Economic Development and Respect of the Environment – What is India going to do?

The Economist just published an article about India’s path into economic development. At the moment, the country is home to some 230 million people living below the poverty line (meaning that they have less than $1.90 a day). At the same time, thirteen out of the twenty most polluted cities are in India. Smoke from cooking with solid matter is estimated to cause up to 500’000 early deaths a year. For the upcoming COP 21 conference in Paris, where hopes are high that a successor treaty to the Kyoto-Protocol will be agreed on, India has promised to reduce its carbon intensity (meaning carbon emissions per dollar of GDP) by a third before 2030. It has not agreed on setting a date after which its absolute emissions will not rise anymore.

Interestingly, in the case of India, economic interests may be somewhat aligned with environmental ones. The electricity grid is in a bad condition. Blackout and informal connections are very common. Half of rural households (i.e. between 250 and 300 million people) have no access to electricity. That’s half the population of Europe. For them, the fastest way to get access to affordable power could be to setup renewables. Using solar energy is in some cases cheaper than buying coal-based electricity.

The Economist argues that implementing energy efficiency measures such as using modern air-conditioners and LED-bulbs can have an important impact on carbon emissions. It may be hard though to cover the initial investment cost of such installations.

It will be interesting to follow how much respect India grants to environmental protection while developing its economy.

The full article can be accessed here:

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21672359-prime-minister-wants-india-grow-fast-over-next-20-years-china-has-over-past-20

Written by Dirk Lauinger, MES 2015 Graduate

A visit at the European Parliament – How European Islands strive to become more sustainable

Last week, there was a two day conference on sustainability issues on European islands at the European Parliament in Brussels. Day 1 was the final conference of the SMILEGOV project. Representatives from islands communities ranging from the Orkney Islands in Northern Scotland, to Malta in the Southern Mediterranean Sea and from the Azores in the Atlantic to Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea attended. There was a huge discrepancy in terms of population, area and administrative level among the islands. Cape Clear Island, south of Ireland, is home to just over 100 (permanent) inhabitants, whereas Cyprus houses more than one million. In terms of public administration, some of the smaller islands may not even be municipalities, whereas Malta and Cyprus are sovereign states. It appears that although there are important discrepancies, many of the islands have some similar characteristics:

1. Remoteness – many islands are hard to access in terms of travel distance, time and cost
2. Fragmentation – many of the islands are of comparatively small size, which in turn makes it hard to realize economies of scale and because of the small market makes the islands less attractive for traditional investors
3. Energy Deficit – often islands are not or poorly interconnected with the grid on the mainland. This results in a poor security and quality of power supply. If electricity is produced with diesel generators, this causes electricity prices that are much higher than on the continent.
4. Fresh Water – not all of the islands have access to sufficient fresh water sources to provide for their often seasonally changing population. In case there is a lack of fresh water, it needs to be either imported or produced through desalination. Both are costly.
5. Environmental Protection Zones – some of the islands are located in fragile maritime ecosystems which are subject to regional or national protection regulations. There is no doubt that the island environment needs to be preserved, however some of the regulations hinder some darely needed developments on the islands and may even prohibit the deployment of renewable energy projects.

The first day dealt with the issue of smart multilevel governance on islands (SMILEGOV), where multi-level governance means that the public administration on the island is subject to legislation coming from a higher administrative level, as illustrated below.

Multilevel and Multilateral Governance

The aim of SMILEGOV is to promote cooperation between islands on the establishment and implementation of so-called island sustainable energy action plans (iSEAPs), plans that state how the islands communities would like to become more sustainable (with the focus on environmental sustainability). There are two groups of island member states: advanced islands that are currently implementing iSEAPs and less experienced islands that have not yet done so. The idea behind SMILEGOV is to accelerate the implementation of iSEAPs for islands in the first group and to build/strengthen local capacity in the second group. This is done through plenary workshops and an e-learning platform.

There are twelve clusters grouped by geographical region.

The Island Clusters and SMILEGOV partners

In each cluster, there were four plenary workshops to exchange best practices among island representatives. It appears that including all relevant stakeholders in the project management is critical, in order to make sure that everyone feels part of the project and gains a sense of ownership. Furthermore, innovative financing mechanisms, such as energy cooperatives and crowdfunding were mentioned. Interestingly, among grass-root energy initiatives, making profit is often not the main driver, but it is the will of making a change.

