Businessweek has discovered the dirty little secret behind he success of Germany’s renewable energy industry.
Germany’s renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country’s electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is €35 billion per year.
But there’s a catch: The climate hasn’t in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven’t prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.
Even more surprising, the European Union’s own climate change policies, touted as the most progressive in the world, are to blame. The EU-wide emissions trading system determines the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted by power companies and industries. And this amount doesn’t change – no matter how many wind turbines are erected.
This is a story that we all need to read and understand. The bottom line is did we really save anything? Did we really reduce carbon? Carbon cap-and-trade frameworks will have to be modified as green energy alternatives come online. The citizens of Germany must continue to demand both the development of alternative energies and the immediate reduction of CO2 emissions levels. Otherwise, renewable energy producers are simply making things easier for their carbon producing counterparts, who find the price of CO2 emissions certifications dropping to almost nothing.
What remains unsaid here is that EU’s carbon neutral system, while it won’t save the planet, is still ahead of the US who over the last decade has outsourced much our carbon emissions to China. Whose environmental problems are a whole other story.
What this article reveals is that while the technology to solve our problems is developing, our governments has to step up to the plate and constantly spur further progress through new standards.