News
Publish date: April 14, 2011
Written by: Niklas Kalvø Tessem
News
The “2020 Project Bonds Initiative” is open for consultation until 2 May. Following the consultation, the Commission will come forward with a proposal for implementation of the Initiative. The plan is to ensure credit enhancement and better liquidity for large long-term infrastructure projects, needed to boost infrastructure and green growth as envisioned in the EU 2020 Strategy. Commissioner Ollie Rehn assured that the Initiative will use sustainability as a criterion when assessing eligible projects, following questions from WWF about the lack of sustainability targets in the proposal text.
– Sustainability will be underlying criteria for the Initiative. In this proposal there was a need to focus on the operational criteria for investments, said Ollie Rehn.
Speed up investments
The Initiative aims to attract additional private sector financing of individual infrastructure projects by improving the rating of the senior debt of project companies, thereby ensuring that this can be placed as bonds with institutional investors. The Commission’s key role will be risk-sharing with the European Investment Bank (EIB), or other financing partners, enabling them to provide the described credit enhancement. No bond issuance will be required by Member States’ governments, the EU or the EIB for this purpose. The measure is supplementary to other sources of finance for projects.
The Commission hope that this will secure long term investment stability that attracts larger private market players. This is important to speed up the transition to a low carbon economy.
– There is a need for huge infrastructure investments to achieve the vision for a low carbon economy, including renewable energy, carbon capture and storage and new nuclear, said Philip Lowe.
The Director General for Energy furthermore stressed that there is a need for rapid implementation of new measures, which include the action of national regulators.
– Some Member States’ regulators were even reluctant to introduce measures in the EU rescue package. We have limited time to reach the 2050 goals. Europe is quite good at being late, said Lowe to the audience.
Role of local government
There were some questions about the role of local and regional projects, and the eligibility of pooled smaller projects for bonds funding. Without giving a definite answer, representatives from the Commission and EIB stated that the bonds would be limited to large inter-regional projects, mostly including multiple Member States.
There will still be some work to be done. The Commission wants to streamline Member States’ procurement rules, and ensure that regulators accept to use bonds financed by the capital market for infrastructure projects.
Recent attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant "mark the beginning of a new and gravely dangerous front of the war," the UN atomic agency's director general said last week.
After years of inaction, Germany is working on its Carbon Management Strategy to resolve how CCS can play a role in climate action in industry. At the end of February, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action published first key points and a proposal to amend the law Kohlenstoffdioxid Speicherungsgesetz (KSpG). Bellona Deutschland, who was actively involved in the previous stakeholder dialogue submitted a statement in the association hearing.
In the midst of a global discussion on whether natural gas should be used as a transitional fuel and whether emissions from its extraction, production, transport and use are significantly less than those from other fossil fuels, Russia has developed ambitious plans to increase its own production of liquified natural gas (LNG) in the Arctic – a region with 75% of proven gas reserves in Russia – to raise its share in the international gas trade.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our main focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution risks and climate change.