The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) announced on Tuesday that eight renewable energy methodologies, which cover about a third of the carbon credits available on the voluntary market, cannot use its “Core Carbon Principles” (CCP) seal of approval.

The ICVCM, an independent watchdog, aims to address widespread concerns over the quality of carbon credits after many projects have been accused of overstating their climate and societal benefits. It is assessing groups of offsetting projects to determine whether they comply with the CCP criteria, which are designed to identify and encourage high-integrity carbon credits that meet requirements on governance, emissions reduction and sustainable development.

The body said existing standards are not strict enough on judging whether renewable energy projects need the funding generated by selling carbon offsets in order to go ahead – a concept known as “additionality”. But it emphasised that renewables like solar, wind and hydropower are key to tackling climate change and carbon credits “still have a role to play” in financing them.

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Since the eight methodologies were designed as long as 20 years ago, the cost of renewables has collapsed, and their profitability in many parts of the world has rocketed, meaning they are more likely to make money without needing extra revenue from selling carbon offsets.

The ICVCM said that “for several years, carbon market experts have noted concerns about the additionality of many renewable energy activities and the difficulties in transparently demonstrating the additionality of these activities approved under existing methodologies”.

Major carbon-credit registries like Verra and Gold Standard stopped accepting new grid-connected projects in 2019, with the exception of those located in least-developed countries (LDCs).

But pre-existing renewable energy activities continue to generate a sizeable chunk of all the offsets available on the registries.

According to a recent analysis by Carbon Market Watch, over 280 million renewable energy credits are available in the voluntary carbon market. If companies and individuals used all those credits, that would compensate on paper for emissions equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide Thailand released into the atmosphere last year.

Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert at Carbon Market Watch, called the ICVCM’s decision “a positive step”. “It sends a clear message to tackle the issue of the many low-quality credits still in circulation and undermining the market,” he told Climate Home.

Despite long being written off as largely worthless by climate experts, renewable energy credits are still popular among corporate buyers.

Fossil fuel majors like Shell and Total, automakers and cruise operators were among the biggest purchasers of renewable energy credits over the last 12 months, an analysis of Verra’s database shows.

In one transaction last year, German carmaker Audi used nearly 100,000 carbon credits generated in 2021 from an Indian solar project to claim that its handover of electric vehicles in Europe and the United States was “CO2 neutral” despite the emissions involved in producing them.

Japanese parcel delivery service Yamato Transport Company and public entities like Australia’s Brisbane City Council and Western Sydney University also relied on renewable offsets to claim carbon neutrality in 2023.

A spokesperson for Audi told Climate Home: “We ourselves are not only dependent on the standards established in the market but depend on them being viewed critically too”, adding that the company is “convinced that constructive criticism leads to higher-quality projects and general transparency”.

The spokesperson said the automaker also increasingly relies on “on-site inspections, thorough due diligence and audit processes” and wants “to act independently of external providers in the medium term”. It founded a joint venture with ClimatePartner in 2022 to develop its own carbon offset projects.

Because of earlier concerns about whether carbon offsets generated by renewable energy deliver the emissions reductions they claim, their price has been falling over the last two years.

According to data provider MSCI, the average price is just $2 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced – less than half the price of offsets derived from projects aiming to protect forests, tackle methane emissions or promote energy efficiency. Renewable energy credits are likely to see further falls in price after the ICVCM’s rejection.

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But Amy Merrill, CEO of the ICVCM, left the door open to better renewables methodologies obtaining CCP approval. She called on carbon crediting programmes to develop methodologies “that better reflect the rapidly changing and variable circumstances around renewable energy deployment”.

“While renewable energy costs have fallen dramatically around the globe over the past decade,” she said, “they have not fallen evenly across all countries and high up-front expenses and other barriers mean that there are still many places where it is difficult to deploy renewable capacity.”

The cost of renewables is particularly high in remote rural parts of developing countries without access to the electricity grid, on islands with small populations and in areas where the authorities are hostile to renewable energy for ideological reasons, particularly in parts of the US. Methodologies enabling projects in these places would have the best case to get CCP approval, market experts told Climate Home.

IPCC’s input into key UN climate review at risk as countries clash over timeline

Verra has announced that it will revise some of its additionality requirements “to address the deficiencies noted by the ICVCM”.

The registry plans to submit its new rulebook to the watchdog and give existing projects the possibility of updating their quantification of credits accordingly. “This is part of our commitment to providing a path for all VCS [voluntary carbon standard] projects that wish pursue a path to CCP labelling,” Verra said in a statement.

A Gold Standard spokesperson said ICVCM’s rejection of the methodologies was “ambiguous and potentially harmful to high-quality renewable energy carbon credits on the market today” as different regions across the world still face various financial and technical barriers making carbon finance necessary.

They added that Gold Standard would consider the ICVCM assessment framework among other inputs in its next review of relevant methodologies.

The ICVCM’s negative assessment of existing renewable energy credits could also have repercussions for the new United Nations carbon mechanism currently under development.

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Renewable energy projects make up four-fifths of all projects seeking a transfer from the old Kyoto-era Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) into the new market system being set up under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, Climate Home revealed last January.

The projects need formal authorisation to proceed from the countries where their activities are located.

Carbon Market Watch’s Wyburd said ICVCM’s rejection of the renewable energy methodologies “will hopefully send a few shock waves” to the countries having to make those decisions. “Given their profound shortcomings, these credits should not be given a new lease of life under the future UN mechanism,” he added.

At the same time, the ICVCM approved other methodologies to capture methane from landfills and to detect and repair methane leaks in the gas industry. That means 3.6% of unretired carbon credits have now been approved to use the CCP label.

Shell, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Western Sydney University and Aviva did not respond to a request for comment on the impact of the ICVCM’s renewables decision. Total declined to comment.

The article was updated on 9/8 to add a comment received from Audi after publication.

(Reporting by Joe Lo and Matteo Civillini, editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Renewable-energy carbon credits rejected by high-integrity scheme appeared first on Climate Home News.

In question is a proposed development called the Energy Transition Zone (ETZ), which is intended to bring in more renewable energy investments as the city tries to cut its dependence on the oil and gas industry that has defined it for half a century. 

As the UK’s new Labour government promises not to issue any more oil and gas licences, the future of the sector is in doubt and the company behind the ETZ says it wants to “protect and create as many jobs as possible” in the region through investing in clean energy.

But the ETZ has received significant pushback from community groups in the part of Aberdeen it is destined for. That’s because the proposed development, as currently designed, would pave over about a third of St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, the only public green space in one of Scotland’s most neglected urban areas.

The battle over St Fittick’s Park illustrates the friction that is emerging more frequently around the world as the ramp-up of clean energy infrastructure changes communities. Climate Home has reported on these tensions provoked by Mexico’s wind farms, Namibia’s desert hydrogen zone, Indonesia’s nickel mines and Germany’s Tesla gigafactory.

Just transition?

The ETZ is backed by fossil fuel giants BP, Shell and local billionaire Ian Wood, whose Wood Group made its money providing engineering and consulting services to the oil and gas industry.

The plan is to create campuses focused on hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, offshore wind, and skills development in an area initially the size of 50 football pitches, but expanding as private investment grows. 

To this end, ETZ Ltd – the company set up to build and run the zone – will receive up to £80m ($103m) from the UK and Scottish governments. Announcing some of that funding in 2021, the Scottish government’s then net zero, energy and transport secretary Michael Matheson said “urgent, collective action is required in order to ensure a just transition to a net-zero economy”, adding “Scotland can show the rest of the world how it’s done”.

But many Scottish climate campaigners don’t see this as a just transition. About 100 of them travelled to St. Fittick’s Park last week to hold a five-day “Climate Camp” in a clearing that would become part of the ETZ.

One camper, who did not want to give her name, told Climate Home that the energy transition should not “exacerbate existing inequalities, but try to redress existing inequalities”. A just transition, she said, must protect both workers in the fossil fuel industry and community green spaces.

Another protestor who did not want to giver her full name is Torry resident Chris. She said “the consultation process was flawed”. Not many people participated to start with, and some stopped going to meetings because “they were disillusioned with the way that good ideas were co-opted and then used to justify the expansion of the industrial area into the park”, she added.

Green MSP Maggie Chapman at the Climate Camp on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Local Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) Maggie Chapman, from the Scottish Green Party, agreed, adding “the best transition zone plan in the world will fail” if it is done to a community rather than with meaningful input from them.

Another protesting resident, David Parks, said wealthier parts of the city would not have been disregarded in the same way. “You wouldn’t see this in Old Aberdeen and Rosemount,” he said. “[Torry] is just kind of the dumping ground for all these projects that you wouldn’t get off with anywhere else.”

Industrial developments have encroached on the old fishing town of Torry for decades. Today, residents are hemmed in by an industrial harbour, roads and a railway and live alongside a waste-to-energy incinerator, a sewage plant, and a covered landfill. 

David Parks at the Climate Camp in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Some of the activists also take issue with the emphasis the ETZ places on hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, which they see as “greenwashing”. 

Hydrogen is a fuel that can be made without producing greenhouse gas emissions, and used to decarbonise industries like steel-making which are difficult to clean up.

But a Climate Camp spokesperson told Climate Home that, “given the industry’s tendencies” and the fact that 99% of hydrogen is currently made using fossil fuels, they assume it will be produced in a polluting way at the ETZ.

Backers respond

ETZ Ltd told Climate Home in a statement that the project is committed to collaborating with the local community, particularly on efforts to refurbish what would be the remainder of the park. 

While the ETZ’s opponents argue there are existing industrial brownfield sites in the area that could be used instead of the park, the company said the area in St. Fittick’s Park next to the port is essential for the development to draw in substantial investment for renewables and for Aberdeen to compete in a new energy market.

Many brownfield sites are already planned for use by the ETZ, and would not provide the kind of logistical access needed for the planned projects, they added.

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“Almost all other ports in Scotland are making similar investments, and we simply don’t want Aberdeen to miss out on the opportunity to position itself as a globally recognised hub for offshore renewables and the significant job benefits this will bring,” said the statement.

The company added that the original plans for use of the park had been considerably reduced and the new master plan includes several measures to revitalise parts of the park and boost public access. It includes several parklets, a boardwalk, enhanced wetlands and a skate and BMX bike park.

While the oil industry’s backing has raised campaigners’ eyebrows, ETZ Ltd said the industry’s involvement is key to ensuring the development of skills and jobs central to the ETZ’s goals. 

The section of St. Fittick’s Park  up for development was rezoned in 2022 by the Aberdeen City council in order to allow industrial use of the land. Campaigners have challenged that decision and Scotland’s highest civil court will issue a judicial review later this month.

“You can’t just switch it off”

The ETZ dispute is just one example of efforts across Scotland to navigate the planned shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Tools to support a transitioning workforce have stalled. An offshore skills passport is meant to streamline and unify the certification process for both the fossil fuel and renewable offshore industries, to enable workers to go more easily from one sector to the other. But it was delayed for years before a “roadmap to a prototype” was released in May this year.

“The people can see a future, but it’s not happening – and they can see the current reality, which is [fossil fuels] declining, and that makes it very challenging,” said Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. 

He said the focus needs to be on manufacturing and the supply chain, as that supports about 90% of employment in renewables such as solar and wind power. “If you don’t get investment, you don’t get activity, you don’t get the jobs,” he added.

That’s the key concern for Alec Wiseman, who spoke to Climate Home while walking his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on Saturday. He seemed mostly unbothered by the climate camp, but complained it meant he couldn’t let his dog off leash. 

Alec Wiseman walks his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

A Torry resident, Wiseman worked offshore for 25 years. He said he wants the ETZ to leave the park alone – and he also wants the overall energy transition to slow down until there is a clear plan.

“The government needs to sit down with the oil companies and figure out something proper” for both the transition and the ETZ, he said, expressing scepticism about employment in wind energy. Overall, operating wind farms, once they’re up and running, does not require as many skilled workers as operating an oil and gas field. “You can’t just switch it off [the oil and gas],” he said.

Lack of planning is what worries Jake Molloy, the recently-retired regional head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union (RMT). Before leading the union, Molloy spent 17 years working offshore, and now sits on Scotland’s Just Transition Commission. He has spent years advocating for a fair deal on behalf of workers and local communities.

“We need to do that value-sharing piece, that community-sharing piece, which was lost with oil and gas,” he said, referencing the privatisation of the industry in the 1980s. Right now, he says, communities that bear the brunt of the impact of oil and gas production don’t see the majority of the benefits – those flow to corporations. “If we allow that to happen again, we’re a million miles away from a just transition,” he warned.

UK court ruling provides ammo for anti-fossil fuel lawyers worldwide

Molloy also thinks the investment and jobs promised by the ETZ are not realistic, because previous changes to government policies caused too much whiplash, making investors shaky. However, he is curious about what will come from Labour’s announcement of Great British Energy, described as a “publicly-owned clean energy company” headquartered in Scotland.  He also hopes to see climate change addressed on a crisis footing, similar to the approach to the COVID pandemic.

There are indications of renewed momentum on renewable energy in the UK. The Labour government has already lifted an effective ban on onshore wind in England and brought together a net-zero task force led by the former head of the UK’s Climate Change Committee,  Chris Stark. 

“In the context of an unprecedented climate emergency,” the ETZ said in a statement, “there are widespread calls from government and industry for energy transition activities to be accelerated.”

But, for many, it is still too soon to know whether that shift will materialise, and be implemented in a just way.

“The opportunities are there,” said MSP Chapman. But, she added, “it requires political and social will to make it happen and that’s the big challenge.”

(Reporting by Hannah Chanatry; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, nearly 200 countries committed to tripling global renewable energy capacity – measured as the maximum generating capacity of sources like wind, solar and hydro – by 2030, in an effort to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

According to figures published on Thursday by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), renewables are the fastest-growing source of power worldwide, with new global renewable capacity in 2023 representing a record 14% increase from 2022.

But IRENA’s analysis found that even if renewables continue to be deployed at the current rate over the next seven years, the world will fall 13.5% short of the target to triple renewables to 11.2 terawatts.

A higher annual growth rate of at least 16.4% is required to reach the 2030 goal, IRENA said.

Renewable electricity generation by energy source

Chart courtesy of IRENA

IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera warned against complacency. “Renewables must grow at higher speed and scale,” he said in a statement, calling for concrete policy action and a massive mobilisation of finance.

The United Arab Emirates’ COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber called the report “a wake-up call for the entire world” and urged countries to add strong national energy targets to their updated national climate action plans (NDCs) due by early next year.

Geographical disparities

Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Alliance, a coalition of private-sector organisations working on renewable technologies, highlighted imbalances in the global picture of record renewables deployment.

“We shouldn’t be celebrating,” he said. “This growth is nowhere near enough and it’s not in the right places.

Africa saw only incremental growth of 3.5% in new renewables capacity last year compared with around 9% growth in Asia and North America, and 12% growth in South America.

And despite those higher increases in Asia and South America, data released last month by international policy group REN21 shows that less than 18% of renewables capacity added in 2023 was in Asia (excluding China), South America, Africa and the Middle East, despite these regions collectively representing nearly two-thirds of the global population.

A simmering conflict over one of Latin America’s biggest wind hubs confronts Mexico’s next president

Slow growth in Africa is failing to live up to the huge potential for renewables on the continent, whose leaders last year pledged to scale up renewables more than five-fold by 2030, to 300 gigawatts.

“The justice piece is huge and too often overlooked,” Douglas said, adding that finance is “by far” the biggest challenge to getting renewables off the ground in the Global South.

Africa, for example, has received less than 2% of global investments in renewable energy over the past twenty years, according to IRENA.

“That’s not acceptable in terms of an equitable transition,” Douglas said, noting that when countries miss out on renewables financing, they are also missing out on the development benefits, jobs creation and improved access to affordable energy that clean energy can bring.

Finance not flowing

The scarcity of financing for renewables in developing countries is in large part due to investors being put off by the high borrowing costs and risk profiles of many such markets, Douglas said.

William Brent, chief marketing officer at Husk Power Systems, which installs and runs solar micro-grids in rural communities in Nigeria and Tanzania, explained: “Most sources of big capital in the West seem largely uninterested in Africa.”

“Despite being home to some of the fastest growing economies in the world, Africa is perceived as having a much higher risk profile and returns that cannot match the Americas, Asia or Europe,” Brent said.

New South African government fuels optimism for faster energy transition

Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council, a body that represents the solar industry, told Climate Home that financial incentives provided by the public sector could help de-risk renewables projects for private investors.

“We need to get MDBs (multilateral development banks) leaning into big renewables projects and taking on some of the risk, which can then attract private finance,” she said, adding that governments in all countries must also play their part in creating policy environments that support and incentivise investment.

Grids and permitting barriers

Grids and permitting for renewables projects also pose major practical challenges, particularly in developed countries.

According to REN21, the potential renewable capacity that is ‘stuck’ waiting to be connected to grids around the world is equivalent to three times the amount of wind and solar power installed in 2023.

For Dunlop, the solution to grid congestion is more storage – batteries for short-term storage and other technologies for longer-term storage, such as storing electricity as heat or pumping water uphill that can then be released to produce hydroelectricity.

