AEA report shows energy-intensive businesses continue to reduce CO2 emissions
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has published a new report that assesses the performance of Climate Change Agreement (CCA) participants in 2010. Written by AEA, the report shows that energy-intensive businesses continue to reduce energy related carbon dioxide emissions in response to CCAs.
Fifty-four separate sectors have CCAs, including a range of processes from certain agricultural activities through to complex and very energy intensive industrial activities such as the manufacture of primary steel. CCAs provide agreement holders with a 65% reduction on the Climate Change Levy (CCL) on qualifying energy use in exchange for meeting challenging energy efficiency targets.
The results, produced by AEA, DECC’s technical advisers on CCAs since the scheme started in 2001, show that energy-intensive businesses, in aggregate, reduced their energy related carbon dioxide emissions by 28.5 million tonnes last year, measured relative to base year. This reduction is the result of improvements in energy efficiency and falls in the level of activity in the steel sector.
When falls in the level of activity in the steel sector are taken into account, a challenging carbon dioxide reduction target of 25.8 million tonnes was set for the participating 54 sectors for 2010, relative to base year. In aggregate, the participating sectors exceeded their targets by 2.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (rounded).
This is the fifth biennial report compiled by AEA on the current CCA scheme.
Other key findings from the 2010 analysis include:
- After all trading activities within the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS) were taken into account, 38 of the 54 sectors met their targets.
- All but one of the facilities reporting performance in the remaining 16 sectors had their CCAs renewed because they met their individual facility targets.
- 9,634 individual facilities qualified for having their CCAs renewed until 31st March 2013.
- Generally there was continued improvement across the sectors.
Commenting on performance, report author Richard Hodges said: “Overall, sectors with CCAs continue to improve the efficiency with which they use energy. However, in some sectors, in recent years, we have seen a slowing in the rate of improvement. As AEA continues to work with DECC on the implementation of the scheme post 2013, we will seek to make sure that CCAs work efficiently with other climate change instruments and continue to drive improvements in energy efficiency, in particular by incentivising projects with longer paybacks.”