Just as the world prepares to negotiate phase out of all fossil fuels at COP28, the EU bloc, a prominent Global North member, is split on the issue
Photo: iStock The 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that is to commence from November 30, 2023 in UAE will be crucial for climate action. Fast-tracking energy transition and slashing emissions before 2030 will be the focus of the summit.
The European Union bloc, which claims to be among the most ambitious when it comes to climate change negotiations, are split on the agenda on phasing out all fossil fuels.
Only 10 countries in the group are demanding a total phase out of fossil fuels, according to a recent article in news agency Reuters. These include Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia.
On the other hand, countries like Malta, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary and Czech Republic lean towards phasing out ‘unabated’ fossil fuels and would continue fossil fuel burning in hard-to-abate sectors. This means burning of fossil fuels will be allowed if emission capturing technologies are in place.
Another article by Reuters also highlighted that the bloc is not agreeing over how soon they should phase out fossil fuel subsidies. Some countries proposed a 2025 deadline but others opposed and ultimately approved a “vague deal with no end date”.
There’s a clear lack of consensus among the countries in the bloc. EU’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told Argus Media Group in a recent article that they’d like the phase out to be “sooner rather than later”, giving no specific deadline. He also emphasised the need for coalition building with the EU bloc.
The recently approved EU negotiation mandate for COP28 underlined EU’s updated Nationally Determined Contributions, which will enable the bloc to reduce emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030 and achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
The European Council further stated that other parties in COP28, particularly major economies, should have revisited their NDCs and long-term strategies to include their Net Zero targets. But the bloc failed to provide a deadline for itself when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels.
The story further gets complicated when countries like Germany and France, which are in favour of all fossil fuel phase out, decided to go a step ahead and restart their old coal-fired power plants to meet their energy demands this year. Given these limitations in just setting out the first steps of a clear roadmap, one wonders how the bloc would achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
Germany had imported 44.4 million tonnes of hard coal in 2022, which was 8 per cent more than its imports in 2021. According to Reuters, coal accounted for more than 30 per cent of the country’s total electricity generation in 2022.
Even though it is among the EU countries that is for the phasing out of all fossil fuels, the country is all set to restart its coal-fired power plants for this winter because of scarce natural gas and to avoid shortages.
It has extended the life of two lignite plants of 600 megawatts each. The country also reactivated reserve capacity of 8 gigawatts of coal plants accounting for gas shortages.
The installed capacity from hard coal and lignite was steadily declining every year, going from 43 GW in 2020 to 40 GW in 2021 and 38 GW in 2022. After an extension of deadlines and using reserve coal capacity, it remained stagnant at 38GW for 2023.
A recent Reuters article on the same suggested that gas bottlenecks have eased since last winters but coal-fired power is to resume.
Last year, the country restarted old coal-fired plants as a result of declining fossil exports from Russia resulting from the war. It could not be advocated as the most efficient decision as these were very old plants and already being dismantled. Plant operators had reportedly dismantled, sold and started to prepare towards transition to hydrogen fuel-based generation but due to this decision had to mobilise a lot of resources to make it work.
Germany’s coal power exit is set in 2038, with an option to forward it to 2035. The country also aims to achieve 80 per cent of power consumption from renewable sources by 2030 which currently stands at 47 per cent. This could ramp up their ambition to exit coal by 2035.
Even after a whole year since the crisis of war, the country is continuing to open more coal-based power plants.
Decisions like this make it unclear whether more decisions like these are awaited in the coming years, thus raising concerns about their coal exit plan of 2035.
The French authorities are extending deadlines for two coal-fired power plants this winter due to continued disruptions in nuclear energy production. These are large coal plants with a combined capacity of about 2GW.
The Cordemis facility with 650 MW generation was the only functioning coal plant in 2022, and in the same year the Saint Avold coal plant (1.26GW capacity) was reopened.
The French government passed a decree in August 2023, extending the life of these plants to the end of 2024, the initial deadline for which was 2022.
Both these plants are around 50 years old, which is much beyond the retirement age of efficient power plants.
This decision comes after France witnessed massive outages from nuclear generators last year, majorly due to corrosion issues.
During COP22 in 2016, France committed to phase out coal by 2023. Later in 2017, the government reaffirmed this and brought the exit forward to 2022.
In August, 2023, the energy transition minister Pannier-Runacher told a French news station that the government aims to completely phase-out coal power by 2030 at the latest.
A month later, the French President confirmed in an interview that the government is going to increase spending towards the green transition of the two plants to convert the last two coal-fired plants into biomass by 2027. This pushes the country’s coal exit to 2027.
After crossing the initial deadline of coal phase out in 2022, there seems to be a lack of clarity on France’s policy on coal phase out.
With continued nuclear energy disruptions and extension of closure deadlines of such old power plants, the signalling towards France’s plan to phase out coal within this decade seems to be getting bleak.
“It's reflected in (the negotiation mandate) that we need to accelerate the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels, to ensure fossil fuels are not with us by 2050," Teresa Ribera, acting Spanish minister for ecological transition, told Argus Media Group after the release of EU Council’s negotiation mandate for COP. “In this pathway towards phase-out there's no room for new coal."
Even as a prominent minister from an EU member state said this, countries in the EU continue to increase their dependence on coal power.
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