Also by EU-China Energy Cooperation
Platform Project
2020
EU China Energy Magazine Spring Double Issue
EU-China Energy Magazine Summer Issue
中欧能源杂志夏季刊
EU-China Energy Magazine Autumn Issue
中欧能源杂志秋季刊
EU-China Energy Magazine 2020 Christmas Double Issue
中欧能源杂志2020圣诞节双期刊
2021
EU-China Energy Magazine 2021 Spring Double Issue
中欧能源杂志2021春季双期刊
EU-China Energy Magazine 2021 Summer Issue
中欧能源杂志2021夏季刊
EU China Energy Magazine 2021 Autumn Issue
中欧能源杂志2021秋季刊
EU China Energy Magazine 2021 Christmas Double Issue
中欧能源杂志2021圣诞节双刊
2022
EU China Energy Magazine 2022 February Issue
Joint Statement Report Series
Electricity Markets and Systems in the EU and China: Towards Better
Integration of Clean Energy Sources
中欧能源系统整合间歇性可再生能源 - 政策考量
Supporting the Construction of Renewable Generation in EU and China:
Policy Considerations
Table of Contents
Letter from the Team Leader
1. Reflections on Energy Market Design
2. How will China control its methane emissions?
3. Open-source data joins the battle against climate change
4. How China is powering the Winter Olympics 2022 in Beijing?
5. District Heating: policies for cutting emissions need work says IEA
6. Hydrogen: the buzz word for the 2020s
7. News in Brief
8. Reports Recommendation
9. Statistics
Letter from the Team Leader
Dear All,
Welcome to the first issue of EU China Energy Magazine in 2022, the year
of the tiger. The tiger symbolises resilience and strength – resources we
need in abundance as the world rebounds from the Covid pandemic.
We have several exciting articles in this issue. The future of the hydrogen
economy is imagined with an invited article by Erik Rakhou, author of a
newly published book ‘Touching Hydrogen Future’. We also look at the
benefits of open-source information, putting the spotlight on some of the
EU Horizon 2020-funded research projects featuring open-source software
models and tools that can assess the benefits, costs and trade-offs associated
with the transition to climate neutrality. Not forgetting an analysis of the
energy story behind the Beijing Winter Olympics 2022.
Our round up of energy news in the EU and China includes key stories that
have hit the headlines over the past weeks, picked out by our ECECP editor,
Daisy Chi.
We hope you will enjoy reading it.
Flora Kan
Team Leader
ECECP
1. Reflections on Energy Market Design
Energy markets are designed to achieve certain societal goals. When they
don't achieve them, questions are naturally raised as to whether the market
design should be changed. Recent high and sustained gas prices and
associated very high prices for electricity have focused attention on the
nature of gas and electricity markets in Europe and whether they are
working in society's interest.
What do we mean by market design?
When talking about energy markets we need to be careful to clarify what
we are talking about. Are we talking about wholesale or retail markets? Gas
or electricity? Or something else?
Also how would we judge if a market design is not working and needs to be
changed? It would need to both be working in a way that could not have
been predicted, and be capable of being changed into something that would
work better.
High energy prices are not necessarily a failure of market design if energy is
genuinely scarce. So far Europe's electricity and gas markets have delivered
energy security. Gas and electricity supply have not had to be curtailed in
Europe.
Nor are high prices necessarily just a function of market design itself, they
could be the result of a failure of market participants to correctly predict
high prices and adequately invest and/or contract against them. Gas prices
were very low in April 2021 and there seems to have been a general failure
to foresee significant increases in the demand for gas coming.
What have we (re-) learned about market design?
While markets may work in the long run (via high prices leading to
investment and lower prices in the future), consumers live in the short run
and may not be able or willing to wait for the long-run effects to come
through, demanding regulatory action to bring forward lower prices.
However, we have learned several new things as a result of the prolonged
high prices (at time of writing, we are now in our fifth month of very high
prices).
First, Europe is very reliant on imported natural gas and exposed to both the
behaviour of Russia and prices in the global liquefied natural gas (LNG)
market. Natural gas prices continue to drive electricity prices in Europe in
spite of the progress made with the roll out of renewables. As we move to
net zero, sudden upswings in the demand for natural gas will become more,
not less marked, even if average annual demand for gas declines.
