Brussels gets real with emissions targets

By taking an EU-wide approach and setting achievable targets, the European Commission is hoping energy buyers will be able to achieve environmental targets without compromising competitiveness

This January, the EU Commission released its targets for energy use, looking forward to 2030. After seven years of dawdling and watching Europe fall further and further behind global counterparts on the competitive stage, decision makers admirably admitted the failings of government green energy subsidies.

For many, these subsidies, which were bound up with over-ambitious targets for emissions and renewables in the energy mix, have been a negative influence on the EU’s current position in the global marketplace.

Energy buyers will welcome the scrapping of the previous ’hard and fast approach’. While targets remain ambitious – 40% and 27% for carbon emissions reduction and use of renewables in the mix respectively – the key difference lies in the EU-wide fulfilment of these objectives, rather than nationally-bound goals.

Finally, it seems, conscious of how embarrassingly far Europe now lags behind competitors in the US, China and Russia (among others) the floor has been opened up to shale exploration, with no official barriers standing in the way of some of Europe’s less-developed economies looking to reduce their reliance on coal and other dirty energy.

The benefits (and, admittedly, the drawbacks) of shale gas exploration are now well-known – consider the energy price gap between Europe and the US; in 2011, buyers of energy in the former would have been handed bills as much as four-times higher than their counterparts across the pond; staggering price hikes have placed Europe at a distinct disadvantage for some time now, making somewhat of a mockery of legitimate exercises such as usage profiling and country-level contract management.

Giving regional procurement practitioners more freedom to explore and decide how they will contribute to the new energy and climate targets – as well as affording considerably more competitive momentum to European industry more generally – will likely prove the biggest win, opening up the floor to forward-thinking functions seeking to add value to the wider business through innovative sourcing programmes, while affording an amount of slack to the industries blighted by stagnation (many of which energy-intensive) via a renewed focus on what can be considered realistic goals.

from Procurement Leaders Blog http://ift.tt/1b723po

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