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Complex planning processes can also mean it takes longer to get planning permission for projects, such as wind farms, than it does to build them – if they even get approval at all.

For Douglas, something as simple as hiring more staff to process project applications in grid and planning authorities could begin to unlock thousands of gigawatts of renewable power.

Energy efficiency overlooked

Although renewables are growing faster than any other energy source, companies and governments are boosting investments in fossil fuels at the same time.

The use of fossil fuels for electricity generation continues to grow, while renewables only provide 6.3% of the energy required for heat, which is mainly used in buildings and industrial operations.

Electricity generation by energy source

Chart courtesy of IRENA

“We are not moving fast enough to fully meet the staggering rise in energy demand, let alone replace existing fossil fuels,” said REN21 Executive Director Rana Adib in a statement on the group’s recent statistics.

Another – neglected – solution is energy efficiency, experts said. The Global Renewables Alliance is running a ‘double down, triple up’ campaign, which calls on countries not only to triple renewables by 2030, but also to double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency, to reduce emissions and help stem energy demand – another goal countries signed up to at COP28.

“We absolutely need that doubling of energy efficiency as well,” said Dunlop. “That isn’t discussed enough.”

(Reporting by Daisy Clague; editing by Megan Rowling)

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Claudia Sheinbaum will be sworn in as Mexico’s first female president on October 1 with a broad electoral mandate. Before entering politics, she was a scientist studying renewable energy, including the ongoing conflict over wind farms on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The tensions have spawned deadly violence, and lawsuits from Oaxaca City to Paris.

One of Mexico’s windiest areas, energy companies have flocked to the strip of land between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean since 2006, making it one of the most important locations for renewable energy in the world’s 13th largest country.

Supporters say projects like this are crucial for transitioning Mexico away from fossil fuels and creating green jobs based on renewable energy. Opponents are concerned about wind turbines harming migratory birds, land access, revenue sharing and – most importantly – problems related to Indigenous community consultations over the investments.

Bloody conflict

In several cases, anger sparked by the projects has turned bloody, including at least 15 killed in a dispute over the wind farms in 2020.

Today, more than 2,000 turbines cover the land, according to data from Amnesty International, leading to “dispossession” and violations of the “collective rights of Indigenous communities”, the rights charity says. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in the projects, mostly by European energy companies.

Anti-wind farm activist Guadalupe Ramirez poses for a picture inside her home in Union Hidalgo, Mexico. (Leon Pineda/Climate Home)

Guadalupe Ramirez is an Indigenous Zapotec farmer who grows pumpkins and corn on a communal plot in the town of Union Hidalgo, a hub for wind energy.  She told Climate Home that “at first, they (wind companies) said they would just take a little piece of the land but they ended up destroying a big piece”.

“The companies started dividing families,” said Ramirez, who also complained about local environmental disruption from the projects. “We were very mad about this. I have hope with Sheinbaum.”

Ramirez expects the new president and former Mexico City mayor may have some unique insights on the problems her community faces. The academic turned politician co-authored a study analysing the unrest over wind projects in Oaxaca state.

“Although wind energy has numerous benefits, [the] concerns of the local people have to be taken seriously,” Sheinbaum wrote in 2016. “Far from the old-fashioned thinking of looking at social acceptance of renewable technologies as a NIMBY (not in my backyard) problem… information, consultation, and participation are key elements to the success and acceptance of wind farm projects.”

Sheinbaum celebrates her election victory in Mexico City on June 3, 2024. (REUTERS/Raquel Cunha TPX)

Those are exactly the elements Ramírez and many of her neighbours say were missing when they were first approached by energy companies back in 2009.

From there, the conflict escalated, said Carlos Lopez, who has experienced it firsthand. As an activist and community journalist in Union Hidalgo, he said he was threatened by masked men toting automatic weapons. He suspects they were hired by landowners or corrupt local politicians who wanted windmills erected in the area in order to receive rent from companies.

“They were killing people here,” Lopez told Climate Home, during an interview in a crumbling building which had been a community radio hub in Union Hidalgo as it underwent renovations.

In 2013, for instance, he said local fishermen and hunters were working in an area near Union Hidalgo coveted by wind investors, when they were accosted by masked men with heavy weapons. The fishermen then fled to the radio station, so Lopez could broadcast what was happening.

Deadly violence

“They [investors and their supporters in government] don’t respect the vision and culture of the original peoples of the Isthmus and want to push through these megaprojects,” said Lopez, sitting on a plastic chair  next to pictures of Che Guevara and posters for protest movements.

Posters are displayed inside a community radio station in Union Hidalgo (Picture: Leon Pineda)

Residents later set up barricades around six areas they considered sacred sites to stop encroachment by companies, he added, as threats continued and violence simmered.

In 2020, for instance, at least 15 people were killed in San Mateo del Mar, a coastal community in Oaxaca and a hotbed of Indigenous opposition to wind projects. Campaigners said they were stopped at a coronavirus checkpoint and shot at by supporters of a local mayor who backed the wind projects.

Last month, a French court allowed a civil case against the energy giant EDF to proceed after Indigenous people in Oaxaca argued the company failed to prevent violence and intimidation of wind farm opponents.

The violence has quietened down in the past few years due to national government policy changes and several court cases limiting new wind investment in the area, said local residents, including both critics and supporters of the projects.

Opposition is “political”

Not everyone in Union Hidalgo is opposed to the wind farms. On a rainy Saturday on his mango, avocado and guava farm, Dueter Toledo Ordonez told Climate Home: “These projects aren’t bothering me.”

“Some people don’t like it,” he said, with wind turbines in the distance, “but it’s all political … It’s clean energy; it’s the future.”

His father, who farms a nearby plot, had a contract with an energy company to install windmills on his land, added Ordonez, “but something happened with the politics and people said they were polluting” so the company stopped construction.

Deuter Toledo Ordonez tends to crops on his land in Union Hidalgo on June 8, 2024. (Photo: Leon Pineda)

Juqulia Elizabeth Lopez Ruiz, a spokesperson for the secretary of renewable energy for Juchitan district, told Climate Home the 28 wind parks in Tehuantepec bring a lot of jobs.

But she acknowledges some farmers aren’t happy about the projects. “To respond to these concerns: we have Indigenous assemblies where we decide the correct way to act with these wind farms,” she said.

As for concerns raised by wind farm opponents that some municipal lawmakers have been corrupted by energy companies, Lopez Ruiz said this was “just speculation”.

“At one point there was a candidate who had the support of the companies but he stopped being a candidate,” said the local government spokesperson, without naming the politician or discussing specifics of the case.

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Eduardo Martinez Noriegua is  an ecologist with the environmental group Ecological Forum in Juchitan, which has conducted some monitoring around the projects.

He said local anger over potential disruptions to migratory bird populations from wind farms, increased litter, and soil and water contamination from the oil lubricating the turbines is justified.

“I believe the government is being very permissive with the quality control for these operations,” he said.

Energy nationalisation

When Sheinbaum takes office, she will be leading a country that gets nearly 80% of its electricity from fossil fuels and is one of only two G20 countries without a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions.

Her key political backer – the popular current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) – invested heavily in new oil infrastructure, and asserted greater national control over the electricity market.

Mexico nationalised its oil industry in the 1930s, and AMLO has taken a similar approach to key materials for the energy transition, cancelling lithium mining concessions granted to foreign firms and creating a new national company to extract the critical mineral.

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The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), a state agency, was also given more control over power generation and distribution.

Sheinbaum has signalled she will continue her predecessor’s policies of state dominance in the energy sector.

Despite the government’s “quest to nationalise electricity generation”, Marilyn Christian, an advisor to the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law, an advocacy group, said the CFE doesn’t currently have the technology to rapidly increase renewable power production. Instead, as demand grows, it has turned to fossil fuels to generate electricity.

“Emissions in the electricity sector … have been on the rise since 2021 – that is bad news for our commitments on reducing carbon emissions,” she said. “We have many expectations with Claudia Sheinbaum. She has a solid academic background in environmental issues … [but] Claudia is also a politician. She has a clear position and ideology.”

Christian said she supports the idea of public control over electricity in principle, an effective option in some European countries, but it will only work if the CFE has the capacity to deliver.

Back in Union Hidalgo, most wind farm critics said their views wouldn’t change if a public institution like the CFE, rather than private companies, managed the projects, posing another complication for generating more renewable power.

But some of the changes recommended by Sheinbaum in her study on Oaxaca – including deeper consultation with communities living nearby and taking their concerns seriously – could help smooth things out, Ramirez said.

“We are not totally against this kind of green energy,” she said as hundreds of white windmills whirred in the distance. “It’s about how they do business.”

(Reporting by Chris Arsenault and Philippe Le Billon, editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The travel and reporting for this story were funded by a grant from the Global Reporting Centre and Social Sciences Humanities and Research Council.

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A few weeks ago, leaders of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) met in Antigua & Barbuda to discuss our next decade of action. This, for us, is the critical decade, no less. We have a few years to change the tides that are swallowing our islands and extinguishing our culture and our identity.  

Pacific Island communities are unwilling witnesses of the climate crisis – emitting minuscule amounts of greenhouse gases while bearing the brunt of the extreme and devastating consequences of the world’s failure to break its addiction to fossil fuels.  

During that meeting, we heard from some G7 leaders that they will support our priorities, that a fossil fuel phase-out and a just and equitable transition is necessary. But these cannot be hollow words. As the single greatest security threat for our region, it is time to implement your commitments or be held accountable for your lack of inaction by carrying the loss of our future generations on your shoulders. 

Just a few months ago, at the UN climate talks in Dubai, countries around the world finally agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. This week in Bonn, any talk of how countries plan to implement this agreement was noticeably absent.

Bonn bulletin: Fossil fuel transition left homeless

But now, G7 nations – Canada, Japan, Italy, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France – are gathering at a historic time for climate politics, holding one of the first opportunities to show their leadership by putting the COP28 decision on fossil fuels into action. 

This will also be the last time these countries meet before they are required to submit updated and enhanced climate plans through to 2035 under the Paris Agreement. It is a final chance for G7 nations to adopt the measures that are necessary to limit warming to 1.5°C. 

Despite having both the capacity and the responsibility to be leaders driving forward a full, fast, fair and funded phase-out of fossil fuels, these countries are not walking the walk – at home or abroad.

Islands as “collateral damage”?

Some G7 countries have plans to massively expand fossil fuel production at home despite science telling us that no new oil, gas, or coal projects are compatible with a safe climate, while others are using billions of the public’s money to finance more fossil fuel infrastructure abroad. 

We are urging G7 nations to demonstrate true leadership at the upcoming negotiations, immediately halting the approval of all new fossil fuel projects and committing to 1.5°C-aligned timelines for phasing out existing fossil fuel reliance in a just and equitable manner.  

This transition must prioritise the needs of developing countries, which bear the brunt of climate change impacts despite contributing the least to its causes. 

G7 coal charade: Funding the fire they claim to fight

G7 countries have already committed to end international public finance for fossil fuel projects but continue approving billions of dollars for fossil fuel infrastructure. They are giving the fossil fuel industry a lifeline, indebting vulnerable countries, and delaying a just energy transition.  

In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres: “The idea that an entire island state could become collateral damage for profiteering by the fossil fuel industry is simply obscene.” 

There is no shortage of public money to enable a just and equitable transition to renewable energy and turn the COP28 agreement into a reality. It is just poorly distributed to the most harmful parts of the global economy that are driving climate change and inequality: fossil fuels, unfair colonial debts, and the super-rich. 

We need G7 countries to pay their fair share on fair terms for fossil fuel phase-out and the other crises we face. Climate finance remains the critical enabler of action – over the course of our meetings in Antigua & Barbuda we heard some G7 countries make commitments and pledges; we also heard a lot of solutions and options that will exacerbate our debt burden.  

But for us, it is clear. Climate finance must be scaled up to meet the trillions of dollars needed for adaptation, mitigation, and addressing loss and damage; and sent to where it is most needed – on fair terms that do not further burden our economies with debt. 

Hold fossil fuel firms to account

The members of the G7 are among the world’s most powerful and wealthiest nations. They have a responsibility to lead the way both at home and abroad. Anything less is hypocrisy and gross negligence, and risks endangering the implementation of the COP28 decision to transition away from fossil fuels. 

The Pacific Island nations have been vocal advocates for ambitious climate action and have led by example for decades. In 2023, our leaders aspired to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific. We embedded the language of phase-out and transition in our leaders’ declaration.   

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

We have felt the impacts of climate change more acutely than most and have consistently called for comprehensive and equitable global action for the very survival of our nations and for the good of all people and species.  

For Pacific Island nations, the transition to clean and renewable energy is not just a goal but a necessity for survival. We call upon the G7 to reflect the highest possible ambition. These countries must acknowledge and support our aspiration for a fossil fuel-free future, setting an example for sustainable development that prioritizes the well-being of people and planet over profit – and ensure that the fossil fuel companies responsible for the climate crisis bear the cost of their actions. 

The time for action is now. The fate of our planet hangs in the balance, and the decisions made by the G7 nations will shape our collective future. We implore them to heed the call of the Pacific Island nations and rise to the challenge of the climate crisis with boldness, ambition and urgency. Our shared future depends on it. 

The post G7 countries must deliver on COP28 promise to cut fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Rich countries have a bill to pay. A study in the journal Nature says they will owe low- and middle-income countries an estimated $100 trillion-$200 trillion by 2050 since they have caused the climate crisis with their outsized emissions, while developing nations bear the brunt of the impacts. 

As negotiators gather in Bonn this week to prepare for November’s COP29 climate summit, wealthy governments have to face the music and pay their fair share of climate finance. With low-income countries struggling with rising seas and spiralling unjust debts, the stakes have never been higher. The good news? Rich countries can deliver the funds needed for climate action. What is lacking is the political will, as usual. But we can change this.

Bonn bulletin: Crunch time for climate finance

At last year’s COP negotiations, world leaders recognised for the first time that all countries must “transition away from fossil fuels” in energy systems. This year they must agree on a new climate finance goal for 2025, which will set a new benchmark for the quantity and terms of the money owed.

Year after year, wealthy countries have failed to pay up. While transitioning away from fossil fuels is technically possible and relatively low-cost, the failure to finance transformative climate solutions like 100% renewable-ready grids, energy access, and programs to support workers and community transitions is one of the key remaining obstacles to tackling the climate crisis. Meanwhile, the lack of funding to adapt and respond to climate impacts means fires, droughts and floods are already bringing devastating consequences.

As UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell has said, “A quantum leap this year in climate finance is both essential and entirely achievable.” But, as negotiations have begun to establish a new global climate finance target, wealthy countries are once again trying to shirk their responsibilities.

Loans and ‘private-sector first’

They have come to the table with only tiny amounts of money. Worse, they argue it should be delivered mostly as loans, investments and guarantees – which they profit from, while climate vulnerable ‘recipient’ countries rack up debt. The US, Canada, UK and their peers claim that there is not enough public money to do anything else. Yet we know they can come up with enormous sums, like for COVID stimulus plans and for bailing out the banks.

Wealthy countries say the private sector can cover most of the costs instead. This ‘private sector first’ approach is particularly emphasized for energy finance. The idea is that all that is needed is a bit of public finance to ‘de-risk’ energy investments and attract much greater sums of private finance.

But as a former World Bank Director has argued, this approach has consistently delivered far less money than promised and “has injustice and inequality built in,” while reducing the role of government action for creating the right market conditions to deliver profits to investors. We need much more public funding to be delivered as grants for a fair energy transition.

Developing countries suggest rich nations tax arms, fashion and tech firms for climate

Rather than relying on the private sector, rich countries can afford the grants and highly concessional finance required for a fast, fair and full phase-out of fossil fuels, which societies and communities want. There is no shortage of public money available to fund climate action at home and abroad. Rather, a lot of it is currently going to the wrong things, like dirty fossil fuels, wars and the super-rich.

The lack of progress is also a symptom of a larger global financial system where a handful of Global North governments and corporations have near-full control. This unjust architecture results in a net $2 trillion a year outflow from low-income countries to high-income countries, historic levels of inequality and food insecurity, and record profits for oil and gas companies.

Make polluters pay

To raise the funds, wealthy governments can start by cutting off the flow of public money to fossil fuels and making polluters pay. The science is clear that there is no room for any new investments in oil, gas or coal infrastructure if we want to secure a liveable planet. And yet governments continue to pour more fuel on the fire, using public money to fund continued fossil fuel expansion to the tune of $1.7 trillion in 2022. 

There is already momentum to stop a particularly influential form of fossil fuel support. At the COP26 global climate conference in Glasgow, 41 countries and institutions joined the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP). They pledged to end all direct international public finance for unabated fossil fuels by the end of 2022 and instead prioritise their international public finance for the clean energy transition.

Rich nations meet $100bn climate finance goal – two years late

With the passing of the end of the 2022 deadline, eight out of the sixteen CETP signatories with significant amounts of international energy finance have adopted policies that end fossil fuel support – and we see international fossil finance figures dropping by billions as a result.

