Page 30 - bne Magazine August 2022

30 I Companies & Markets bne August 2022
bne:Green
Has green energy had its day?
Richard Lockhart in Edinburgh
Global efforts to combat climate change are being endan- gered by the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the current energy crisis.
Unseasonal heatwaves, melting ice in the Arctic Sea and flooding across the world are symptoms of the climate crisis that requires urgent and wholehearted action by governments, corporations and the international community.
The actions demanded by the COP26 conference and a range of international bodies led by the UN to achieve green targets are being side-tracked as governments race to secure energy supplies.
The EU raised its Green Deal and Fit for 55 targets from 40% to 45% renewables by 2030 in response to the war in Ukraine by launching its REPowerEU programme. Brussels chose to focus on energy savings, diversification of energy supplies and the accelerated roll-out of renewable energy in a bid to replace fossil fuel imports from Russia.
But governments are also still buying Russian fossil fuels as it will take months for the EU’s gas and oil sanctions to kick in.
The world risks taking its eye off the ball in the race for energy and putting in danger any chance that the energy transition has of staying on track.
Renewable energy’s ability to provide the world with the power it needs is being severely tested by a combination of killer factors that threaten to annihilate the energy transition just as climate change is beginning to threaten life as we know it on Earth.
Fossil fuels
Two recent reports from the Centre for Clean Air and Energy warned that Europe is still importing fossil fuels, spending €57bn on Russia fossil fuels in the first 100 days of the
war, even as governments make policy announcements
to accelerate transitions away from oil and gas towards renewables.
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Speaking to bne Intellinews, Lauri Myllyvirta, lead researcher at CREA and a writer of the Shocked into Action report, warned Europe had been too slow to react to the war.
“The frustrating thing from the perspective of Ukraine and the duty we have to support Ukraine’s struggle is so much of this energy policymaking and trade sanctions are playing out over the course of several months in the case of the oil and coal ban, and over several years in the case of replacing fossil gas with clean energy.”
On the other hand, he stressed that deeper policy developments were needed to drive forward to energy transition and to meet the EU’s targets.
“The bottlenecks for meeting the target that the EU has, in other words the thing that we need to be on the lookout for, include permitting and supply chain issues, which are quite separate from the Ukraine war; these are the key issues in order for the clean energy targets to become attainable.”
The IEA noted in its World Energy Investment Report that even though it estimates an 8% rise in global energy investment
Russia's estimates revenue from fossil fuel exports