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After the two letters the SEE SEP network directed towards the Energy Community in October, regarding the Ministerial Council of Energy Community, which took place on October 24 in Belgrade, and the subject of setting up a High Level Reflection Group (HLRG), we received a reply from the three commissioners: Günther Oettinger, Janez Potočnik and Štefan Füle.
The commissioners used the letter to elaborate on the different important issues the SEE SEP network tried to raise with the letters. “We share your views on the importance of raising awareness about the work of Energy Community and its benefits among the citizens of its Contracting Parties, and that they take note of the comments, especially on the establishment of High Level Reflection Group (HLRG), the adoption of the list of Projects of Energy Community Interest (PECI) and specific decisions concerning the Large Combustion Plants Directive and the Directive on Industrial Emissions”.
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[Letter from Commissioners, January 20 '14]
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| January '14 |
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SEE SEP is a multi-year, multi-country, EU funded regional programme, which intends to use fact-based advocacy to allow civil society groups to go beyond protest and argue for more citizen friendly EU orientated energy policies in the countries of the South East Europe. A key component of SEE SEP is the development of a publicly accessible energy model to allow decision makers and others to see the impacts of their current and future policies. SEE SEP is in a process of completing the demand-side sectors in energy model.
- The 7 countries from SEE region involved in this activity are: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, FYR Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia
- The Lead Partner in the SEE SEP project is SEE Change Net
- The Project has 17 CSO partners
- The Project, with the support of the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), is using an energy model called OPE2RA – Open Source Prospective Energy & Emissions Road Mapping - based on the DECC “My 2050 Calculator”
- Technical support to train 14 Civil Society researchers in Energy Modeling is being provided by ClimAct who also provided technical support to the recently completed 2050 Pathways Calculator for Belgium
[SEE SEP Energy Model Fact Sheet]
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South East Europe (SEE) stands at a crossroad. There are plans to spend €30 billion on energy projects over the next ten years in our region. Decisions made by the governments of the SEE countries will determine, for better or for worse, how warm the citizens are, how safe the energy projects are, and how clean – or dirty – the air and water will become.
Recognizing the importance of the choices which need to be made we have developed these infographics – “Warm, Safe, Clean Energy – Which Path are the SEE Countries Taking?” – a kind of school report card – on how our Governments are doing compared to neighbours and EU goals.
Below you can view and download infographics for 7 countries which are part of the SEE SEP Project: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
Feel free to share!
Warm, Safe, Clean Energy - Which Path are the SEE Countries Taking? - [Summary]
Note: All sources for the infographics are listed in the fact sheet attached to every infographic for each country.
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Albania
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| Infographic - English | Fact Sheet - English |
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| Infographic - Albanian | Fact Sheet - Albanian |
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Bosnia and Herzegovina
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| Infographic - English | Fact Sheet - English |
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| Infographic - BHS | Fact Sheet - BHS |
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Croatia
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| Infographic - English | Fact Sheet - English |
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| Infographic - Croatian | Fact Sheet - Croatian |
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Kosovo
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| Infographic - English | Fact Sheet - English |
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| Infographic - Albanian | Fact Sheet - Albanian |
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Macedonia
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| Infographic - English | Fact Sheet - English |
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| Infographic - Macedonian | Fact Sheet - Macedonian |
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| Infographic - Albanian | Fact Sheet - Albanian |
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Montenegro
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| Infographic - English | Fact Sheet - English |
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| Infographic - Montenegrin | Fact Sheet - Montenegrin |
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Serbia
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| Infographic - English | Fact Sheet - English |
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| Infographic - Serbian | Fact Sheet - Serbian |
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Civil society urges President Barroso to review the list of energy projects in Western Balkans for alignment with EU principles
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Brussels - NGOs from across the region are expressing very serious concerns about the list of 35 priority energy projects approved by the European Commission-backed Energy Community meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, last Thursday. The decision to support projects that are in conflict with EU environment goals and climate goals has seriously dented the EU's credibility as a positive force for the protection of the environment and people's health in the Western Balkans, say the NGOs.
Several of the selected projects are environmentally and socially damaging coal and hydropower plants and NGOs point out that the EU has condoned regional Ministers choosing projects that conflict with EU goals such as biodiversity protection and decarbonisation.
