( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany’s boom in stationary batteries linked to solar PV systems accelerated last year, doubling the total number of units to more than one million, reports solar industry association BSW. The batteries have a combined capacity of 12 gigawatt-hours – enough to power 1.5 million 2-person households for a day.

“The expansion of solar electricity storage systems has picked up speed rapidly. Both the total number of solar batteries installed and their storage capacity have doubled in just one year,” said the lobby group.

“When installing new solar power systems on private buildings, electricity storage systems are now standard. More and more companies are also storing solar power from their roofs to use it around the clock,” said the association’s director, Carsten Körnig. He added that the market for home and commercial storage systems grew by over 150 per cent in 2023.

The industry group lamented that current policies still underestimate the potential of battery storage systems, and that market barriers continue to slow their spread. Against this backdrop, BSW welcomed the economy and climate ministry’s proposals for a storage strategy published in December, but said the draft didn’t address central strategic questions regarding the role of batteries in tomorrow’s electricity system.

Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI) Video : “Going Green – Germany’s Energy Transition”

Storage systems should be considered a central pillar of the electricity system, on par with generation, grid, and consumption, the industry association said.

Storage will become key in the next phase of the energy transition, as Germany aims to cover 80 percent of power demand with renewable sources by 2030. A traditional electricity system doesn’t require much storage because power generation can be adjusted to match demand.

This changes dramatically as the system uses more renewable energy, as power generation from wind turbines and solar PV systems depends on the weather. This means that production often dramatically exceeds demand but also that current power production can fall well short of what is needed at a given moment.

Via Clean Energy Wire

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

Just before the recent climate summit in Dubai, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, with some exasperation, came out with the following rather amazing statement:

“Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Al-Jabar was posturing when he made this quip about caves, but he can almost be forgiven. We badly need a roadmap for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” By noting the lack of one, he underscored its absence. This is true even if he spoke as a flack of the fossil fuel cartel.

Speaking of COP28, it helped settle the question of the COPs, which still troubles the climate left. The COPs are easily dismissed as “blah blah blah.” But they are, in a word, necessary. We would be in far greater trouble without them, and this is true even though the COPs are condemned to make decisions by consensus, even though they engender endless greenwashing, even though, with next year’s COP29 slated for Azerbaijan, two in a row will be hosted by straight-up petrostates.

The climate negotiations are finally circling core issues. COP26 saw a decision to “phase down” coal, and COP28 opened with the Loss and Damage fund finally lurching into existence. Then came COP28’s key decision text, which called for “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Only a month later—with President Biden’s move to “pause” the approval of new liquified natural gas terminals, a decision the White House explicitly linked to COP28— the COP decision demonstrated real world benefits. It could have many more in the future, including outside the United States.

Meanwhile, COP29 is set to see the next big battle begin in earnest, as climate finance takes center stage. This battle could (if all goes well) culminate in 2025, where COP30 will be hosted by Lula da Sila’s Brazil, and deliver a meaningful decision on that crucial front. This is not the time to performatively insist that COP stands for “conference of polluters.”

Having said all this, I must immediately add that the climate negotiations have thus far failed, as decisively witnessed by the steadily rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration. COP skeptics are quite right about this. But in their failure the international negotiations are hardly alone. Domestic climate action has had many victories, but it has hardly put us on a path to deep and rapid decarbonization. Nor has the green technology revolution brought planetary emissions into a peak-and-decline pathway. Nor—and this is not easy to say—have the world’s direct action and climate justice movements filled the gaps. Politically, they may be everything, but they too have failed to stop the warming.

One key point: the COP28 text does not simply call for transitioning away from fossil fuels but rather stipulates that this transition must be “just, orderly, and equitable,” a much more challenging prospect. This led Sivan Kartha, a climate equity specialist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, to add that the “deepest fissure” in Dubai was between those who simply want a rapid fossil phase out and those who insist that, to have any hope of success, such a phase out must be fair.

Many of us agree—but what does such fairness imply? 

Embracing “Climate Emergency”

It has become fashionable, yet again, to argue that terms like “climate emergency” are dangerously demoralizing. Perhaps they are. Unfortunately, they are also accurate. We really do have to aim for net-zero emission by 2050, and that means facing political-economic challenges that are difficult to exaggerate. As are those posed by the closely related 1.5°C temperature goal. 

A graphic is appropriate here. I chose this one:

So far, the temperature spike we saw in 2023 is just temporary. For details, see here.

There are lots of voices telling us that 1.5°C is no longer achievable, but this is not quite true. Rather, 1.5°C remains achievable, but only via “overshoot and decline” pathways in which, sometime after the warming grinds past 1.5°C, we manage to claw it back down. What must we do to improve our chances? This is the real question.

We’re going to go into 1.5°C overshoot soon. As we do, even if we assume we’ll be able to draw the temperature back down, we can’t know how extreme the overshoot will be, or how long it will last. We can’t know because it depends on what happens in the future! Some people, Marxist climate hawk Andreas Malm among them, do not think we’ll be able to pull off the necessary drawdown (“I’m not an optimist about the human project”), though he agrees that it is technically possible. 

If we seriously intend to keep 1.5°C alive (as a long-term goal—think 2100), we must in the short term do everything to keep the temperature peak “well below 2°C” (the weak end of the Paris target), which is widely judged, by top scientists, to still be achievable. But there’s a hitch. Even this weaker goal demands, per the IPCC, “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” It’s not going to happen in the world as we have it today. 

