Mott's Blog

The new government announced plans to compel other state-owned companies to kick in funding to bankrupt coal-mines also owned by the government. Since it costs more to mine the coal than its market value (and Polish coal is notoriously poor in quality), this is the classic maxim of throwing good money after bad. Or maybe the black hole of Poland? Animation here.

The new government in Poland has announced its intention to much more actively promote and support biogas development. We are excited by this change in attitude and are trying to provide them with accurate information and policy suggestions to make it happen. The details have been provided today by the Polish Biogas Association. We basically argue against using auctions for biogas and other smaller RES projects (citing a lot of studies and data). PBA also asks that the current system be fixed by providing a weighted certificate value based on the cost of production of the various technologies (as will be required by the European Commission in their review of the certificate program). We think that program should be continued for several years, even to 2020, to assure that there is a continuous construction of new facilities of all types.  The new auctions will not occur this year at this point and if they go ahead next year with two to four years to wait before new projects tha...

The big move Poland made in the climate talks and that it is pushing in further policy discussions may well be meaningless. The option of using re-forestation as a carbon sink to reduce or offset CO2 emissions was one of the big plays by the Polish Government. " A  carbon sink  is anything that absorbs more carbon that it releases..."   [sinkwatch.com]. The Kyoto agreement allowed forests to be considered carbon sinks and encouraged the planting of new forests as a means of CO2 control. There was some of abuse of this mechanism as with other Kyoto projects, but it is a recognized means of CO2 reduction. Allowing the same means to be used under the European Union Emissions Trading Directive (the main instrument for EU climate policy) was a bit controversial. But Poland and others got this option recognized. The difficulty - as always - is in the details. One 1000 MW coal-fired plant requires over 100,000 hectares of forest to offset its emissions. The standard appli...