Topic Climate Policy

Impact of Renewable Energy Act Reform on Wind Project Finance

The 2014 reform of the German Renewable Energy Act introduces a mandatory shift from a fixed feed-in tariff to a floating premium system. This is envisaged to create additional incentives for project developers, but also impacts revenues and costs for new investments in wind generation. Thus uncertainties for example about balancing costs and the impact of the location specific generation profile on ...

The German "Energiewende": An Introduction

The German government's multi-decade effort to transition to a low-carbon, renew-ables-based energy economy is now commonly known as "energiewende" ("energy transition"). The transition has four major objectives: increasing the share of renewables to at least 80% (in electricity) and 60% for total final energy consumption, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% (basis: 1990), phasing out nuclear ...

Technical Greenhouse-Gas Mitigation Potentials of Biochar Soil Incorporation in Germany

Biochar is a carbon-rich solid obtained from the heating of biomass in the (near) absence of oxygen in a process called pyrolysis. Its deployment in soils is increasingly discussed as a promising means to sequester carbon in soils and, thus, to help mitigate climate change. For a wide range of feedstocks and scenarios and against the baseline of conventional feedstock management, we calculate the technical ...

Technical Greenhouse-Gas Mitigation Potentials of Biochar Soil Incorporation in Germany: Data Documentation

European Energy and Climate Policy Requires Ambitious Targets for 2030

In January 2014, the European Commission proposed a framework for its climate and energy policy up to 2030. It includes targets for reducing greenhouse gases and using renewable energies, but no specific targets for increasing energy efficiency. By 2030, greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced by 40 percent over 1990 figures. Another element of the proposal is the introduction of a market stability ...

The Short-Term Population Health Effects of Weather and Pollution: Implications of Climate Change

This study comprehensively assesses the immediate effects of extreme weather conditions and high concentrations of ambient air pollution on population health. For Germany and the years 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of all 170 million hospital admissions, along with all 8 million deaths, with weather and pollution data reported at the day-county level. Extreme heat significantly increases hospitalizations ...

Climate Protection through Biochar in German Agriculture: Potentials and Costs

In recent years, there has been much discussion about biochar - a carbonaceous product made of biomass - as a promising technique for mitigating climate change. In particular, this method has the potential to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for the long term by incorporating biochar into the soil while enhancing soil fertility at the same time. A research project conducted by DIW Berlin calculated ...

Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development

The EU ETS: Eight Years and Counting

This paper provides an introduction to the EU's Emissions Trading System. As such it provides a discussion of the historical and legal context in which the EU ETS developed and now operates, a presentation of the key performance indicators for the first eight years through the end of the second phase in 2012, and some concluding observations on the system's future. The paper is purposively descriptive ...

Comparison of Feed-in Tariffs and Tenders to Remunerate Solar Power Generation

This paper analyzes the trade-offs for using feed-in tariffs or tenders to remunerate different scales of solar photovoltaics (PV) projects. In recent years, European countries increasingly combined feed-in tariffs for small renewables systems with tenders for large installations. This study develops an analytic framework to quantify deployment effectiveness of responsive feed-in tariff adjustment ...