Limiting climate change requires quadrupling renewables

To tackle climate change, 60% of the world’s vehicles must be electric by 2030.

Meeting the international community’s goals of limiting climate change requires, among other things, quadrupling the annual rate of increase in solar and wind electricity deployment by 2030.

This is one of 25 recommendations included in the first official assessment report commissioned by the 45 countries that committed at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 to make clean technologies the most affordable, accessible and attractive option in the main carbon dioxide (CO) emitting sectors by the beginning of the next decade.₂).

In the past decade, renewable electricity generation capacity increased by 130%, while non-renewable sources rose by 24%. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) and the UN High-Level Champions for Climate Change, who authored the report, believe that by 2030 the world needs to incorporate an additional 630 gigawatts of solar and 30 gigawatts of wind.

Increase 8% by 2022

According to their calculations, renewable capacities will rise by 8% this year to 300 gigawatts, which in total is equivalent to what is needed to supply about 225 million homes.

Another of the main recommendations addressed to the leaders participating in the Global Action Forum for Clean Energy to be held in the US city of Pittsburgh this Wednesday and Thursday is to set deadlines for the commercialization of new vehicles that emit_CO2.

Specifically, its proposal is not to allow the sale of new cars and vans with thermal engines from 2035 (when it is already planned to impose this obligation in the European Union) and also to force that from 2040 only zero-emission trucks go on the market.

A record 6.6 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide last year, twice as many as in 2020. They represented around 9% of the total in the world.

60% of electric vehicles by 2030

To meet the international targets of global warming limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, that market share would have to be raised to 60% by 2030, which would require a tenfold increase in charging infrastructures for electric vehicles.

The production of so-called green hydrogen (generated with renewable sources) and hydrogen with low CO2 emissions would have to rise from less than 1 million tons in 2020 to about 150 million in 2030.

In the steel industry, the priority would be to move from 1 million tonnes of low-carbon steel per year today to around 100 million tonnes by the start of the next decade.

That would imply a 30% reduction in emissions intensity. The authors of the study also set a series of targets for the agricultural sector, which accounts for about 20% of global emissions that cause climate warming.

In that case, it would be about increasing yields and at the same time stopping the expansion of cropland and grazing land to stop deforestation.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol insisted that “only by accelerating the transition to sustainable clean energy” can “energy security” be achieved, at a time when the world is experiencing “the first truly global energy crisis”.

International cooperation for energy transition

Birol stressed the importance of international cooperation that will allow this transition to be “faster, cheaper and easier for everyone.” “Without that collaboration, the transition to net-zero emissions will be much more complicated and could be delayed by decades.”

According to the bodies involved in this study, international cooperation can contribute to the costs of some clean technologies falling by 18% by 2030.

In addition, the energy transition to align with the objective of global warming limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius would create about 85 million new jobs on that horizon from 2019, which would compensate for the 12 million jobs that would disappear by that same process.

Source: El Tiempo