesy NEG Micon)

Development of a 2020 EU target will have to wait for the arrival of new European commissioners after the election this autumn, Guenther Hanreich told reporters.

Also needed is a review, to be launched by the new Commission, of current EU legislation promoting renewables, he said.

In addition, Hanreich expressed concern that the EU might not meet its existing 2010 target of 12 percent renewable energy. "In our enthusiasm for 2020 targets we shouldn't forget to achieve our 2010 targets," he said.

Environmentalists have accused his political boss, Commissioner de Palacio, of "hijacking" the Berlin conference. hey cited her last minute withdrawal from the event and claimed she is anti-renewables and has an obsession with nuclear energy.

The German government is said to be irritated by the Commission's failure to back a clear 2020 target, but German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin would not comment publicly on the issue. The EU should set a "pioneering" target, he told delegates, but he refused to speculate on what this should be.

In a document prepared for the conference, de Palacio's Directorate-General for Energy and Transport acknowledged the "clear" need for financial support from the European Community for renewable energy.

"Several of the technologies, especially wind energy, but also small-scale hydro power, energy from biomass, and solar thermal applications, are economically viable and competitive," the directorate said. "The others, especially photovoltaic - silicon module panels directly generating electricity from the sun’s light raher than heat - depend only on increasing demand and thus production volume to achieve the economy of scale necessary for competitiveness with central generation."

Financial support is needed, most stakeholders agree, but a long running argument over which financial support mechanism is best for promoting the industry rages on, the Berlin renewables conference has revealed.

The debate will intensify this year as the European Commission begins a review of the 2001 renewable electricity law. One issue the Commission must tackle is whether to propose a harmonized EU support method.

The main choice is between straight subsidies - giving generators guaranteed minimum prices for electricity on the German feed-in model - and market-based systems that set electricity suppliers a renewables quota, often involving tradable green certificates.

Feed-in systems provide a more certain return for investors and have generated huge expansions of wind power in Denmark, Germany and Spain.

Quotas are in theory more economically efficient and should promote competition and bring down costs. They operate in the UK, the Netherlands and Italy among others.

Advocates for both systems made their cases in Berlin on Tuesday.

Solar photovoltaic panels power a British building. (Photo courtesy FreeFoto)

Hermann Scheer, German MP and veteran renewables campaigner, said feed-in was better and that no harmonized EU support was needed for at least 10 to 15 years.

Johannes Lackmann of the German Renewable Energy Association also backed feed-in tariffs. He said they are politically more acceptable because they provide a direct link between subsidies and employment. He said they had bucked conventional wisdom and were producing prices lower than those in the UK's quota based scheme.

But Iain Todd of the UK Industry Ministry said he is confident that the quota scheme would achieve greater cost efficiency. The UK had sufficient faith in its approach to have recently announced an extension in its domestic renewables target from 10 percent by 2010 to 15 percent by 2015, he said.

Poul Erik Morthorst of the Ris National Laboratory in Denmark suggested that renewable energy costs would have fallen less in recent years had only feed-in support schemes been used.

The European Commission is said to be thoroughly polarized on the issue after it tried but failed to introduce a quota based harmonized EU system in 1999. Given progress now being made under a variety of support systems, the chances of a new attempt to specify a single support look slim.

Commission Awards Prizes to the Best Renewable Energy Projects

Today, on the last day of the conference, the EU Awards of the Renewable Energy Campaign for Take-Off were handed out for the fourth and last year. The award ceremony marked the official closure of the campaign.

"I would like to congratulate the winners again this year for their commitment to renewable energies. In view of the greater challenges facing us now that enlargement will become a reality in May, I would also like to encourage them and all our partners to continue these efforts" said de Palacio, announcing the awards.

The Commission rewarded the efforts made in promoting renewable energy and showcasing successful projects and initiatives all over Europe.

• Third party financing and the take-off of renewable energy sources in Spain led by IDAE

• Promoting the deployment of renewable energy in Ireland, led by the Renewable Energy Information Office of the Sustainable Energy Authority

• Energy planning in Navarra, Spain, led by the Government of Navarra

• Pohjolan Voima's Bioenergy Program, led by the Finnish Pohjolan Voima

• Varese Ligure 100 percent sustainable led by the Municipality of Varese Ligure, Italy

• World Network on Bioenergy, a global renewable energy partnership, led by the European Biomass Industry Association

• Soltherm Europe Initiative, a large EU-wide consortium lead by Ecofys b.v.

• Objective 15 percent of renewable energy in 2010 led by ST Microelectronics

• Renewable Energy for Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany led by the Regional Energy Agency

• In order to highlight the closing of the campaign, a prize for the best renewable energy program of the last four years was awarded to the region of Upper Austria "Energie 21 - The Energy Action Plan for Upper Austria," which is run by the O.Ö. Energiesparverband.

In the future, support to initiatives promoting renewable energies in the Member States will be granted under the new programme Intelligent Energy Europe adopted in June 2003 with a four year budget of €250 million for the enlarged Europe which will include 25 countries as of May 1, 2004.

Building on the achievements of the Campaign for Take-Off, the Commission will launch a larger successor Campaign on Sustainable Energy in mid-2004, encompassing energy efficiency and renewable energy.

The European Campaign for Take-Off was launched by the European Commission in 1999 and has been the first Renewable Energy Promotional Campaign launched at European level.

During these four years, 127 Renewable Energy Partnerships embracing more than 700 institutions have been signed throughout the European Union.

Thirty-one of these Renewable Energy Partnerships were elected as leading projects and were awarded prizes on the basis of their substantial contribution to the Campaign for Take-Off.

As underlined in the Commission Green Paper on Security of Energy Supply, the EU's objective is to reach a share of 12 percent for the contribution of renewable energy sources to the European Union's gross inland consumption by 2010.

In order to reach this target, major legislative proposals have been adopted. The Directive on Renewable Energies adopted in 2001 provides for an overall EU indicative target of 21 percent for the share of renewable energy sources of the EU's electricity consumption, in the enlarged Europe.

The Directive on Biofuels entails a target of 5.75 percent for the share of biofuels in the transport sector by 2010.

These objectives are coupled with efforts towards the rationalization and stabilization of energy demand to achieve an indicative annual reduction in energy intensity of an additional one percent per year above the business as usual forecast.

{Published in cooperation with ENDS Environment Daily, Europe's choice for environmental news. Environmental Data Services Ltd, London. Email: envdaily@ends.co.uk}