Denmark emissions trading

After these first two prominent countries in the European allocation process, we turn to a set of three smaller countries, two of which, Denmark and Sweden, like the UK, have some experience with emissions trading and governments strongly supportive of climate policy, and a third, Ireland, the government of which was committed to being an early mover in part because Ireland held the presidency of the EU Council in the first half of 2004 when the NAPs were due to be submitted. 

Denmark stands out in a number of respects. It is the only Member State for which an existing national emissions trading programme... 

This chapter presents lessons learnt in connection with the national allocation plan for Denmark (Ministry of Environment 2004). Section 1.1 outlines some particular features of the Danish energy sector and the historical CO2 emissions. Section 1.2 describes the previous experience with emissions trading in Denmark, and Section 1.3 describes the process and milestones in the production of the Danish National Allocation Plan (NAP). 

Thus, CO2 emissions cap-and-trading was already a well-known instrument, at least for electricity producers, and had also been discussed for a number of years outside the electricity sector. This fact is likely to have contributed to the smooth implementation of the emissions trading directive in Denmark (see the next section). 

It came as a surprise that it was not entirely clear from the Directive which installations were covered by emissions trading. Denmark has -like a little more than half the Member States - chosen to use the Commission s definition of combustion installation , whereas the remaining Member States implemented a more narrow definition. This has led to... 

In the political discussions prior to the first Danish NAP, this problem was raised by some stakeholders and politicians. It was stated in the Danish emissions trading legislation that if the Commission should change its definition of the Directive s scope, the Danish government would be prepared to change the legislation in order to secure that the scope of the Directive was the same in Denmark as in other Member States. 

Previous experience with emissions cap-and-trade in Denmark... 

---