If, in 2050, we are approaching true net-zero planetary emissions, we’ll have a good chance of avoiding a world in which the cascading consequences of the warming become unmanageable. Very rapidly building low- and ultra-low emissions energy systems around the world is a necessary step towards that goal—and because such systems are emerging, and rapidly dropping in cost, it’s possible to be honestly optimistic. But such systems are not going to be enough. 

Net-zero 2050 means going beyond the deployment of new, ultra-low emissions infrastructure to also eliminate existing fossil fuel infrastructure. This means that virtually all countries, be they rich or poor, developed or developing, should immediately stop investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, not least because that infrastructure will have to be decommissioned—shut down, mothballed, stranded—long before it’s worn out. All countries must also very rapidly decommission the fossil fuel infrastructure (e.g. existing oil wells, old coal plants) they already have in place—even if it’s profitable and even if people depend on it for their livelihoods. Such a decommissioning process is going to be both expensive and disruptive, in both political and economic terms, and in ways that are particularly hard on poor and insecure populations. 

In a world geared for rapid transition, these would be tractable challenges, but that would be a world in which we were speaking honestly about the depth and profundity of the necessary transformation, a world in which we were, as per Australian author and analyst David Spratt, in “emergency mode.” This, obviously, is not our world, which still tends towards greenwashing, soft-pedaling, and small-bore gradualism, if not actual denialism and climate “brightsiding.”

League of Conservation Voters Video: “A New England Case Study: Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition Through Offshore Wind”

The encouraging possibilities are real, don’t get me wrong.

The green technology revolution really does make it possible for us to save ourselves, and to build new futures. But we’re still facing almost impossible strategic challenges, and justice is at the heart of many of them. Brave choices are going to be necessary, and a political movement that tries to avoid them will not do well when push comes to shove. As it will, within the lifetimes of our children. 

A global extraction phase out

It will be very difficult to engineer a sufficiently rapid phase out of fossil fuel consumption. But the difficulties are even greater when it comes to fossil fuel extraction and production. Think mining, and drilling, and fracking.

There are rich countries like the United States and Norway, which are heavily invested in oil and gas extraction. High-poverty developing countries, like South Africa and India, are heavily invested in coal, while the Democratic Republic of Congo is highly dependent on oil revenue to provide public services. Gulf oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates, the COP28 host, was a developing country before it struck oil. Today, though the UAE may not be “developed” in the same way as, say, the United States or Germany, it is nonetheless a wealthy, high-capacity country with the money and resources to buffer the turbulence that will come with any rapid abandonment of oil.

Which countries deserve more time before they have to stop extracting and selling fossil fuels? The question haunts the climate negotiations, but it is not, in an important sense, the right question at all. The greater truth is that we must do everything to stop the fossil energy pipeline, globally and as soon as possible, and the right question is which countries need support—financial, political, and technological support—before they can hope to rapidly break their dependency on fossil fuel extraction. 

All extracting countries plead their cases. The most legitimate pleas come from poor developing countries that are highly dependent on fossil-related revenues and livelihoods. But before this can become obvious, a point of potential confusion must be clearly acknowledged – lots of countries call themselves developing, but some of them are a lot richer than others. The good news is that this confusion is dissipating, for reasons that were easy to appreciate in Dubai, the global city of the United Arab Emirate. The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, is an extremely wealthy Gulf oil exporter that, while still officially a member of the “Group of 77” developing countries, is not a developing country at all.

Why must we say this? Because we must transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly, and equitable” manner, and because – as the challenge of a fossil fuel extraction phase out makes particularly clear – such a transition is going to be extremely difficult. It is also going to be expensive, which immediately raises the “who pays?” question. Those who wish to evade this question—there are many, and they tend to be rich—seek delay by any available means, and it is important to stress that in the next 10 years aggressively rosy predictions about carbon-dioxide removal—which would, if real, make a perfect case for delay—seem certain to play a leading role in their strategies. 

In this situation, with uncertainty layered upon complexity upon emergency, optimism is as much a danger as pessimism. For one thing, it is not at all obvious that we will manage to rapidly draw temperatures back down after they overshoot 1.5°C—Malm’s pessimism may, in the end, be well placed. For another, all efforts to honestly face the severity of our situation will be endlessly harried by soft-pedaling, false solutions, dangerous distractions, and lies. Politicians everywhere will want all the wiggle room they can get, and meanwhile the fossil cartel will move at every opportunity to deflect all efforts to mandate, or even discuss, the strategic demands of an actual planetary fossil-fuel phase out. 

Al-Jaber was right: we need that roadmap. 

On the ground, with war in the air

The climate negotiations are marked by endless skirmishing between global North and global South, which will not abate anytime soon. How could it, when our world – and its crises – are still strongly structured by the “uneven and combined development” of the colonial past, and the countries of the global North still host the majority of the world’s wealth?

Despite this skirmishing, which has for decades kept fossil fuels off the negotiating agenda, COP28 saw the fossil phaseout challenge finally take center stage. Activists and diplomats alike saw this challenge as a litmus test that would show if the climate negotiations were fit for purpose. Will the negotiations take up the challenge, or can they be forever derailed and distracted, while the fossil cartel just continues its relentless expansion? Perhaps we’ll know in a few years, but just now, after Dubai, a bit of guarded optimism may actually be in order. 