FEDARENE (the European Federation of Agencies and Regions for Energy and Environment) identified six factors for the successful realization of energy projects by regional and local organizations:

1. Shared Vision of the project goal among the stakeholders
2. Working Partnership that should be formalized in some way, e.g. through a Memorandum of Understanding
3. Stakeholder Involvement
4. Funding Availability
5. Energy Planning Expertise
6. Multilevel Governance Processes

Not surprisingly, it can be quite hard to fulfill all of these factors when considering that some island communities have municipalities counting only a handful of employees. Islands do however have a potential for the deployment of renewable energy technologies. Especially, the wind resources are often better than on the mainland. Since they face the challenges outlined above, there is an incentive for decentralized power production. A welcome side effect is the creation of local jobs, which may prevent some of the emigration of the young generation to the cities on the mainland. Below are three case studies presented at the conference:

Biogas for Public Transport on Öland

Agriculture is important on Öland, the second largest Swedish island, home to about 25,000 inhabitants. Actually, there are more cows than inhabitants. The manure produced by these cows is used to power the public transport buses. It was necessary to set up a biogas plant and filling stations for the municipal busses. The project was made bankable through a gas off-take agreement that the municipality signed with the investor in the biogas infrastructure, guaranteeing the offtake of the produced biogas at a specified price for a certain time period. This approach is similar to power purchase agreements.

Windpower on the Shetland Islands

The Shetland Islands are situated North-East of Scotland. They do have a great potential for wind power production and since the region has revenues from oil and gas, some funds were available for the undertaking of a major project. The Viking Wind Farm was originally projected to consist of 150 wind turbines with an installed capacity of 600 MW. That’s more than half the power of a modern nuclear power plant, and not too far from the 730 MW capacity of the Beznau nuclear power plant in Switzerland. Such a large wind farm does have a considerable footprint on the local environment. Sustainability groups on the island and the local airport administration raised a fierce opposition. There were several legal complaints. The courts decided to maintain planning permission for a 457 MW wind farm. The consumption of the island (which at the moment relies on an unstable diesel grid) is only 30 MW. The plan is to export the excess power. However, this requires the construction of a DC-link with the National Grid (the Shetland islands have never been interconnected before). When the electricity arrives at the mainland it will be more expensive than mainland wind power because of the high transmission charges. The special characteristic of the wind park is that 50% of it will be community-owned, meaning that the islanders will be shareholders.

Tidal Power on Les Iles du Ponant

Les Iles du Ponant are a group of 15 islands off the coast of Brittany in France. Only three of these islands are not interconnected. The islands have promising tidal resources. It is difficult to take advantage of them since although the electricity sector is liberalized on paper by an EU-directive, EDF, the main French electrical utility, still has a very strong market position. Without storage facilities, les Iles du Ponant, will not be granted the right to cover more than 30% of their power consumption by tidal resources for fear of grid instability. Because of these obstacles for the deployment of tidal power, the first measure taken by the islands was the reduction of their energy consumption.

At the end of the SMILEGOV session, there seemed to be a common feeling among the representatives that islands should concentrate on how to create a good life on the island despite the various challenges they are facing. They should not be too much constrained by non-island regulations.

On the second day, the Islands Commission of the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions of Europe (CPMR) came together for its 35th general assembly to discuss not only sustainability issues, but also cohesion and migration policy.

For futher information please visit:

http://www.sustainableislands.eu/

Written by Dirk Lauinger, MES 2013 Student

Debate: “This house would ban carbon intense imports from China”

Today, the Energy BPT Group organized the last debate of the semester on banning carbon intense imports from China.With the outsourcing/offshoring of production activities to China, the developed nations also relocate the pollution associated with these activities to China. In 2008, it is estimated that China exported about a quarter of its CO2 emissions [1]. Today, air pollution is a major issue in Chinese domestic politics. The life expectancy in some of the northern provinces has decreased by five years. The Chinese government has recognised this issue and is introducing a carbon market to fight pollution.

Air Pollution in Shanghai

The proposing side focussed on the impact of Chinese emissions on climate change. Their main point was that in developed nations, we have a moral obligations to fight climate change and that banning carbon intense Chinese imports helps us in doing so. They rightly pointed out that air pollution is moving and does not stop at national borders. Indeed, some studies of atmospheric transport phenomena relate air pollution over the West Coast of the US to Chinese industries.

On the opposing side, an argument was made for national sovereignty and the reign of free markets. It is true that air pollution is an international issue, however the opposition does not believe that it should be tackled by unilateral efforts from individual countries, but that international consensus is necessary to come up with efficient solutions that will not result in a trade war with China. Imposing a substantial tax on carbon and creating functional clean development mechanisms at the Paris conference in December was proposed as an alternative solution. In order for this to work it may be necessary to consider both consumption and production based accounting of CO2 emissions – and to balance the two of them.

This debate was interesting because it interwove domestic Chinese environmental pollution with global CO2 emissions and climate change. There was a consensus among the parties that the carbon-intensity of the Chinese economy should decrease (because the negative impact of Chinese CO2 emissions is global). The disagreement was about whether or not limiting trade with the People’s Republic is an efficient way of achieving this goal.

I wonder how the debate would have turned out if it was not about CO2 emissions, but about imports related to negative pratices that are confined to within China. Child labor for exemple. Or groundwater pollution.

If you want to know more:

[1]: Glen P. Peters et al. “Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008”.
In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108.21
(2011), pp. 8903–8908. ISSN: 1091-6490. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1006388108 .

Written by: Dirk Lauinger, MES 2013 Student