“We are deeply concerned about several hydropower projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia that have received the backing of the Energy Community. These projects will have significant environmental and social impacts and do not meet basic EU standards. WWF will therefore appeal to the competent European institutions to review the list and eliminate the projects that fail to comply with EU legal requirements,” said Angela Klauschen from WWF Mediterranean.
“It is highly disappointing that an EU-backed body has prioritised projects that directly conflict with EU goals, including three lignite power plants – Kolubara B and Nikola Tesla B3 in Serbia and Kosova e Re in Kosovo – which clash with the EU's long-term climate goals and harm local people's health”, added Pippa Gallop from CEE Bankwatch Network.
The selected “Projects of Energy Community Interest” will be fast-tracked and prioritised for financing over the coming years, in particular by the EBRD and EIB. Yet several of the projects are aimed at exporting electricity rather than meeting local needs, while others will perpetuate the region's addiction to lignite power.
“EU Commissioner Oettinger backs projects which divert the clean energy out of Balkans to feed EU markets while leaving our citizens breathing more dirty coal. We sincerely hope that this is not the birth of a new EU energy strategy, which takes advantage of local resources of candidate countries for fulfilling its own renewable energy goals”, said Garret Tankosić Kelly from SEE Change Net.
NGOs call on the EU and specifically Commissioner Oettinger to ensure that environment and health issues are taken seriously in decisions about energy infrastructure development in the region. “The Energy Community has stated that projects not meeting EU standards will be deleted from the priority list and we are holding Commissioner Oettinger and President Barroso accountable for ensuring that this pledge is followed up”, conclude the NGOs.
Among the most controversial projects selected are:
Dabar and Dubrovnik II hydropower plants, BiH and Croatia
The construction of new hydropower plants in Croatia and BiH (HPP Dabar and HPP Dubrovnik II) is part of the very complex Upper Horizons cross-border project that collects water from the catchment basins of the Neretva and Trebišnjica rivers and diverts them to the coast, bypassing the areas that usually get this water via underground connections. If realized in current form, these projects will increase the salinization of the Neretva delta and threaten agricultural production in the region, and cause the drying up of the Hutovo Blato Nature Park, a Ramsar wetland and one of the largest habitats of migratory birds in the Balkans.
Kolubara B lignite power plant, Serbia
A new 750 MW coal plant is planned to be built at Kolubara, in western Serbia, in order to exploit the resources in the Kolubara coal basin. One million tonnes of additional CO2 would be emitted annually, while total annual emissions of such a plant would exceed 8 million tonnes, a quantity that is roughly equal to 25% of the total CO2 emissions from the current power generation in Serbia.
Dajc-Velipoje wind power plant, Albania
The project has repeatedly been refused permission by the Albanian Environment Ministry as it is planned to be located in a Ramsar site near Skadar Lake. The wind farm it is not designed to raise the renewables uptake and meeting local energy demand but rather for export of energy to Italy, and should not gain points under facilitation of renewables, because it does not contribute to developing renewables in Albania's or the Energy Community's electricity system.
Hydropower system on Drina river, BiH/Serbia/Montenegro
The Upper and middle Drina hydropower plants will seriously endanger the hydrology of the beautiful Drina river, including some of the most valuable biodiversity hot-spots like Tara river and its gorge. At the same time, these projects will have irreversible destructive impacts on the river itself and all local communities living next to it. Electricity produced in these plants will not benefit local and national economies and will be a serious burden on the national budgets of Serbia and BiH, especially since the electricity produced in the middle Drina hydropower plants is meant to be exported to Italy.
Pljevlja – Lastva transmission line, Montenegro - Italy
This transmission line is to be connected to the underwater energy interconnection between Italy and Montenegro, which wil significantly affect the environment, and some parts of the country are going to be changed forever. With the almost certain bankruptcy of aluminium factory KAP as the biggest consumer of electricity in the country, Montenegro already has sufficient electricity production for domestic use, so all new projects will be exclusively oriented towards export, which opens up questions about how will the people of Montenegro benefit from these expensive projects.
