Canadian RE Organization to Counter U.S. Kyoto Projections

 

December 8, 2005

"This is a strong reason for the COP11 summit in Montreal to look seriously at renewables as one of the true options for the post-2012 period," said Bill Eggertson, executive director of the Canadian Association for Renewable Energies (CARE). "Since the treaty was written 1997, we've called for more consideration of green power and green fuel, as well as considerably more support for green heat."

Eggertson will deliver a parallel session and a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) webcast Friday, December 9, 2005, on the potential for climate change mitigation from green heat technologies, which include earth energy (geothermal heat pumps), solar thermal collectors and advanced biomass.

"The world is slowly starting to understand and appreciate the environmental and economic benefits of green power for electricity and green fuel for transportation," Eggertson adds. "Now the focus must include green heat for low-grade thermal space conditioning applications."

The prediction is contained in the U.S. DOE's 'International Energy Outlook 2005,' released earlier this year by the Energy Information Administration. It explains that the projected penetration of renewables will be lower under Kyoto for a number of reasons, including a 12.5 percent global increase in consumption of electricity from non-carbon-emitting nuclear reactors and a 1.7 percent decline in total energy use by 2025 under the treaty. Generation from non-fossil fuels provides a larger share of total energy under Kyoto than in the reference case, but generation from green power is lower, and the report concludes that more use of carbon sequestration will limit the potential for renewables.