Second, aggregate wind output can be low for a prolonged period and this
now has a significant effect on the demand for natural gas for power
generation. This necessitates a change to the contractual arrangements for
natural gas to ones which are much more flexible (for example wind speed
indexed gas contracts).
Third, retail business models have to be regulated more closely. We learnt
in the financial crisis that anyone with a computer can make money in good
times by buying short and selling long and undercutting more responsible
players who match their buy contract lengths with their sell contract
lengths. When the good times end it is society and/or more responsible
buyers and sellers who have to make good on the losses that result from
such irresponsible trading. National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs) have to
regulate this more closely for households and for small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs), who cannot be expected to pay attention to the
financial soundness of energy retailer business models.
Fourth, we have been reminded once again how unusual electricity market
design is. In spite of the fact that the underlying investments in generation
and network assets are long term and substantially drive the true economic
cost, wholesale electricity prices are determined on the price of the marginal
unit, which can be much higher than the average unit for prolonged periods.
Even though consumers might be willing (and almost certainly are willing)
to commit to paying prices which lock in longer run average costs, they are
not able to commit to doing so under the current retail market design. While
fossil fuel costs were a substantial part of long run total costs this might
have been acceptable, but as fossil fuel costs decline as a share of average
total costs, this payment model will seem increasingly bizarre to non-
electricity intensive customers.
Fifth, general tightness of supply and demand creates opportunities for
strategic residual monopoly behaviour as the market power of individual
players behind constraints is increased. This could be occurring in local
electricity congestion markets and in the European gas market as a whole.
This is something that requires real time market monitoring and rapid
intervention by NRAs and competition authorities. Political support for any
market in a democracy is premised on appropriate regulatory oversight of
anti-competitive behaviour.
Sixth, residential and small business price caps have been very
controversial in the current crisis. The inability of prices to naturally adjust
to higher wholesale gas and power prices has worsened the position of
energy retailers. However, it has, in some cases, postponed large price rises.
Clearly the way price caps are calculated has to reflect true underlying costs
and should be robust to any change in cost during the price cap period.
Regulators need to review the length and flexibility of price caps, and what
price caps must imply for the contractual position of retailers. A six-month
price cap based on forward wholesale prices could be ok if the retailer has
also locked in wholesale costs for six months. The failure to let retail prices
naturally rise has led to much higher demand than would have been the case
if wholesale costs had been passed through more rapidly to final consumers,
though it has no doubt protected poor and vulnerable customers.
Finally, there has been a resounding silence in the current crisis on the issue
of demand-side flexibility. This crisis has been about the supply side. But
what about the demand side? A big reduction in energy demand would have
helped mitigate the price rises and reduced the financial burden of the crisis.
So does market design need to be changed? And if
so how and when?
We have the market design in Europe we see today because it does actually
minimise the use of expensive fossil fuels. Efficiency in fossil fuel use was
the whole idea behind creating wide area electricity and gas markets across
Europe. Prolonged periods of high fossil fuel prices will surely prompt
reduced fossil fuel use and investment in low-carbon alternatives, just as it
did following the first and second oil shocks. Any gaming by fossil fuel
producers in the current crisis is surely counterproductive in the long run.
Wide area electricity and gas markets in Europe also reduce the significance
of the price impacts for individual jurisdictions that would be the worst
affected by the shortage of gas. For instance, if Norway were not
interconnected with the rest of Europe via electricity interconnectors,
electricity prices would be even higher in the rest of Europe. Sharing the
adjustment to underlying scarcity across Europe mitigates the worst local
price rises and improves security of supply under stress conditions.
More renewables will not necessarily solve the ongoing issues with the
current market design for the electricity market in Europe. The crisis has
revealed that low renewables output might incentivise building more
renewables but won't guarantee them being available more often. What will
be increasingly difficult to explain to consumers as renewable capacities
increase is why the energy prices are still so linked to fossil fuel prices.
Energy market design cannot be changed quickly and should not be
changed in response to a short run problem. The single markets in
electricity and gas took almost two decades to develop and remain a work
in progress. They have kept electricity and gas flowing in Europe and
increasingly protect peripheral EU nations from the increased energy
insecurity that they might otherwise experience.