Not everyone in Dubai connected the brutal logic of the climate reckoning to the larger geopolitical crisis, but this crisis hung palpably in the air. COP28 took place in the Arab world, and Gaza did not seem so very far away. The atrocity of the Israeli bombing continued day by excruciating day, and it did not seem that it could be entirely separated from the discussions in the conference halls. The pain was acute within civil society circles. Demonstrations took place, and though they were marginalized by the COP’s security regime, they were noticed. Importantly, the ethos of the protests was an expansive one. The bombing, in particular, was not an isolated consequence of local hatreds. There were larger forces at work. The Palestinians had been given to champion the global South. The United States—the same United States that refused all talk of climate liability—was more than implicated. The term “settler colonialism” was heard again and again. The war, and war in general, was not a distant abstraction.

COPs are not mere climate meetings. The talk is not confined to carbon budgets and energy-system transformation. International debt relief, for example, is now front and center, as is the need for a radically new planetary finance architecture. The global military budget—now over $2 trillion a year—is a common point of comparison, and a reminder that we routinely subsidize violence on a vast scale. The problem of climate is the problem of history, and history is suddenly a very big problem. As the Financial Times noted,

The anecdotal evidence that war is surging round the world is confirmed by the numbers. A recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies documented 183 ongoing conflicts around the world, the highest number in more than three decades. And that figure was arrived at before the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

The fraying of the world order is, obviously, a threat to climate cooperation. Beyond this, and beyond the fading illusion that the climate challenge will yield to simple interventions, we’re still only beginning to come to terms with its implacable sprawl. There is little chance of climate stabilization without a political-economic shift that makes robust cooperation possible, but such a shift isn’t going to come cheaply and easily, and simple stories will not help trigger it. How could they when the riddle of climate stabilization is as well the riddle of development, and the riddle of peace?

The Gaza bombing is now on the agenda of the International Court of Justice, where it has joined a crowded docket that includes climate change lawsuits and all manner of other infamies. Nor can these all be laid entirely at the feet of the global North. The two million people of Gaza are currently, and justly, in the spotlight, but spare a thought for another two million people, the Rohingya of Myanmar, who have been murdered and expelled by a huge and terrifying wave of anti-Muslim violence. Southern elites are not innocent. 

And don’t forget Russia’s war in Ukraine, which, in addition to its immediate murderous consequences, is a milestone in the global right’s campaign against collective action, including climate action. It has certainly been an enormous setback to the Russian activist campaign for carbon neutrality.

Spinning the outcome

During COP28’s second week, the negotiations were roiled by the leak of a letter that Haitham al-Ghais, the OPEC secretary general, had sent to the 13 members of OPEC. The letter warned that “pressure against fossil fuels may reach a tipping point with irreversible consequences”, and argued that OPEC members must “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.” 

This was not an isolated move. There was also, by accounts, a great deal of arm twisting, and even a Saudi walkout. Jennifer Morgan, a long-time civil society climate strategist who is now Special Envoy at the German Foreign Ministry, went so far as to speculate that OPEC might be in “a bit of panic.” If so, the panic quickly passed. Once COP28 was over, the Saudis argued that the Dubai agreement to transition away from fossil fuels was entirely optional, just one of several “choices” on an “a la carte menu.”

There are two essential points here. The first is that the OPEC cartel, and the fossil cartel more generally, wants to prevent the “transitioning away” or “phasing out” or “phasing down” frames from taking hold, and argues that “emissions” (which can, it is said, be “captured”) are the real problem. This is the core of the greenwashing strategy, and its partisans will use all available arguments in its service, including repeated references to energy justice. Al-Ghais, for example, explains that “Our goal must be to reduce emissions, which is the core objective of the Paris Agreement, while ensuring energy security and universal access to affordable energy.” 

OPEC has no intention of scaling back fossil fuel extraction. This could change (one must hope) but there is absolutely no chance that it will do so unless the great powers of the global North have already taken the lead and begun their own fossil fuel extraction phase out. Which is why the Biden administration’s decision to scrutinize and hopefully reject a wave of new LNG export terminals, if it survives the counterattacks, could mark a decisive turning point. Talk, after all, is cheap, and just because a country’s delegation supported phase down/out at COP28 (as did the U.S. delegation) this doesn’t mean its actual decision makers are ready and able to follow through. At the COP, many of them clearly weren’t, as is crisply shown in this December 2023 graphic from Carbon Brief:

Some countries, or rather the fossil powers within those countries, are planning even greater production increases than the United States is. Some of these (India and Nigeria) are clearly developing countries, while some (Canada, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) are not. Most all fossil-rich countries, whether their history lay with the global North or the global South, are still planning on exploiting their coal, oil, and gas resources for as long as they possibly can, though do note that China is at the encouraging bottom of the chart. All told, despite its complexities, the picture is grim.

At the same time, the climate reckoning is arriving, and it finds us everywhere divided between rich and poor. In consequence, the countries of the global South can continue to make compelling appeals to basic levels of developmental justice, and these appeals cannot be easily dismissed, even when they bleed into PR cover for continued fossil investment. The energy poverty of the global South is deadly real, as is its pressing need—and its right—to a viable development path, as are the obstacles that today’s world system strews in its path.

(Note that this chart is somewhat out of date – Azerbaijan, which holds the COP29 presidency, has since COP28 announced that it is planning on raising its gas production by a third.)

Moving forward

To succeed, the fossil fuel phaseout roadmap must be reasonably detailed and properly funded. At the same time, it must sharply increase the development and build-out of low-carbon energy systems. In practice, this roadmap has to include nationally differentiated coal, oil, and gas extraction phaseout timeframes detailed enough to be useful to both government planners and political organizers, and financing strategies that can support them. 

