In A Quest For Clean Energy, Europe Is Turning To North Africa.

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• In A Quest For Clean Energy, Europe Is Turning To North Africa.

• Meme Of The Week.

• TotalEnergies and Corio join forces to develop offshore wind in Taiwan.

• Quick & Clean Weekly Bites.

In A Quest For Clean Energy, Europe Is Turning To North Africa.

solar panels in sun-rich North Africa generate up to three times more energy than in Europe. And North Africa has a lot more room for them than densely populated Europe. Result: Europe’s drive to end its reliance on Russian natural gas supplies, triggered by the Ukraine conflict, is resulting in a rush to install giant solar energy farms and lay underwater cables to tap into North Africa’s abundant renewable energy.

But there are growing concerns about the environmental impacts in Africa of Europe’s outsourcing of its energy needs. Desert ecosystems will be decimated. Livestock pastures that have been grazed by nomadic tribes for millennia will be commandeered. And analysts fear that this will all happen with minimal community consultation or ecological assessment.

Solar and wind farms are already proliferating south of the Mediterranean. Morocco’s Noor and Egypt’s Benban solar farms are among the largest in the world. Their initial aim has been to boost domestic power supplies and reduce reliance on coal. But now these facilities are increasingly being lined up to supply green energy to industrial neighbors to the north, through new intercontinental submarine cables, or to locally manufacture “green” hydrogen for shipping to Europe, where demand is growing fast for low-carbon industrial fuels.

Meme Of The Week.

TotalEnergies and Corio join forces to develop offshore wind in Taiwan.

TotalEnergies and Corio Generation, two of the world’s leading offshore wind and renewable energy developers, have signed a joint venture partnership to develop the Formosa 3 offshore wind farms in Taiwan. Under this agreement, Corio will remain the majority shareholder and lead developer with 50% plus 10 shares overall in the project.

The announcement comes after Taiwan’s Bureau of Energy confirmed in late December 2022 that Formosa 3’s Haiding 2 wind farm had been successfully awarded 600 MW grid capacity following the first phase of Taiwan’s Round 3 auctions.

The Formosa 3 project comprises three proposed wind farms – Haiding 1, 2, and 3 – in Changhua county on the central-western coast of Taiwan. The project received Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) approvals in 2018, with an EIA-approved capacity of around 2 GW.

The wind farm development is expected to contribute to Taiwan’s ambitious plans for the green energy transition and represents a multi-billion investment from the partners and project lenders up to the end of construction. Future investments will be made in proportion to the partners’ project shareholdings.

Quick & Clean Weekly Bites.

• Portugal has signed an agreement to swap Cape Verde's debt for environmental investments. Such 'debt-for-nature' deals are emerging in other countries as a way to reduce the impact of climate change. They also touch on the dilemma of who should foot the bill for climate change mitigation. Cape Verde owes around €140 million to the Portuguese state and over €400 million to its banks and other entities. Ultimately, this will now end up in an environmental and climate fund established by Cape Verde. Link.

• Creating a network of ecological corridors is one of a number of measures in the European Commission’s ‘New Deal for Pollinators’. One in three bee, butterfly, and hoverfly species are currently disappearing in the EU, so we urgently need to reverse their decline by 2030. The deal aims to do that by targeting their key adversaries: pesticides, pollution, invasive alien species, changing land use, and climate change. Link.

• Bill Gates is funding an Australian start-up that hopes to combat methane-emitting cow burps. Agriculture is the main culprit for human-caused methane emissions, one of the biggest drivers of global warming. Australian climate technology start-up Rumin8 wants to tackle this issue by feeding cows seaweed. Link.