Page 48 - European Energy Innovation - autumn 2017 publication

48 Autumn 2017 European Energy Innovation

PHOTOVOLTAICS

Why Europe needs to install more
PV Systems to deliver the
Paris Agreement

By Arnulf Jäger-Waldau (pictured), European Commission

The 21st session of the
Conference of the Parties
(COP 21) to the United
Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) in Paris, France ended in
December 2015 with the landmark
agreement to keep the maximum
global average temperature rise
as close as possible to 1.5°C. This
agreement, now known as the Paris
Agreement entered into force on
4 November 2016.

Despite this success, there is general
consensus that the Nationally
Determined Contributions (NDC’s)
proposed by each country are not
sufficient to reach the goals of the Paris
Agreement. With the current policies
in place global green-house gas (GHG)
emission are not projected to decrease
fast enough to stay below 2ºC [1].

The decarbonisation of our energy
supply is an important component to
achieve the targets, because 65 % of
the world’s current CO2 emissions are
due to burning fossil fuels. In 2014,
81 % of our total primary energy
supply depended on burning fossil
fuels, namely 29 % coal, 31 % oil
and 21 % natural gas [2]. In terms of
final energy consumption electricity
only accounted for 18.1 %, but was
responsible for 35.2 % of the total CO2
emissions [2, 3].

According to the World Energy

Outlook (WEO) 2016 of the

International Energy Agency (IEA), the

global average of CO2 emissions per
kWh of electricity was 515g in 2014 [4].

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