Wind and carbon capture EC funding

Wind & Carbon Capture Funding

Last week the European Commission (EC) conveniently announced its renewable energy funding allocation at the same time the most important UN summit on climate change was kicking off in Copenhagen.

The big winners are the offshore wind and carbon capture sectors, two major industries that world leaders hope will help reach emissions targets.

The EC selected 15 projects at the cutting edge of energy technologies to receive 1.5 billion euros in EU funding, with 40 percent of the money going to wind farms and carbon capture and storage projects. The cash for the nine wind projects, mostly clustered in the North Sea with one in the western Baltic, and the nine carbon capture and storage (CCS) activities spread across Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK, is part of the EU's 4 billion euro economic recovery programme, as reported by BusinessWeek.

Publicly supported green jobs

Climate change is undoubtedly a major reason for the investment, but the publicly supported green jobs created by the cash injections are also aimed at dragging Europe out of recession.

The other area on which the funding is focused is electricity interconnections to help improve energy supply to vulnerable member states and to link so-called "energy islands" to the rest of the EU energy market.

These more traditional gas and electricity projects will receive 2.4 billion euros, around 60 percent of the pot.

The highly contraversial CCS technology will get around a billion euros while offshore wind can expect to receive about 565 million euros. This will not be a popular choice among environmentalists who would rather see wind power receive more money than CCS, which they argue only hides the problem as it posits the continued use of fossil fuels and buries the carbon rather than getting rid of it completely.

But CCS can be a very useful transition technology allowing us to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere while we continue to develop zero-emitting, clean sources.

Reverse the global warming process

The more conservative groups also argue CCS is the only technology that can allow countries to shift not merely to a "carbon neutral" position, but even a "carbon negative" one, where CO2 begins to get sucked out of the atmosphere. This could eventually begin to reverse the global warming process.

Commercial viabiltiy is the main stumbling block for the technology as it remains very expensive.

BusinessWeek says that each of the CCS projects, most of which aim only to demonstrate the technology, will receive 180 million euros, apart from an Enel-backed scheme in Porto-Tolle, Italy, which will actually install CCS technology on a 660MW coal power plant and sequester the carbon in an offshore saline aquifer nearby.

For scale, every significant CCS projects are expected to set goverments back between 0.5 and 1.1 billion euros - per project. But the lack of alternatives make CCS a necessity.

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