COP28 'triple renewables' target needs teeth not just talk, warn green power leaders

Global alignment around a proposed tripling of renewables capacity means the UN climate summit, which begins today in Dubai, has been described by green energy leaders as a “once in a generation” opportunity, but they qualified this with a warning that effective action requires inclusion into a final COP28 agreement with teeth.

The pledge to triple renewables capacity by 2030, formally proposed by COP28 president Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, has reportedly been signed by more than 100 countries and 300 corporate or institutional entities.

“That’s great to see and it sends such a strong signal about the support for renewables....Renewables are now mature, and they are cost competitive in all markets around the world. We know the policies that work and we can implement them,” said Bruce Douglas, head of the Global Renewables Alliance, organiser of an online discussion about the renewables outlook at COP28.

However, Douglas warned that meeting a global target of tripling renewables capacity to get to 11TW will require “something like 3GW a day to be built and connected by 2030".

“We desperately need action at the country level in order to meet the tripling target and also the doubling of energy efficiency rates,” he said.

Douglas said COP28's Global Stocktake will have to face up to the fact that the national determined contributions of countries are falling far short of what is needed to meet global warming targets.

“We do need course correction to get back on track, that's important," said Douglas, who described a doubling in fossil fuel investments by G20 nations over the last year as "heading dramatically in the wrong direction."

The GRA has proposed that five enablers for renewables be addressed at COP28, including permitting which, Douglas said too often takes longer than actually building a wind farm, along with grid infrastructure and connections.

Access to low cost capital, especially in developing economies, and strong, diverse supply chains were also listed.

The final enabler, accountability, represents a new challenge. "A pledge is a nice signal but we we need some sort of monitoring and review process to be created afterwards," Douglas said.

"Countries will need to update their NDCs and increase their national targets for this tripling to get done. So my last call is for countries to take this seriously and move the pledge into the negotiating text, so we get some sort of legal basis and accountability going forward."

'Ready and on track'

Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council described COP28 as a momentous event for the renewables industry, because of the common message on the tripling of renewables.

"I can tell you that solar photovoltaics is absolutely ready and on track to deliver on its path. ... currently just like wind, we are at one terawatt of total installed capacity. And we think if given the right policy conditions, given the right grid connections and grid capacity, given the right finance, we could be at eight terawatts by 2030," she said.

Describing her own high hopes for Dubai to be the "crowning glory" for a Triple-Up campaign carried through major diplomatic summits this year, Dunlop added: "We need to see this in the formal negotiated outcome of this COP together with a process to finance this, and to then follow up on it and review it and implement it.

"But the market signal that that is going to send to the global financial market.. and to the global energy industry, in terms of what it should be investing in, is going to be absolutely tremendous."

Hydrogen's greenwashing concern

Jonas Moberg, CEO, of Green Hydrogen Organization said aspirations already expressed prior to COP28 pointed to a renewables grid that accounts for at least half of final energy use, and batteries accounting for 'perhaps 20%'.

He said a green hydrogen economy could fill the gap for the “outer circle of the future energy mix”, the projections for which range between 8% and 24%

“We need governments to be crystal clear that that hydrogen needs to be low carbon, genuine low carbon,” he said arguing that blue hydrogen needs to be carefully defined in order to avoid potential greenwashing.

“Almost all hydrogen used today is so called grey, essentially a free byproduct from oil and gas refining that comes with between 12 and 15 kilos of greenhouse gas emissions per kilo of hydrogen, Moberg said

“You can of course, turn that into so called blue hydrogen, if you store the carbon and do it well. ... The problem is that there are very few that are keen to define blue and almost all blue is sort of a poor quality with many kilos of greenhouse gas emissions per kilo of hydrogen.

“So having a definition, a clear understanding a standard for what is blue hydrogen, is actually one of the most important things for green hydrogen. Because if if you start to sell blue with low capture rate, and call that clean hydrogen or low carbon hydrogen, that makes it harder to charge for real renewable green hydrogen."

Supply chain

The wind sector reached an estimated 1TW of capacity earlier this year, but is falling short of the kind of ambitions being expressed by those arriving at COP28.

"We'll probably reach 2TW by the end of 2030, but we need to be on a tripling trajectory, not a doubling trajectory. So there's there's a lot to be done, said Ben Backwell, CEO of the Global Wind Energy Council.

"The supply chain has been one of the challenges, I know, we're going to need an industry that's literally three or four times bigger by the end of this decade, and eight to 10 times bigger by 2050, to get to net zero goals. There's a huge amount of investment that needs to go into industrial capacity and the supply chain, but the condition in many regions has not been attractive enough for those investments to happen," he said.

Backwell and other industry representatives said they were encouraged by the "game-changing" US Inflation Reduction Act and breathtaking growth in renewables capacity in China.

For the rest of the world to keep up with renewables development in China the renewables leaders suggested that enablers, such as those proposed by the GRA needed to become part of the discussion.

"We in the solar PV industry and what we need is grid, grid, grid! We need capacity on the grid, we need all the different flexibility in terms of energy supply and demand that we can garner we need, we need cross border grid interconnections," said Dunlop.

"And we need to find minutes especially in those global south developing countries where there are so many, almost a billion people who still do not have access to any electricity.