Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Governance . The European Commission proposes new system of governance
based on national energy plans proposed by the member states and coordinated
by the Commission.
The 2030 framework for climate and energy policies package is raising some con-
troversy among member states. The first observation is on clarity of objectives:
only two of them, reducing the GHG emissions by 40 % and expanding the share of
RES up to 27 % compared to 1990, are expressed in quantitative terms. The other
objectives are not yet associated with measurable commitments and therefore, at
this stage, appear more generic than the first two.
In addition, only the first target concerning GHG emission reduction is binding
both for the EU as a whole and for member states, while the second objective relat-
ing to the RES is binding only for the EU but not for member states.
Can a macro entity, which is the sum of n micro entities, hit a target if its constit-
uents are not subject to the same constraint? Many environmental problems share
the features that when many countries are involved in international agreements, it is
possible that some of them do not actually participate (Cremer and Gahvari 2002 ;
Kolstad 2000 ; Stavins 1995 ). Participation to environmental agreements is related
to the gains countries can get: climate change is a global problem and each country
believes to get only small benefits compared to its effort.
With the 2030 framework for climate and energy policies package, there might
be problems regarding cooperation to achieve RES' goal: when member states dif-
fer from each other with respect to costs and benefits of implementing RES, some
of them might find affordable to free ride.
Moreover, the characteristic of public good of environmental policy implies that
free riders may benefit from others' efforts without bearing any costs.
Most of the literature on free-riding states that if all countries are convinced to
cooperate, an efficient treaty would specify the joint abatement policy correspond-
ing to the internationally optimal objectives (actually, this is what happened previ-
ously with the binding targets per member state within the 2020 climate and energy
package. It follows a description in Sect. 1.2). For some countries, however, the
environmental policy may be so costly that it makes them worse off to cooperate,
compared with the noncooperative equilibrium, i.e. the business as usual (BAU)
scenario.
Another controversial aspect concerning the not-binding RES' goal at national
level of the 2030 framework for climate and energy policies package is related to
RES production decision. On the one hand, the lack of national constraints allows
to choose the best RES to be implemented throughout the EU taking into account
their productivity compared to the territory, that is geo-referencing at regional-level
RES' production. For instance, each EU member states is characterized by different
levels of solar radiation, wind intensity, and crop productivity for biomasses which
reflects in different productions' marginal costs.
On the other hand, multinational companies in the electricity market can lever-
age their oligopolistic position and locate RES production in a suboptimal way. It
is tricky to say whether or not liberalized electricity markets are likely to adopt the
Search WWH ::




Custom Search