Given the emergency, these phaseout timeframes will be extremely challenging, as befits the goal of net-zero emissions by or around 2050. We have to be realistic about this, but it’s not a traditional realism that we’re after. Traditional realism tells us that the necessary timeframes are unachievable, in large part because countries always hew to their “national interests,” which can be only slowly changed. Climate realism, on the other hand, tells us that it’s the pace of the necessary decarbonization, not the politics of the day, that is immutable, and that climate stabilization must come as a solution to a global collective action problem, in which national interests rapidly change. 

Collective action problems—commons problems—have a special relationship to justice. So, while I have no idea what the “orderly” part of “just, orderly, and equitable” is going to wind up meaning, I’m confident that justice and equity are going to be key to any successful climate transition. 

But what kind of justice? And what shape must it take? These questions bring us back to Al-Jaber’s roadmap, the one for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” It’s a bear of a problem, but lots of people are working on it. For starters, look at the work of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative. Or Phaseout Pathways for Fossil Fuel Production within Paris-Compliant Carbon Budgets, the Tyndell Centre report that Dan Calverley and Kevin Anderson published in 2022. Or Economic Diversification from Oil Dependency, a report Vincent Yu, a key G77 negotiator, wrote for the Third World Network. Or the many reports of the Civil Society Equity Review, an international collaborative that, full disclosure, I work closely with. The conversation is still in its early days, but there are lots of good ideas floating around. 

Meanwhile, if we’re going to use terms like “economic diversification” and “developing countries,” let’s use them carefully. The challenges here involve “differentiation” between different kinds of countries and different kinds of circumstances, and they are anything but easy. The obvious example is the Gulf oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They may in some sense be developing countries, but they have the money to diversify their economies as they phase out fossil fuel extraction, in ways that other developing countries like Kenya or even India absolutely do not. Harder cases come when you consider China, a hybrid that is both developed and developing, or when you take inequality within countries into proper account. For example, Saudi Arabia is traditionally considered to be a developing country, while the United States is the richest country in the world, but both are brutally divided between rich and poor. Somehow, this has to matter. 

At the end of the day, the biggest differentiation problem remains the one between the global North and the global South. The challenges here are now widely if not routinely recognized. In Dubai, soon after the COP28 decision was gaveled through, Avinash Persaud, now Barbados’ special climate envoy, noted that “Some activists were disappointed we didn’t commit to an immediate fossil fuel phase out. Still, without the trade, investment, and finance to achieve it, it would either have hit developing countries hardest or been meaningless.”

These points will have to be addressed as the finance challenge—the need for a global financial architecture that can support rapid climate transition—takes center stage. Which brings me to a new report – An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction: Towards a reference framework for a fast and fair rapid global phase out of coal, oil and gas—the preliminary version of which was released at COP28 by the Extraction Equity Working Group of the Civil Society Equity Review. 

I can’t summarize this report here—though it does sport a fine executive summary—but I do want to explain why its subtitle includes the words “towards a reference framework.” The explanation, basically, is that a detailed climate transition roadmap is not yet possible. An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction thus proposes a framework by which to judge the steps that can be taken in the next few years, to at least indicate if they are fair and ambitious enough to have a real chance. To this end, it concentrates on calculating coal, oil, and gas phaseout dates for all major fossil fuel producing countries—here’s a scatterplot with the oil dates; scroll right or left for coal and gas—and on estimating the minimum level of annual international public finance that will be needed to support these phase outs.

This minimum is denominated in “hundreds of billions of dollars” a year. 

An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction argues that, if we would limit warming to 1.5°C, all countries must immediately cease to build new fossil fuel extraction infrastructure. Further, wealthy fossil fuel producers whose overall economies are less dependent on fossil extraction—such as the United States, UK, Australia, Norway, Germany, and Canada—must phase out all fossil fuel extraction by 2031, while also providing significant financial support to poorer countries that are economically dependent on fossil fuel revenues and employment. Such poorer countries are given until 2050, though they too must be wrapping things up much earlier. 

One key point, in all this, should never be forgotten. The “unrealistic” nature of these dates is not the result of any equity-side logic—in which we try to model a fair phase out—but rather derives from the implacable constraints imposed by the Earth’s nearly-depleted 1.5°C emissions budget. To push these deadlines out, say to 2060 or 2070, we must either weaken our temperature goal or we must assume—as the geoengineers will incessantly encourage us to do—that gigatons upon gigatons of carbon-dioxide can very soon, and affordably, and safely, be collected and concentrated and “sequestered” away. 

Back to the ground

After Dubai, much of the left’s commentary focused on criticizing the late-game negotiations in which “phase out” was replaced by “transitioning away,” as if such diplomatic wordsmithing was only a watering down, as if it revealed the compromised truth at the core of a meaningless negotiation. For the activists embedded in the negotiations, the sense was different. They generally agreed that Dubai had “sent the necessary signal”—despite everything, the world’s governments have decided the fossil economy has to go.

Bill McKibben, to my mind, had the right take on this disagreement when he argued that the “transitioning away” phrase “will hang over every discussion from now on—especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy.” In a nutshell, he argued that the diplomats forged a tool and it’s up to us all to wield it.

