Soaring costs are driving many countries toward more of the fossil fuels they had sought to phase out, proving the aggressive shift toward green energy to be a luxury of peacetime.
The war in Ukraine caused a spike in oil and natural gas prices, which were already creeping up before Russia’s invasion. Western governments have responded by pledging to spend even more, and faster, on scaling up renewable energy sources, but at the same time, they have committed to building more gas infrastructure and have sought to increase power generation from coal to displace gas demand and keep the industry running in the short term.
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The dilemma has been especially acute for Europe, where governments have been charging a carbon price since 2005 and where there is a strong commitment to a “green transition.” The war has pitted its priorities of punishing Russia for the war, maintaining stable energy supplies, and aggressively phasing out coal directly against each other.
With the threat of gas shortages looming larger now that Russia has reduced flows to its largest customers, European leaders are readying new plans to burn more coal, forcing some governments into a position of bringing back shuttered plants and leaning on the emissions-heavy fuel longer than they had preferred.
Austria, which phased out coal in 2020, will reactivate at least one coal plant to be used under emergency conditions, while the Dutch government is lifting restrictions on power plants, enabling them to burn more coal.
The French, who are struggling with a shortage of power supply due to offline nuclear power plants in addition to gas market disruptions, are also considering keeping some coal plants available until 2024 rather than overseeing their retirements this year.
In neighboring Germany, Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, who has accused Russia of trying to disrupt the gas market by reducing flows, said Europe’s largest economy will burn more coal this summer in response to generate electricity under a gas replacement regime the federal government is developing. The arrangement would run through the end of March 2024, Habeck said Sunday.
Germany also plans to incentivize the industry to consume less gas in order to direct gas imports to storage ahead of winter.
“This is painful, but it is sheer necessity in this situation to reduce gas consumption,” Habeck said.
The reversion to coal led European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to caution EU members against “backsliding on the dirty fossil fuels.”
“It’s a fine line, and it’s not determined whether we are going to take the right turn,” she said of Europe’s response to the energy crisis.
Outside the European Union, the British government is working out a deal to keep a coal-fired plant, whose life was already extended once before, online through March 2023.
Camilla Fenning, program lead for the Fossil Fuel Transition team at environmental think tank E3G, said some coal phaseout plans have now hit “turbulence” but insisted these short-term measures are still congruent with the governments’ overriding commitment to phase out coal by 2030.
“Although this might result in a short-term spike in coal, this must be seen in the context of a hard shift away from all fossil fuels,” Fenning told the Washington Examiner. She said the headwinds coal in particular was facing before the war “haven’t just continued — they’ve become stronger.”
“Ultimately, it makes more sense to use existing power generation assets sparingly in order to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels than it does to build costly new fossil fuel infrastructure,” Fenning added.
But the EU has determined to build more fossil fuel infrastructure, too, since the war began — if not for power generation, then for importing and transporting fuels.
European leaders insist that more green energy is ultimately the solution to the price hikes and supply worries, saying that measures supporting fossil fuels are meant to enable their breakup with Russia and to keep their economies afloat, but the energy crunch has required some compromising.
Leaders in Europe have been working to displace Russian gas supplies, which in recent years have accounted for around 40% of the EU’s gas imports, with imports from the United States and other friendly nations.
Extra-Russian imports have increased, including from the U.S., but to ramp that effort up enough to be able to displace Russian supplies significantly will require European nations to spend more money on liquefied natural gas import terminals and pipelines that otherwise might have gone to greener priorities.
Several European governments have announced plans to spend on new gas infrastructure since the war began — in some cases wherein such plans had been forgone in favor of greener alternatives.
Kadri Simson, the European Commission’s energy commissioner, said after the commission’s “REpowerEU” energy plan was announced in May that Russian fossil fuel imports “can and should be replaced by energy savings and renewables.”
The plan increased its energy savings and renewable energy targets, raising the EU’s renewable energy target by 5% to 45% by 2030, but it also earmarked 10 billion euros for spending on gas infrastructure projects as part of its plan to break up with Russian energy.
The spending for fossil fuels is angering green activists, who have accused leaders of trampling on their green energy ambitions and in some cases violating EU law by supporting new gas infrastructure.
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President Joe Biden, whose green ambitions are much in line with those of the Europeans, has himself been accused of walking back his green energy agenda for encouraging more fossil fuel production and committing to facilitating the supply of several hundred billion cubic feet of additional U.S. LNG to Europe beginning next year through 2030.
