The Polish Ministry of Energy presented today its draft national energy policy 2040, whose orientation obviously stands in the way of the Paris Agreement as well as EU’s energy targets by 2030. It also turns a blind eye on the ever decreasing costs of renewable technologies, wind power in particular.
Read more: Polish short-sighted 2040 energy plan must be fixed
The transport and industry committees of the European Parliament voted today on the future Connecting Europe Facility after 2020. While this EU fund should enable infrastructure that connects Europe’s citizens with clean energy and sustainable transport, MEPs turned a blind eye on the need to exclude fossil fuel subsidies from the fund.
Shifting financial flows is crucial to global efforts to combat climate change. The European Commission claims that its proposals for the post-2020 EU budget are in line with the Paris Agreement. However, support for fossil fuels remains in the pipeline of future budget negotiations, as revealed today in the ‘EU Toxic Funding Awards’.
Today, the Climate Vulnerable Forum - a forum of countries who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change - are holding the first Virtual Climate Summit of Heads of State and Government. Several European leaders are joining the 24-hour event, adding momentum for urgent climate action ahead of COP24.
The Polish electricity grid operator has just published the official preliminary results of the first capacity market auction in Poland to award contracts to power plants from 2021 onwards. Capacity mechanisms, which are supposedly intended to ensure supply in case extra power is needed, are often used as backdoor subsidies for the most uneconomic power plants, which are also the least efficient and most polluting. As such, they are a source of additional profit for the utilities on top of their regular revenues from the actual supply of electricity.