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Berlin (UPI) Jun 4, 2010 Representatives of the world's biggest cities are flocking to Berlin to learn how to make urban energy supply more efficient and financing it in times of strained budgets. More than 3 billion people are living in cities, accounting for up to 80 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions. "The cities are the biggest causers of climate change but they also have the largest potential for mitigation," Katrin Lompscher, the environment secretary of Berlin, Thursday told the foreign press corps in the city. Lompscher next week will greet around 150 representatives from 40 of the world's largest cities -- among them New York, Toronto, Beijing, Moscow and Cairo -- for a workshop of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership network. The meeting in Berlin's city hall will focus on combined heat and power generation as part of a modern energy supply system and public-private partnership financing models for improving the energy efficiency of buildings, topics that "are of high interest with cities right now," said Lompscher, of the far-left Left Party. Berlin, with 3.4 million citizens, is home to Western Europe's largest district heating grid. Several large power stations produce electricity as well as heat in the inner city ring. Swedish energy giant Vattenfall, for example, operates a highly efficient gas-fired co-generation power plant in the Mitte district, less than a mile from the Alexanderplatz. "We know how to heat and power our city efficiently and we are eager to share our knowledge with our partners from all over the world," Lompscher said. Another aspect Berlin knows well is dealing with money -- mainly because it has so little of it. The city's unemployment rate towers at 13.1 percent, nearly double the national average. A record 17 percent of Berliners get unemployment and welfare aid. Branded as "poor but sexy," the city over the past years had to come up with creative financing methods to modernize its energy system, Lompscher said. Contracting partnership models have helped refurbish and increase the energy efficiency of 1,300 public buildings. Lompscher last month unveiled a 160-kilowatt solar power unit on the roof of a Berlin police station. The highly modern photovoltaic plant, which will save 107 tons of carbon dioxide per year, was realized thanks to a partnership between the city's property management agency BIM and a solar energy investment fund. Meanwhile, Lompscher will have to keep a close eye on Vattenfall, the main utility in Berlin. The company has announced that, starting in 2017, it would fuel its biomass plants in the city with wood imported from Liberia. Lompscher said Berlin and Vattenfall are in negotiations to make sure that the wood the company uses meets then highest possible sustainability criteria. If that's not the case, Lompscher will have a hard time convincing Berlin's citizens why it makes sense to haul in wood all the way from Africa and not from nearby Brandenburg.
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Insuring the poor against climate change Washington (UPI) Jun 4, 2010 With climate legislation stalled in the U.S. Senate and international climate control negotiations facing equally daunting obstacles, there is one thing that the key players largely agree on: Something must be done to help communities facing the worst impacts of climate change. At the U.N. climate talks last December, the United States pledged $10 billion to a fund that will help the ha ... read more |
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