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[Press release Report
"EU-backed energy projects will harm people and the environment
in the Western Balkans" Belgrade, October 30 2013]
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October '13 |
The avoidable health cost of dirty coal in just three countries of the region is 6.5 billion Euros
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Ministerial Council of the Energy Community Treaty, led by Serbia, is scheduled to meet in Belgrade on Thursday, October 24 to decide on their approach to cleaning up pollution from dirty coal in line with their EU membership aspirations. A group of NGOs have published a report to contribute to this discussion. Time to Phase out Dirty Coal: The Hidden Cost We Can Avoid presented today in Belgrade, testifies to the need for protecting citizens of South Eastern Europe from the health damage resulting from use of coal. The leading regional organization, SEE Change Net, in cooperation with the Public Interest Advocacy Center - CPI (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Fractal and CEKOR (Serbia) and MANS (Montenegro) urge the Energy Community to avoid any delay in implementing EU legislation for reduction of air pollution from power plants.
A group of signatory countries to the Energy Community Treaty – led by Serbia – is trying to block the European Commission’s proposal to tighten up legislation controlling pollution from coal power plants. The strength of the decision by ministers of the region on two obscure but important directives (Large Combustion Plants Directive and Industrial Emissions Directive) will clearly show whether they care more about profits from energy or the health of their citizens.
So far, the countries of the region have failed to prepare for the stricter emissions standards and, as the deadlines for compliance near, they are looking for excuses. “By proposing to delay implementation of these crucial directives, Serbian government wants to condemn its people to living in the dirty air for years to come. We don’t want to be treated as second class citizens of Europe”, said Zvezdan Kalmar from CEKOR.
Jernej Stritih, author of the report, independent consultant and former director of Slovenia’s Government Office of Climate Change, stated: “If we compare the investment options of building new coal fired power plants or installing pollution control in the existing ones with the current annual costs of burning coal to the economy, which include health costs and subsidies, it becomes obvious that coal should be phased out as soon as possible.”
Annual projected health costs range from 2.3 to 6.5 billion EUR in the countries of the region – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia.“Another alarming fact is that even if the pollution is reduced by 90% compared to present levels the annual health costs would remain at a level between 250 and 650 million EUR in these three countries”, says Lidija Kesar from Serbian NGO Fractal.
On the other hand, investing in pollution control and then closing the existing power plants in the next 10 years would cost 1 billion in investment and would cause around 40 billion external costs until their closure, but the negative health effects would be reduced much sooner than in case of building new power plants that would operate another 50 years.
The public of the region deserves better, explains Dejan Milovac of civil society organization MANS from Montenegro: “If EU environmental standards are not enforced vigorously, we will find ourselves in a situation where our government profits from selling energy to Italy and we get stuck paying the environmental and health costs.”
The European Commission and the Energy Community Secretariat must resist attempts to delay implementation of crucial pollution legislation which will help to reduce the number of deaths from coal. The Ministerial Council of the Energy Community Treaty needs to decide in favor of applying mechanisms which can save peoples lives. It is crucial that any strengthening of the Energy Community Parties’ obligations regarding the LCPD and the IED are binding, not ‘recommendations’ or ‘guidelines’. Irma Filipović of the Public Interest Advocacy Center - CPI says: “The decision which will be made on Thursday will clearly show whose interests are being protected – the interests of the industry or the interests of the citizens.”
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[LCPD/IED Report]
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| eng | |bih | | srb | | cg |
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[Press release Report
"Time to Phase Out Dirty Coal in South Eastern Europe"
Belgrade, October 22 2013]
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October '13 |
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SEE SEP is a group of 17 partners who work together on a multi-country, multi-year, EU funded programme entitled South East Europe Sustainable Energy Policy (SEE SEP).
Representatives from our group recently attended the EBRD public consultation hearing in Belgrade on the 4th of September and, while we are assured that all the comments made at that consultation will be posted in full on the EBRD website and considered, we wished to embody in written form some of the key issues and points which we believe are critical to the EBRD Energy Strategy and the EBRD's future consultative processes.
We strongly believe that in future all consultation meetings should include senior decision makers and board members from the EBRD in order for those who are most responsible for the strategy to be accountable to the public rather than less senior staff having to answer for decisions that they may not have had a strong influence on.