However net zero seems set to make Europe increasingly reliant on the
availability of European wind. What we need is an energy market design
which can handle that wind-induced volatility. While we can hope for a
global market permanently awash with cheap green hydrogen, that remains
a distant dream. Thus short run price signals remain necessary and the
contractual position that energy consumers are exposed to must be carefully
considered. As the importance of capital costs rise in the energy system and
fossil fuel price exposure reduces, how consumers pay for energy should
change to reflect the capacity they create the need for.
There would therefore seem to be an increased role for longer term
contracting within the European energy system where consumers are able to
lock in a significant part of their energy costs at fixed prices. Contracts for
Differences (CFDs) written by the government can help do this for low
carbon generation, as can regulatory asset based funded investments in
generation and network assets.
Better ways to induce demand-side flexibility, other than by sharp rises in
prices, need to be investigated. More controlled shifting of device demand
across the day could increase flexibility without the use of indiscriminate
price based rationing. Deeper demand response can be complemented by
increasing the availability of low carbon base load power (for example from
nuclear, biomass, or hydrogen), which could be of increased value if intra-
day demand side flexibility could be improved.
As we move to net zero, market design will need to evolve. What most
energy customers will care about is not the design of individual wholesale
markets but the retail market for energy. However, the nature of the retail
market and its regulation will have implications for the design of wholesale
markets.
By Michael Pollitt
CERRE Academic Co-Director
University of Cambridge
Republished with permission from CERRE.
2. How will China control its methane
emissions?
The US-China joint declaration has given political impetus to controlling
methane by 2030. The focus will be on monitoring and calculating
emissions, and on policy measures.
An open pit coal mine in Ejin Horo Banner, Ordos city, Inner Mongolia, China (Image: Wang Zheng /
Alamy)
A declaration made by China and the US at the COP26 climate summit has
pushed methane into the limelight. Both countries have acknowledged the
significant impact of emissions of the gas on rising global temperatures.
The US–China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in
the 2020s, published last November, commits both countries to working
together to bolster monitoring, management and research of methane
emissions over the next ten years. China said it will produce a
comprehensive and forceful national plan to control and reduce emissions,
while the US had already announced its own emission-cutting action plan.
The latest official figures available show China released 55.3 million tonnes
of methane in 2014. When converted to CO2 equivalent, that is 10.4% of the
country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, second only to CO2 itself
(81.6%). The gas has a shorter ‘lifespan’ in the atmosphere – about 12
years, compared to over 100 years for CO2. But methane’s warming
potential (the ability to trap heat in the atmosphere) is 80 times that of CO2
over 20 years. Controls will therefore help to reduce near-term warming.
Last May, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and UNEP (the United
Nations Environment Programme) released a Global Methane Assessment,
finding effective measures could cut anthropogenic methane emissions by
45% in the next 10 years. That would reduce the level of warming reached
in 2045 by almost 0.3C. It might not sound like much, but global average
temperature has already risen 1.3C since the Industrial Revolution.
Avoiding 0.3C of warming could therefore see the world stay within the
Paris Agreement’s preferred warming limit of 1.5C.
In the past, far less attention has been paid to methane than to carbon
dioxide. But methane controls will be a powerful tool for limiting warming.
According to the US–China Joint Glasgow Declaration, China is to take a
range of actions to cut methane emissions, both by building a system for
monitoring, measuring, reporting and verifying emissions, and by
developing policies, technologies and standards.
The life and times of methane
Methane featured surprisingly heavily in the joint declaration.
In the run-up to COP26, the US and EU issued a Global Methane Pledge,
with another 108 countries signing up during COP26, committing to reduce
anthropogenic methane emissions by 30% by 2030 on a 2020 baseline.
China did not join.
Methane, however, accounted for a sixth of the length of the joint
declaration with the US, concluded in the latter half of the COP26 talks.
This demonstrates China’s determination to control methane emissions. The
schedule set out in the declaration is clear: by this year’s COP27 the two
parties will ‘develop additional measures to enhance methane emission
control, at both the national and sub-national levels’. And China, in addition
to its newly submitted NDC, ‘intends to develop a comprehensive and
ambitious National Action Plan on methane, aiming to achieve a significant
effect on methane emissions control and reductions in the 2020s.’
