intensity of electricity and heat production from 2000 to 2010. Select countries do not have much room to improve in this category, as they are already performing extremely well. For them, the indicator simply represents the amount of CO2 emissions per unit of electricity and heat produced.
countries are ranked highly in this important category is no guarantee that they will continue to perform at the same level as conditions change. As is true with all of the EPI’s issue categories, even a cursory investigation reinforces the fact that individual indicators only tell a fragment of the story.
Iceland is among this very small group of exceptions. Aside from shipping and transportation, all of the country’s energy comes from renewable sources, mostly geothermal and hydropower. Although Iceland is endowed with a low population and an optimal mix of resources to achieve that distinction, it would be unwise to think its success is unrelated to policy. Iceland manages its power sector so well that it is able to export energy and still provide clean, reliable electricity to its citizens. A different scenario exists in one of the other exceptions. In Paraguay a massive hydropower system provides the power sector with the bulk—almost 80 percent— of its energy. However, poweroutages are frequent, reliability is low, and access to the abundant clean energy is not widespread. In fact, the majority of the electricity produced is exported to Brazil, at bargain-basement prices.118
These case studies are examples of countries that blend a strategy of natural resources endowments and policy to keep emissions low. When there is little room to improve because of already high performance, incremental performance is even more challenging. Judging small improvements can seem like a penalty. Sadly, such high performance is well outside the norm. For the vast majority of nations, the Trend in CO2 Emissions per kWh indicator is based on the trend in reduction of carbon intensity in the electricity sector.
Both countries have tremendous opportunities for innovation: Iceland is on its way to putting its geothermal energy to use for the recycling of CO2 into usable, exportable fuels.119 And Paraguay, which imports all of its fossil fuels, is positioned to use its abundant hydropower to foster a robust domestic renewables fuels industry. However the fact that these 118
119
Toledano, P. and Maennling, N. (2013) Leveraging Paraguay’s hydropower for economic development. Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Development: New York, United States. Available: http://www.vcc.columbia.edu/ 2014. Katz, C. (2013) Iceland seeks to cash in on its abundant renewable energy. Yale Environment 360. Available: http:// 10, 2014.
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Ideally, future measures of climate change and energy performance will be tied more directly to policy actions toward both mitigation of and adaptation to climate effects. For now, the data for such a global-scale venture does not exist (see Box: Evaluating Policy Performance – The Climate Change Performance Index). Until it does, the EPI must make do with existing data, offering imperfect measures at best.