The Dubai decision is of course limited. But its real weakness has more to do with loopholes and omissions than with any fine point of diplomatic wording. And the greatest of its omissions is financial: there is no agreement on how the phaseout will be funded. Harjeet Singh, now the Global Engagement Director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, put the overall picture succinctly and well,

A long-overdue direction to move away from coal, oil, and gas has been set. Yet, the resolution is marred by loopholes that offer the fossil fuel industry numerous escape routes, relying on unproven, unsafe technologies. The hypocrisy of wealthy nations, particularly the USA, as they continue to expand fossil fuel operations massively while merely paying lip service to the green transition, stands exposed. Developing countries, still dependent on fossil fuels for energy, income, and jobs, are left without robust guarantees for adequate financial support in their urgent and equitable transition to renewables. COP28 recognised the immense financial shortfall in tackling climate impacts, but the final outcomes fall disappointingly short of compelling wealthy nations to fulfil their financial responsibilities—obligations amounting to hundreds of billions, which remain unfulfilled.

Harjeet is being diplomatic when he refers to “hundreds of billions,” a figure that echoes the one used in the Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction report. It seems to be the formulation of choice these days, at least when civil society researchers and activists want to assert financial markers large enough to move the window, but small enough to be taken as realistic.

It’s important to understand that figures of this scale refer to public monies—grants and grant equivalents—and that they’ve lately been sharing the stage with references to trillions, which are typically private monies framed as “investments.” As in Dubai’s high-level Leader’s Declaration, which spoke of the opportunities that lay in “investing $5-7tn annually in greening the global economy by 2030.” 

The elites, left to their own devices, are far more likely to deliver on ambitious private finance pledges than on ambitious public ones. Investment is something they know how to do. But a future defined by “investment” and “insurance” and “loans” and “aid” is unlikely be a future that takes proper account of even deep decarbonization, let alone the challenges of development in a climate-constrained world, let alone people-centered adaptation and an ethically defensible loss and damage response and recovery system. Which is to say that, unless we win a comprehensive climate finance breakthrough, all hope for a “fair, orderly, and equitable” transition will be abandoned in favor of a short-term neoliberal expediency that is unlikely to deliver the global just transition we actually need. 

The challenge here encompasses everything from the historical responsibility of the global North to the debt crisis now wracking the global South to the inequality crisis raging in both North and South. Not to mention the crisis of democracy and the endless techno-economic complexities of the great rebuilding that’s now on the horizon. Bracket all this for now, but know that the next international battle will be fought over finance. 

It’s about time. 

Tom Athanasiou

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

1. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reports that the European Union’s carbon dioxide emissions fell 8% in 2023, to a level not seen since John F. Kennedy told people that he was a Berliner in 1963.

The bulk of the decline — 56% — was driven by wind, water, solar and nuclear, all low-carbon sources of energy. It also helped that use of the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, declined by 25% in just one year, and is down by half since 2016. So the emissions fell in part because there are far more renewables in the European mix now, and in part because there is much less coal. Good weather also contributed to a decrease in electricity usage.

This finding is great good news because if we take the whole world into account and not just the EU, NOAA is predicting that we’ll have put out 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, a 1.1% increase over 2022. Instead, the world needs to cut CO2 emissions by 1.8 billion metric tons every single year from here on out.

What the EU is showing is that with deliberate climate policy you can actually start significantly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide– a dangerous greenhouse gas that helped cause 28 disasters in the US last year that did $1 billion in damages each. That is, unfortunately, only the beginning.

Only if Europe ups its game further and only if the US, China and India follow Europe’s lead can we avoid tipping the planet into a chaotic, violent climate that threatens orderly human civilization.

The New Futurists Video: “Germany’s Green Revolution – A Hopeful Climate Change Story ”

2. Another piece of good news is that the International Energy Agency is saying that all the new demand for energy generated throughout the world for the next three years — through the end of 2026 — will be met by wind, water, solar and nuclear.

By 2025, a third of global power will be produced by renewables, which will outstrip coal for the first time.

3. Clean energy has gone from being something exotic to actually making a difference in a country’s gross domestic product. According to The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, China wanted 5% growth in 2023, but would only have achieved about 3% growth without wind and solar. With them, the economy grew 5.2%.

That is, some 42% of China’s GDP growth was generated by renewables. That is an astonishing statistic.

Moreover, virtually all of the country’s investment growth was in the renewables sector, as real estate and heavy industry turned soft.

This $890 billion investment in green energy matched the investments of the entire world in fossil fuels last year, and equaled the annual GDP of a G-20 member such as Turkey.

The clean energy sector generated $1.6 trillion for the Chinese economy, an increase of nearly a third over the previous year.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany has generated more than half of the electricity it used this year with renewable energy for the first time, according to preliminary calculations by the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and utility association BDEW.

“Renewable energies will have covered almost 52 percent of gross electricity consumption in 2023,” the organisations said in a press release. “This means that the share has risen by five percentage points compared to the same period last year and is above the 50 percent mark for the first time for a full year.”

Germany’s renewables share was 46 percent in 2022. Both a decrease of overall electricity consumption and an increase in absolute renewables production – which rose six percent to an all-time high of 267 TWh – pushed up the share of renewable electricity.

Germany aims to have a renewable electricity share of 80 percent by 2030 and a largely decarbonised power supply by 2035. “The figures show that we are on the right track. Many people once thought that renewables would only account for a single-digit share of electricity consumption, but today we use more electricity from renewables than from conventional sources and have our sights firmly set on 100 percent renewables,” said BDEW head Kerstin Andreae, who called for the removal of bureaucratic hurdles that slow down the renewables roll-out.