Making fossil fuel companies pay for their pollution through a ‘windfall’ tax on fossil fuel companies in the richest countries could raise an estimated $900 billion by 2030. Alongside taxing windfall profits, a progressive tax on extreme wealth starting at 2% would raise $2.5 trillion to 3.6 trillion a year. Brazil currently has a proposal to tax the super-rich globally, which is gaining momentum at the G20. 

Canceling illegitimate debts in the Global South can free up even more.

The public money is there for a liveable future for all. As leaders negotiate on the next climate target, we must ensure those most responsible for the climate crisis finally pay up.

The post No shortage of public money to pay for a just energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

This is Azerbaijan’s first large-scale solar power plant. It opened last October and the Emirati company developing it, Masdar, says it can power 110,000 homes.

Climate Home visited the solar park as part of a media tour organised and sponsored by the Azerbaijan COP29 Presidency, which is arranging the UN climate summit in Baku this November.

At the park’s opening ceremony, in front of Sultan Al-Jaber – Masdar’s CEO who led the COP28 climate summit in Dubai – Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev boasted about his country’s determination in “moving towards a green agenda”. 

“This is our contribution not only to the future development of Azerbaijan but to the issues related to climate change,” he told the assembled dignitaries. 

But despite this rhetoric, climate scientists have questioned Azerbaijan’s climate credentials as it prepares to host the COP29 summit. 

An increase in renewable energy production does not mean Azerbaijan is planning to leave its vast oil and gas reserves in the ground. Aliyev said last month that Azerbaijan will try to sell abroad the gas it saves by not using it in power stations at home. Europe is the main target customer, as it shifts away from Russian gas supplies.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

On top of selling its surplus, Azerbaijan is planning to extract more gas thanks, in part, to fresh investments from foreign fossil fuel giants like Britain’s BP, France’s TotalEnergies and Emirati oil giant ADNOC, which Al-Jaber also heads. 

Bill Hare, CEO of climate science non-profit group Climate Analytics, called Azerbaijan’s plans “a fantasy”. “Ramping up renewables won’t make a dent in emissions unless they displace fossil fuels in the system,” he told Climate Home. “You can’t tackle climate change without getting rid of fossil fuels.” 

A spokesperson for COP29 said gas is “an ideal transition fuel in the production of electricity”. In emailed comments, they added that gas exported to Europe can replace coal power – which currently provides around 15% of the EU’s electricity – in the short to medium-term, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Azerbaijan is not alone in pursuing both renewable energy and fossil fuel production. Most fossil fuel producers – including wealthy nations like the US, UK and Canada – have no plans to stop producing oil and gas. That’s despite the International Energy Agency (IEA) warning that new fossil fuel extraction projects are not compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan’s strategy does not contradict IEA scenarios, noting those do not exclude continued investment in existing oil and gas assets and approved projects.

A fossil fuel economy

Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel industry is steeped in history. As early as the 13th century, Italian explorer Marco Polo wrote of Baku’s “stream of oil in such abundance that a hundred ships may load there at once”. 

In the 19th century, Azerbaijan gave birth to modern crude refining, and by the 20th century it accounted for around half of the world’s oil production, helping fuel the Soviet Union’s victory in World War Two.

Oil and gas remain omnipresent today. The Flame Towers, Baku’s iconic skyscrapers, are a symbol of fossil fuel wealth. At night, their facades light up to display flickering flames in a reference to the naturally-occurring fires produced by gas leaks that earned Azerbaijan its name, “The Land of Fire”. 

The logo of SOCAR, the state-owned oil and gas firm, emblazons the national football team shirts, while one of the country’s oldest oil fields sits just behind Baku’s Olympic Stadium, the venue for the COP29 climate summit. 

Oil fields on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2o24. Photo: Matteo Civillini

By global standards, Azerbaijan is no longer a major fossil fuel producer, pumping less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas. But its economy remains heavily dependent on the income they generate. Fossil fuels make up over 90% of all exports and 64% of government revenue.

At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin last month, Aliyev said that “having oil and gas deposits is not our fault. It’s a gift from God. We must not be judged by that. He added that “our oil and gas will be needed for many more years, including in European markets”.

A shrinking market?

European countries have historically been the main destination market for Azerbaijani oil and gas, and flows have been rising in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

As Europe tried to wean itself off Moscow’s supplies, the European Commission went looking around the world for alternative sources of gas to keep the lights on and curb skyrocketing prices. In Azerbaijan, it struck a new deal to double gas exports by 2027. 

Baku is now scrambling to make good on that pact, while using it as a lever to expand its lucrative gas industry. The country could boost its gas production by more than a third over the next decade, according to data analysis by campaigning group Global Witness. 

“We are largely investing in increasing our gas production,” said Aliyev in Berlin, “because Europe needs more gas from new sources.” 

But energy experts question that reasoning. While looking for new gas supplies in the short term, the war in Ukraine also prompted the EU to fast-track its transition towards renewable sources of energy. Its strategic energy plan, laid out in 2022, would see overall gas demand in the bloc halve by 2030. 

“There will be a lot of supply globally and not that much demand on the European side,” said E3G analyst Maria Pastukhova. “Looking at the amounts alone, the EU will not need any additional gas from Azerbaijan if it delivers on its energy transition policies.”

Clean, cheap or fair – which countries should pump the last oil and gas?

But much will also depend on what kind of gas the block will continue to rely on. Norway, Europe’s top supplier, Algeria and Azerbaijan provide it through pipelines, while the United States and Qatar ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the continent. 

“It’s hard to say at the moment [which supplies will remain],” added Pastukhova. “But it isn’t very likely that Azerbaijan can continue to bank on crazy gas revenues from the EU. We don’t see readiness from European buyers to sign long-term contracts beyond 2035.” 

Sell, don’t burn

Meanwhile, Baku also wants to ensure that its gas is channelled towards the lucrative export market not burned at home.

Central to this strategy is the rollout of renewable energy. With strong winds blowing from the Caspian Sea and sun shining for a large part of the year, Azerbaijan boasts significant clean energy prospects.

But that potential has so far been largely untapped. Renewable sources, mainly from three hydro power stations, produced only 7% of Azerbaijan’s electricity in 2023. The government wants to increase that to 30% by 2030. 

If that target is met, Aliyev says that solar and wind will pump 5 gigawatts of clean electricity into the national grid, freeing up “at least” 5 billion cubic metres of gas for the European market.

At Masdar’s sprawling solar park in Garadagh, this plan is being rolled out. The park spans the equivalent of 770 football pitches, but was built in just under two years. It cost $262 million, with multilateral development banks stumping up just under half of that.

Speaking to journalists inside the plant’s control room, Kamran Huseynov, deputy director of the Azerbaijan Renewable Energy Agency, said eight more solar and wind projects are being developed for the coming years. “We are quite sure we can reach the target [of 30% renewables capacity] by 2028,” he added. 

As in Garadagh, foreign energy companies will be at the helm of those eight projects. Masdar will build two more solar parks and one onshore wind farm. Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power is erecting a wind farm just north of Baku by the Caspian Sea.

Renewables-processed fossil fuels?

Later this year, BP is expected to start building a solar farm in the district of Jabrayil. This is one of the territories Azerbaijan captured after a long-running dispute with Armenia centred on the Nagorno-Karabakh region. 

Baku seized control of these areas in a two-part military offensive that started in 2020 and ended last autumn. As a result, some 136,000 ethnic Armenians who had lived in Nagorno-Karabakh fled in a mass exodus which, according to Armenia and the EU Parliament, amounted to “ethnic cleansing”. Azerbaijan has rejected those accusations. 

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

The Azeri government is now promoting a green vision for Nagorno-Karabakh which involves the construction of government-branded “net zero” villages. It has also designated the region as a “green energy zone”, aiming to attract investment in renewable energy.

BP was the first major international energy firm to jump at that opportunity. In 2022, the company’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, praised Baku’s efforts to turn Karabakh into “the heart of sustainable development”. 

BP wants electricity produced from Jabrayil’s solar power plant to make some of its vast oil and gas operations in Azerbaijan less dirty.

The British energy giant runs the Sangachal terminal, one of the world’s largest oil and gas processing facilities and the starting point for the pipelines transporting gas to Europe. Processing all of this oil and gas requires power, which BP currently gets from burning gas in generators.

The Sangachal oil and gas terminal in Azerbaijan. Photo: Azerbaijan Presidency

According to Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and the COP29 CEO, these are “very inefficient” and produce “some of the dirtiest electricity” in the country. After being electrified, the fossil fuel processing plant will receive the same amount of electricity from the grid as the solar park generates, according to Azernenerji, the country’s grid operator.

The process will also free up “more gas to export to world markets”, BP says.

BP’s project is being developed in partnership with SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas giant. After setting up a “green energy” unit last year, SOCAR says it is working with international companies, like BP, “in order to get the know-how” and “learn in the process” with the goal of transforming into a “comprehensive energy company”.  

“Sooner or later, hydrocarbons will slowly die out – not right away,” Teymur Guliyev, deputy vice president for the energy transition at SOCAR, told reporters including Climate Home. “But we have to start our transformation process when we still have plenty of time to plan accordingly, go through trial and error.” 

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan “is making significant progress” towards reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, Azerbaijan has a goal to reduce emissions 40% by 2050 as outlined in its national climate plan (NDC). It has promised to submit a new NDC that is aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5C, which is due by early 2025.

How to move it

While the current priority for Azerbaijan’s renewables push appears to be maximising its gas exports, the government is also wrangling over how to sell its clean energy to Europe, when gas demand falls.

COP29’s Soltanov told Climate Home and other international journalists that he is “very optimistic” about Azerbaijan’s green transition. “Azerbaijan has been at the forefront of the oil revolution, it has been at the forefront of the gas revolution, and it has all the conditions to be at the forefront of the clean energy revolution as well,” he added. 

But the transportation of green electricity remains an obstacle.

The main option being explored is laying an electric cable under the Black Sea, stretching over 1,155 kilometres between Georgia and Romania. Originally the project, under discussion for several years, had the stated intention of linking Georgia to the European transmission network and boosting its energy security. 

But it was recently revamped as a possible route to carry Azerbaijan’s clean energy to the European market. In December 2022, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Hungary formed a partnership to push the project forward, indicating it could be completed by 2029 at a cost of €2.3bn ($2.5bn). A two-year long feasibility study is currently in its final stage, according to President Aliyev. 

The leaders of Azerbaijan, Romania, Hungary and Georgia, and the European Commission President, at the signing of a green energy partnership in December 2022. (Photo: Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via Reuters)

Implementing the project could be challenging given the fragile geopolitical situation in the region. The cable would run just south of the Crimean Peninsula, under Russian control, and near a theatre of war in Ukraine with the strong presence of military vessels. 

For Climate Analytics’ Bill Hare, “it’s a tricky location to attract investment and get built at the moment, but it would provide a lot of benefits in the long-term”. 

There are also questions over whether Azerbaijan’s current plans to export green energy via the Black Sea cable will yield a high-enough return to compensate for selling less fossil fuel.

“Electricity trade is a stable source of revenue, but it is also capital-intensive and not very high margin,” explained E3G’s Pastukhova. “It will not replace the same amount of export revenue that gas and oil have been contributing.”

“What Azerbaijan is doing right now [on renewables] is not enough and quite alarming because this country is so dependent on oil and gas revenue,” she said.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini in Azerbaijan; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

Matteo Civillini visited Azerbaijan as part of an “energy media tour” organised and sponsored by the COP29 Presidency.

The article was updated on 17 May to include comments from a COP29 spokesperson received after publication. 

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New data from a Transition Minerals Tracker compiled by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) shows that more than 630 allegations of human rights violations have been associated with minerals mining since 2010. Of those, 91 were made in the last year alone.

The tracker monitors human rights abuses associated with the extraction of seven minerals including copper, lithium and bauxite, which is new in this year’s update. These elements are essential for the production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and electrification more broadly.

The latest BHRRC data points to widespread violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights – such as forced relocation, water pollution and denial of access to traditional land – as well as attacks on human rights defenders and workers’ rights abuses.

BHRRC also registered 53 allegations of work-related deaths since 2010, with 30 percent of those newly reported in 2023.

Supply chain FAQ: What you need to know about critical minerals

Caroline Avan, BHRRC’s head of natural resources and just transition, said the situation is not improving. “The sector is blatantly failing at protecting those who generate its profits, and this is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

“We are probably only capturing a fraction of abuses because we rely on public data and so many issues don’t get reported,” she added. The BHRRC gives companies an opportunity to respond to the allegations it documents.

Just ten companies are associated with more than half of all allegations registered since 2010 – including China Minmetals, Glencore, Grupo Mexico, First Quantum Minerals and Solway Group – while 46% of the total originated in South America.

Allegations of human rights abuses linked to transition minerals by category 

Source: Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

Avan explained that many abuses follow a pattern that begins with environmental violations –  such as water or soil pollution – compounded by inadequate consultation with local communities, which then leads to protracted conflict.

This has been the case at the Las Bambas copper mine in Peru, now owned by MMG Ltd – whose major shareholder is China Minmetals Corporation (CMC) – and formerly controlled by Glencore. It received the most allegations of rights abuses not only in 2023, but across the tracker’s full 13-year monitoring period.

The mine’s infrastructure, activities and expansion plans have led to a series of social and environmental impacts, provoking protests and blockades by Indigenous communities. Most recently, last November, 1,500 workers went on strike to ask for a larger share of profits.

CMC, MMG and Las Bambas have not responded to the BHRCC over the reported allegations.

New global principles

The persistence of human rights abuses in mineral mining is set to attract more attention, with the International Energy Agency estimating that mineral demand for clean energy applications is set to grow by three and a half times by 2030.

The BHRRC’s report notes that the mining sector is under pressure from civil society, Indigenous peoples and global policymakers alike to strengthen human rights protections.

For example, the new EU Batteries Regulation, adopted last July, obliges end users of battery minerals to carry out thorough supply chain due diligence.

“We are seeing the automotive industry asking more of the upstream mining sector, and that is good news,” said Avan. “But we are not seeing enough from the renewable energy sector in terms of asking mineral suppliers to ensure their operations are not linked with abuses.”

Days after climate talks, US slaps tariffs on Chinese EVs and solar panels

Last month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched a high-level Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals tasked with developing a set of global principles to “safeguard environmental and social standards and embed justice in the energy transition”.

Guterres said supply chains must be “managed properly” to ensure that developing countries get a fair share of benefits and that the environment and human rights are protected.

“Too often, production of these minerals leaves a toxic cloud in its wake: pollution; wounded communities, childhoods lost to labour and sometimes dying in their work. And developing countries and communities have not reaped the benefits of their production and trade,” the UN chief said in comments at the launch.

“This must change… The race to net zero cannot trample over the poor,” he added. The panel is expected to deliver initial recommendations ahead of the UN General Assembly in September.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

The BHRRC’s Avan told Climate Home it was “concerning that countries in the Global North are rushing to sign strategic partnerships with resource-rich countries in the Global South because they want to secure their mineral supply chains, but the companies who will be involved in delivering those minerals are not asked much in terms of requirements for human rights protections”.

For companies, recommendations from the centre’s new report include adopting human rights policies and giving affected communities access to the benefits and governance of projects.

Avan said government regulation and better business practices are essential “to ensure that the global energy transition is a just one, centred on respect for human rights, fair negotiations and shared prosperity”.

“The alternative is rising resistance, conflict, and distrust – all threatening to slow the pace of the transition,” she added.

(Reporting by Daisy Clague, editing by Megan Rowling)

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Beijing is aiming to reduce its energy intensity –  the amount of energy consumed per unit of its gross domestic product – by 2.5% in 2024, according to a government policy work plan published on Tuesday at the opening of the annual National People’s Congress.

The target falls short of the rate of reduction needed to hit a goal of slashing energy intensity by 13.5% in the five years to 2025, energy analysts noted.

China is already lagging way behind that goal. Energy intensity fell by only 2% between 2020 and 2023 as the country powered its economic growth with carbon-intensive sources like coal, recent analysis by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) found.

‘Admitting defeat’

“China is effectively admitting its failure to fulfill the five-year target,” Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society think-tank, told Climate Home. “This year’s target is even more modest than the average rate of reduction needed, while they should be playing catch up.”

Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society and co-founder of CREA, said that China is “basically admitting defeat” with this “very important metric”.

“The [2.5%] target is completely inadequate to get China back on track towards its 2025 goals,” he added. “It is very alarming that the government is not articulating a plan on how they are going to hit an internationally-pledged target.”

How to hold shipping financially accountable for its climate impacts

The energy intensity goal is one of the main climate commitments made by the Chinese government in its current five-year plan and is also referenced in the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC), submitted to the UN under the Paris Agreement.

China set the target in 2021, but a year later it watered down the rules when it stopped counting energy consumption from renewable sources. “It’s essentially a fossil-fuel intensity target now,” said Myllyvirta.

A similar goal of reducing China’s carbon intensity – CO2 emissions per unit of economic output – by 18% is also at serious risk of being missed unless emissions fall dramatically over the next two years.

