With the continued advancements in the development of renewable energy technologies and their ever-increasing cost competitiveness, there is more and more money at stake for countries and companies alike. A number of countries have recently found themselves at odds with one another over the international impact of certain domestic financial support policies for promoting renewables. The United States, China, Japan, Canada, and the European Union, discussed here, along with many others, currently find themselves on varying sides of major international trade disputes on this topic. High-end manufacturing of renewable energy technology components, and the money and jobs this brings with it, is becoming an increasingly important component for policymakers and an increasingly contentious issue at the international level.

A worker assembling solar PV panels in a Suntech Power Holdings Co. factory in Jiangsu Province, China. (Source: Bloomberg)

The dispute between the United States and China over solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing is probably today’s most high-profile renewable energy trade dispute. The Chinese share of global solar PV manufacturing has grown at an incredibly fast pace since the country entered the market, as Chinese manufacturers have rapidly expanded from a 15 percent market share in 2006 to provide nearly half of the world’s total solar PV manufacturing output today. As of 2008 China produced 2,500 megawatts (MW) of solar cells, up from just 4 MW a decade earlier, as reported in the Worldwatch-REEEP report Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in China. With an existing installed capacity of 900 MW at the end of 2010, much of this production is being slated for export.

Read the rest of this entry

The president of COP 17, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, speaks at the final plenary session of the climate change meetings in Durban, South Africa (Source: Worldwatch).

As the new year begins, climate negotiators have begun to move on from their engagement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. After two weeks of intense negotiations on the future of the international regime to combat climate change, they bring home pieces of an ambiguous mandate—but also some critical steps forward. Below, we discuss some of the outcomes of those exhilarating talks in early December.

Symbolic survival of the Kyoto Protocol

Under European Union leadership, signatories of the Kyoto Protocol agreed to enter a second commitment period for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, extending the treaty terms through 2017 or 2020. This symbolically salvaged the agreement—the only existing climate treaty with internationally binding reduction targets. However, the 27 EU countries, together with Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland, are the only countries to take on these targets, and they agreed to do so only under the condition that all major countries agree to a new, truly global and comprehensive climate treaty, if necessary outside the Kyoto structure.

Read the rest of this entry

Yesterday, the Worldwatch Institute joined Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), Representative Edward Markey (D-MA), the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21^st Century (or REN21), and a panel of energy experts to celebrate the launch of Renewables 2011 Global Status Report, an integrated analysis of the state of renewable energy around the world. First published in 2005, REN21’s annual report has since become the most heavily cited analysis of renewable energy business and policy.

According to Alexander Ochs, event moderator and Director of Climate and Energy at the Worldwatch Institute, renewable energy today already accounts for about 25 percent of total global power capacity and 20 percent of actual electricity production, percentages that continue to grow quickly. Over the five-year period from the end of 2005 through 2010, total capacity of many technologies including wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and biomass  grew at rates averaging 15 - 50 percent per year. Total global capacity of solar photovoltaics (PV) in 2010 was up as much as 72 percent from just the year before. Little noticed, approximately half of the estimated 194 gigawatts (GW) of new power capacity that was added globally in 2010 were renewables.

Read the rest of this entry

A chart showing just how much oil sands (tar sands) have contributed to Canada's total oil reserves estimates (Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2007).

All oil is not created equal – or, at least, all oil is not produced with equal environmental impacts, according to estimates proposed last week by the European Commission. The proposal, now under consultation amongst European Union (EU) member states, would add new definitions of the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints for oil from tar sands and shale oil to the EU’s 2009 Fuel Quality Directive (2009/30/EC) and would present a tough barrier to the import of tar sands oil into European markets on the basis of its high life-cycle GHG emissions. The Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) mandates a 6 percent reduction in the average carbon intensity of fuels supplied to the EU (to about 79 grams carbon dioxide-equivalent per megajoule, or g CO₂e/MJ) by 2020. It also establishes a mechanism in Article 8 requiring fuel suppliers to report the life-cycle GHG emissions of the fuels they supply and reduce them from 2011 onwards. With its recently proposed value of 107 g CO₂e/MJ, oil from tar sands would be high above the target recommended under the FQD.

Tar sands, the colloquial name for highly viscous deposits of oil and bitumen, are expected to become a major source of global oil supplies over the next few decades. The largest known deposits in the world, thought to hold 170 billion barrels of oil reserves and as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in place, are concentrated in and around the Canadian province of Alberta. Compared to conventional oil deposits, tar sands require production techniques that are more expensive and are associated with greater environmental impacts, particularly in terms of GHG emissions. Shallow deposits are typically accessed using strip-mining techniques, while deeper deposits are generally accessed using in situ techniques whereby steam is injected into the reservoir to heat the bitumen until its viscosity decreases sufficiently to allow it to flow out of the reservoir.

Read the rest of this entry

Session of the United Nations climate negotiations October 2 in Panama City. Source: International Institute for Sustainable Development

Panama is only a short hop from the Caribbean islands now home to Worldwatch Institute’s Low-Carbon Energy Roadmaps project. But, it’s a big leap from the national renewable energy strategies being developed in the Caribbean to the tense efforts just wrapping up in Panama City to agree on global climate change reduction goals.

The Panama meetings from October 1-7 marked the final preparatory negotiation before the next United Nations climate change summit convenes in Durban, South Africa from November 28-December 10. With many issues on the negotiating table, countries made surprising progress on providing funding for climate change solutions, especially in developing countries. Countries also pushed big issues like a new global climate agreement and the next stage of the Kyoto Protocol onto an already overflowing agenda for Durban.

