France To Ban Coal-Fired Power, Promote NGVs
Closing France’s last coal-fired power plants by 2022 and banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 are among the commitments in a new ‘climate plan’ presented July 5 by ecology minister Nicolas Hulot. The plan also includes incentives for natural gas vehicles (NGVs).
Hulot, a former environmental activist who has responsibility for energy in Emmanuel Macron's new government, also aims to ban all oil and gas production in French territories by 2040.
The plan, more details of which were published July 6, will make combating climate change “irreversible” both in the domestic and international arenas – a response to an election manifesto pledge by the US president, Donald Trump, to pull his country out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which he formalised at the start of June.
Tax breaks for trucks run on gas
For vehicles, the government will study ways to make grants to encourage the replacement of pre-1997 petrol and pre-2001 diesel vehicles with less pollutive new or second-hand ones, but will also “support the development of alternative fuels (electricity, natural gas and bio-gas, hydrogen)” and give tax incentives for heavy trucks to convert to gas.
“The government will take the initiative of proposing at a European level a new ambitious ‘Euro 7’ standard and fixing as its objective the end of sales of cars emitting greenhouse gases in 2040,” the plan notes.
It also says a carbon tax element in taxation of petrol and diesel will be fixed five years ahead in each budget, warning that “studies have shown a [carbon] price of €100/metric ton by 2030 is insufficient to keep the world within a 2oC trajectory.”
Coal-fired plants for the chop
Coal-fired power plants provide some 5% of French power production, peaking at 10% on cold winter days. They will be closed definitively by 2022 or converted to less carbon-intensive production, the plan states, with a more gradual transition permitted in overseas territories.
Last month Hulot said that, by the autumn, he would publish a draft law to stop the award of new onshore exploration licences. Now he says this will extend to banning all shale and unconventional gas exploration and production, declaring it part of a “gradual exit from oil and gas production on French territory by 2040.”
Mark Smedley