Emission cuts vs growth

China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter and juggles its emissions-cutting targets with Beijing’s desire to boost economic growth and maintain energy security.

The Asia Society’s Li said this year’s government work plan “does not really prioritise climate and environmental issues in light of the difficult domestic economic conditions”.

Germany uses funding to pressure climate groups on Israel-Gaza war

It does, however, indicate strong support for clean energy, saying the government will “further advance the energy revolution” and “strengthen the construction of large-scale wind power and photovoltaic bases”.

But it also says the government will continue to recognise the role of coal power in its energy system and “increase the exploration and development of oil and gas”, suggesting China is not yet planning to start transitioning away from fossil fuels, as countries agreed to do at Cop28 in December. 

Renewables and coal leader

The country is already both a global leader in renewable energy and a primary backer of coal power.

In 2023 it doubled its solar capacity after installing as many solar panels as the whole world had done in the previous year, according to the International Energy Agency. Wind power capacity also rose by 66% last year.

But it also has more than half of the coal-fired generating capacity operating globally. That is likely to increase as China has more coal power capacity under construction than the rest of the world combined, according to an analysis by the Global Energy Monitor.

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Steep cuts in CO2 emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, will be needed in the coming years if targets to limit a global rise in temperatures and prevent runaway climate change are to be met, scientists have said.

“Far from falling rapidly – as is required to meet the global climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement – CO2 emissions reached a new record high,” the IEA said in a report.

Global emissions from energy rose by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023 to 37.4 billion tonnes, the IEA analysis showed.

A global expansion in clean technology such as wind, solar and electric vehicles helped to curb emissions growth, which was 1.3% in 2022. But a reopening of China’s economy, increased fossil fuel use in countries with low hydropower output and a recovery in the aviation sector led to an overall rise, the IEA said in its report.

Moves to replace lost hydropower generation due to extreme droughts accounted for around 40% of the emissions rise, or 170 million tonnes of CO2, it said.

“Without this effect, emissions from the global electricity sector would have fallen in 2023,” the IEA said.

Energy-related emissions in the United States fell by 4.1% with the bulk of the reduction coming from the electricity sector, according to the report.

In the European Union emissions from energy fell by almost 9% last year driven by a surge in renewable power generation and a slump in both coal and gas power generation.

In China, emissions from energy rose by 5.2%, with energy demand growing as the country recovered from COVID-19-related lockdowns, the report said.

China, however, also contributed around 60% of global additions of solar, wind power and electric vehicles in 2023, the IEA said.

Globally electric vehicles accounted for one-in-five new car sales in 2023, reaching 14 million and up 35% on the level of 2022.

The post Global energy-related CO2 emissions hit record high in 2023 – IEA appeared first on Climate Home News.

The birthplace of crude refining, Azerbaijan has embedded fossil fuels in the fabric of its society for centuries. Oil, and more recently, gas have never stopped flowing from the vast reservoirs dotted around the Caspian basin.

Feeding energy-hungry consumers across Europe continues to bring immense wealth to the country and particularly its ruling elite. Fossil fuels make up over 90% of all exports and are by far the largest source of government revenue.

But as it gears up to host the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, Azerbaijan wants to show the world a different image. Burnishing its clean energy credentials through its state-owned oil and gas company, Socar, is part of the plan.

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At a board meeting at the end of December, just a few weeks after the country was appointed as Cop host, Socar announced the creation of a green energy division called Socar Green. It is promising investments in solar and wind projects, green hydrogen production, and carbon capture and storage (CCS).

It was a largely unexpected move for a company planning to expand its gas output and recently criticised for lacking any energy transition strategy. The timing sparked suspicions among international observers: are they serious about it or is this just greenwashing?

“A green division is meaningless for the climate without an accompanying plan to phase out oil and gas”, Myriam Douo, a senior campaigner with Oil Change International, told Climate Home. “The reality is that to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown more than half of fossil fuels in existing fields must stay in the ground”.

Oil and gas keep flowing

Despite being heavily reliant on oil and gas, in global terms Azerbaijan is not a major producer. It pumps less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas output.

Its oil is expected to run out in about 25 years and production is already going down slightly as reserves are depleted. But it has enough gas for nearly 100 years and is exploiting more and more of it each year. Industry analysts Rystad expect its gas production to rise by a third in the next ten years.

“The country will not be producing oil and gas forever”, said Gulmira Rzayeva, an Azerbaijani senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “But consumers in Europe, Turkey, Georgia need these hydrocarbons now and, if Azerbaijan alone stops extracting oil and gas, it will absolutely not change anything for the energy transition of the world. If there are such plans, they need to involve all producers”.

Harjeet Singh, a campaigner at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, agreed that to move away from fossil fuels all nations need to “act in concert, each according to their fair share and historical responsibility”. But he added that”every fossil fuel producer, including Azerbaijan, must have a clear transition plan to phase out fossil fuels”.

No transition plans

Government-controlled Socar is at the heart of Azerbaijan’s money-spinning machine. It extracts, transports and refines fossil fuels, usually in partnership with private European companies like BP and Total or other state-run firms like UAE-based Adnoc.

It is also one of the most worst oil and gas companies in the world in terms of its climate credentials, according to the Oil and Gas Benchmark. Out of 99 firms, its researchers ranked Socar 91st.

Amir Sokolowski is global director of climate at CDP, the non-profit behind the benchmark. He says that, at the time of their analysis late last year, “there were no transition plans to speak of and these take a very, very long time to develop”.

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The firm has no emission reduction targets, no commitment to supporting human rights and no long-term transition plan although it does have a “low-carbon development strategy”.

Socar’s latest accounts dedicate pages and pages to oil and gas operations but only a very small paragraph to any form of green energy activities. Their use of wind and solar energy, the report indicated, was limited to powering measuring devices installed on oil and gas pipelines and to illuminating some office buildings.

“This would not seem to be a high priority on their agenda, but we can hope that with the spotlight of hosting Cop29 things may start to change”, Sokolowski added.

Renewables potential

Azerbaijan’s history with renewable energy is largely one of untapped potential and unmet expectations.

In 2020 Azerbaijan set a target of increasing the share of renewables in its electricity mix to 30% by 2030.

Since then, its barely changed, still standing at 6%, which is almost entirely hydropower rather than wind or solar.

The country has “abundant” wind and solar resources, according to a recent World Bank report, but while investment projects have been announced, “little progress” has been made on the ground.

The dominance of state-owned enterprises, like Socar, was cited by the World Bank as one of the biggest challenges to the energy transition.

The development of the only three major renewable projects (one wind and two solar) have so far rested in the hands of foreign companies.

At the end of last year, president Ilham Aliyev inaugurated the country’s first major solar power plant, which could supply up to 110,000 homes with clean energy. Its owner is the Emirati company Masdar, headed by Cop28 president Sultan Al-Jaber.

Now Socar wants its slice of the cake. It said in its initial phase the new green energy division will collaborate on these projects with a view to “expand partnership opportunities” and “incorporate international best practices”.

Plans split opinions

Gulmira Rzayeva thinks it is a strategic decision to make Socar’s green push coincide with the country’s Cop hosting. “Socar can play a decisive role”, she said. “It wants to invest in clean energy and it’s targeting production of green hydrogen not only for domestic use but for export.”

Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Hungary announced last year they would set up a joint venture to lay an electricity cable under the Black Sea, bringing green electricity from Azerbaijan to Europe.

Sokolowski says it is hard to predict what Socar’s green proclamations will amount to.

“Will they be leaders on that front? I find it hard to believe”, he added. But “when it comes to renewable energy, having even just a small unit, something that would be considered greenwashing, actually has an impact. It is the beginning of every change”.

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The “UAE consensus” did not go so far as to call for a “phase-out” as more than a hundred countries wanted. It settled on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”.

Still, after coal was targeted for a “phase-down” two years ago in Glasgow, it extended that scrutiny to the oil and gas sector.

Cop28 president Sultan Al Jaber brought down the gavel on a deal late Wednesday morning, one day into overtime. “We have language on fossil fuel for the first time ever,” he said, to applause.

One delegation not joining in the ovation was Saudi Arabia. Oil-exporting states fought hard against the phase-out language that appeared in earlier drafts.

Many emerging economies were also wary of signing up to quit fossil fuels, given limited finance on the table to support cleaner development paths.

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Samoa complained they were not yet in the room when the deal was adopted. Small island states had pleaded for a rapid fossil fuel phase-out to hold global warming to 1.5C, seen as critical for their survival.

Excerpt from the global stocktake text agreed at Cop28 addressing fossil fuels

The energy package included a push to triple renewable capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. It called for accelerating the implementation of technologies like carbon capture, utilization and storage, “particularly in hard-to-abate sectors”.

Controversially, it cited a role for “transitional fuels”, which can be taken to mean fossil gas.

Attention now turns to the next round of national climate plans which, the deal says, should align with limiting global warming to 1.5C. But the pathway to do so is vanishingly small.

The post No ‘phase-out’, but Dubai deal puts oil and gas sector on notice appeared first on Climate Home News.

For years, the region has suffered blackouts which worsen during Israeli attacks and wealthier Gazans have turned to solar panels for reliable electricity.

After Hamas militants invaded Israel on 7 October and massacred over 1,400 civilians, the Israeli defense minister ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off electricity and fuel supplies.

Residents of Gaza told Climate Home these solar panels, while still vulnerable to Israeli bombardment, were helping keep the lights on.

Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Photo: Naaman Omar apaimages)

Twenty-nine year old Amjad Al-Rais lives in Gaza City, the part of the Gaza Strip which Israeli fighters have attacked the most. He has had solar panels on the roof of his house for five years.

He told Climate Home: “Solar panels are very important to our lives and they are the best option during the current time with the outbreak of war, to produce electricity around the clock without interruption.”

Like many Gazans, Al-Rais had previously relied on fossil fuel generators but said these require a lot of fuel “which is not currently available due to the Israeli blockade”.

Muhammed Al-Yaziji owns a company that sells solar panels in Gaza and said that “there has been a significant demand during the last five years… with the frequent power outages in Gaza”.

Bad in peace, worse in war

For over a decade, Gaza has not had enough electricity to meet its needs, leading to blackouts.

The United Nations says this has “severely affected the availability of essential services, particularly health, water and sanitation services, and undermined Gaza’s fragile economy”.

The electricity that Gazans do have comes partly from a gas-fired power plant and partly from electricity cables from Israel, paid for by the Palestinian authority. Some Gazans supplement this with their own generators or solar panels.

Since Israel cut off supplies, hospitals in Gaza have struggled to provide care to the sick and injured.

URGENT UPDATE: Doctors in #Gaza have issued an urgent warning that the lives of 130 premature babies are in imminent danger if fuel does not reach hospitals soon.

1/4 pic.twitter.com/JiVFQIdOwJ

— Medical Aid for Palestinians (@MedicalAidPal) October 21, 2023

This sparked protests from humanitarians. The head of Medical Aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, said that 130 premature babies were in danger from the hospital’s lack of electricity.

“The world cannot simply look on as these babies are killed by the siege on Gaza… A failure to act is to sentence these babies to death,” she said.

Prior to the recent explosion of violence, the World Bank attempted to build Gaza’s resilience, offering grants to put solar panels on hospitals and in refugee camps.

No silver bullet

Like other imports to the Gaza Strip, solar panels are subject to Israeli custom duties, pushing up costs.

Anas Abu Sharkh is a 46-year old teacher in Gaza City, who paid $8,000 in installments for eight solar panels.

He said this price which he said was “extremely high” but cheaper than running a generator. The average Gazan earns $13 a day.

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Electricity systems based on rooftop solar are harder for armed groups to destroy than centralised systems based on fossil fuel power plants.

This, along with their falling price, has led to a boom in their use in war-torn countries like Yemen.

But solar panels are not immune from war. Three of Sharkh’s solar panels were damaged by Israeli bombs and Al-Rais said his panels were “subjected to severe damage”.

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At a meeting of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), China’s board representative Yingzhi Liu objected to six projects because their risk assessments highlighted the potential of forced labour use in the production of solar panels.

The programmes, which included efforts to help vulnerable communities in Sierra Leone, Benin and Laos cope with the impact of climate change, were eventually approved following a majority vote.

China manufactures four-fifths of all the world’s solar panels, having a near-total monopoly over the production of some silicon parts which form the core of solar cells.

Forced labour allegations

Beijing has faced multiple accusations of using forced labour practices in solar panel manufacturing. Concerns have focused particularly on the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has committed “serious human rights violations” against the Uyghur population, according to a UN report.

Xinjiang is the source of up to two-fifths of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, a key raw material in the solar panel supply chain.

In 2021 academics at Sheffield Hallam University said that the biggest polysilicon producers in the region reported their participation in “labour transfer” programmes administered “in an environment of unprecedented coercion”.

The Chinese government disputes the presence of forced labour in its supply chains, arguing that employment is voluntary.

Chinese opposition

At this week’s GCF board meeting, China’s Yingzhi Liu said he opposed “the unsubstantiated allegations of so-called forced labour allegations in the solar supply chains” included in the project documents.

“It is unacceptable to have this sort of presumption of guilt and stigmatisation of the PV [photovoltaic] supply chain”, he added. “Chinese PV should be treated in a fair, just and non-discriminatory manner in GCF projects”.

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None of the project documents seen by Climate Home News mentioned China or Chinese companies directly.

Potential forced labour risks in relation to the supply chains of solar panels featured in the ‘environmental and social action plans’ that accredited entities are required to submit in their funding applications. The assessment allows project developers to rate potential risks and suggest ways to minimise them.

Laos project

Among the proposals the Chinese board member took issues with was a project by Save the Children Australia to strengthen the climate resilience of the health system in Laos, one of Asia’s poorest countries.

The documents submitted to the board said that Save the Children “understands the risk of forced and child labour with procurement of these systems [solar panels]” and will manage the risk through the procurement process.

China’s Belt and Road gets ‘green’ reboot and spending boost

Despite regarding the proposal as “good” overall, Liu opposed it for “singling out so-called forced labour” in the solar panel supply chain. The same happened with five more projects.

“They are all good projects with a high impact that will bring benefits,” he added at the end of the session.

Technical requirements

In response to Liu’s remarks, a representative of the GCF told board members that the fund “requires accredited entities to undertake due diligence to make sure there is no forced labour in primary supply chains”, in line with the performance standards set out by the International Finance Corporation – an arm of the World Bank.

The GCF added that all references made to forced labour are “technical” and “have no political dimension”. It also highlighted that the same risk assessments are applied to all supply chains and are not limited to the solar energy sector.

Climate Home found forced labour risks mentioned in projects not involving solar energy submitted to this week’s board meeting.

A proposal to increase climate-friendly rice production in Thailand included forced labour among the potential risks. The project proponents wrote that “although forced labour or child labour is not reported to be a serious problem in rice farming, measures need to be taken to inhibit these practices”. China did not object to that proposal.

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President Xi Jinping said China will “further deepen cooperation” in green infrastructure and energy projects with developing countries as part of a reboot of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Xi unveiled his plans at a glitzy summit celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the infrastructure-focused initiative, which has built power plants, roads, and railways around the world and extended China’s sphere of influence in over a hundred emerging economies.

It has also faced accusations of pushing low-income borrowers into unsustainable debt.

‘Smaller and greener’

The revamp will attempt to breathe new life into the initiative after a lull. Lending levels plummeted over the last couple of years as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s internal economic troubles.

Now Beijing wants to make the Belt and Road smaller and greener, shifting the focus away from colossal and polluting projects and into high-tech and clean energy.

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Dimitri de Boer, regional director for Asia at ClientEarth, said the summit reinforced the idea that “green is the base colour” of the BRI. “There is a major opportunity here for advancing the global energy transition to mitigate climate change,” he told Climate Home.

Chatham House’s Bernice Lee says the real litmus test is whether the updated Belt and Road can support multiple objectives, beyond simply economic growth. “It is helpful that at a time when so many countries cut their aid spending someone is putting more into the pot, even though the proof is in the pudding as to whether it delivers long-term, lasting benefits”, she added.

The green pivot is not an overnight move and comes two years after Xi pledged China would stop building coal power plants overseas.

Clean energy pivot

Fossil fuel infrastructure had absorbed nearly two-thirds of the energy-related funding committed through the Belt and Road up until then. Dozens of coal plants were built in countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam, locking in carbon-intensive energy production for potentially decades.

According to an analysis by Boston University, Chinese-financed power plants emit more than 245 million tons of CO2 each year – roughly equivalent to Spain’s annual carbon footprint.

Since Xi’s 2021 promise, however, no new coal plants have been developed and investment in renewables has taken off. In the first half of 2023, solar, wind and hydro took up about 55% of energy-related construction and investment facilitated by the Belt and Road, according to Beijing-based Green Finance and Development Centre.

Observers hope the trend will continue, as China pumps cash into its overseas investment programme. Xi said on Wednesday 780 billion yuan ($106 billion) will be made available through Chinese-backed development banks to support Belt and Road projects.

JETP rival

Beijing has also announced the launch of a clean energy initiative seen as China’s response to the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) struck up by rich Western nations and South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal.

