Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sector is comes from. In practice this is far from the case. Table
2
shows the implicit
cost of abatement of CO
2
for different fuels for a selection of European countries.
As Table
2
shows this is far from the case. The implied abatement cost per ton of
CO
2
is very high for PV and relatively low for wind and hydro. There is thus
considerable scope of increasing the ef
ciency of the tax structure so that cost per
unit reduction in CO
2
or increase in energy ef
ciency is the same across different
sectors.
More limited information is available on obligation systems, one of the more
innovative policy instruments to promote energy ef
ciency. Despite the fact that
they are attracting a growing interest among different governments, probably due to
their social acceptability, they still have a short lifespan, which strongly limits the
empirical analysis. In the case of obligation or white certi
cates systems, their
recent introduction does not allow an ex post evaluation. Researchers have mainly
tended to develop summaries and reviews of the different initiatives carried out in
Europe, comparing the characteristics of each system. Mundaca and Neij [
55
]
gather information from different sources such as of
cial documents, or interviews
with experts or regulators, to carry out a multi-criteria evaluation of the experiences
in UK and Italy. The analysis indicates that both systems have achieved a high
degree of success because the programs were not very ambitious. One additional
problem faced by such analyses is the dif
culty to identify the energy savings
associated with business-as-usual.
However, given the interest the European Union has shown regarding the pos-
sibility to introduce an obligation system, there have been some simulation exer-
cises to estimate the effects of such initiative (e.g. [
27
,
56
]). The main results of
such simulations point to the existence of an important potential to reduce energy
consumption from residential and commercial sectors in the EU-15, but also inform
about the necessity to carefully analyze how those savings will be distributed
among Member States.
Table 2 Implicit abatement costs for different fuels in the electricity sector (
€
/Ton)
Hydro Wind
Biomass
Biogas
PV
Geo-
thermal
Waste
Czech
Republic
83.2
21.1
59.3
166.2
790.4
::
::
France
133.2
385.2
536.8
420.7
5381.0
::
::
Germany
67.4
77.6
228.6
::
733.8
294.5
::
Italy
149.9
142.1
224.8
::
759.5
153.8
::
Netherlands
224.9
185.4
171.0
::
890.2
::
111.3
Poland
::
::
::
::
::
::
::
Spain
124.8
129.2
219.8
::
1134.3
::
84.5
United
Kingdom
131.0
145.4
129.5
127.6
416.7
::
::
Source
BC3: CECILIA Project
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