China’s circumstances drove the decision to not sign up to the Global
Methane Pledge but to commit to action on methane in the joint declaration,
experts told China Dialogue. Teng Fei, deputy director of the Institute of
Energy, Environment and Economy at Tsinghua University, points out that
methane emissions in the US and EU are concentrated in the oil and gas
sector, whereas China’s come mainly from coal mining. Tackling methane
emissions from coal mines is harder and more costly, and the potential for
reductions is less.
‘Given the differences in the make-up of methane emissions and ease of
reduction, the targets proposed by the EU and the US are easier for them to
achieve than for China. I think that’s the reason China didn’t sign up to the
Global Methane Pledge.’ Teng Fei told China Dialogue.
‘But China is already aware of the potential of reducing methane emissions,
and its importance to mitigating climate change,’ he added. ‘Now is the
time to make realistic commitments, setting targets appropriate for China.
That approach was the ‘greatest common factor’ that the two countries
found in their joint declaration.’
Meanwhile, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at
a press conference that developing nations commonly lack the basic data,
monitoring technology and effective measures needed for controls of non-
CO2 greenhouse gases, and that needs to be remembered when setting
ambitious targets.
Given China’s stance on controls of non-CO2 greenhouse gases in recent
years, the prominence of methane in the US–China Joint Glasgow
Declaration could have been predicted.
In 2016, ‘Controlling non-CO2 greenhouse gases’ was included in the the
13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020) outline. Then, last March, the 14th Five
Year Plan (2021-2015) outline went further, saying China would ‘strengthen
controls on other greenhouse gases such as methane, hydrofluorocarbons
and carbon tetrafluoride’.
But how will that be done? At a seminar on methane held in March 2021,
Li Gao, head of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s Department of
Climate Change, explained that the 14th Five Year Plan period will see
China produce action plans for controlling methane, with new policy,
technology and standards introduced in sectors including oil and gas, coal
and waste. Market mechanisms will also be used to encourage emissions
cuts.
More accurate data needed
A lot of work is still needed on the basics. The priority areas will be
monitoring, calculating, reporting and verifying methane emissions in key
sectors, such as energy, agriculture and waste.
Globally, methane data is obtained more by calculation than by actual
measurement. Sample monitoring is carried out at emission sources, with
the data obtained used to calculate average ‘emission factors’, and then
national methane emissions. This is known as bottom-up calculation. Top-
down calculations, on the other hand, use satellites, airplanes, drones and
vehicles to monitor methane at the country, regional or facility level.
But research shows that neither method is adequate, and there is room to
improve the quality and coverage of data.
Between 90% and 95% of China’s methane emissions in the energy sector
come from coal mines. For the 2014 National Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Inventory, the most recent to be made public, China used default emission
factors provided by the IPCC in 1996 to calculate methane emissions from
open-air coal mines. To calculate emissions from abandoned mine shafts,
China used the IPCC’s simplest methodology and simplified assumptions.
But Teng Fei says these factors and methodologies may not be suitable in
China – and any inaccuracies will have a big impact on the overall data.
The US may have the same problem. Research between 2012 and 2018,
headed up by the Environmental Defense Fund, a US environmental
organisation, measured 13 million tonnes of methane emissions throughout
the oil and gas industrial chain – 60% higher than the figure calculated by
the Environmental Protection Agency using emissions factors. Calculation
methods need to be improved globally, with more on-site methane
monitoring to make inventories more accurate and support localisation of
emission factors.
Teng Fei highlighted abandoned mine shafts: ‘China has been shutting
down small mines, and the number of working shafts has plummeted. The
majority are no longer in use. But China doesn’t have a handle on the
associated geological and methane emissions data.’ He thinks there should
be more on-site monitoring and establishment of emission factors suited to
China.
There are also limits to ‘top-down’ monitoring. Thick clouds can interfere
with spectral imaging by satellites, reducing accuracy. And not all the
methane in the atmosphere is from human activity – there are other sources,
such as wetlands. ‘When processing data, researchers need to carefully
account for the background concentrations of methane in the atmosphere
and sources of interference,’ said a Chinese research paper published in
2021.