Few details about the Green Investment and Finance Partnership (GIFP) have been revealed and no concrete deals have been announced. But Boston University’s Kevin Gallagher, who attended the summit, told Climate Home that the focus will be on “green energy pathways” and not on decommissioning existing fossil fuel plants, like in the Jetp.

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He added the programme will enable partner countries to receive technical assistance on project design and investment from a consortium of participating Chinese financial institutions.

“Beijing’s initiatives are a complement, not an alternative, but hopefully they will spark healthy competition,” said Gallagher. “The JETPs have had trouble getting off the ground and developing countries worry they will accentuate debt burdens. It remains to be seen if GIFPs can be cheaper and faster.”

Vulnerable countries watching

The plans are being watched with interest by emerging and low-income economies that struggle to access the level of finance needed to clean up their energy systems.

Attended by representatives from 130 countries, largely from the Global South, the summit saw repeated appeals from leaders of climate-vulnerable nations for more money to fund climate action.

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Sara Jane Ahmed, who represented the V20 coalition of vulnerable nations in Beijing, said the group can work more closely with China through a “green” Belt and Road. “China has launched a program that will truly matter,” she told Climate Home. “What we are seeing more clearly from China is a recognition of collective gains and of shared prosperity aims and this is being driven by technology leaders and long-term partners.”

No talks of ‘climate’

Amid all the green rhetoric, one word remained largely absent from any of the speeches made by the Chinese leadership in relation to finance: climate.

This is no accident, says Li Shuo, global policy advisor for Greepeace East Asia. “China certainly see some of its Belt and Road projects as contributing to the world’s decarbonisation efforts. But it won’t label them as climate finance, so that it is not in any way confused as a potential Chinese contribution to UNFCCC climate finance targets,” he added.

The provision of UN-mandated climate finance has become an increasingly thorny issue. While developed nations have not yet delivered on a pledge to provide $100 billion in climate finance annually by 2020, they are increasingly pushing to expand the donor base beyond historical polluters.

China strongly maintains that it is the responsibility of developed countries to provide climate finance labeled as such.

The post China’s Belt and Road gets ‘green’ reboot and spending boost appeared first on Climate Home News.

Following fraught negotiations, G20 countries clinched an agreement in India’s capital New Delhi on Saturday afternoon.

Raising the bar on climate targets was a priority of India’s G20 presidency, which had placed big stakes on the event’s success. Across Delhi, it was impossible to escape the gaze of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his face alongside motivational slogans on huge billboards.

His main negotiatior Amitabh Kant hailed the agreement as the “most ambitious document on climate action” so far, striking a triumphant figure during the press conference.

But deep fault lines remain on fossil fuels ahead of the Cop28 climate summit later this year.

Renewables breakthrough

The G20 member countries together account for over three-quarters of global emissions and gross domestic product, and a cumulative effort by the group to decarbonise is crucial in the global fight against climate change.

The big breakthrough was on renewables. The final text includes a commitment to “pursue and encourage efforts to triple renewable energy capacity” by 2030. That target is vital to keep the goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C within reach, according to the International Energy Agency.

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The European Union and the United Arab Emirates, the Cop28 hosts, have made it a centerpiece of their respective battle plans for the climate summit. When it was first announced, experts thought the pledge would find broad consensus. But at the G20 energy ministers’ meeting in July, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China blocked a deal.

One and half months later leaders broke the deadlock. It is welcome news for the Cop28 president-designate Sultan Al-Jaber, who said “the G20 has made important progress” and he was “grateful for the commitment made” on the renewable energy target.

Carbon-capture caveat

Getting the leaders to unite behind it in Delhi has come alongside concessions on other fronts. In the same paragraph, the declaration says G20 countries will “demonstrate similar ambition with respect to other zero and low-emission technologies, including abatement and removal technologies”.

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The language covers controversial carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, favoured by oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

CCS remains expensive and unproven at large scale. Many climate campaigners call it a “distraction” that gives fossil fuel companies a licence to keep extracting more climate-harming coal, oil and gas.

Phase-out failure

G20 leaders also failed to move the needle on commitments to phase out polluting fossil fuels. This was referred to as “indispensable” to achieve a net-zero goal by the United Nations climate body in the first Global Stocktake report published on Friday.

The Delhi declaration urges countries to accelerate “efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power”. That is a carbon copy of what leaders agreed at their previous meeting in Bali ten months ago, following a landmark deal on coal at the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow.

Madhura Joshi, an analyst at E3G, told Climate Home News the language “just maintains the status quo” and “bolder action” is needed from leaders. “Increasing renewables must be backed by phasing down fossil fuels – both are indispensable”, she added.

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The outcome is a disappointment for India which has been advocating for this pledge since Cop27 last year. India is still largely reliant on coal for its electricity generation, so it has been attempting to put equal pressure on producers of oil and gas.

In his speech, Sultan Al-Jaber said a fossil fuel phase out is “essential” and “inevitable”. The spotlight is now on his team’s attempts to bridge divisions and garner support for it on the road to Dubai.

The G20 leaders also called for a steep increase in climate finance, moving “from billions to trillions of dollars globally” to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. A key driver of the scale-up will be reforms of multilateral development banks, which – the G20 believes – could free up $200 billion over the next decade.

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Climate Home News is seeking stories on the global renewable energy supply chain.

The rapid deployment of renewable energy is critical for the world to meet its climate goals. This requires a massive expansion of the renewable energy supply chain, from the critical minerals required to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries to the skills and jobs needed to produce, assemble, and install them.

Yet, large parts of this supply chain are concentrated in a few countries (including China) and dominated by a handful of companies. This rapidly-growing industry has at times pitted the clean energy transition against human rights and other environmental impacts, and sparked conflicts over land and water resources.

Delivering a fast and fair energy transition means avoiding the pitfalls of the extractive fossil-fuel economy. Responsible extraction and production, and centering local communities and workers’ rights could spur sustainable development and create good jobs.

What we are looking for

Our ‘Clean Energy Frontiers’ series aims to produce hard-hitting accountability journalism on the changing-landscape of the renewable energy supply chain.

Stories should spotlight bottlenecks, scrutinise key actors, and expose environmental impacts, and human and labour rights violations. We are also looking for stories robustly examining solutions to these challenges, including through innovation.

This could include examining the plans of emerging transition mineral producers, exposing working conditions in manufacturing processes, investigating the relationship between coal power and clean technology production, and assessing early efforts to address waste.

We plan to publish six deeply reported articles by June 2024. We are seeking stories from around the world and we encourage journalists from developing countries to send us their ideas.

The ideal story will capture the attention of our international audience by providing an original angle, highlight (geo)political tensions or controversy, and combine on-the-ground reporting (when appropriate) with investigative journalism techniques.

Stories should include visual elements (such as satellite images, high-quality photos and videos) and we encourage partnerships between journalists and photographers. A graphic designer is working with us to support the creation of graphics and illustrations.

How to pitch

If you are a journalist with at least three years’ experience, please send us your pitches. You must have fluent spoken and written English. Journalists from all countries are welcome to apply. It helps if you have worked with international media before and have awareness of climate change issues.

Your pitch should include:

• The top line of the story and essential context in no more than 200 words. If we like the idea, we will ask for more detail
• The sources you would interview
• Any travel requirements
• A short summary of your journalism experience, including links to three recent stories you are proud of.

We can offer a reporting fee of around $1,600 per story, including photos and videos, in addition to covering travel and accommodation expenses. Travel costs will be negotiated in advance and reimbursed subject to valid receipts.

Please send your pitches with the word ‘Pitch’ in the subject line to project editor Chloé Farand by emailing chloe.farand@outlook.com. We will commission the first three stories by late October and continue to review pitches until February 2024 for publication by June next year.

The post Climate Home News seeks pitches on renewable energy supply chain appeared first on Climate Home News.

The investment blueprint is supposed to set out how foreign funding will help wean the Southeast Asian country off coal. But international talks on it have been tense, with Indonesia wanting more money on better terms from rich countries.

Originally slated for public release on Wednesday, the Just Energy Transition Partnership (Jetp) document is now scheduled to be officially unveiled later in the year as experts need additional time to develop “a technically credible pathway”, the Jetp Secretariat said in a statement. The Secretariat acts as a coordinating body and represents both Indonesia and the donor countries.

Tense negotiations

The setback follows nine months of tumultuous behind-the-scenes negotiations since the deal between Indonesia and a group of international partners led by the US and Japan was announced at the G20 summit in Bali.

Disagreements over the type of funds provided and technical challenges in ensuring the coal-to-renewables switch have been the biggest roadblocks so far, according to sources with knowledge of the discussions.

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Instead of launching the plan, on Wednesday the Jetp Secretariat submitted a draft document to the Indonesian government and its international partners for further review.

Dadan Kusdiana, Indonesia’s Secretary General of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, told Climate Home News the government is “committed to the energy transition”, but it will have to review the technical findings “to see if the targets are credible and workable”.

Energy transition targets

The partnership aims to peak Indonesia’s total power sector emissions by 2030, bring the sector’s net-zero target forward by ten years to 2050 and accelerate the rollout of renewable energy to reach at least 34% of all power generation by 2030.

Indonesia relies on coal for nearly half of its electricity production. Coal consumption in the country hit a record high in 2022, while the share of renewables in the energy mix slightly declined. The financial help promised by developed countries aims to reverse the course.

Similar deals have been struck with South Africa and Vietnam, but the Indonesian program is going to face particular challenges.

Whereas South Africa’s Apartheid-era coal plants are close to retirement, Indonesia’s are only on average nine years old, which makes compensating their owners for shutting them down early much more costly. On principle, the program should also strive to make the transition to clean energy fair for more than a quarter of a million people employed by the country’s coal industry.

Major roadblocks

Indonesia’s plans to build new coal power plants to power metal smelters – so-called captive plants – have also raised concerns. A coalition of NGOs recently sent a letter to the Jetp’s funders saying the plans “threaten global climate goals ” and could “stifle any progress” made on the other fronts.

Kusdiana told Climate Home the pipeline of captive plans is among a set of additional information currently being discussed by Jetp partners, alongside the need for a “massive” grid expansion and financial arrangements.

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The court’s interim charging order – meaning it is not yet final and can be objected to by the debtor – was issued on Wednesday but made public on Friday.

The judgement was issued under the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT) which protects investments in both clean and polluting types of energy.

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Nick Cherryman, one of the lawyers representing the investors, said the step was “only necessary because Spain, a recalcitrant debtor, refuses to honour the judgment against it”.

The investors took Spain to arbitration under the ECT nearly 10 years ago for withdrawing subsidies for renewable energy.

Spain, which relies heavily on foreign energy sources, tried in the early 2000s to lure renewables investors with a programme combining subsidies, tax breaks and guaranteed fixed feed-in tariffs.

But after the 2008 financial crisis, it started altering the framework under which renewables could receive support, which some investors saw as a violation of their legitimate expectations.

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The World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) awarded the investors 101 million euros plus interest in 2018, with the award later being registered at London’s High Court.

Spain tried to overturn the award citing sovereign immunity, but the High Court dismissed Madrid’s application in May.

Alongside other European countries, Spain has announced its intention to leave the treaty – although both renewable and fossil fuel investments will remain protected for 20 years under the treaty’s  so-called sunset clause.

The European Commission negotiated reforms to the ECT last year which allowed countries to stop protecting fossil fuel investments while continuing to protect renewables.

But these reforms were rejected by Spain and other EU countries, who decided to leave under the unreformed treaty and try to limit the effects of the sunset clause through agreements with other EU member states.

The post Court says renewable firms can seize Spain’s property after subsidy cuts appeared first on Climate Home News.

Just this year, China will install much more solar than it was doing just a few years ago and more, in one year, than the US has installed in its history. The growth in capacity will be huge.

But the percentage of China’s electricity which is generated by wind and solar is still expected to grow slowly, by less than 1% a year between 2023 and 2030.

How does exponential growth in new solar lead to just 1% growth in the amount of solar used? Because longstanding issues in China’s power market curtail the impact that new solar or wind power can have.

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Issues include the electricity market and grid’s inability to transfer power between regions even on grids already linked up physically, the under-developed price mechanism for renewable energy, and little support for energy storage.

These issues require policy attention first and foremost, highlighting the ways that the world’s largest energy transition needs more than buckets of hardware. And why continued focus on coal power for “energy security” leads policymakers to overlook fundamental items on the energy transition checklist.

China has not lacked the capacity to generate electricity for years but, even with an overcapacity of coal plants, high-growth regions have struggled to meet growing energy demand.

That isn’t because there isn’t enough power, but because China’s power system isn’t able to deliver it.

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For example, even if they’re linked by transmission cables, transferring power from a province which generates a lot of electricity to a neighbouring province which uses a lot of electricity isn’t possible without clear policy guidance for the electricity market.

Despite an overcapacity of coal plants, an outdated grid with restrictive, inflexible policies that limit regional electricity grids from performing basic electricity transfers can mean that one province sits on wasted power supply while its neighbor’s lights go out.

This hampers coal’s ability to provide electricity across China. Instead of fixing these issues though, authorities are just building more coal power plants.

If they are not resolved, these issues could derail wind and solar’s ability to deliver the world’s biggest energy transition.

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You can install all the solar panels and wind turbines you want. Unless there’s the policy and infrastructure to support them to meet electricity demand, then the the inefficiencies inheritied over from a coal-reliant power system could choke the development of renewables.

One solution is energy storage – things like batteries. But, even for a technology with as much investment appeal as this, basic policy support is necessary.

China’s electricity grid has for decades prioritised fossil fuel energy sources and the factors of this preferential treatment for fossil fuel continue today.

One major factor that blocks the application of energy storage is the power grid’s preferential sourcing of electricity from large-scale power plants, such as a typical coal plant, so there is a unidirectional transmission of electricity from a major hub to a number of end points – the electricity users.

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The alternative is that the grid would select a number of smaller power sources which can more efficiently switch on and off of supplying electricity, and coordinate a multidirectional flow of electricity among multiple sources and multiple endpoints.

It is only under this second scenario – which energy planners have projected as China’s future of renewable energy use – that energy storage has a real application.

As coal plants cannot efficiently turn on and off, and China’s grid responds to this by keeping them on, energy storage remains sidelined despite its future role as a key player.

While China’s renewables generate a lot less electricity than they could do if used properly, the opposite is true for coal.

Carbon credits touted as saviour of coal-to-clean energy deals

While the percentage of renewable energy in China’s energy mix is increasing, actual use of those new energy sources remains low.

In the end, renewables generate a loss less electricity in China than they could.

The opposite is true for coal which continues to get preferential status from China’s energy systems.

And China’s most recent energy roadmap has projected that coal use will continue to grow at a “reasonable speed” into 2030.

This continued growth risks locking China out of a renewable energy transition, and mountains of unused solar panels alone won’t be able to unlock it.

At Greenpeace East Asia’s Beijing office, Gao Yuhe is a project leader and August Rick is an international communications officer

The post Unfinished paperwork is kneecapping solar’s potential in China appeared first on Climate Home News.

The tax credit makes France the first EU country to take advantage of a loosening of European state aid rules in recent months in response to new tax subsidies in the United States made available by the Biden administration’s $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Le Maire’s ministry said the tax credit, which will be available on a temporary basis in line with the new EU rules until 2025, with the possibility of an extension to 2029, was expected to generate private investments totalling 23 billion euros by 2030 and directly create 40,000 jobs.

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The tax credit aims to spur investment in environmentally friendly projects and revive France’s industrial sector as European companies come increasingly under pressure from U.S. companies, major tax subsidies in the IRA to cut carbon emission, boost domestic production and manufacturing.

“We have no reason to be embarrassed by comparisons with the United States,” Le Maire said on Tuesday, adding that various European and existing French aid available was of a similar scale.

The tax credit will cover companies’ capital expenditures on 25-40% of their investments in wind and solar power facilities, heat pumps and batteries.

US backs Indonesian oil refinery despite pledge to end fossil fuel finance

It will be included in the 2024 budget law and its cost will be offset by reducing tax breaks available for certain types of carbon-intensive fuels which remain to be determined.

The bill also aims to make 2,000 hecatres (4,900 acres) available for new industrial sites and cut in half how long it takes to approve a new industrial project from 17 months to nine months.

It also will create a new class of tax-free savings accounts available to people under the age of 18 through their banks, which the finance ministry expects to generate 5 billion euros that can be used to finance green industrial projects.

The post France proposes tax credits for green technology appeared first on Climate Home News.

The United Arab Emirates climate envoy Sultan Al-Jaber told the Petersberg climate dialogue that he backed the EU’s call for the world to set a target to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. The UAE will host the Cop28 climate talks in November.

Other supporters of that commitment include the US, Chile, Colombia and representatives of small island states. The proposal has not met significant opposition.

EU makes case

The head of the European Union’s Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, first suggested global renewable and energy efficiency targets in a speech to a US-hosted climate summit two weeks ago.

In Berlin this week, the EU’s climate lead Frans Timmermans repeated the call. He said that renewables growth was “a success that nobody expected at this scale”.