We are deeply concerned that EBRD does not have clear models and scenarios on how its countries of operations will achieve the necessary GHG emissions reductions in line with IPCC recommendations, nor on how they could manage energy demand and achieve the transformation to 2 energy-efficient, renewable energy-based economies. From this it follows that the EBRD has no clear picture of what its contribution needs to be to achieve these goals. Nor does it have a bank-wide climate target, which we believe is essentially especially for the accession and pre-accession countries of our region and we urge the EBRD to evaluate all energy projects in the context of the EU 2020 targets, forthcoming 2030 targets and 2050 Roadmaps in order to avoid investing in future stranded assets.
We were disappointed that while the EBRD has announced that it will establish a shadow carbon price this figure or even range was not available during the public consultation, which makes its impact unclear. We urge the EBRD to adopt a shadow carbon price at the same level as the EIB's.
Given the insufficient attention paid in the strategy to how a transition to energy efficient, renewables-based economy can be achieved, we urge the EBRD to establish an emissions performance standard at the level of 350 gCO2/kWh to prevent investments into carbon-intensive energy generation infrastructure.
In our recent publication “Invest in Haste, Repent at Leisure” we pointed out that the EBRD's investments in energy efficiency in the Western Balkans between 2006 and 2012 was approximately 12% of the bank's energy sector investment portfolio, according to our project classification.
Among these investments there were very few residential energy efficiency investments or projects in public buildings, and we would like to see an increase in such projects. As we suggested at the public consultation – we would as a gesture of cooperation be interested in joining a brainstorming workshop or some such mechanism to see how to unblock greater latent potential for investment in energy efficiency and savings in our region.
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[SEE-SEP EBRD Final Energy Strategy, 30 September 2013]
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September '13
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Following the critical decisions by the World Bank and European Investment Bank (EIB) to move away from dirty coal, our organisations are now calling on the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to do the same.
The recently published report "Invest in Haste, Repent at Leisure" states that the EBRD was the largest lender in South East Europe between 2006 and 2012, and almost half of the EBRD’s energy lending has supported fossil fuels. The public consultation on the draft Energy Sector Strategy, scheduled to happen in Belgrade on September 4, will be the time to prove if they are willing to make the change.
We are concerned that these public consultations are simply "window dressing", and that in spite of the tens of thousands of signatures and fact based analysis which support our claim that coal kills and that EBRD should get out of financing coal, will be ignored in the service of a small elite of special interest groups.
We have decided to send a public letter to the board members of the EBRD in order to ask this bank to show genuine commitment to dialogue in respect to the critical questions regarding the revision of the Energy Sector Strategy.
The letter is an initiative under the SEE SEP program (South East Europe Sustainable Energy Policy), and it is signed by 17 partner NGOs.
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[Public letter to EBRD board members, 28th August 2013.]
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| August '13 |
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Guidelines for support to civil society in the enlargement countries
Outcomes of online and national consultations May-June 2013
The European Commission's DG Enlargement is in the process of developing guidelines for support to civil society in the enlargement countries for the period 2014-2020. Consultation on the first draft of the guidelines took place in Brussels on 25 and 26 April 2013 with invited stakeholders representing civil society, government offices for cooperation with civil society and EU Delegations in the region.
Based on stakeholder input at the Brussels event, the draft guidelines were revised and published for broader consultation online as well as at national consultation events.
ELARG Guidelines CS support after online consultation
Results of broader consultation on CS guidelines, May and June 2013
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| June '13 |
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The social strategy outline to accompany the regional energy strategy was presented at the 6th Social Forum of The Energy Community Treaty (ECT) on 23rd April in Belgrade. In regard to this process, CSOs from the region urged that before any discussions or decisions are made regarding either of these topics the ECTS should commission research, which evaluates the scale, depth and particularities of Energy Poverty in the region currently and in addition, should model for possible scenarios showing the impact on energy prices, and therefore those caught in the energy poverty trap, following the planned 1st of January 2015 liberalization of the market for all customers. See Letter
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Projects of Energy Community Interest
In late November 2012, Energy Community Treaty (ECT) launched a call for proposals under the acronym PECI or Projects of Energy Community Interest. The list of potential PECIs was compiled based on submissions from project promoters by December 2012. Proposed PECIs derive their logic from regional energy strategy that has been criticized not only by CSOs but by four groups in the European Parliament. CSOs from the region submitted comments to the PECIs public consultation in April 2013, urging the Energy Community Secretariat to take corrective action and ensure that PECIs become Projects of Every Citizens' Interest. See Letter of Complaint
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May '13
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