The research added that both methods have problems. China, along with the
rest of the world, needs to combine both approaches, merging the data to
obtain a better picture of what is actually happening.
The industrial emissions problem
At a late November press conference, the Ministry of Ecology and
Environment’s Department of Climate Change said China will also:
research controlling methane emissions; produce an action plan for the gas;
encourage trials of methane emission reductions; and increase international
cooperation.
Currently, China has few rules on emissions of methane. Those it does have
are focused on emissions from urban water-treatment plants. The biggest
emitters – coal mines, oil and gas facilities – aren’t subject to any binding
standards, although some firms are looking at the problem and carrying out
monitoring.
The lack of policy guidance or economic reward means companies aren’t
motivated to tackle those emissions.
According to a report in China Energy News last April, the coal industry
releases methane during extraction, processing, transportation and
consumption, and reducing those emissions will cost. ‘Companies are
unlikely to spend more, unless it’s due to safety concerns or to harness a
profitable source of coalbed methane,’ the reporter suggested.
There are policies in place encouraging the harvesting of methane gas
where its concentration is over 2% by volume, and in particular over 8%.
But 80% of emissions are from sources where methane is less than 1%.
That’s very hard to make commercial use of, so the gas is allowed to enter
the atmosphere. Han Jiaye, head of the Ministry of Emergency
Management’s Energy Safety Institute, said in an interview with China
Energy News that even demonstration projects for use of methane had been
paused because they were uneconomic. ‘Making use of methane where
possible [to incentivise the capture of it] is essential to cutting those
emissions.’
China’s methane action plan, announced in the US–China Joint Glasgow
Declaration and due by COP27, may help.
Teng Fei thinks China needs to decide whether to use sticks such as binding
emissions standards or carrots such as subsidies. ‘It costs companies to
recover methane. If there’s neither reward for doing that, or punishment for
failing to, policy targets will be hard to deliver.’ He says the government
should consider complementary financial measures when setting targets,
and strengthen coordination between these carrot and stick policies.
Some oil and gas firms are already acting. In June, China Gas signed up to
the UNEP-led Oil and Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP), becoming its first
Chinese member. The OGMP aims to help member firms understand and
manage their methane emissions and promote information and technology
sharing. Other members include 66 big energy firms from around the world,
not least Shell, BP and Total. And in May, seven Chinese energy firms,
including the China National Petroleum Corporation and Sinopec, formed
the China Oil and Gas Methane Alliance, with an aim of reducing methane
emissions intensity during natural gas production to below 0.25%. In
October, the Hong Kong and China Gas Company headed up ten Chinese
coal gas suppliers signing up to a methane initiative, indicating they too are
on board with cutting emissions.
As China begins to draw up its plans for methane emissions control for the
next decade, such moves by its industries are welcome signs of momentum
in acting on this potent greenhouse gas. But the intention to act must now
be met with effective implementation to ensure the chances of successful
mitigation by 2030 – and the broader warming goals of 2050 – remain
alive.
By Gao Baiyu
This article was originally published on China Dialogue under the Creative
Commons BY NC ND licence.
3. Open-source data joins the battle
against climate change
Global challenges require global solutions. Yet in a world where
competition has long been lauded as the route to riches, companies and
countries are too often averse to opening up their wealth of knowledge and
experience to others for the common good.
The common goal, of limiting global warming to well below 2˚C, requires a
level of cooperation that the world has never seen before. Is it right for
companies and nations to profit from their climate successes, and so hold
back the progress towards climate neutrality? Rather, they have an
obligation to share the progress they have made, so the collective
movement towards net zero can be accelerated.
The EU is committed to becoming climate-neutral by 2050 to fulfil its
commitment to the Paris Agreement. It recently published the results of 14
research projects that have developed models and tools that can assess the
benefits, costs and trade-offs associated with the transition to climate
neutrality. Many of them feature open-source software that has the potential
not only to benefit nations and companies who are planning their own
routes to climate neutrality, but can also be developed and improved in the
years ahead by subsequent research from around the globe. Funding for the
projects has come from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation funding
programme.
