World Leaders to Kick Off Money Fight With Renewable Goal Update

September 24, 2024

(Bloomberg) — World leaders on Tuesday will be under pressure to announce new strategies for tripling global renewable energy capacity by 2030 — a goal set at last year’s UN climate summit in Dubai.

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The president of this year’s summit in Azerbaijan, Mukhtar Babayev, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are among the leaders expected to give details on the work and cost to reach the target as they address attendees of the Global Renewables Summit at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The event is one of hundreds taking place at Climate Week NYC, which is running alongside the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

While last year saw record growth of global deployment of renewable energy, the International Energy Agency said the world will probably fall short of its tripling goal if countries don’t improve or introduce policies to support a faster rollout of solar and wind energy. This could mean taking steps such as addressing issues that hold up approvals for renewable projects in rich nations to incentivizing clean energy investment in the developing world.

The latter concern may be further addressed by von der Leyen, who announced on Monday that the European Union will help subsidize green bond issuance in poorer countries as way to mobilize private investments in environmentally friendly projects. Meanwhile, Babayev has already criticized the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for not stepping up with more climate finance for developing countries.

Total installed renewable power capacity was 3.9 terawatts last year — a 14% increase from 2022, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

At COP28 in Dubai nearly 200 nations agreed to reach at least 11 terawatts of clean energy capacity by 2030. This would require an annualized rate of increase of 16%. The IEA says the world is on track for only achieving 8 terawatts by the end of the decade. (One terawatt of solar is enough to power 180 million homes in the US.)

The vast majority of the world’s investment in solar and wind power so far has been in rich countries and China. Yet the countries that most need and have the potential for plentiful solar and wind power are developing nations. Cheap renewables are the “path to prosperity” for poor countries, said Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at the think tank RMI.

That’s why getting their fair share of clean energy funding will be a key fight for developing countries at COP29 in Baku. The main focus of the summit will be to agree on a new post-2025 goal for climate finance to emerging markets. Already some countries like India are calling for that figure to be in the trillions of dollars, which the European Union has said is unreachable. Rich nations have a patchy track record on meeting climate finance promises, previously missing a deadline to provide up to $100 billion-per-year by 2020.

Fewer than 100 countries have included renewable power deployment targets in their so-called nationally determined contributions, which are plans that must be submitted to the UN to show progress toward the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming ideally below 1.5C. New NDCs with targets for 2035 are required to be submitted by February next year.

The key bottleneck for renewables deployment in rich countries has been getting regulatory approvals tied to land acquisition or grid development. Wind energy, in particular, has faced an uphill battle and may be a laggard compared to solar development over the next several years.

“Solar will probably be pretty close or even exceed tripling,” BloombergNEF’s analyst Jenny Chase said on a recent episode of the Zero podcast. But based on current policies, “wind is not going to triple by 2030.” Even if wind power capacity were to triple, countries will need to increase battery capacity 16-fold to be able to optimally use all that renewables, according BNEF.

–With assistance from Greg Ritchie and John Ainger.

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