CGTN Europe: “Sunny times ahead for German solar industry ”

The country’s environment agency UBA also said the targets were challenging. “According to current estimates, renewable electricity generation must increase to around 600 terawatt hours [by 2030] and thus more than double in order to cover the increasing demand for electrification in the heating and transport sectors,” UBA said.

ZSW and BDEW said the share of renewable electricity was particularly high in July (59%), May (57%) and October and November (55% each). In June, electricity generation from photovoltaics reached a new all-time record of 9.8 terawatt-hours (TWh), while electricity generation from onshore wind energy reached a new record of 113.5 TWh for the year as a whole, they added.

Solar and wind energy contributed around 75 percent of Germany’s renewable electricity, with the remainder covered by biomass, hydropower, and a small share of geothermal plants.

Graph shows renewables share in gross power consumption 1990-2023. Graph: CLEW 2023:

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

1. The solar industry in the US increased new installations by 55% over the previous year, installing 33 gigawatts of new solar capacity, according to Wood McKenzie. Solar accounted for about half of new electricity generating capacity put in this year. According to Maria Virginia Olano at Canary Media, in 2022 only 21 gigawatts of new solar had been installed. In total, the US has 161 gigawatts of solar now, which generates 5% of the country’s electricity. She points out that half the total US solar capacity has been put in since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. This is an industry newly on a roll. In 25 years the bulk of US electricity is likely to come from this source.

2. Solar panel prices in the US fell 15% in 2023. The price of solar panels in China, however, fell 40%. The good news is that solar panel prices continue to fall, and there is room for substantial increases in efficiency. Translation: Solar will get cheaper and will generate even more power. The Energy Information Administration predicts that solar in the US will be up another 39% next year.

3. Pattern Energy raised $11 billion in funding for its massive wind farm in New Mexico, the largest such project in the northern hemisphere. The financing will allow the completion of the 3-gigawatt SunZia wind facility, as well as of a high density transmission wire that will bring the electricity to Phoenix and Tucson. The clean electricity thus generated will power 2.6 million households. New Mexico has nearly a million households and Arizona has about 7 million. In one of my most viral postings, I pointed out that New Mexico is poised to become the Saudi Arabia of wind. Overall, the US added 8 to 9 gigawatts of new wind capacity in 2023, considered a slowing of installations. But because of the Inflation Reduction Act, a lot of new projects were begun this year that will come to fruition in 18 months or so.

4. At COP28 the US pledged to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and to double energy efficiency. Since the US more than tripled its renewables in the past decade, this seems a plausible goal, especially since the cost of solar panels continues to plummet.

5. Wind and solar are expected to account for 16 percent of US electricity generation in 2023, up from 14 percent the previous year.

Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash

6. The EIA projects that wind and solar combined will generate more electricity than coal in 2024 in the US for the first time in history. Coal is the dirtiest and most dangerous fossil fuel, emitting twice the carbon when burned of fossil gas, and polishing it off is essential to saving the planet.

7. Americans bought a million electric vehicles in 2023 according to AP, an unimaginable number only a couple of years ago. The way is not smooth, in part because of the protectionist quirks Biden built into the IRA’s tax rebates for electric vehicles, and sales started flagging later in the year. Many Americans are pairing their EVs with rooftop solar installations. If you have such a set-up and charge the car during the day, you are driving on free sunshine. Of 131 million households in the US, 4.5 million have rooftop solar. The combination is unbeatable, and will certainly burgeon.

There is no room for complacency. The US is on track only to achieve between 66% and 75% of its 2030 emissions reduction goals, even with the IRA. Unless it does a 100% we are in danger of tipping the world over into climate chaos. But the picture is much brighter now than it was in 2015, or in the era of the odious Trump. We need to elect Democrats across the board if we’re going to make it. The task is too big for any institution but government, and the Republican Party’s platform is to fart out enough carbon to doom the planet.

Still, the incredible advances of solar power in the US this year, and the projections for next, are a source of optimism.

There are many milestones to pass in the transition from a high to low-carbon sustainable energy system. There is the first hour without coal, or oil, or gas generation (or all of them together) and the point when the last coal, oil or gas power plant (or all of them together) are finally retired.

Another milestone that feels important is the first year when renewables generate more electricity than fossil fuels. For the past three months we have been tracking the data for Great Britain (not Northern Ireland, which shares an electricity grid with the Republic of Ireland) and we believe it is on track to pass this milestone in 2023, but it will be very close.

Using the broadest definition, renewables actually first overtook fossil fuels in the odd, COVID-affected year of 2020 (although not in the subsequent years of 2021 and 2022). However, that includes 5% or so of Britain’s electricity that is generated through “biomass” plants (which burn wood pellets, often imported from forests in America).

Trees can of course be regrown, so biomass counts as renewable. But the industry has its critics and it’s not globally scalable in the same way as the “weather-dependent” renewables: wind, solar and to a certain degree hydro power.

When we use this narrower, weather-dependent definition that is more appropriate for a global transition, then there is a very good chance these renewables will overtake fossil fuels for the first time ever in 2023. Once this milestone has been passed, we also think it is unlikely (though not impossible) that gas and coal will ever again generate more of Britain’s electricity than wind, solar and hydro over a full year.

Whether Britain passes the milestone in 2023 will come down to the final few days of the year (from here on we’ll use “renewables” to refer to the tighter, biomass-excluding definition).

