Despite the development of renewable energies and infrastructures, the EU’s energy dependence on Russia has been a strong factor in the lowering of tone after the Maidan massacre in Kiev last month. Brussels did not jump on the sanctions bandwagon rolled out by Washington but took a more diverse diplomatic approach to the Crimean conundrum.

When considering economic sanc­tions to support democracy in Ukraine, an EU heavily dependent on Russian gas imports is wary of their possible impact on its more vulnerable members, among them Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

Even as the situation flared up last month, Russian gas exports to Europe continued flowing uninterrupted through Ukraine. A New York-based energy analyst for Barclays Capital warned that a halt in gas flow by Russia’s gas export monopoly supplier Gazprom could backfire since “all three sides” would suffer economic consequences.

Russian gas accounts for around a quarter of Europe’s consumption. Producers in Qatar, Algeria and elsewhere are showing a preference for Asia and Latin America’s higher-paying markets. Ukraine gets most of its imported natural gas from Russia, and Russia is dependent on gas revenues to run the government.

In the midst of this political crisis, Russia has asked Ukraine to return the equivalent of 65,000 shipments of LNG gas to the Delimara power station or pay a non-discounted price for it. Ukraine’s failure to meet the demands of Gazprom sparked fresh concerns that gas supplies could be switched off, as they were for three days in 2009. If flows through Ukraine were to halt, the shortfall would reverberate throughout the European pipeline network.

At an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels earlier this month, an Italian official asked: “What sanctions can you place on a country that can cut off your gas?”

Nafeez Ahmed, author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It, writing in The Guardian, looks at both sides of the equation, with Eurasia and the EU/US scrambling for control over energy: “Ukraine is caught hapless in the midst of this accelerating struggle to dominate Eurasia’s energy corridors in the last decades of the age of fossil fuels.”

A pipeline from Azerbajan which eventually comes ashore in southern Italy is set to bring Caspian Sea gas to Georgia and Turkey in 2018, with the first deliveries to Europe the following year. This competes with Russia’s Southern Stream project, with Gazprom needing to be perceived as a stable supplier and reliable partner to its European clients. But Gazprom’s plan is overshadowed by legal conflicts with the EU, which seeks to wean itself off over-reliance on Russia for gas supplies.

What sanctions can you place on a country that can cut off your gas?- an Italian official at a meeting of EU foreign ministers

The idea of a gas corridor to southern Europe was hailed as ‘the new Silk Road’, bringing riches from the east. Observers have recently commented that if Azerbaijan were to decide to sell its gas to Russia, the whole philosophy of the Southern Corridor would fall apart.

Malta has an 18-year contract for the supply of gas from Azerbajan through Electrogas, chosen to develop the LNG-to-power plant at Delimara. After that, the possibility of the UK consortium partner Gasol tapping into an African gas source to supply Malta seems likely.

According to Kenneth Rapoza, writing in Forbes magazine, the US wants to become a large liquid natural gas exporter, and a portion of that would be bound for Europe: “In this context, any effort to cut off gas supplied to Europe may harden the US resolve to pursue LNG exports as a way to support European allies.”

With this in mind, efforts to accelerate a sharper turn to renewable energies are under way in Europe and have been for some time. The present crisis in Ukraine adds a further note of urgency to the picture.

In Brussels on Wednesday, a parliamentary hearing on building political will for 100 per cent renewable energy is to be co-hosted by the forum along with the World Future Council and Climate Service Centre. The hearing aims to build capacity and help decision-makers understand how renewable energy and energy efficiency can bring socio-economic development.

At present, all eyes are on Germany, which saw renewables rise from six per cent to 25 per cent of generated power in the past 13 years. Recognised for its role as a European leader in renewables, the German government is now facing calls to scrap its ambitious Renewable Energies Act because of high costs. In reality, renewable energies have dramatically reduced the price of electricity on the trading floor. The problem is that the benefits are not passed on to end consumers. One solution could be a revision of the surcharge mechanism.

In her blog on the Climate and Energy Commission website, Anna Leidriter cautions against caving in to the fossil fuel industry’s demands: “If Germany’s Minister for Econo­mic Affairs and Energy turns the reform of the Renewable Energies Act into a unilateral brake of the expansion of renewables he will be playing into the hands of the opponents of the Energiewende (transition to renewables) domestically and abroad. This would be fatal for the climate and the environment.”

Governments around the world are looking for success stories that can be adapted to their region. Failure to recharge the renewables effort in Germany would send a devastating signal about global climate protection progress as international negotiations falter and emissions continue to increase despite 19 UN climate change conferences.

Eufores, a European parliamentary network supported by renewable energy companies and associations, is a driving force in the sector, transforming best practice into coherent legislation for Europe. Its secretary general Jan Geiss said: “Now more than ever, it is essential to send a clear signal to the European energy industry and the world that the EU is determined to pursue its renewable-based system.”

One of the energy forum’s projects, Keep on Track, aims at monitoring that the actual development of renewable energy in the EU towards the 2020 target is not lagging behind the trajectory outlined in the relevant directive.

An assessment of feasibility and impacts of upcoming 2030 targets for renewable energy sources (RES) for Europe has been published. It said the successful deployment of RES across EU member states rose by 40 per cent increase in the first decade of the new millennium.

On a regional scale, a Med programme project supported by European regional development funding is defining the energy landscape in a number of Mediterranean countries, including Malta. Fondazzjoni Temi Zammit recently hosted a mid-term conference for the Energeia project earlier this month. The conference theme was support for small enterprise start-ups and innovators in the field of renewable energy. Partners from Italy, France, Spain, and Bosnia Herzegovina were also present.

The first step of the project, which has been running since April 2013, was to define the ‘energy landscape’, according to common guidelines, that allowed partners to build up a clearer picture of current needs and challenges for companies operating in the renewable energy sector. The knowledge gained will be chanelled into pilot actions to reinforce business support capacities and development of a pathway to fully exploit business projects in the energy field.

Engineer Justin Farrugia, representing the Energy Ministry, said that together with the Economy Ministry, every effort was being made to attract investment, especially for new businesses such as alternative energy. He told participants that in the coming weeks a solar farm policy is to be unveiled by government and work is proceeding on feed-in tariffs while “also considering some wind turbines”.

Nearly 6,000 street lamp bulbs in Gozo are to be replaced by LED bulbs. The same plan will be adopted along 12 kilometres of road in Malta with the aim of eventually covering the entire Maltese islands.

A presentation on mapping the renewable energy sector of partner countries and regions was given by Juan Pablo Jimenez of the Andalusian Institute of Technology. Electricity produced by photovoltaic systems in Malta topped 13 gigawatt hours in 2012 although much more needs to be done to meet EU targets.

Malta’s own Institute for Sustainable Energy will be holding its annual conference on Thursday.

www.worldfuturecouncil.org

www.climate-service-center.de

www.keepontrack.eu

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