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Courts block Spanish coal subsidies

11 November 2010, 17:14 CET
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The European Court of Justice has issued a temporary injunction preventing the Spanish government from subsidising the use of domestically produced coal in electricity generation.

The Spanish government plans to require generators to use ten million tonnes of Spanish-mined coal every year until 2014, and to give a very generous subsidy (as high as the solar Feed-in Tariff) to purchase the electricity generated. The Spanish energy regulator has estimated that subsidies will be worth around €800 million. The European Commission had said that this plan was acceptable. The European court will now decide whether to issue a full injunction and launch an investigation. An investigation would last years.

Two Spanish courts are also investigating this plan to subsidise filthy electricity. Spain’s central court issued a temporary injunction last week . And some generators have asked Spain’s supreme court to rule on the plan’s legality. The Spanish government has said that the plan will be on hold until the courts reach decisions.

The Spanish government and the European Commission had justified the subsidies because they would ‘safeguard a strategic energy reserve’. This is a very weak defence – the subsidies are clearly inconsistent with the EU’s climate policies and also the single market programme to remove barriers to trade, which has been central to EU policy for the last quarter century. Any subsidies for coal, in Spain and elsewhere, should go only to CCS. And Spain’s best strategic energy reserves are solar and wind. The Spanish government is reducing subsidies to these to try to deal with the economic crisis. This crisis is serious, but so is the climate crisis. Renewables should continue to get the support they need.

By Stephen Tindale

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Climate change is the most serious issue ever to have faced humanity. Rightly, it is now high on the public, political, media and business agendas. However, too much of the discussion is still about what we should not be doing or what we should be against. There is not enough discussion or information on solutions - what we can and should do to minimise dangerous climate change, and what should be done to make us not only safer and more secure, but also richer and happier.


Stephen Tindale photoStephen Tindale (29 March 1963 – 1 July 2017) was a British environmentalist who was Executive Director of Greenpeace UK from 2000 to 2005. He was Director of The Alvin Weinberg Foundation, co-founder of the organisation Climate Answers, Associate Fellow at the Centre for European Reform and co-author of Repowering Communities with Prashant Vaze.