The chart above can be used to track progress and will update with the latest data each day. The lines show the running total of the difference between how much electricity has been generated by renewables and fossil fuels.

When the line is increasing, this shows more renewables than fossil fuels for that period. The horizontal axis shows the day of the year, so, if at any point the line is above the zero axis, that indicates that the year so far has had more renewable than fossil fuel generation. If the red line ends the year above zero, then Britain will have achieved the milestone.

Image by Roman Grac from Pixabay

(One caveat is that we know from the official statistics published later that there are some differences from “missing” and estimates for embedded generation; this typically only accounts for around 1%-2% of the final total.)

It depends on the weather

As we write this, with ten days of data left in 2023, renewables are very slightly ahead (by just over 1000 GWh – about the same level as a peak day of electrical demand). However if they are to stay ahead it will depend on the weather – especially the wind.

The reasoning here is that Britain uses less electricity over the holiday period due to less industrial and commercial demand. As wind power is clean and has become cheaper, it tends to be used first, meaning when demand is low or it is sufficiently windy there is less need to generate electricity with fossil fuels.

There are nuances around this such as where the generation is located, and the amount of electricity imported from other countries, but the general principle of renewables taking market share away from fossil fuels is a factor of Britain’s electrical market.

An important area to also highlight is the continued drop in electrical demand. 2023 is on track to have a lower demand than 2022, which itself was lower than the COVID-impacted year of 2020 (against our predictions) due to record prices. The drop in electrical demand means that additional generation was not needed, much of it inevitably from fossil fuels.

Additional milestone also likely to be passed

However 2023 could be the first year where renewable generation exceeds domestic electricity demand (homes comprise 36% of total electrical demand). This means the annual electricity generated by Britain’s wind turbines, solar panels and hydro resource will now be greater than that consumed over the year by its 29 million households.

The above bar chart demonstrates the trend towards this point since 2009. In the first half of 2023, renewable output was less than domestic electrical demand by 1.5 TWh (1500 GWh), but strong renewable performance since then means it is likely to end the year with total generation in excess of household demand.

If either of the milestones described here do not happen for 2023, then they will almost certainly occur in 2024, during which another 1.7 GW of offshore wind capacity will begin generating and Britain’s last coal-fired power station is scheduled to cease producing electricity altogether.

Grant Wilson, Associate Professor, Energy Systems and Data Group, Birmingham Energy Institute, University of Birmingham; Joseph Day, Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Energy Systems and Data Group, University of Birmingham, and Katarina Pegg, PhD Student, Energy Systems and Data Group, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – German industry is increasingly investing in climate protection measures, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) reported just before the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28), which kicked off on 30 November.

Climate protection investments in the manufacturing sector have increased by 74.3 percent over a decade. In 2021, manufacturers spent some 4.15 billion euros on systems to avoid emissions or use resources more sparingly, up from 2.38 billion in 2011. Legal regulations and government funding have contributed to the increase in investments, Destatis notes.

Nearly 50 percent of climate protection investments in 2021 — 2.04 billion euros [$2.22 bn.] — went to renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and photovoltaic systems.

Image by Melanie from Pixabay

Companies invested a further 1.63 billion euros ($1.77 bn) (39.2%) in increasing energy efficiency and energy saving, such as thermal insulation of buildings or systems with combined heat and power. The manufacturing and service sectors generated sales of 53 billion euros with climate protection products in 2021 – an 11.9 percent increase compared to the previous year.

The solar sector saw the biggest sales increase in 2021 with a 24 percent boost (920 million euros) for a total of 4.8 billion euros. From 2011 to 2021, sales of climate protection products – such a solar PV arrays and insulation – rose 16 percent. Nearly 55 percent of sales, or 28.6 billion euros, came from measures to increase energy efficiency in 2021.

Thermal insulation of buildings contributed substantially, generating almost 10.2 billion euros [$11.1 bn.] in sales, while the manufacture and installation of wind turbines resulted in revenue of 11.8 billion euros [$12.8 bn.].

Meanwhile, the number of employees in “green jobs,” increased by 44 percent between 2011 and 2021.

German development bank KfW recently reported that climate protection investments by domestic companies in 2022 rose by 18 percent in real terms to 72 billion euros [$78.4 bn.].

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( Clean Energy Wire ) – The past decade has seen a sharp drop in prices for clean technologies, which means models identifying efficient pathways to reduce emissions could become subject to change.

Plummeting prices for solar and wind power generation, battery storage or heat pumps could make the energy transition take effect faster than previously expected, according to a report by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC).

“The fight against global warming remains an enormous political challenge – but at least new, cheaper ways are opening up,” the MCC said. During the past decade, solar power generation has become 87 percent and battery storage 85 percent cheaper, according to the institute.

While scenarios compatible with the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C are optimistic regarding the deployment of technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), they don’t reflect the rates of technological learning and upscaling in renewables in the past decade, the researchers wrote.

There is now evidence “that fossil-free alternatives could become a game changer instead,” according to the MCC.

“Greenhouse gas emissions are higher than ever, the measures taken so far are too weak, but in this politically muddled situation, technological progress provides a ray of hope,” report co-author Jan Minx said.

New decarbonisation models could show that, in the foreseeable future, the global energy transition might be less costly than previously assumed and even help to save costs, Minx added.

The models informing pathways to reduce emissions “would benefit from updated cost assumptions . . . higher resolution on sector coupling, and an overall consideration of demand-side solutions,” the authors concluded.

