Brussels, 08/07/2014 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission announced on Tuesday 8 July that it has awarded €1 billion in funding to 19 projects to fight climate change under the second call of the NER 300 funding programme (New Entrants Reserve, see EUROPE 10819). The funding for the projects comes from revenues resulting from the sale of emission allowances in the EU Emissions Trading System. This makes the polluters the driving force behind developing new low-carbon initiatives.
The Commission hopes the introduction of the projects in twelve member states (Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, France, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) will boost the generation of power from renewable sources and carbon capture and storage (CCS) across the entire European Union.
The funding will be used to demonstrate technologies that will subsequently help to scale up production from renewable energy sources across the EU as well as those that can remove and store carbon emissions. The projects awarded co-financing cover a range of technologies - bioenergy (and advanced biofuel in Estonia, Latvia, Denmark and Sweden), concentrated solar power (€70 million for Cyprus), geothermal power, photovoltaics, wind power (€100 million for Spain), ocean energy, smart grids and, for the first time, carbon capture and storage (CCS) (€300 million for the United Kingdom).
EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard told reporters: “With these first-of-a-kind projects, we will help protect the climate and make Europe less energy-dependent. The €1 billion we are awarding today will leverage some additional €900 million of private investment. So that is almost €2 billion of investment in climate-friendly technologies here in Europe. This is a contribution to reducing Europe's energy bill of more than €1 billion per day that we pay for our imported fossil fuels”. She said that Europe is easily the world's biggest importer of fossil fuels and events in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq demonstrate the EU's vulnerability to fluctuations in prices and decisions taken in other parts of the world. She said Russia could decide to cut off gas supplies but nobody can decide to cut off access to the sun or the wind and work was also needed on renewables and CCS. She said there was enormous potential for job-creation and reducing the EU's energy bill and carbon dioxide emissions, making the announcement of the funding a good day for the climate and for energy.
The pioneering projects include the first NER 300 trans-boundary project which will build a geothermal plant across the French-German border near Strasbourg to produce electricity and heat; the development of a geothermal power plant in Croatia; the first NER 300 photovoltaic project, located in Portugal; the first example of a large-scale CCS project in the EU, a UK-based project to use oxyfuel technology to capture 90% of the CO2 produced by burning coal at the Drax power plant near Selby in Yorkshire that will be safely stored at an offshore storage site in the North Sea. The commissioner said there was still some way to go before achieving the twelve projects planned in 2009 when the climate and energy package was introduced, but was a good first step in technology that will help achieve the EU's climate change targets.
The Commission hopes the selected projects will increase the annual EU renewable energy production by almost 8 terawatt hours (TWh). This energy amount corresponds to the combined annual electricity consumption of Cyprus and Malta. The CCS project will capture 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to taking over a million cars off the roads.
The announcement of the NER 300 project funding came on the same day as the European Court of Auditors published Special Report 6/2014 that recommends that the EU improve the use of funding for renewable energies to ensure cost-effectiveness in the generation of electricity from renewable sources (see related article). Asked about the cost-effectiveness criterion for the selected projects, Hedegaard said the European Investment Bank had made a detailed analysis off all the projects and would never select unprofitable projects. All the NER 300 funding has now been spent but in its recent Communication, A policy framework for climate and energy in the period from 2020 to 2030, the Commission outlines the possibility of exploring an expanded NER 300 system in the post-2020 climate and energy framework. This could be a means of directing further revenues from the EU emissions trading scheme towards the demonstration of innovative low-carbon technologies in the industry and power generation sectors. (AN)