Climate pledges for 2.7°C warming / industry energy use up

UN Climate Change Secretariat

“Global response to climate change keeps door open to 2 degree C temperature limit”

A report assessing the 140 climate action plans submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ahead of the Paris summit shows that combined effort can help curb damaging greenhouse gases, the UN says in a press release. The combined impact of the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) “will lead to a fall in per capita emissions over the coming 15 years”, the report finds. Furthermore, emissions will fall by as much as 8 percent in 2025 and 9 percent in 2030, and are capable of limiting the forecast temperature to a rise of around 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Although this does not meet the 2-degree limit scientists recommend, it is lower than the 4-5 degree Celsius rise many had previously predicted, says UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres. Germany’s environment state secretary Jochen Flasbarth said that the long term goal had to be decarbonisation by the end of the century.

Separately, NGOs Germanwatch and Bread for the World jointly commented on the findings. They said that the direction was good but insisted that more effort was needed. “On the one hand, the Paris climate has achieved something significant: the self-established goals of around 150 countries are on the table. On the other hand, it is clear that these contributions are not enough to prevent dangerous climate change,” said Sönke Kreft, team leader of international climate policy at Germanwatch. Read more >

WWF Germany said that a mechanism which forces individual states to reduce emissions every five years would have to be decided in Paris. “It’s necessary that fossil energies like coal, oil and gas will be phased-out faster and in a more sustainable way than currently envisaged in Paris,” Regine Günther, WWF head of climate and energy policy, said. Read more>

Read the UNFCCC press release in English here.

Read the full UNFCCC report here.

Spiegel Online

“Climate regulations in residential buildings: The brick and roof-tile-making industry is misusing the refugee debate for lobbying purposes”

The head of the Bayerischer Ziegelindustrieverband, the Bavarian brick and roof-tiling association, sees the refugee crisis as an opportunity to postpone implementing expensive building efficiency standards, according to a letter seen by Spiegel Online. “We can’t pass up the opportunity that is now presenting itself!” wrote Manfred Zehe, the Bavarian association head, to colleagues at the Germany-wide association and other state-level associations, according to Spiegel. He was referring to a state building ministers’ conference in Dresden, where housing hundreds of thousands of refugees in the near-term has become a major topic, the paper reports. The state of Schleswig-Holstein had proposed postponing the planned efficiency measures until 2019 from 2016 in order to allay building costs. In the letter, Zehe says the measures should be postponed until 2021.

Read the article in German here.

dpa / Building ministers’ conference

“Standards have to be tested”

The buildings ministers of Germany’s 16 federal states have concluded their conference in Dresden, saying that 2016 energy efficiency rules will not be suspended because of the refugee crisis, dpa reports. A draft proposal had suggested that the new, strict energy efficiency decree (EnEV 2016) should be put on hold for three years while extra homes for up to 1 million refugees and their families have to be built. The state ministers will continue to press for changes to energy efficiency legislation in order to make building new homes more affordable, the conference press release said.

Read the building ministers’ press release in German here.

Read the dpa report in German here.

Read a statement of the Deutsche Umwelthilfe who welcomed that the 2016 efficiency rules were upheld, in German here.

DeStatis –The Federal Statistics Office

“Industrial energy usage rose slightly in 2014”

German industry used 0.1 percent more energy in 2014 than in 2013 - at 4,043 petajoule, the Federal Statistics Office DeStatis says. Usage for energy-only purposes, such as power and heating, fell by 0.5 percent, while non-energy usage - such as raw materials used in chemical products - rose by 2.8 percent. Energy-intensive manufacturers were the biggest users, with the chemicals industry comprising 31 percent of industrial consumption, followed by the metals industry at 23 percent, DeStatis said.

Read the press release in German here.

Federal Network Agency /Montel

Solar capacity addition down / Reduced support for onshore wind energy and biomass in 2016

New German solar installations boosted total photovoltaic (PV) capacity by 127 megawatts peak (MWp) in September, totalling 39,402 megawatts, according to the German Federal Network Agency.  The figure is a reduction from 266 megawatts of added capacity in August, according to energy market information service Montel. Germany had 1,454 megawatts of additional capacity, well below its target, in the last year to the end of September, Montel said.
The Federal Network Agency also reported that payments to onshore wind and biomass power producers in Germany will fall by 1.2 percent and 0.5 percent respectively, the Federal Network Agency says. Onshore wind development has exceeded its permitted addition corridor of 2,400 to 2,600 megawatt (MW) as 3,666 MW were added in the reference period, therefore payments are decreasing more. Biomass (71 MW addition) fell behind its development target of 100 MW, so the payment degression is smaller.

Read the press release in German here and the PV data here.

Read the Montel story in English here.

WirtschaftsWoche

“Expensive preference for buried cables”

Field tests by grid operator Amprion have shown what the consequences of the government’s decision to bury future high-voltage power cables in the ground will be. Building these connections will take several years longer than overland power lines, writes Christian Schlesiger in the WirtschaftsWoche. And it will make the grid expansion more expensive because building and operating underground cables is more costly and they have a reduced life-time compared to overland lines. This could endanger the affordability of the energy transition, the article says.

Read a CLEW dossier on the grid expansion here.