Germany promises €2bn to global Green Climate Fund

“Look at what China is doing in the road to renewables ,” he told the group of climate ministers which included a Chinese representative. “It is amazing, it is inspiring, it really is mind-boggling sometimes, to see the scale at which this is happening”.

“Should this not be something that we should take to the global level and try to agree on global goals to achieve this: removing, decarbonising our energy system?” he asked.

Cop hosts support

In their speeches to mark the opening of the Berlin talks this week, Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and the UAE’s Al-Jaber both said renewables should be tripled by 2030.

Ahead of #COP28, representatives of 40+ countries discussed at the #Petersberg Climate Dialogue how to accelerate the energy transition & keep 1.5 alive. A firm target for #renewable expansion would be a strong signal. Find the co-chairs’ summary here: https://t.co/jUrfWQf7l5

— GermanForeignOffice (@GermanyDiplo) May 5, 2023

Al-Jaber, who will shape the agenda of Cop28, said that, after reaching that initial goal, renewables should double again by 2040.

An official summary of the talks did not mention opposition to the target. But some unnamed governments criticised renewables at the meeting, claiming “fossil fuels currently are the most affordable form of energy, particularly in developing countries, given the high up-front costs of renewables deployment”.

Cop28 boss slams rich nations “dismal” $100bn finance failure

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has found that as renewable energy costs have fallen, they are now “competitive” with fossil fuels in many countries. Utility-scale solar and onshore wind are the cheapest options for new electricity generation in a significant majority of countries worldwide, the IEA said.

Step up in ambition

The details of the target are still being worked out but tripling capacity by 2030 will mean significantly raising the current level of ambition on the global renewables roll-out.

The International Energy Agency predicts that current governments’ policies will less than double the world’s renewables capacity on 2021 levels by 2030.

But analysts at Ember think the world needs even more renewables than the IEA claims. A spokesperson said the IEA’s figures “likely downplay the scale of wind and solar required by overestimating the success of other measures (nuclear, carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency) and underestimating the pace of growth in solar manufacturing”.

Based on research

The tripling target is based on work carried out by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena).

The IEA has said that the world currently has about 3,300 GW of renewable energy capacity and, in order to be in with a shot of limiting global warming to 1.5C, about 1,000 GW should be added every year to 2030, roughly tripling the total amount to 10,350 GW.

These findings were echoed in a statement released by the UAE-based International Renewable Energy Agency in March and the IEA’s head Fatih Birol presented a paper highlighting it at the US-hosted Major Economies Forum on climate last month.

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Details of the renewables target have yet to be finalised. But it could be set in terms of an outright volume of new renewable capacity or as a percentage of renewables in total new electricity sources installed.

On energy efficiency, the IEA says that energy intensity should fall 4% a year every year until  2030 to help limit global warming to 1.5C.

As energy intensity fell by 1.3% in the second half of the 2010s, the world needs to roughly triple the effectiveness of its energy efficiency measures like the insulation of buildings and incentives for less energy-guzzling household appliances.

Fossil phase-out

While the renewables target did not meet significant opposition, a proposal to phase out fossil fuels is much more controversial.  It was rejected at the last Cop climate talks in Egypt after opposition from Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran.

Chile’s environment minister Maisa Rojas told journalists during this week’s Berlin talks that renewable and energy efficiency targets have to go “hand in hand” with the phase-out of fossil fuels.

She said: “This has to go together because otherwise we will just be adding new energy right? We really have to make sure that if we add new energy, we’re also taking the dirty energy out of the system”.

The UAE’s Al-Jaber said this week that only “fossil fuel emissions” not fossil fuels should be phased out, wording which allows fossil fuel use to continue if the emissions are taken in by carbon capture technology.

The post Europe’s push for global renewables target gains support appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act is offering billions of dollars in tax incentives for facilities using American equipment to accelerate decarbonization of the U.S. power sector while creating domestic jobs.

But the subsidies, signed into law last year, have yet to trigger a boom in U.S. solar manufacturing as investors await guidance on those perks. Their main question: will solar panels qualify if they are assembled in the United States using components made overseas?

As soon as this month, the U.S. Treasury Department is expected to release those details, the latest in a series of advisories on how companies can take advantage of the landmark law.

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The IRA contains a 30% tax credit for renewable energy facilities, with the domestic content bonus worth an additional 10% of the project cost. The IRA contains a number of such bonuses, including for building projects in disadvantaged communities and for adhering to certain labor standards.

“The average project size that we do is $300 (million) or $400 million. So you’re talking about a lot of money,” George Hershman, CEO of solar contractor SOLV Energy, said in an interview.

Array Technologies Inc of Albuquerque, New Mexico, which makes solar trackers, said its business has not yet experienced an expected IRA-related boom.

“The main feedback we get is that there needs to be clarification from the Department of Treasury on what qualifies as domestic content under the IRA,” CEO Kevin Hostetler said on a call with investors last month.

A Treasury Department spokesperson said the agency was “focused on providing clarity and certainty for taxpayers and ensuring the bonus as written in the statute is workable for taxpayers.”

Trade groups divided

The top U.S. solar trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), has proposed that panels assembled in the United States should qualify for the credit regardless of where the cells inside them are produced.

There are no cells being made in the United States currently, the group argues, so the credit would be useless if panels were required to have American-made cells.

“Requiring U.S. cells, which currently don’t exist, would hold back solar deployment,” SEIA CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said in an emailed statement.

But manufacturers hoping to set up or expand domestic factories for solar components want stricter rules, saying requiring solar wafers and cells to be made in America is key to producing goods that today are almost exclusively made in China.

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In February, top U.S. solar manufacturer First Solar Inc said it would delay further expansion decisions until Treasury releases its guidelines.

A manufacturing group, Solar Energy Manufacturers for America (SEMA), said both manufacturers and developers want clear rules that will fuel growth.

A potential approach could be to allow the bonus credit to apply to domestically available goods, with that standard changing over a set timeline.

“There’s a lot of money that is ready to invest in this, and it is just waiting for this last tidbit of information to secure those investments,” Mike Carr, SEMA’s executive director, said in an interview. “Then everybody can march forward in lockstep.

The roll-out of solar power in the US was previously placed on hold after the US government ordered an investigation into whether Chinese solar panel exporters were getting around US tariffs by routing their exports through third countries in south-east Asia.

These tariffs could have resulted in retrospective tariffs being applied so many solar installers paused projects while the investigation took place. But last June, President Biden suspended tariffs on these south-east Asian nations for two years, to the relief of solar installers.

Green protectionism

As well as solar panels, the IRA offers more subsidies to electric vehicles which are assembled in North America, angering other car-making countries.

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, has warned against “a slide into protectionism” through climate measures.

In March, she said that policies should stay focused on [the energy] transition—rather than providing a competitive advantage to domestic firms”, adding that policies should be “carefully designed” to avoid “trade tensions”.

The post US solar boom on hold as industry awaits subsidy rules appeared first on Climate Home News.

The EU bloc sees hydrogen made with renewable energy – known as “green hydrogen” – as a cost-effective way to reduce emissions, especially in industries that are difficult to decarbonise such as aviation and heavy land transport.

While the European industry is in its infancy, hopes of achieving short-term goals largely rest on production overseas. Countries, especially in Northern and Sub-saharan Africa, have been attracted by the sector’s opportunity for investments and new jobs, analysts told Climate Home News.

But experts warned the enthusiasm hides significant risks. Incentives built into the EU regulations mean the massive scale-up of green hydrogen exports could take up most renewable electricity in developing nations, at the expense of local populations.

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This would be a problem for countries like Namibia – one of the EU’s key hydrogen partners – where just over half of the population has access to electricity.

For Godrje Rustomjee, an analyst at the African Climate Foundation, countries need to find the right trade-off between domestic needs and export potential.

Otherwise, he says, the risk is that green hydrogen may turn into “another neo-colonial project”.

“There is a real possibility that foreign countries come in with direct investment, but all the benefits and added value end up being extracted and sent across to Europe”.

Marta Lovisolo, a hydrogen analyst at Bellona, says the risk developing countries will divert resources toward production for exports is “extremely high”.

“Green hydrogen is something Europe desperately wants and developing countries could potentially mass-produce for a lucrative market,” she says. “As it happened with fossil fuels, countries seem ready to stake everything on becoming exporters without being given the necessary safeguards.”

Very glad to meet President @hagegeingob

Namibia is a trusted partner of the EU. We stand by your side in the fight against the pandemic.
#GlobalGateway can support Green Hydrogen plans and sustainable raw minerals value chains.

Let’s develop a full-fledged partnership. pic.twitter.com/uU4HdYnIIO

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) February 18, 2022

Betting big on hydrogen

Despite being a nearly non-existing energy source today, green hydrogen has become a cornerstone of Europe’s decarbonisation plans.

Green hydrogen is mostly produced through electrolysis, a process that separates water into hydrogen and oxygen, using electricity generated from renewable sources.

The bloc has set a target of reaching annual domestic production of 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen by 2030 and importing the same amount. It is a tall order, considering that last year worldwide green hydrogen production capacity was 109 kilo tonnes – a fraction of what the EU wants to achieve.

Currently, most hydrogen is created using fossil fuels. Around three-quarters is derived from methane gas and a quarter from coal. Green hydrogen is more expensive to produce and accounts for less than 1% of total global production.

To fuel its ambition the EU is pouring billions of euros into the sector. Alongside investments in the build-up of domestic capacity, funds are being committed towards partnerships with future exporting nations.

The EU has signed agreements with a series of countries including Egypt, Kazakhstan, Morocco and Namibia. The partnerships are billed as a win-win situation.

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Rules exemption

The Commission has also recently set out the rules on renewable hydrogen. Among various provisions, it includes a criteria for developing renewable electricity called 'additionality'.

In the future, hydrogen producers will have to make sure that only new renewable electricity generation capacity is used for green hydrogen production. This is to ensure hydrogen production does not take away existing renewable energy from the grid, potentially increasing reliance on fossil fuels elsewhere.

Additionality can be achieved either by directly connecting a solar or wind farm to a hydrogen production facility or through purchase agreements with clean power generators.

But European lawmakers have included a phase-in clause to speed up the industry with the hope of meeting its 2030 goals. Any green hydrogen installation that starts production before 2028 will be exempted from the additionality rules for the following ten years, until 2038.

That means the projects developed before that date will be able to use already installed capacity, for instance taking clean energy directly from the grid.

Analysts say the rules have set off a race between exporting nations to meet the 2028 deadline. Namibia, for example, hopes to begin exporting green hydrogen in 2026, although analysts believe this will be very difficult to achieve.

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Risk of 'cannibalisation'

Maria Pastukhova, a senior policy advisor at E3G, says the rules allow hydrogen projects to “cannibalise” the existing local infrastructure for the purpose of export production.

“For many countries, especially in Africa, this energy is needed at home, where grids need to be decarbonised or local citizens don’t have access to electricity,” she added.

Only 56% of Namibians had access to electricity in 2022. The nation imported 60-70% of its electricity demand, most of it coming from fossil fuel sources.

The Southern African nation, in particular, is racing to become Africa’s first green hydrogen exporting hub, but faces a context of high unemployment and one of the most unequal economies in the world, according to the World Bank.

Namibia's pitch

Namibia’s President Hage Geingob sees green hydrogen as an “engine of growth” that will make the country an industrialised economy and create a large number of jobs.

“Because of our national green hydrogen efforts, Namibia remains well-positioned to become a major supplier of clean and green energy to the world,” he said at Cop27.

In 2021 the Namibian government began pitching its proposition to European leaders, luring them in with the promise to supply up to three million tonnes of renewable hydrogen every year.

Namibia's Tsau Khaeb National Park has been earmarked for green hydrogen projects. Photo: Olga Ernst and Hp Baumeler

Germany was first to respond to the calls and quickly partnered with its former colony. A German private joint venture is now working with the Namibian government to develop a $9.4 billion green hydrogen project. The huge infrastructure is expected to take up 4,000km2 of land (roughly four times the city of Berlin) within the Tsau Khaeb National Park.

Its goal is to begin hydrogen production by the end of 2026.

Money for hydrogen

Following Berlin’s lead, the European Commission signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Namibia on renewable hydrogen, something they have also done in at least other three developing countries

The agreement aims to facilitate “the production and export of renewable hydrogen”, while offering Namibia the “possibility to achieve its own energy security and decarbonisation objectives”.

At the same time the European Investment Bank pledged to give Namibia a loan of up to 500 million euros to finance renewable hydrogen and renewable energy investments. The EIB President said “the development of a green hydrogen economy will bring Namibia and Europe closer together - as partners”.

A similar memorandum of understanding was signed on the sidelines of Cop27 between the European Union and Egypt. The partnership is aimed at "contributing to the EU future plans to import renewable hydrogen", while accelerating "the Egyptian energy sector's transition and decarbonisation".

The agreement does not yet contain any binding commitment but it expects to encourage investment in infrastructure and easier access to financing options.

Upon unveiling the deal, the European Commission Vice-President said Egypt is "ideally placed" to transport green hydrogen to Europe. He added that Egypt is blessed with "unlimited potential for solar and wind energy", which goes beyond local electricity needs and, therefore, can also be used for green hydrogen.

Despite this potential, the country's energy sector is still hugely dominated by fossil fuels, with only about 6% of the supply coming from renewables.

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Bellona’s Marta Lovisolo says the agreements are “full of nice words, but do not have any legal safeguards” to prevent European interests come first.

She adds developing countries are particularly attracted as the European Union has signalled it would subsidise the big premiums needed for green hydrogen.

More money to come

Brussels is working on a subsidy scheme to bring down the prices of hydrogen for buyers. Green premiums would cover the cost gap between renewable hydrogen produced overseas and the fossil fuels it would replace.

The money pot is expected to be large. The green premium to achieve the 2030 targets for hydrogen could come up to €115 billion in total.

For the African Climate Foundation's Godrje Rustomjee the financial incentives are just too good for developing countries to ignore. "On one hand they could use renewables only for domestic consumption but this could come at extreme cost," he says, "on the other, the nature of these export deals has the potential of doubling a country's economy".

The key, he says, it's striking the right compromise and securing safeguards in the deals with rich importing countries.

He believes these should include safeguards for local electricity provision and incentives, such as the localisation of manufacturing in the country.

The post Green hydrogen rush risks energy ‘cannibalisation’ in Africa, analysts say appeared first on Climate Home News.

A group of 13 nations and the European Union agreed to give those developing projects like renewable energy, electricity infrastructure and low-emission transport longer to pay back loans and charge them less for insurance.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s head Matthias Cormann hailed the deal as a “great milestone to help increase the impact of trade and finance flows on securing our climate objectives”.

But campaigners claim there is no clear definition of green projects and criticised the inclusion of technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture and storage.

They claim that, as many hydrogen and CCS projects are driven by fossil fuel companies, that sector will be among the beneficiaries of the reform, potentially for polluting projects.

The agreement is part of a package of reforms secured within a group of the OECD responsible for setting rules for the export credit agencies (ECAs) of member states.

ECAs influential role

Participants are the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey.

The reform is expected to come into effect later this year once national ECAs have implemented it.

ECAs are highly influential in directing investment towards specific sectors by offering exporters government-backed loans, guarantees or insurance. This limits the risk taken by companies selling services and goods in countries or industries considered high-risk.

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Under the new agreement, maximum repayment terms will be increased from 15 years to 22 years for investments including ‘environmentally sustainable energy production’, carbon capture storage and transportation, clean hydrogen and ammonia, low-emissions manufacturing, zero and low-emissions transport and clean energy minerals and ores.

The reforms will introduce further flexibilities on repayment schedules and adjust the minimum premium rates charged for insurance cover.

Uncertain ‘climate-friendly’ label

The statement released on Monday does not give any more detailed explanation of what specific type of projects will be given favourable treatment.

A definition for ‘clean hydrogen’, for example, could range from green hydrogen produced with renewable energy to gas-derived blue hydrogen.

An OECD spokesperson said the member states are still in the process of negotiating the final text, which will incorporate the agreement in principle and make all the details public.

OECD boss Matthias Cormann said the reforms will allow the scaling up and better targeting of public and private finance to support climate-friendly investments.

The European Commission said this is “the culmination of more than two years of negotiations”.

‘Incentives for fossil fuel sector’

The reforms have been met with disappointment by campaigners who had pressured governments for more far-reaching changes, including the end of public export finance for fossil fuel projects.

Nina Pusic of Oil Change International told Climate Home the group is worried this will enable benefits to fall into the lap of oil and gas industries that are already heavily supported by export credit agencies.

“Better incentives for truly climate-friendly projects are needed at OECD level, but we are concerned about the definition used here,” she added. “It is still subject to further refinement but the scope has now been set”.

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Steven Feit, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, said carbon capture, hydrogen or ammonia are the primary avenues through which the fossil fuel industry seeks to legitimise itself in the wake of climate action. “Labeling these projects as ‘green or climate friendly’ perpetuates a false narrative,” he added.

