The European Green Deal was not designed to cope with the extraordinary series of overlapping crises the world has been facing. Though the EU has ultimately been reinforced through crises, that may not continue, explain Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega and Diana-Paula Gherasim at IFRI who summarise their study “How Can the Green Deal Adapt to a Brutal World?” Costs are rising and investment is not keeping pace. Dependence on China and the burst of … [Read more...]
Another good year for Renewables. But can we triple Wind and Solar by 2030?
COP28 saw a calling for a tripling of renewable capacities by 2030, off the back of positive signs. In 2022, 80% of incremental power demand and 12% of electricity generated worldwide came from solar and wind. And the IEA believes solar generation can grow at 25% to 2030. But, as Ramnath Iyer at IEEFA explains, specific challenges must be met to ramp up successfully. The non-financial barriers include a lack of policy clarity, permitting, and … [Read more...]
Lookahead to 2024 27-nation EU Parliamentary elections: will ambitious climate policies win or lose votes?
In June next year Europeans from 27 nations will elect a new EU Parliament that will shape the bloc’s energy and climate policy in the years leading to the 2030 climate target deadline. It’s not clear whether rising prices, energy security and heatwaves will steer votes towards parties pushing for more rapid decarbonisation, or whether the cost and disruption of transition will do the exact opposite. At the last election in 2019 climate concerns … [Read more...]
Falling oil prices are defying the forecasters. Expect to be surprised for the rest of the year
The worst expectations for oil prices never materialised, thank goodness. In mid-March a year ago Brent reached $114 and WTI $103 a barrel. By the same time this year it was $72 and $66 respectively. That’s despite no end in sight for the Russia-Ukraine war, the trigger to the 2022 price escalation and global crisis. Carole Nakhle at the University of Surrey explains how today’s forecasts are similarly uncertain. She points at conflicting … [Read more...]
“GETs”: cheap ways for Grids to double Wind & Solar integration and help battle global inflation
Accelerating the clean energy transition can tackle the inflation crisis, not just save the climate, explain Russell Mendell, Mathias Einberger and Katie Siegner at Rocky Mountain Institute. Rising energy costs are driving current global inflation. So now is the perfect time to drive through low-hanging-fruit ways to increase wind and solar generation and storage. In the U.S. interconnection queues – the pipeline of clean generation projects … [Read more...]
Record global clean energy spending, but it’s still not enough and costs are rising
Since 2020, clean energy investment has grown by 12% per year – it was only 2%/year during the five years after the 2015 Paris Agreement. That boost is the main reason why total global energy investment is set to reach $2.4tn in 2022, according to the latest “World Energy Investment” report from the IEA. It’s very good news that spending on solar PV, batteries and EVs is now growing at rates consistent with reaching global net zero emissions by … [Read more...]
A massive expansion of domestic Renewable energy stops wars, not just climate change
Hans-Josef Fell at Energy Watch Group says bluntly that a massive expansion of domestic renewable energy generation over the last decade would not only have saved the planet from a future climate catastrophe, it would be stopping wars today. Firstly, 70% of Russia's state revenues come from oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy deals. State revenues fund its military. Secondly, an EU dependent on imports from any geopolitical adversary will … [Read more...]