Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2.7.2 The Reply
The debate on harmonization has been mostly polarized, arguing either in favor or
against harmonization. However, the dichotomy
“
harmonisation
”
versus
“
national
support schemes
is outdated. It neglects the existence of more realistic alternatives
in the middle. These include, but are not limited to, increased cooperation and
collaboration between Member States regarding their support schemes.
Gephart et al. [
73
] provide the following de
”
nitions of these intermediate
alternatives:
'
simply means that policies become similar in different Member
States. Klessmann and Lovinfosse [
78
] and Gephart et al. [
73
] have shown that
there has been four converging trends between the support schemes in the EU:
(1) Use of combination of instruments instead of one size
Convergence
'
ts all (e.g., FITs for
small scale plants and auctions for offshore wind); (2) Diffusion of feed-in
premiums across Europe as compromise between revenue security for investors
and RES-E exposure to market signals. (3) Moratoriums and uncertainties on the
future of support schemes because of public de
cits (e.g., Spain, Portugal,
Latvia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic). (4) Joint support schemes (e.g., Sweden and
Norway). Coordination and Cooperation lead to convergence.
Coordination might refer to knowledge exchange between governments and
possible alignment of certain elements of a support scheme.
Cooperation either refers to governments loosely working together or it might
refer to the RES Directive (2009/28/EC) and its inherent possibilities to
establish statistical transfer of renewable energy, joint renewable energy projects
(among MSs or with third countries) or joint support schemes as speci
ed in
Articles 6, 7, 9, and 11 of the Directive.
The European Commission initiated the debate on harmonization with the pub-
lication of the 1996 Green Paper on Renewable Energy (COM(96) 567
nal) and it
has traditionally been an advocate for harmonization. However, facing opposition
from the majority of MSs and the European Parliament, the political debate has
moved from harmonisation toward coordination and cooperation between MSs [
76
].
The European Commission itself supported the existence of different instruments in
the different Member States in its 2008 Communication. This is currently the
approach followed in Europe according to the RES Directive (Directive 28/2009/
EC). The recent Communication from the Commission in June 2012 (COM(2012)
271) stresses the need for improved support schemes and calls for guidance on best
practices, convergence and cooperation rather than harmonization [
76
].
Those intermediate alternatives have shown to be more cost-effective than either
harmonization or isolated national instruments [
48
,
78
,
79
]. These authors show
that the support costs of reaching the EU 2020 target with strengthened national
policies (41 billion
€
/year) would be 25 % lower than with a uniform EU support
level. More recently, Resch et al. [
76
] show that strengthened national RES policies
complemented by moderate to strong cooperation and coordination appear suitable
to keep RES well on track for reaching moderate to strong deployment targets for
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