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2 months ago
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Est. 3min
11-07-2024 (updated: 11-07-2024 )
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News Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
French Minister for Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire speaks during a lecture titled 'Partnership between Morocco and France in the field of energy' at Mohammed VI University in Rabat, Morocco, 25 April 2024. [EPA-EFE/JALAL MORCHIDI]
France submitted its final national energy-climate plan (NECP) to the European Commission on Wednesday (July 10), ten days after the legal deadline, the plan includes a 2030 target for renewable energy, which the French government had previously resisted.
Each EU country is required by law to submit a plan that sets out how it will meet EU decarbonisation targets by 2030.
In recent months, attention has focused on France’s refusal to specify a target for the ‘share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption by 2030’, as required by the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) adopted in March 2023.
In its draft NECP, France preferred to provide a ‘low-carbon’ target of 58%, which combines both renewable and nuclear power into a single target. The European Commission did not accept this approach.
However the country’s final NECP gives pride of place to renewables, with a ‘final energy consumption’ target of 1,381 terawatt hours (TWh) and a ‘renewable energy consumption’ target of 570 TWh.
Two points stand out in the plan.
Firstly, France has now set itself a power production (TWh) target. Previously the country limited itself to talking about installed capacity (gigawatts, GW) targets.
Secondly, the plan’s renewable target may still not be enough for the Commission.
While the document does not explicitly state the planned share of renewables in 2030, a simple calculation shows that the renewable share would be 41.3% of final energy consumption. According to the Commission, France share of renewables should be at least 44%.
Some in Paris believe that that this may be sufficient for the Commission.
“It’s not enough, but it’s in the EU Commission’s interest for France to make progress,” the French ecologist member of parliament Julie Laernoes, who worked on an energy-climate programming bill (LPEC), that will be used to enshrine the targets in French law, told Euractiv.
The abandonment of the plan’s ‘low-carbon’ objective raises questions about France’s push for more support at an EU-level for nuclear energy – in particular its wish for a ‘low-carbon’ target in any new EU-wide targets for 2040.
The government has yet to comment.
[Edited by Donagh Cagney/Rajnish Singh]
Read more with Euractiv
China accelerates green steel shift as EU levies loom, researchers say
SINGAPORE, July 11 (Reuters) - China approved no new coal-based steel projects in the first half of 2024, researchers said on Thursday, accelerating its shift towards green production as it prepares for the impact of a new carbon levy on exports to Europe.
Local governments approved 7.1 million metric tons of new steelmaking capacity from January to June, but all of it was for cleaner scrap-based electric arc furnace (EAF) projects, rather than coal-intensive blast furnaces, said the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
China's efforts to cut production and recycle more scrap via EAF could reduce CO2 emissions from the steel industry by 200 million tonnes by 2026, equal to the entire emissions of the EU steel sector, CREA said.
China's steel industry, by far the world's biggest, is under growing pressure to decarbonise. It is expected to join China's own emissions trading scheme this year, and exports to Europe will be subject to the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) starting from next year, which could make them 11% more expensive by 2030.
"Chinese steelmakers targeting the EU market will need to take action to reduce the carbon intensity of their products in order to maintain competitiveness," said Xinyi Shen, the report's co-author.
Europe introduced CBAM in order to tackle the problem of "carbon leakage", which allows businesses to avoid carbon costs by sourcing products from countries with weaker climate compliance. Starting from 2026, importers of steel, fertiliser, cement and chemicals will pay levies based on the carbon footprint of the products they buy.
Researchers at China's Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress (iGDP) said last week that China's steel industry could face up to 5.9 billion yuan ($811.09 million) in total CBAM levies by 2030, depending on how much it cuts emissions.
Traditional blast furnace steel could face levies of around 250 yuan per ton by 2030, but scrap-based EAF would not yet face any additional charge, it said. ($1 = 7.2742 yuan) (Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
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