Open-source tools are software tools that are freely available without a
commercial licence. These tools are built to retain data, are low cost, and
facilitate monitoring and the gathering of data. In the private sector, there is
a noticeable change in companies' attitudes when it comes to applying an
open-source philosophy. For example, Elon Musk has made Tesla’s patents
open source, rendering the technology readily usable by anyone to spur
innovation in the development of electric vehicles. ECECP looks now at
some of the research topics that the EU has funded and whose results will
be available to climate scientists around the world.
Identifying regions at risk
The COACCH team – CO-designing the Assessment of Climate Change
Costs – set out to identify regions most at risk from climate change, and to
provide indicators for policy action. It has developed focused assessments
of the risks and costs of climate change in Europe.
What is unique about their approach is their ‘inverted approach’ to analysis.
The team started from local social and economic shocks, such as localised
production losses, price increases or job losses, and then worked their way
backwards, to assess the climatic conditions that led to these shocks. That
approach helped them to identify the root causes of local climate events,
such as flooding in homes and business premises.
The COACCH project includes an open-source web interface which will
allow anyone access to the project data, assumptions and results, so that
researchers can download and explore all of COACCH’s results. The hope
is that this publicly available data will help research communities to
improve their models and result in more effective mitigation and adaptation
policies.
If subsequent researchers do, as anticipated, tap into the data compiled, then
the project will become a building block in the global search for effective
models and ways to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Website: www.coacch.eu
How do individuals fit into the battle against
climate change?
‘Net zero’ is a phrase that is flung around with abandon by politicians and
journalists alike. But what will people’s lives and jobs look like in a world
with net zero carbon emissions? The EU-funded EUCalc project has built
an interactive pathways explorer to show how the Paris Agreement
objectives will affect citizens around the world.
The project offers policy makers, business owners, scientists and everyday
citizens access to interactive charts and information on the work under way
to achieve climate neutrality. They can see how actions taken in Europe
benefit the world as a whole, and they can compare scenarios where the rest
of the world does, or does not, follow suit.
The EUCalc team of 13 institutions, coordinated by the Potsdam institute
for Climate Impact Research in Germany, has designed the model and tools
so they can be accessible to as many people as possible. It looks not only at
the impact of technology, but also lifestyle changes. ‘We know that
technological progress alone is not sufficient to reach net zero in 2050, so
EUCalc systematically considers the role of lifestyle changes in supporting
the decarbonisation of Europe,’ explains project coordinator Juergen Kropp.
The idea is that an individual can see how their own efforts can contribute
to the global effort to reduce emissions. The tool looks at terms such as
distance travelled each year, type of transport, or amount of food wasted. It
aims to show that significant lifestyle changes, if widely adopted, could
result in emissions savings of 60% by 2050.
This powerful tool does an impressive job given the amount of data it is
able to process. To the average citizen, the wealth of information may be
overwhelming and to be honest, it is not in fact easy to see the effect of an
individual’s lifestyle changes, only the overall impact of general lifestyle
change on a sector. However, it is a welcome step towards involving the
general public in the climate discourse, which is all too often conducted at
many removes from the average citizen.
Website: tool.european-calculator.eu/intro
Open source modelling
Access to reliable and practical modelling systems that can asses the
feasibility, effectiveness, costs and impacts of different policy actions is
vital if companies and governments are to reach informed decisions about
the most appropriate pathways to climate neutrality.
The LOCOMOTION (Low-carbon society: an enhanced modelling tool for
the transition to sustainability) project, coordinated by the University of
Valladolid in Spain, is compiling an open-source software in Python which
will offer an improved model that draws on other models such as World6,
LEAP, GCAM and C-Roads, with an increased level of detail and greater
geographical coverage. It has created a new worldwide multiregional model
with seven global regions and the integration of the 27 EU Member States.
The project will end in 2023, but the project’s findings will be available to
scientists and modelling experts in future, with a second interface aimed at
non-scientists to provide a user-friendly decision support tool for policy
makers.
Website: locomotion-h2020.eu
Low Carbon Transition Pathways
The shift towards renewable and clean energy sources is set to be supported
by an EU-funded Open ENTRANCE project – an open-source platform for
assessing low-carbon transition pathways.
