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It is relatively cheap, it is abundant and its renaissance started before the Fukushima accident. In the future energy mix, gas and renewables will play an important role, but coal will be the most important source. That’s why we need to implement CCS and make it economically affordable if we want to meet our mitigation targets. Prof. Ottmar Edenhofer, in this interview conducted by Mauro Buonocore, talks about the future of energy, the opportunity of a European super-grid and proposes a two-track model for climate negotiations.

Prof. Edenhofer, how have climate negotiations been going since the last COP in Cancùn?  What can we  envision for the future of international negotiations on a post-Kyoto agreement?

It’s very hard to predict what will happen after Cancùn. By and large, I would say that the prospects for a quite comprehensive climate regime in the near future are not very good. And the likelihood that this would happen at the Cop 17 in Durban, South Africa, unfortunately is very low. Nevertheless people become aware of what happened in Fukushima, which has basically nothing to do with the climate change issue, but has a lot to do with the energy issue and will change things substantially in the energy market at the international level. I think that people are going to be a little bit more aware that energy security, human development, economic growth and climate change are all parts of the one integrated issue which deserves much more attention than we gave to these single topics in the last decade. So, I do not assume that the Cop in Durban will be a great success, but I think that in the next three years something will happen at the international scale, which will help us with the broader sustainability issue. The longer we wait, the more expensive mitigation becomes – and the risk increases that climate change reaches tipping points in the earth system like Greenland ice sheet melting.

Should the international community drop the project of a global agreement and should it concentrate its efforts on countries’ individual pledges without a legally binding framework?

I think that a legally binding agreement is important but this should not be the one and only target to camp on. Think about China, for example. China has recently presented the 12th five-year which is extremely ambitious, in some aspects. We don’t necessarily need legally binding agreements. What we need is some kind of international cooperation, which could be very effective as a starting point of negotiations and, with its new 12th five-year plan, China could be one of the driving forces for international cooperation.

After the conferences in Copenhagen and Cancùn the format of the COP was criticized and some experts said it was  not the most  effective way to get concrete results for climate negotiations. Do you agree with this assessment?

That’s probably true. The whole framework of the UNFCCC is good at getting a consensus in the end of a process, but it is not the best format to do real negotiations and therefore I would strongly propose to have a two-track model. On the one hand we could negotiate within the G20 and other international arenas about several issues. In the end if we have achieved any concrete results, the UNFCCC would be a very good framework to get everybody on board and to have the strongest legitimacy on the achieved outcomes.

Could you please make some examples of these other arenas?

G20 would be one of them, for example; or other arenas where you could achieve a bilateral agreement, let’s say between Europe and China, on climate and energy topics. Let me give  you a more concrete example. China intends to implement an emissions-trade scheme and the European Union,  which has great experience on this issue, could advise China on how to implement such a thing. This could be done at a bilateral level. There are so many opportunities for international cooperation and I would avoid the kind of negotiations where people are only focusing on the UNFCCC. I mentioned the G20 as a good arena to achieve outcomes because in the G20 we have already agreed to abandon fossil fuels subsidies. This kind of decision should be simply implemented and this would also be a very good starting point to do something at the international scale. So I think we have to combine different scales of cooperation, we should be aware that in the end we have to achieve an international agreement but there are many ways and many smaller steps that could have a strong impact on all the international negotiations.

Will the Fukushima nuclear crisis have any consequences on energy policy and on nuclear strategies around the world?

First of all, Fukushima has a strong impact on the European policy and I am quite convinced that in the end it will have a strong impact on the global energy policy. I would like to give you a number. Up to now, 14% of the  entire world’s electricity production comes from nuclear power. We have now about 455 light water reactors on the globe. And, given that the electricity consumption will double within the next 20 years, if we  would decide to stabilize the share of nuclear power on the electricity production, we will have to implement around 450 other light water reactors across the globe by the year 2030. I think that – independent of the question whether this is something to aspire to – at the international level we will simply not be able to stabilize the electricity production at 14% from nuclear plants around the world.  I also think that China and India will think about nuclear power again. I’m not saying that they would phase out nuclear power, but the speed and the race to build nuclear power plants might very well be much slower than the project many people anticipated before the Fukushima event. I would say that we could  expect a decline in the share of nuclear power in the global energy mix. From my point of view, in the global scale, the big issue in the future will be coal because it is relatively cheap, it is abundant and many countries will then substitute their nuclear power capacities with coal. Therefore, it is absolutely crucial for an ambitious climate policy, that we have Carbon Capture and Storage technologies available. I know that CCS is not available now at the commercial level and we have only a few pilot plans. People, particularly in Europe, think that CCS is not an important part of the mitigation portfolio. I think it is an almost inevitable part because coal remains the most important issue. Gas will also become important, energy efficiency also has to play a very important role. And the scenarios produced by IEA show that renewables will play an extremely important role and then we have to make sure that renewables really become competitive and cost efficient.

Are the European targets on mitigation achievable with an energy strategy with no nuclear plants?

It is an issue, which has to be analyzed very carefully, but I have the feeling that the European Union  can achieve its mitigation targets if we have a common and a unified European energy policy. If we would have a grid across Europe, we would be able to have integrated energy from the best sites for renewables. We could concentrate, for example, solar power in Spain, wind plants in the North Sea, and so on. With this perspective, I think that we could achieve the ambitious climate protection goals even without nuclear power, but admittedly a   European super-grid requires a lot of investments in the infrastructure.

But renewables are not competitive in the energy market, today. And they are growing on public incentives. Do you think that they will soon become competitive?

It is a stepwise process and it has to be complemented by energy efficiency. Wind is to a certain extent already competitive and also an increasing CO2 price will make coal and gas less competitive. So this is a timing issue and I’m not saying that we can achieve it immediately, but over a reasonable time horizon we can build  this kind of super-grid which  integrates renewables from all over Europe. It’s definitely an option, but it takes time. Even in Germany we  are now debating about by when we should phase out nuclear power. It is my expectation that we will not phase out nuclear power immediately, but we will also do this step by step. And although we have to invest, we have to inform the people and  ask them if they would like to phase out nuclear power by 2020 or a bit later. Anyway, new investments in renewables are inevitable and people have to accept that this is not a free lunch.

Which kind of energy mix are China and India going to compose?

I definitely think China  now has the goal to increase the energy efficiency to an unprecedented scale so China is also thinking about an emissions trade scheme at a national scale, which is very encouraging. The Chinese energy portfolio will count on renewables, but they also have a huge amount of coal and gas. The role of nuclear power will depend on how fast they will be able to build up new nuclear plants. But, again, coal will be a  prominent energy source and so we need CCS and we have to clarify to what extent it is feasible and economically affordable. China is now willing and is committed to do something to reduce their emissions and I find this a very encouraging sign.