IGPN - International Green Purchasing Network

April 17, 2013

Clean energy progress too slow to limit global warming

The development of low-carbon energy is progressing too slowly to limit global warming, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said. With power generation still dominated by coal and governments failing to increase investment in clean energy, top climate scientists have said that the target of keeping the global temperature rise to less than 2C this century is slipping out of reach.

“The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled,” said Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA’s executive director, at the launch of the agency’s report on clean energy progress.

Global clean energy investment in the first quarter fell to its lowest level in four years, driven by cuts in tax incentives at a time of austerity, according to a separate report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The IEA said that coal-fired generation grew by 45% between 2000 and 2010, far outpacing the 25% growth in non-fossil fuel generation over the same period.

With the world still reliant on fossil fuels, the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is critical, but there are no commercial plants in operation. The IEA has envisaged that CCS, which buries and traps CO2 underground, should play a major role in cutting global emissions and had forecast 63% of coal power plants should be equipped with the technology by 2050. However, there are only 13 large-scale demonstration projects in operation or being built, with the capacity to store about 65 million tonnes of CO2 a year. This represents only a quarter of the storage capacity needed by 2020.

Government policies and the EU’s emissions trading scheme need to be strengthened to enable more energy efficiency and clean technology uptake, the IEA said.”Unless we get (carbon emissions) prices and policies right, a cost-effective clean-energy transition just will not happen,” the report said.

Read more at The Guardian.

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