Read the rest of this entry

President Obama announced last week that automakers must enhance the future performance of their cars and light trucks if they want to continue selling in the United States. The fleets for Model Years 2017 through 2025 will need to meet a combined highway/city performance equivalent to 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) and 163 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per mile according to EPA test procedures. The new standard extends one established in 2009 that requires a Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) of 35.5 mpg and 250 grams of CO2 per mile by Model Year 2016. For passenger vehicles, the standards increase by an average of five percent annually from 2017 through 2025.

The CAFE requirement includes a flexibility mechanism that provides credits allowing automakers to reduce their fleet-wide efficiency performance by designing a variety of systems including efficient air conditioning, flex fuel engines, and compressed natural gas treatment. These ‘accounting tricks’ combined with the possibility of a slight rebound effect in driving behavior may undermine fuel efficiency improvements. Meeting the higher fuel economy standards may not be so far out of reach for automakers even without flexible crediting, considering the efficiency levels achieved by cars on the road today, such as the Toyota Prius, which gets 50 mpg. Nonetheless, the new standard is leaps and bounds beyond the 27 mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard for passenger cars that had been in place since 1985.

Read the rest of this entry

(Photo: The Adopt a Negotiator Project) The Kyoto Protocol (KP) still sits in troubled waters, as three of its signatory countries threaten to jump ship on its continuation beyond 2012.

Governments just finished another round of negotiations in Bonn, Germany under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. If the international climate talks are a ship, the last two weeks’ voyage saw equal parts clear sailing, stormy seas, and listless drifting, as nations advanced toward agreements on addressing ocean carbon storage and clean technology transfer, fought over the future of the Kyoto Protocol, and wasted nearly three days just trying to agree on the agenda for parts of the meeting.

Read the rest of this entry

The Waste Management Hierarchy

At a May 11 event in Washington, D.C. cohosted by the German Embassy and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, panelists discussed the differences in how Germany and the United States deal with their municipal solid waste (MSW). Germany, which created a national ban on landfilling MSW without pre-treatment in 2005, sent only 1 percent of its MSW to landfills in 2007. Sixty-four percent of Germany’s waste was recycled or composted, and the remaining 35 percent was incinerated in waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities. The United States, on the other hand, landfills 69 percent of its MSW, recycling only 24 percent and using 7 percent for WTE.

At first glance, WTE would seem to be a win-win. It involves incinerating MSW to run a turbine and produce electricity. WTE reduces the amount of space needed for landfills by 90 percent, prevents the expenditure involved with procuring fossil fuels and disposing of MSW, and lowers greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding methane emissions from landfills and replacing fossil fuel consumption in waste transport and electricity production.

But WTE has many opponents, for a wide variety of reasons. Some object to the high costs. In the United States especially, with so much unused land, landfilling is cheap and the economics of any alternative are not good. Other critics worry about local air pollution or simply don’t want an industrial facility that deals in garbage near their homes or businesses. And some see WTE as taking attention and urgency away from recycling and composting (a better method of dealing with waste) and therefore believe it does more harm than good. This post will look deeper into this last claim.

Read the rest of this entry

European Commission: Let's get to work on transportation (Ross/geograph.ie)

By: Alexander Ochs and Will Bierbower

Several news items out of Europe in recent weeks demonstrate that the European Union is continuing to lead the push for policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on oil imports. The United Kingdom released its Carbon Plan with concrete steps for how the country will meet its target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions 34 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and the EU continues to prepare for the third phase of its Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS).

The European Commission also officially approved a roadmap last week outlining how the EU can meet its long-term goals to streamline and coordinate transportation across member states. In the plan are 40 initiatives meant to help build a transportation system that increases mobility and improves security and safety, while reducing carbon emissions and reliance on oil imports.

The Commission expects that carrying out the roadmap’s initiatives will facilitate a 60 percent cut in carbon emissions from 1990 levels in the transportation sector by 2050. The EU has already set an overall carbon emissions reduction target of 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. The target for transportation, despite being lower than the overall goal, is ambitious given that this is the only sector in the EU where emissions have continued to rise from 1990 levels. Transportation emissions have grown more than 25 percent in the past 20 years, due in large part to the inertia of current transportation infrastructure and a lack of economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels.

Read the rest of this entry

In 2007, the European Union (EU) adopted its integrated approach to climate and energy policy. By 2020, the region aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent below 1990 levels, to generate 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources, and to improve energy efficiency by 20 percent. While the EU is on track to meet or exceed its goals in the first two categories, it is set to miss its energy efficiency target and is poised to reduce its energy consumption by only 9 percent.

Maybe they should try more double paned windows

Under current EU rules, energy efficiency is the only energy and climate target that is not legally binding. Despite the forecasted shortfall, two weeks ago Europe’s heads of state shied away from taking decisive action on energy efficiency and announced a review of the region’s energy savings plan in 2013 at the earliest. European leaders said they did not want to place additional constraints on their economic policy during a period of economic crisis.

What explains the difference in success rates among the EU targets? Critics contend that the lack of enforceability is to blame for the region’s shortcomings in energy efficiency. A closer look at the EU’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, reveals that binding targets alone may not be sufficient to reach energy-efficiency goals.