Carbon capture and storage is where carbon dioxide is sucked out of the air, often directly from a polluting smokestack. Hydrogen and ammonia are products used for a wide variety of purposes. They can be made using clean electricity or polluting fossil fuel electricity.

Bankrolling fossil fuels

In recent years, ECAs have come under fire for being a prominent source of public funding for fossil fuel projects worldwide.

The ECAs of G20 nations provided seven times as much export finance to fossil fuel projects ($33.5 billion) than for renewable energy ($4.7 billion) between 2019 and 2021, according to data compiled by campaigners.

In 2021 the OECD group agreed to end ECAs’ support for unabated coal-fired power plants.

Uncertainty on renewable retraining frightens South Africa’s coal communities

But campaigners and some countries urged it to go further. The Council of the European Union called for an agreement to end officially supported export credits for projects in the fossil fuel energy sector, including oil and gas projects.

Backsliding on pledges

Additionally, at Cop26 in Glasgow 20 countries – including the biggest EU members, the UK, the US and Canada – signed onto a commitment to end public finance for overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022.

But countries have subsequently been accused of watering down the terms of the pledge, by inserting exemptions.

Italy has U-turned on its promise. Its ECA’s new funding policy carves out a wide range of exemptions for the continued support of fossil fuel projects beyond the deadlines on energy security grounds.

Germany and the United States have yet to publish their policies outlining how their pledge will work in practice.

The post OECD reforms set to give “green” projects better export finance appeared first on Climate Home News.

Nelly Sigudla, a qualified fire watcher and part-time control room operator at Duvha power station in Mpumalanga, South Africa’s energy capital, worries for her future, when her main source of income gets unplugged.

The mother of four children lives in Benicon Park, an informal settlement next to the coal-fired power station, which is scheduled to be decommissioned by Eskom – South Africa’s public electricity company – between 2031 and 2034.

Like many employees in the coal-mining industry, Sigudla fears her qualifications won’t be enough in the near future, when renewables take over coal as South Africa’s primary source of new energy, risking becoming unemployable.

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The country, which depends on coal for about 85% of its electricity, is home to one of the largest energy experiments in the world: an $8.5-billion deal with a group of rich nations – including the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union – to transition towards renewable energy.

For solar panels and wind turbines to operate, South Africa will have to redirect coal workers towards new jobs in the renewable energy sector, such as construction, electrical engineering and information technology.

But an investigation by Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism and Climate Home News found a major skills gap in coal-reliant communities and a lack of clarity on how funds for reskilling will be implemented.

Sigudla said the transition to green energy sources in Mpumalanga is difficult to welcome. From a community perspective it could bring even more poverty. The region has a soaring unemployment rate of 38%, and more than 100,000 jobs depend on coal.

“When the renewable sector kicks in, what fire am I going to watch?” Sigudha asks. “No one has come to the communities to tell us about new skills programmes that we can follow to acquire skills that will be needed in future.”

Reskilling programmes

The Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET-IP), a document that is guiding South Africa’s move to renewables, includes an investment of nearly R2.7-billion ($151 million) for reskilling programmes across the country.

In Mpumalanga, R750-million ($42 million) is allocated to “investing in youth” – including education, training, work experience and placements – and R5.6-billion ($310 million) to “caring for coal workers”, which includes re-skilling, redeployment, placement and temporary income support.

Funds would not only come from the JET partnership, but also from government budgets, venture capital and multilateral banks.

According to the JET-IP, the government plans to set up a national skills hub to advise on reskilling needs, and R1,6-billion ($89 million) will be allocated to creating pilot training centres known as “skills development zones” in Mpumalanga, Eastern Cape and Northern Cape provinces.

These pilot zones will be run by technical colleges and support the development of new skills and courses, aiming to “ enhance the employability of graduates”, says the JET-IP.

One of the options to set up facilities for the training centres is to use old decommissioned coal plants. This was one of the options for the Komati power station, the first one to shut down, in October 2022, according to a recently published report by environmental justice organisation GroundWork.

But details about how these training centres would actually become operational are scarce.

Development zones

Blessing Manale, spokesperson for the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), an independent multi-stakeholder body established by President Cyril Ramaphosa to oversee the country’s transition, was unable to indicate when the skills development zones will start operations.

Additionally, he acknowledged that skills development is severely under-prioritised, adding “all stakeholder groups have raised this as a fundamental weakness in the JET-IP”.

“In the PCC’s view, much work needs to be done, both to quantify the needs for skills development, and to upskill the workforce and new entrants – in particular youth and young women,” Manale said.

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Manale added the transformation of technical and vocational colleges, typically aimed at adults looking for new technical skills, is “fundamental”. The PCC is rolling out a new programme on skills for the energy transition along with the departments of education and energy, he said. 

But there needs to be more clarity on the skills needed for the decommissioning of coal-fired plants, he said.

“This gives rise to questions around who will actually provide the training required for upskilling workers in the coal value chain, design curricula for educational institutions where skills development will take place, and how this can be funded,” Manale told Oxpeckers.

For workers in the coal industry such as Nelly Sigudla (above), the transition to green energy sources in Mpumalanga is difficult to welcome. (Photo: Ashraf Hendriks)

Vocational training

Mpumalanga has three technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges that fall under the department of higher education and training (DHET). They focus on “preparing students to become functional workers in a skilled trade”.

These colleges, based in Ehlanzeni, Gert Sibande and Nkangala districts, provide practical skills training for the mining and fossil fuel industries, among other courses. At the start of the year, the department reported that more than 500,000 students had enrolled at TVET colleges countrywide.

Oxpeckers and Climate Home reached out via email to all three TVET colleges, as well as the DHET and several other tertiary institutions in the province, to understand how skills development courses currently on offer could be applicable to the green energy sector. Similar questions were also sent to Eskom’s Academy of Learning and the South African Renewable Energy Technology Centre. Despite follow-up phone calls, no responses were received at the time of publication.

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The curricula of the TVET colleges and other educational facilities needs to change to achieve the energy transition, said professor Victor Munnik, co-author of the Contested Transition report recently released by GroundWork.

Training and reskilling for renewables must be “fit for purpose”, he said. “It should be aimed at a society that lives on renewable energy and understands how it works. There are specific specialised skills involved; for example, for the grid to become a smart grid it has to integrate a lot of IT technologies.”

Changes in the education system need to include school courses “to prepare young people not just to work in the new economy but to actively shape it and be part of it”, Munnik said.

Wendy Poulton, secretary general of the South African National Energy Association, added that there is a scarcity of specialist technical and managerial skills in the renewable energy sector. “This will require the education, training and upskilling of engineers and technicians to shift into renewables,” she said.

Happy Sithole, NUM health and safety chairperson in the Highveld region and an Eskom shop steward, says he has no knowledge of skills development zones in Mpumalanga. (Photo: Ashraf Hendriks)

Union concerns

The regional chairperson of National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the Mpumalanga Highveld region, Malekutu Motubatse, is concerned that the current courses offered at TVET colleges and other education facilities still produce learners that will be unemployed in the near future.

Next to each power station there is a coal mine that is used for the purpose of providing coal to the power station, he said. “So the reskilling should be a reskilling of everyone. If the government is talking about reskilling, who is going to be reskilled, Eskom employees or mine employees? Let’s assume that it talks to Eskom employees, then where does it leave the coal mine workers?”

Happy Sithole, NUM health and safety chairperson in the Highveld region and an Eskom shop steward, believes not many artisanal coal miners - who conduct small scale mining - will be employed in the renewables sector.

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“We are talking about artisans, a job that pays well. If you change from coal to renewables, what’s going to happen to them?”

Sithole said he has no knowledge of skills development zones in Mpumalanga: “We find ourselves trying to understand what this is, because as NUM we have not seen any development.”

NUM is also unaware of a training facility that is supposed to be set up at Komati power station, which was decommissioned in October 2022 and is punted as a model for repurposing, Sithole said.

“We have not heard of Komati becoming a training facility. All we know about Komati is that there is intent to demolish it. There’s a lot of information that needs to be cleared up, and it’s difficult to get answers,” he said.

Gaylor Montmasson-Clair, a senior economist at Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS), an economic research institution, said Eskom’s skilled workforce has a higher chance of finding alternative jobs in other industries, such as electricians, for example.

But coal miners might not have the same luck. “To be blunt, we must stop the delusion that the bulk of the people who are employed in coal mining are going to be employed in renewable energy. That narrative just makes no sense,” Montmasson-Clair said.

Duvha power station, located in Mpumalanga, South Africa, is scheduled to be decommissioned between 2031 and 2034. (Photo: Ashraf Hendricks)

Construction jobs

Peter Venn, chief executive of Seriti Green, said the transition will create more jobs in the construction sector in the coming years. “We see a positive job growth in the renewable space for the next 10 years through the construction period,” he said.

Seriti Green is an offshoot of a mining company and will soon begin construction on South Africa’s largest wind farm in Mpumalanga, with power supply due to come online by 2025.

With Seriti being on both sides of the transition from coal mining to renewable energy supply, Venn emphasises the importance of training programmes for the skills required in the renewable sector.

“The Cape Peninsula University has partnered with Komati power station and Eskom to deliver skills in Mpumalanga. And there are other organisations offering significant renewable energy skills,” he said.

“Renewables require across-the-spectrum skills. All the back-office skills are required, civil and electrical skills are required; it goes into IT, security, data analytics, preventative maintenance,” Venn said.

Middelburg resident Emanuel Marutle says the current education system is not even able to provide skills for learners to work in the coal-mining sector, making a transition towards renewables even more difficult.  (Photo: Ashraf Hendriks)

Young workers

According to the PCC, workers in the coal-mining sector are relatively young, with a median age of 38 years. About 90% of those employed in Mpumalanga are semi-skilled (74%), or low-skilled (17%) workers.

The urgency for the skills they will need to diversify is heightened by the fact that transition planning is developing in the context of already high unemployment, poverty and inequality, the PCC says.

“These dynamics make skills diversification more complex as the just transition ought to manage job losses and create employment opportunities in a country with an unemployment rate of 33.9%,” said Manale.

Emanuel Marutle, a resident of the coal fields in Middelburg, told Oxpeckers he is worried the education system in Mpumalanga doesn’t have the resources to help affected community members gain practical skills to weather the transition.

“The current education system is not even able to provide skills for learners to work in the coal-mining sector, so how will it equip people with the skills needed in the renewables sector?”

International Court of Justice to advise states on climate duties

Marutle said during a community consultation about the transition held “by government people from Johannesburg” in 2022, locals were promised that people from their municipality would be taken to undergo training for the renewable sector. This has not happened, he said.

Given Masina, another local and a member of the Khuthala environmental group, said he hasn’t heard anything about any reskilling, training, or skills development in Mpumalanga.

“Our kids are studying in the fields of coal, but coal is dying. People will be left without knowing what they can do,” he said. “If people are skilled, they can transfer skills to other people in the communities so that they have chances of being employed.”

This investigation by Climate Home News and Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center, and is part of a series on South Africa's Renewables Revolution.

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“Houston, we have a problem,” Sultan al-Jaber, chief executive of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and president-designate of the COP28 climate summit, said to loud applause from the nearly 1,000 attendees of at the CERAWeek energy conference.

“Energy leaders in this room have the knowledge, experience, expertise and the resources needed to address the dual challenge of driving sustainable progress while holding back emissions,” Jaber said in his speech to an audience that included OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais and U.S. climate envoy John Kerry.

Jaber and Kerry, who strode to the stage and shook Jaber’s hand when the speech ended, left the room together. The two held a meeting ahead of the conference on Sunday.

“Look forward to working together to deliver ambitious action on clean energy transition and align the oil and gas sector w/ 1.5C imperatives,” Kerry later tweeted.

UAE’s Cop28 boss calls for “course correction” on climate change

Jaber was a controversial pick to lead the COP28 climate summit because his country is an OPEC member and major oil exporter. The United Arab Emirates is only the second Arab state to host the conference, after Egypt in 2022.

He called on his peers to get behind efforts to limit global warming. “Alongside all industries, the oil and gas needs to up its game, do more and do it faster,” Jaber said.

The UN-backed climate change conference’s recent inclusion of oil and gas representatives is a far cry from 2021 summit, where energy companies complained they were shut out of the event.

Jaber’s appointment as COP28 president last year fuelled activist concerns that the oil industry was hijacking the world’s response to the global warming crisis.

UN sets date for loss and damage talks, risking Asian no-show

Some activists demanded he give up his ADNOC role to steer the event. Jaber’s COP28 presidency involves shaping the conference agenda and negotiations between governments.

But others say the whole energy industry needs to be involved in the energy transition. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked an energy crunch that underscored continued dependence on fossil fuels and vulnerability to supply disruptions.

On Monday, Jaber emphasised that he would “consult and convene” with all members of the energy world.

“This industry must take responsibility and lead the way,” he said of the oil and gas sector. “Let’s remember that progress is made through partnership not polarisation.”

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An estimated 1,400 families could be displaced by the Mphanda Nkuwa hydropower project due to be built across the river in what would be Southern Africa’s largest dam. Another 200,000 people could be affected downstream.

The government of Mozambique has touted the 1.5GW Mphanda Nkuwa dam, in the district of Marara, Tete province, as key for the southern African nation to address energy poverty and reach its goal of universal energy access by 2030.

But environmental groups say the dam threatens to negatively impact local communities and ecosystems. Local people told Climate Home News they haven’t been consulted on the project and have only heard about it through non-official sources.

Moreover, climate impacts and increasingly erratic rainfall risk making the project unviable, scientists say.

In spite of outcry from local people and green groups, both the World Bank, through its private investment arm the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the African Development Bank (AfDB) are supporting the project and pushing for the dam’s construction.

The project is expected to “accelerate the transition to clean energy to combat climate change in Southern Africa,” said IFC.

The Mphanda Nkuwa hydro project site is located in the Zambezi river (Photo: International Rivers)

In May last year, the two development institutions acted as advisors to develop the dam, hoping it will become “attractive to reputable developers, financiers and investors to ensure competitive and least-cost power for Mozambique and the region,” AfDB said in a statement.

Sources told Climate Home that the European Union and the European Investment Bank (EIB) have considered getting involved, but have not yet made a final decision.

At the end of 2022, Mozambique became Africa’s newest gas exporter despite 72% of its population having no electricity access. The Mphanda Nkuwa dam is the country’s largest venture into renewable energy and is designed to supply power domestically.

Yet, studies have shown that large-scale hydro may not be as clean as previously thought. While considered a source of low-carbon energy, large hydropower projects emit significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The social impact of large hydro projects has also been criticised for violating indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights, and increasing the risk of over-topping and flooding for people living downstream.

The Chirodzi-Nsanangue community during a meeting with Justiça Ambiental (Photo: Justiça Ambiental)

Dam for development 

The government of Mozambique has earmarked the Mphanda Nkuwa project as a national priority in the country’s energy master plan. It’s also a priority investment for the Southern Africa Power Pool Plan.

The dam will be built in the lower part of the Zambezi river basin, around 60 km downstream from the existent giant hydropower plant at Cahora Bassa, known as HCB. Under current plans, the project is expected to reach financial close in 2024 with commissioning to start in 2031.

Government officials, the IFC and AfDB say that Mphanda Nkuwa is key to bringing energy and development to Mozambique.

“The project reinforces our efforts to combat climate change in a region that is desperately short of power but equally in need of transformation and a just energy transition,” said Kevin Kariuki, AfDB’s vice president for power, energy climate and green growth.

Carlos Yum, managing director at the project’s office under Mozambique’s energy ministry, said that Mphanda Nkuwa will support the country’s industrialisation and provide “reliable transmission infrastructure”.

Governments sworn to secrecy on ‘$20bn’ for Indonesia’s energy transition

Resettlement anxiety

The Mphanda Nkuwa project is poised to result in the eviction of farming communities from their land. But people in the affected areas told Climate Home that nobody has yet come to inform them about the plans or seek their consent.

“No one has ever sat down with us to explain about the project or about our rights,” said Horlando Elias Djaquissone, who has lived in the Chacucoma community for 14 years.

The community of Chirodzi-Nsanangue, in Marara district, lies at the heart of the project area. Fisherfolk, artisanal miners and farmers who “rely on the river and its banks for everything” have the most to lose, says a report sent to the EU and EIB by environmental group Justiça Ambiental (JA), which is part of Friends of the Earth International.

The group estimates that more than 1,400 families living in the region could be displaced, and a further 200,000 people living in the delta area would be affected.

A fisherman in the Zambezi river in Mozambique, a sector that is threatened by the Mphanda Nkuwa hydro project (Photo: Justiça Ambiental)

Farmers in the communities of Chacucoma and Nhahacamba live off growing maize on small-holding plots, fishing and artisanal mining, as well as raising cattle, goats and chicken.

But the province of Tete does not have plenty of arable land to resettle the communities of mostly subsistence farmers, the report highlights.

And it’s not the first time some communities have been asked to move. 15 years ago, a coal mine in Marara resettled farmers to infertile lands where they couldn’t grow crops, and where housing conditions were unsafe. In the 1970s, the HCB dam, developed under Portuguese colonial rule, displaced around 30,000 people in the region.

