A week long effort by the United Nations to reach a new agreement on Climate Change ended on 8 April in Bangkok with little signs of progress. The existing agreement, known as the Kyoto Protocol, ends in December 2012 and it is now accepted that time has run out to have a new agreement in place by that deadline. The Kyoto Protocol is the only international set of accounting rules that protect the environmental integrity of mitigation efforts of countries around the world. Hopes were high that a new agreement would be reached at the UN Climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 but that meeting ended in failure and subsequent efforts in Cancun and Bangkok have made little progress.
Meanwhile recent calculations by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) show that wind energy is achieving over a quarter of the emissions reductions required under the current Kyoto agreement. The association’s Regulatory Affairs Officer, Rémi Gruet said “An international agreement remains absolutely vital but it’s clear that while there’s an impasse in the negotiations, many countries around the globe are getting on with avoiding CO2 emissions by installing wind energy and other renewable energy sources.”
EWEA calculations show that at the end of 2010, wind energy across the world avoided 255 Mt of CO2, equivalent to 26% of the emissions reductions commitment of industrialised countries under the Kyoto Protocol and by 2020, wind power should avoid some 69% of the pledges made in Cancun.
Last year in Ireland the annual average wind energy penetration was 11% of total electricity consumed in the country and the Irish Wind Energy Association (IWEA) estimates that Ireland could presently generate 25% of its electricity from the wind with no increase in electricity prices. If this was done, IWEA estimates that there would be wind turbines scattered across only 1/2 of one percent of the country, assuming no offshore development. There would be thousands of new jobs created in manufacturing and research, and we would be able to avoid EU pollution penalties. The new Government Ministers in Environment and in Energy should make this a priority.
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