This four-year project, coordinated by Sintef Energi in Norway, has
developed four scenarios for low-carbon energy futures at a pan-European
and national level, covering subsequent 1.5˚C and 2.0˚C global temperature
increases.
It includes case studies on topics such as how energy flexibility in
households will impact investment needs at a European level and how
optimal use of energy among communities will impact the overall load
profile.
The information is to remain available in an open-source format for the next
10 years. This way, the platform can be reused and further developed by the
scientific community, and the datasets used in other carbon transition
research. The project is due to finish in 2023.
Website: openentrance.eu
Sustainable Energy Transitions Laboratory
Another modelling solution featured in the CORDIS Results Pack is the
SENTINEL project, which has taken a modular approach to energy
modelling. ‘Policy makers need to know the economic, social and
environmental implications of the difference choices that they face today,’
explains Anthony Patt, professor of Climate Policy at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology Zurich, which coordinates the project. ‘We focus on
answering these questions not with a single model that is so large and
complicated as to be a mysterious black box, but rather by pulling together
a set of small, transparent, open-source models and data that can precisely
meet their needs.’
The team aims to make these models available for download with clear
instructions on how to use them in combination.
Once again, the online platform will remain available after the end of the
project’s funding period and will remain as a hub for community users who
will help to improve the tool by sharing feedback and data. The aim is for
SENTINEL to develop as a widely used resource for decades to come.
Website: sentinel.energy
According to research published by Sky and the UK-based Behavioural
Insights Team (BIT) in November 2021, 70% of people across Europe are
willing to change their behaviour to address the climate crisis.
Yet without access to information about what changes are necessary, and
what impact they will have, that willingness may vanish into a sea of
apathy. The same applies to companies: there is a general acceptance of the
need to implement climate-friendly changes to current practice, but how are
start-ups and SMEs to find out about and choose between the technologies
on offer? How are they to learn what grants, incubators and policy support
exist to support them? And when technology is protected by patents, how
can that encourage widespread adoption of that technology?
Governments bear a heavy responsibility to reach out to individual
consumers, climate innovators and investors, and create policies that will
support action to reduce carbon emissions.
By funding these projects, many of which advocate and espouse open-
source data, the EU shows that it is happy to contribute to the development
of a global understanding of the challenges ahead, and aware of the need to
cooperate and share information in order to avert a climate disaster.
The projects highlighted here are part of the CORDIS Results Pack, a suite
of 14 research projects funded by the EU through its Horizon 2020
programme, which have developed a suite of models and tools that are able
to assess the benefits, costs, risks, trade-offs and synergies with other policy
objectives of strategies and investments associated with the transition to
climate neutrality. For more information about these and the other projects
in this Results Pack, please follow this link.
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/418144-climate-neutrality-pathways-for-
achieving-european-green-deal-objectives
By Helen Farrell
ECECP English Editor
4. How China is powering the Winter
Olympics 2022 in Beijing?
China is branding the Winter Olympics 2022 in Beijing as the first ‘green’
Olympic games, including the first games to run on 100% renewable
electricity.
In a new analysis for Carbon Brief, we show that the desire of China’s
leadership to showcase clean energy development and make it a part of the
country's international image, while important in itself, is backed by real
developments on the ground.
Zhangjiakou, the mountain city in China's Hebei province that is hosting the
skiing events of the games, has renewable energy capacity exceeding that of
most countries in the world – and a pioneering ‘Zhangjiakou Green Electric
Grid’ built to deliver power from the city to neighbouring Beijing.
Moreover, the pilot renewable power grid is a scale model of a much larger
plan that the Chinese government is rolling out nationwide, as it aims to
peak carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060.
Olympic ‘green’ power supply
From the start of the preparations, in mid-2019, to the end of the games, the
venues will require about 400 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity,
according to the organisers. This is equal to the annual electricity
consumption of approximately 180,000 Chinese households.
By the end of 2021, the installed capacity of wind and solar power in China
was more than 600 gigawatts (GW), with both technologies crossing the
300GW mark last year. Including hydro power, a total of 2,480 terawatt
hours (TWh) of renewable electricity was generated in 2021 in China.
China’s plentiful renewable energy capacity can, therefore, easily cover the
Olympics electricity use.