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Energy Post

The best thinkers on energy

Carbon Offsetting via old wind and solar farms is no way to reduce emissions

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Companies can offset their emissions by buying carbon credits, where the money goes to fund clean energy projects. But the carbon credit market includes credits for very old projects. This is a foolish waste, explain Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis at UCL (UK). The market must be based on the principle of additionality: the money should be aimed at projects that would not have happened otherwise, thereby causing emissions reductions that would not … [Read more...]

A new EU Gas Market must expose it to all clean energy solutions, not just gas-on-gas

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Towards the end of this year the EC is expected to issue new proposals for gas legislation, a once in a decade market reform. Simon Skillings and Lisa Fischer at E3G highlight the big difference between the design of gas and electricity markets for Europe. The electricity market is growing, the gas market needs to shrink. The authors quote figures showing that the EU's 55% emissions reduction target for 2030 means natural gas use will reduce by … [Read more...]

WEO 2020 means updated price predictions to 2040: Oil, Gas, Coal, Renewables, Power

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The combined effect of the global lockdown, more ambitious climate policies and the rise of renewables will have a significant effect on European power prices up to 2040, as well as the sales revenues of renewable energies. Carlos Perez-Linkenheil at Energy Brainpool uses their Power2Sim model to look at the data in the IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2020 and make quantitative forecasts. The pandemic has caused structural distortions to the … [Read more...]

California learns even flexible Emissions Markets won’t guarantee price stability

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In May, emissions allowance prices hit rock bottom in California. How can cap-and-trade work properly when prices are so volatile and difficult to predict? It makes life very difficult for businesses and investors, not to mention the state. Changes to the rules are being proposed to introduce more flexibility into the effective price floors, ceilings and the availability of allowances. But Severin Borenstein at the Energy Institute at Haas … [Read more...]

Dutch-Spanish startup navigates coronavirus fallout while also guiding utilities into the digital age

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In late summer 2015 at a research university in Belgium, an Italian graduate student new to campus attended a welcome event hosted by engineering department faculty. Sampling beer brewed by an electrical engineering student association, Simone Accornero mingled with a dozen other new classmates in his program at KU Leuven. Accornero began chatting with an engineering master’s student who had just arrived from Poland. “We hit it off,” Accornero … [Read more...]

Europe’s new Hydrogen Strategy: the questions that still need answering

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Yesterday saw the launch of the EC’s new Hydrogen Strategy, the focus of our next live online discussion and Q&A. Register now to join us at the event next Wednesday at 12.45 CEST on Zoom to hear direct from the European Commission's Dr. Florian Ermacora, Future Energy System expert Prof. dr. Ad van Wijk, Giulia Branzi - Head of Regulation at event partner SNAM and trading specialist Marcel Steinbach of BDEW. Here, to set the scene, Gökçe … [Read more...]

EU ETS: The Market Stability Reserve should focus on carbon prices, not allowance volumes

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The Market Stability Reserve (MSR) aims at providing carbon price stability for the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). But serious questions are being asked about how much stability – if any – it provides, say Michael Pahle at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Simon Quemin at the LSE's Grantham Research Institute. They argue that the MSR rules are too complex, have difficulty accommodating changing EU and national policies, … [Read more...]

Energy Post panel discussion – Cross-Border Capacity [VIDEO]

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Whilst renewable generation continues to grow, cross-border capacity fails to keep up. On May 19, 2020, Energy Post hosted a unique panel qualified to discuss the issue and shed some light on how we got here and what the options might be going forward. The discussion was moderated by Erik Rakhou - alternate member of the ACER board of appeal and consultant at Baringa. Representing the European Commission was Florian Ermacora and for independent, … [Read more...]

Re-shaping the EU ETS as a safety net, not a driver

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The EU ETS (Emissions Trading System) has struggled to cope with the current economic crisis which has caused a drop in the European carbon price, while the expected drastic drop in 2020 emissions will only add to the existing surplus of allowances. This highlights how necessary it is to reform the mechanism for managing this surplus or even to implement a carbon floor price, explain Charlotte Vailles at I4CE and Nicolas Berghmans at IDDRI. They … [Read more...]

Bounceback or Recession? Modelling the impact on electricity prices to 2025

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Carlos Perez Linkenheil at Energy Brainpool models three scenarios to understand the factors that are having the biggest impact on – and thereby make predictions for - electricity prices, revenues, energy source merit order, and emissions in the EU. Other parameters in the scope of their analysis include oil prices, gas prices, commodities markets, carbon taxes, and the EUA/emissions market. Clearly, collapsing prices are profoundly distorting … [Read more...]

Regulatory challenges to foster cross-border trade in electricity systems with increasing shares of renewables

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The share of renewable generation in Europe’s power system is rising fast, but interconnection is not keeping up. Join us on May 19, 2020 to discuss this and related issues. More wind and solar makes the supply of electricity much more dependent on the weather. Nobody wants to build capacity only to switch it off when there’s too much heading onto the local grid. This could put an extra strain on delivering the Green Deal. One solution is to … [Read more...]

2019-2024: competitive auctions will launch over 2/3rds of utility-scale renewables, says IEA

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Government support for new utility-scale capacity is being replaced with competitive auctions, the surest sign that the commercial appetite for renewables - particularly solar PV and onshore wind - is growing strong. This article by the IEA pulls out the essential numbers from their annual Renewables 2019 report (their 5-year market analysis and forecast for renewable energy and technologies in the electricity, heat and transport sectors). The … [Read more...]

Creating a market to trade excess wind/solar between states (without outsourcing your emissions!)

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How do you get neighbouring states, with different renewables mixes, and different emissions targets and penalties, to trade their surplus energy? It’s one of the biggest challenges to face the rapid growth of intermittent wind and solar. Meredith Fowlie at the Energy Institute at Haas describes how an “Energy Imbalance Market” (EIM) is operating across eight states in the west of the U.S. Bidding for your neighbour’s excess renewable energy is … [Read more...]

The rapid liberalisation of China’s domestic gas market

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China’s coal-to-gas ambitions are driving big changes to its internal gas markets, says a report “China’s Quest for Blue Skies: The Astonishing Transformation of the Domestic Gas Market” by the IFRI Centre for Energy & Climate, authored by Sylvie Cornot-Gandolphe. To cope with a doubling of gas demand by 2030, market reforms are liberalising the downstream gas market. Nobody wants a repeat of the winter shortages of 2017-18. And air … [Read more...]

TurkStream disruption: Turkey, Greece can become new gas hubs

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For over 30 years the Trans-Balkan pipeline has been used to pump Russian gas to southeast Europe. But Russia’s construction of the new TurkStream pipelines can open the door for the Trans-Balkan to be re-purposed, explains Aura Sabadus writing for the Atlantic Council. Going forward, LNG can be imported into Turkey and Greece and pumped back up the same pipes to serve the region, reducing dependence on Russian gas. However, such a plan would … [Read more...]