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”

Via Clean Energy Wire

(The Conversation) – Just over a year since US President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law, it’s becoming clear this strangely named piece of legislation could have a powerful impact in spurring the global transition to net zero emissions by 2050.

But the vast amount of investment unleashed by the IRA has raised tensions with some of the United States’ closest allies, and creates risks, as well as opportunities, for Australia’s transition to clean energy sources.

In his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised to commit the US to net zero by 2050, and to spend US$2 trillion to get there – the biggest investment in manufacturing since World War II. Biden is delivering on those promises.

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included about $100 billion for electric vehicles and for speeding the electricity grid’s transition to clean energy sources.

The IRA changes the landscape

Passage of the IRA, in August 2022, ensured a swathe of green technologies would benefit from tax credits, loans, customer rebates and other incentives.

The original announcement estimated that uncapped subsidies over ten years would be US$369 billion, but Goldman Sachs Research now estimates that total subsidies could reach US$1.2 trillion and attract US$3 trillion investment by industry. That’s trillion, not billion.

Already, 272 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing projects in the US, including 91 in batteries, 65 in electric vehicles and 84 in wind and solar power, have been announced. These projects are estimated to create 170,000 jobs, predominantly in Republican-led states.

The IRA is all carrot, no stick. It contains no carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes. Instead, tax credits for capital expenditure and production costs encourage companies to invest in solar, wind, hydrogen, batteries, electric vehicles and other zero emissions technologies.

This approach is shifting the debate on the best way to reach net zero emissions. To free-market economists who ask why government should invest in private sector industries, the answer is that the green energy transition is not natural. Renewable energy would never have advanced without Germany subsidising solar and Denmark subsidising wind.

Subsidies and mandates are also crucial in explaining why, last year, Chinese vehicle manufacturers produced 64% of the global total of 10.5 million electric vehicle sales, and deployed about half of the global capacity additions in solar and wind power.

Industrial policy to protect the climate

The IRA is America’s response. More than climate policy, it is industrial policy, replete with made-in-America provisions. Companies are more likely to obtain tax credits if they employ unionised labour, train apprentices and set up shop in states that are transitioning out of fossil fuels.

Consumers will earn a $7,500 federal tax credit on an electric car only if that car is assembled and at least half the battery made in America. Similarly, wind and solar projects will earn tax credits only if half of their manufactured components are made in America.

These policies were made with China in mind. Both main US parties agree the US must reduce its dependence on sourcing minerals and products from China, and move towards a new form of “strategic economic nationalism”.

Yet while America’s strongest allies are also alarmed by the challenge from China, they are disturbed by aspects of the IRA. They fear that to benefit from its subsidies, their own clean energy companies might pack up shop and establish plants in the US.

The European Union, for example, has praised the IRA’s overall approach, but fiercely criticised its made-in-America provisions. French President Emmanuel Macron called the Act “super aggressive” toward European companies. European leaders say the IRA violates trade rules by discriminating against imported products, and could “trigger a harmful global subsidy race to the bottom on key technologies and inputs for the green transition.”

Yet even as it criticises the US, the EU has responded to the IRA by relaxing its rules and allowing individual states to provide direct support to clean energy companies to stop them taking their projects to the US.

Canada, worried about investment flowing south to benefit from the IRA even though its free trade agreement with the US should give its companies access to the subsidies, has also announced tax credits and programs to boost clean energy production. Japan and South Korea have announced similar programs.

Why the IRA challenges Australia

In Australia, before the IRA was legislated, the Morrison government provided a A$1.25 billion loan to Iluka Resources to fund construction of an integrated rare-earths refinery in Western Australia. The refinery will produce separated rare earth oxide products that are used in permanent magnets in electric vehicles, clean energy generation and defence.

But Australia risks being left behind in the race to build clean energy industries. The US could so heavily subsidise green hydrogen production that our own planned industry – seen as a foundation of our aspiration to be a clean energy superpower – will be uncompetitive, leading our aspiring manufacturers to set up shop in the US.

The IRA, however, brings Australia many potential benefits. The US wants to source the raw and refined materials it needs from countries, such as Australia, with which it has a free trade agreement. To respond to this interest, Australian industry, transport and mining must have access to low-emissions electricity.

The US will be an essential market for our rare earths such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, used to make the powerful permanent magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors. Australia can also build new industrial processes and supply chains so that we earn more from decarbonised metallic iron, aluminium and nitrogenous fertiliser. We can ship our renewable energy in the form of hydrogen and ammonia.

In this race, Australia’s friendship with the US and volatile relationship with China could be decisive. The IRA does not spell out the concept of friend-shoring but nevertheless it seeks “to onshore and friend-shore the electric vehicle supply chain, to capture the benefits of a new supply chain and reduce entanglement with China,” according to the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The IRA denies electric vehicle tax credits when any component or critical mineral in the vehicle is sourced from China or any “foreign entity of concern.”

A clean energy trade war is just one of the potential obstacles that could prevent the full benefits of the IRA being realised. Many communities in the US and Australia are resisting the installation of new transmission lines, wind farms and other clean energy infrastructure, and these objections are often on environmental grounds – the so-called Greens’ Dilemma. And a win for Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election could reverse American climate policy.

Yet on balance, the IRA can only be good for getting to net zero. It brings the US in from the climate wilderness to be a leader in emissions reduction, helping to drive new technologies and lower costs that will benefit not only America but the world.

Alan Finkel, Chair of ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Biotechnology, The University of Queensland

This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.