To meet climate change targets, European Union (EU) countries need to significantly increase investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and show greater urgency to develop and deploy the technology. Installing 11 GW of CCS electricity generation in the EU by 2030, as envisaged by the EU Energy Roadmap, could cost between €18 and €35 billion. Current policies, including those envisaged by the 2030 framework for climate and energy and the emerging Energy Union, are unlikely to deliver this investment. Economic models indicate that CCS is crucial to the cost-effectiveness of Europe’s emissions reduction targets. CCS can provide flexible, mid-merit electricity generation, which will be much needed as the share of electricity from variable renewable sources increases. It is also, to date, the only technology that can help reduce emissions from industrial installations.
The overriding challenge for many European governments today is to reduce major fiscal deficits with the least collateral damage to the economy. This report shows that carbon fiscal measures may raise significant revenues while having a less detrimental macro-economic impact than other tax options. This gives them an important potential role in fiscal policy; a role that is currently widely overlooked. This benefit arising from carbon fiscal measures goes beyond the usual arguments in their favour – namely that they are crucial, cost effective instruments to reduce Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions. The main focus of this report has been on the immediate opportunities for carbon pricing to assist with deficit reduction. In addition to this, the report explores whether there may also be longer term opportunities to raise greater revenue from carbon pricing while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the EU ETS.
Electricity systems across the U.S. and Europe face significant challenges in the transition to low-carbon energy. While the transition provides plenty of opportunities for investors, businesses, and consumers alike, the current business and regulatory models of investor owned utilities (IOUs) and independent power producers (IPPs), which have mainly developed around competitive markets for fossil fuel generation, are particularly ill-suited to take advantage of these new opportunities. This paper outlines the some major challenges each business segment will face and sets out a roadmap for addressing the challenges.
This study, undertaken by Eunomia Research & Consulting (Eunomia) in conjunction with Professor Mikael Skou Andersen of Aarhus University and the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), has, as its central aim, to: “… provide empirical data or secondary sources on the potential economic and social benefits of environmental fiscal reform, to support the input in the European Semester process on environmental protection and resource efficiency”. The specification elaborates on this as follows: “The task includes presenting data on the potential of revenues from environmental taxation and other indirect benefits such as job creation resulting from EFR in 14 selected countries, using the methodology the EEA has developed and which was also applied to the study published on 03.03.14 for 12 Member States”. The following 14 Member States were included in this study: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, United Kingdom.