The World Is Far Off From a Landmark Goal to Triple Renewables
(Bloomberg) -- A landmark pledge made by countries less than two years ago to triple the world’s renewable capacity by 2030 already looks in danger of not being met, a new report finds.
Targets put forward by national governments for the rollout of technologies like wind and solar will bring global installations far short of what countries committed to at the United Nations COP28 summit in 2023, according to Ember, a climate think tank. The renewable goal was agreed in Dubai as part of a hard-fought deal to commit to a transition away from fossil fuel.
Ember calculated the world will hit just 7.4 terawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, a little more than double the 3.4 terawatts installed in 2022, based on national targets. The world needs 11 terawatts in order to meet the tripling goal.
“There is a real disconnect between the sort of high level agreement to sign pledges at COP and then the reality of how electricity planning is done,” Katye Altieri, global electricity analyst at Ember, said. “National targets send policy signals to the market and I think countries have lost sight of that.”
The findings underscore the key issue facing international climate talks, and one that will likely dominate the COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belem this November: Countries are very good at talking the talk once a year, but bad at actually implementing the promises they’ve made.
Since Dubai in 2023, there are few signs the world is transitioning away from fossil fuels. Scaling up renewables was supposed to help tackle the demand-side of the equation: the more wind and solar can meet the world’s energy needs, the less countries will need to extract gas, oil and coal.
Ember’s research found only 22 countries have revised their renewable targets since Dubai, and most of those nations are in the European Union, which campaigned for the renewables pledge and have put new laws in place to achieve its objective to cut emissions by 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels.
Group-of-20 nations like China and South Africa are expected to still come forward with more ambitious climate targets this year, but others like Canada, Russia and Turkey have yet to do so, and probably won’t before the summit in Belem, according to Ember.
The US, which hasn't put forward a 2030 renewable target, is very unlikely to do so. President Donald Trump is withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement and rolling back many of the clean energy programs put in place under Joe Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
Altieri noted China alone could make a sizeable difference in the global renewable goal, but it won’t be enough to make up for shortfalls elsewhere.
Among some glimmers of good news: India hasn’t updated its ambition, but Delhi’s 2030 target of 500 gigawatts of fossil fuel-free energy is aligned with the tripling goal, the report found. Perhaps surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is also on track for meeting its share, too.
Brazil’s COP30 summit comes 10 years after the Paris Agreement and is seen as the first that will herald a new age of climate diplomacy, one that will focus on implementing the promises made instead of writing the rules to do so. A few days before the conference, the UN will publish its synthesis of countries’ national climate plans and how far off the world currently is from the 1.5C goal. It will be up to Brazil to steer negotiators on the best way to close that gap, including by scaling up clean energy.
For Ember’s Altieri, it won’t take much to get the clean energy transition to snowball, but targets are needed to make sure that countries think about where they place renewables and the kind of infrastructure, like grids and battery storage, that’s needed to accompany it.
“It’s not about target setting for the sake of target setting,” she said. “The economics are there for every country in the world.”
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