Cornélio Juliano Pacate, of Chacucoma, who sells fish and produces crop all year round, fears he might lose his livelihood if he is resettled. “I don’t want to leave because there might be problems where [the government] will relocate me to,” he told Climate Home.

A preliminary assessment carried out by TMP Systems, a development consultancy agency, suggested the project could see an increased cost of $1.3bn due to resettlements negotiations and social disputes around displacements.

Wrong direction

Civil society groups have been sceptical about the benefits and sustainability of the project.

The country already produces enough energy to meet domestic needs, but most of Mozambique’s population cannot access electricity, said Anabela Lemos, director of Justiça Ambiental.

Electricity is one of Mozambique’s largest exports. In 2021, it came third after aluminium and coal, and generated nearly $570m in revenue. Last November, the country exported its first liquified natural gas (LNG) to the European market.

“The vast majority of Mozambique’s energy output is exported to South Africa at prices that are unfavourable to us, and what we import back is largely used by industry rather than by people,” Lemos said.

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Under current plans, the energy generated by the Mphanda Nkuwa dam will be channelled by transmission lines to Mozambique’s capital Maputo, which is located 1,500km away from the project site.

Because Mozambique’s population is widely dispersed and two thirds of its population live in rural areas, “it makes no sense to invest in transmission lines that cover long distances,” Lemos argued. Instead, the government should  “promote local solutions adjusted to the potential of each place,” she said.

Climate shocks

The Zambezi delta is under severe threat of droughts worsened by climate change, which researchers think could grow even worse after accommodating another large dam in its basin.

Along its course, the river is already powering around 5GW through the Kariba dam, between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and Mozambique’s HCB, also in Tete province. As the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, there is a serious risk that the lower Zambezi will not be able to provide the best conditions for the 1.5GW hydro plant to function.

A farmer along the banks of the Zambezi river in Mozambique, a sector threatened with displacement to new infertile lands (Photo: Justiça Ambiental)

A 2012 study by advocacy group International Rivers found that climate change could reduce water availability in the basin and risk hydropower production. According to the study, rainfall levels could decrease up to 15% over the next century.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures could lead to more evaporation, said Miguel Uamasse, researcher at Eduardo Mondlane University, in Maputo, who has studied the impact of climate change in Mozambique’s hydro landscape for years.

Less rainfall coupled with increased evaporation “will result in lower river flow and lower revenue from energy production,” Uamasse said.

Losses on the local ecosystems and on the Zambezi delta will be “irreversible,” Lemos added, explaining that the dam will alter and disrupt sediments in the river. This will affect the “productivity of the floodplains, the soil and the health of the vegetation,” she said.

“Here, I am doing fine,” said farmer Tafere Juliano, who lives by the river margins. “I don’t know if there will be enough water for my animals to drink wherever they put me,” she added, in anticipation of her resettlement.

Community members argue they can only leave their homes given fair compensation – a matter yet to be determined.

Fungai Caetano contributed to report this story.

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Norway’s supreme court in 2021 ruled that two wind farms built at Fosen in central Norway violated Sami human rights under international conventions, but the turbines remain in operation more than 16 months later.

Police began removing a handful of demonstrators from outside the building housing most of the finance ministry – a new target for demonstrators – while over a hundred demonstrators chanted “C, S, V”, the abbreviation of a 1970s Sami slogan meaning “Show Sami spirit”.

The removals took place on Supreme Court Square, across the street from the court that ruled in favour of reindeer herders in the Fosen case.

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Meanwhile, campaigners pressed on with a demonstration at the nearby energy ministry, which also houses the transport and family ministries and parts of the finance ministry.

Thunberg, an advocate for ending the world’s reliance on carbon-based power, has argued that governments should not allow a transition to green energy to come at the expense of Indigenous Sami rights.

“They should have seen it coming for violating human rights,” Thunberg told Reuters when asked about the need for the protests, while she was sitting outside the energy ministry.

One of the campaigners said they would “close down the state, ministry by ministry” for as long as necessary.

South Africa tried to weaken corruption safeguards in coal phase out deal, says CEO

“The state has let the Sami people down,” Ella Marie Haetta Isaksen told Reuters.

“I hope some ministers will soon understand that the only way out of this human rights violation is to tear town the wind turbines.”

The finance ministry said it had asked staff to work from home if they are able.

Reindeer herders in the Nordic country say the sight and sound of the giant wind power machinery frighten their animals and disrupt age-old traditions.

“Quandary”

The energy ministry has said the fate of the wind farms is a complex legal quandary despite the supreme court ruling and is hoping to find a compromise.

Owners of the Roan Vind and Fosen Vind farms include Germany’s Stadtwerke Muenchen, Norwegian utilities Statkraft and TroenderEnergi, as well as Swiss firms Energy Infrastructure Partners and BKW.

“We seek to find … mitigation measures in dialogue with the reindeer herders and the ministry that ensure the operating basis and the Sami opportunity for cultural expression,” Statkraft said in a statement to Reuters.

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Roan Vind on Monday told Reuters it trusted the energy ministry would find solutions allowing production of renewable energy to continue.

Utility BKW said it expected the wind turbines to remain in place, with compensatory measures to ensure the rights of the herders.

Stadtwerke Muenchen declined to comment.

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After all, there’s no use making clean electricity if you can’t get it to anyone who needs it. 

But, while anyone with a few million in their back pocket can throw up a solar farm, who has got the billions to build power cables across the country?

Well the Indian government does. On Wednesday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman promised $1bn towards cables linking renewable projects in the Himalayan state of Ladakh with states that people actually live in.

Over in Washington DC, the Climate Investment Funds does too. It has just lent Colombia $70m for transmission lines and other green projects. It has got $230m more in the pot for projects like this and is asking rich nations to top it up so they can roll out the programme to big hitters like India, Brazil and Indonesia.

This week’s stories

• Colombia gets $70m from new global renewable integration fund
• Coal communities fear South Africa’s clean energy transition
• India announces $4.3 billion investment in clean energy
• France seeks EU loophole for French Guiana to power space sector with biofuels
• Taiwan’s failure to clean up industry endangers its net zero pledge
• DR Congo delays rainforest oil auctions
• EU plans restrictions on climate-wrecking fishing method

In Colombia though, there are fears that having to consult with every community the cables pass through could slow the project down more than is helpful in a climate crisis.

Over in South Africa’s coal country, locals complain that they’ve not been consulted over plans to shut down coal power plants. They fear being left behind.

Making the energy transition both fast and fair is no easy task.

The post Cables become cool – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Coal is the heritage of this province, it is the backbone of our economy. It’s an undeniable fact,” says Philani Mngomezulu, founder of an established community-based greening project in the municipality called the Khuthala environmental group.

According to Mngomezulu, almost 80% of the more than 80,000 residents working and generating income in Ermelo are employed at Eskom and Transnet, the state-owned energy and transport companies. Camden is one of 12 coal power stations in Mpumalanga scheduled to be decommissioned in the coming years, most of them by 2035.

“As an environmental group, we are clear about the impact of coal on our environment, in particular climate change and pollution. However, as the community of Ermelo we will only be in agreement with the energy transition if it is going to impact positively on the local people,” he says.

Ermelo and other coal-mining regions in Mpumalanga province are at the frontline of South Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET) process, which aims to repurpose coal power plants and coal-mining lands to greener energy. But coal workers are still hesitant and have said to feel left out of the country’s energy transition.

Lack of consultation

According to Mngomezulu, however, the people of Ermelo are in the dark when it comes to the transition because the government is not bringing consultations to the communities.

“We’ve been saying to the presidential climate commission [PCC] that they must come and do a proper consultation in Ermelo because people here are dependent on coal, so if we are going to shut down the power stations and any other coal mines without informing the community, that’s a bit unfair,” he said.

The PCC is a multi-stakeholder body set up by President Cyril Ramaphosa to “oversee and facilitate a just and equitable transition towards a low-emissions and climate-resilient economy” in South Africa.

Thulani Madlala, a ward councillor in the Msukaligwa municipality, says he is waiting to see how the transition will assist the local poverty-stricken people.

“We are waiting for the JET to be explained to the masses of our people on the ground. We hope that this programme doesn’t negatively affect the unemployment rate that is already here because, if that’s the case, our people are going to be against the transition,” Madlala says.

Meanwhile, Ermelo communities are living in “energy poverty: most of our informal settlements don’t have electricity, so they rely on coal, and some are able to profit from coal sales”, he says.

‘Causing havoc’

Data collated by the Oxpeckers’ #MineAlert tool shows that at least 227 government-licensed coal mines surround Ermelo. The area is also home to more than 3,000 small-scale artisanal miners who contribute to the local economy, pay rent, buy clothes and provide jobs.

Given Masina says the downside of phasing out coal is that businesses such as his will have to close. He started a coal yard in Wesselton, Ermelo’s satellite township, in 2011 that sells coal to community members and he employs people from the community.

India announces $4.3 billion investment in clean energy

Masina says they had not heard anything from the government about consultations with the community. “Look, if they decide to phase out coal, this means I will also have to retrench the employees I have so far employed.”

“There is no doubt that this transition is causing havoc in South Africa. At the moment, power stations are being bombed because of this transition that is not being explained properly to the people of the country,” Masina says.

In December, the government deployed troops to at least four Eskom power stations after a series of incidents of theft and sabotage.

Employment opportunities

The JET plan, released in 2022, states that more than half the youth in Mpumalanga communities are unemployed and the coal value chain decline will further narrow employment opportunities as the sector downscales.

It shows that the coal sector provides direct jobs to almost 90,000 people in mines and power plants in the province, and indirect jobs for people who provide goods and services to the coal sector, which supports a significant portion of induced jobs and other economic activities.

Power utility Eskom says the implementation of JET is envisaged to create some 300,000 jobs in the renewables value chain. “This represents a net jobs gain,” said an Eskom spokesperson in response to Oxpeckers’ questions.

Given Masina says his coal yard will have to close and retrench employees from the local community (Photo: Thabo Molelekwa)

Research by the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies published in 2022 indicates that in South Africa as a whole, job creation through renewables could exceed anticipated job losses in the coal sector.

However, in Mpumalanga, not all job losses in the fossil fuel sector can be replaced by clean energy jobs. Under an ambitious decarbonisation scenario, these net losses can be minimised.

The report states the two most important technologies for the energy transition in Mpumalanga will be wind and solar PV energy, which will also make the largest contributions to job creation: up to 43,000 jobs in solar PV and 28,900 jobs in wind energy by 2030.

Reskilling programmes

While people on the ground who spoke to Oxpeckers are unaware of reskilling programmes, Eskom says people employed at power stations due to be decommissioned are “being trained to obtain skills in the renewable industry so they may be able to manufacture, install and service the renewable energy components required to operate the repurposed power stations.”

“To achieve this end, and in partnership with the Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s South African Renewables Energy Technology Centre and recognised labour unions represented at Eskom, Eskom has established an accredited training centre at the Komati power station,” an Eskom spokesperson who asked not to be named said in response to Oxpeckers questions.

“Those whose skills are required at other coal-fired power stations get transferred to those stations to meet the staffing requirements there. As part of the shutdown plan, extensive socio-economic studies were conducted which included widespread consultation with all communities around the affected power stations.”

And most importantly, he said, Eskom assures all its employees that “no Eskom employee will lose their jobs because of the JET”.

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The spokesperson said employees who no longer work at Komati had either resigned, retired, or were transferred to other stations.

“Eskom plans to use its limited funding to catalyse the construction of renewables plants across the country,” the spokesperson said. “This is demonstrated by the leasing of land at Eskom power stations to allow private participants to rapidly bring online new generating capacity, inter alia.”

Unions sidelined

Michelle Cruywagen, the just transition and coal campaign manager at environmental justice NGO Groundwork, says unions set out processes for a just transition in 2018, “but the business and mining sectors didn’t really come on board in assisting with facilitating the transition, even though they are obliged to do so legally through the social and labour plans”.

“This can be coordinated through the minerals council [a mining industry employers organisation], and the unions who generally negotiate wages and retirement plans should have been leading the way forward,” she says.

Cruywagen maintains that the consequences now are that the transition is not being managed properly, and the job losses aren’t being mitigated because of a lack of management and political will, which puts communities in a vulnerable position.

“It’s fine to reskill people, but employment is actually the thing that people need,” she says. “Part of what we’re pushing for is to get local government involved so that they drive the message, raise awareness and facilitate engagement on the issues of a just transition at a local level.”

Thabo Molelekwa is a freelance health and environmental journalist, and an Associate of Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism. This investigation was originally published in Oxpeckers and was supported by the African Climate Foundation’s New Economy Campaigns Hub.

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Wedged between Brazil and Suriname, the overseas department has little in common with mainland France bar the name. The Amazon rainforest covers more than 90% of the territory.

However, French Guiana is critical to Europe’s soft power. It is home to the continent’s spaceport where the European Space Agency launches its satellites.

Now, the French government is seeking exemptions from proposed EU rules that would restrict the use of bioenergy on the territory. The loophole would allow French Guiana to receive public financing to produce biofuels “especially for the space sector”.

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Local lawmakers argue the dispensation is necessary to protect French Guiana’s forestry sector and accelerate its energy transition. But campaigners have warned the exemption risks setting an incentive for increased logging in Europe’s corner of the Amazon forest.

“Thousands of hectares of Amazon forest could be cleared to be replaced with monocultures designed to produce energy… with the help of public financing,” Marine Calmet, a lawyer specialised in environmental law at NGOs Maiouri Nature Guyane and Wild Legal, told Climate Home News

Rules for biofuels

The EU considers burning wood a renewable energy and subsidises its production. Bioenergy accounts for almost 60% of the EU’s renewable energy mix. But a mounting body of evidence is showing that burning wood emits more carbon dioxide than coal per unit of energy – worsening climate change.

Regrown trees may eventually remove the emitted carbon from the atmosphere but the process could take decades to a century – time which scientists say the world doesn’t have to prevent the worst impacts of global heating. To start addressing the issue, the EU is negotiating stricter sustainability criteria for producing and using bioenergy.

DR Congo delays rainforest oil auctions

Draft legislation adopted by the EU parliament proposed to exclude “primary woody biomass” – untransformed wood such as whole trees, logs and stumps – from receiving renewable energy subsidies, with limited exceptions. It also caps the amount that can count as renewable energy to current use.

Biomass from agricultural crops can’t be considered renewable if they are grown on land of great biodiversity value or replacing primary and ancient forests.

But French lawmakers introduced an exemption for “an outermost region where forests cover at least 90% of the territory”. It would allow biomass fuels and biofuels “especially used in the space sector” and regardless of their origin to receive public financing if they incentivise the transition away from fossil fuels.

Analysts told Climate Home French Guiana is the only known EU region where this could apply.

The Guiana Space Center is surrounded by 90% of forest covered territory in the Amazon. (Photo: CNES/ESA/Arianespace/Optique Video CSG/P Baudon)

Biofuels in the rainforest

The loophole would allow France to count woody bioenergy production in French Guiana towards its own renewable energy target – despite a cap in the rest of the continent. In 2020, France was the only EU member state to fail to achieve its renewable energy target.

Authorities in French Guiana argue the EU’s proposed rules threatened the territory’s goal to move away from fossil fuels, including at the spaceport, which consumes 18% of the electricity produced locally.

Two biomass plants, totalling 9MW, are being built to produce electricity and cooling for operations at the space station. By 2030, French Guiana wants 25% of its electricity mix to come from woody biomass.

Thibault Lechat-Vega, a local official responsible for European affairs, told Climate Home that halting subsidies to the sector would require the territory to import wood pellets from Canada and China “at a catastrophic carbon cost”.

EU plans restrictions on climate-wrecking fishing method

“There is clearly no question of cutting the forest to produce biofuels but to support research to green the European space launcher,” he said, adding that the logging sector in French Guiana followed some of the world’s strictest sustainability criteria.

Waste from forest clearance to give way to agriculture and to build homes and infrastructure would be used, he explained.

But Calmet said these assurances were insufficient. “Elected officials are providing no guarantees about the origins of the biomass. On the contrary, they want to contravene all legal obligations designed to protect primary and old forests, and ecosystems with high biodiversity value,” she said.

Cleaner rockets

While rocket launches account for a tiny fraction of the space industry’s emissions, a number of companies are developing greener propellants, including using biofuels. In French Guiana, researchers are working to scale up biofuels production from micro algae.

Andreas Schütz, a chemical propellant expert at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), told Climate Home that producing rocket fuels from wood, using a process known as gasification, is feasible.

But Mike Mason, an engineer who researched biomass at Oxford University, said the process was “very expensive” and that burning wood to produce electricity remains inefficient.

“Wood is a renewable resource but burning it has a global warming impact,” said Mason, warning of the risk of creating a precedent for climate-damaging activities in the Amazon.

Negotiations on the draft rules are ongoing. Sources close to the discussions told Climate Home that while the EU Council showed willing to accommodate France’s request, the Commission was concerned about the biodiversity impacts.

France recently closed a consultation on requesting the waiver. The government said “minimal environmental guarantees” would be put in place to limit tree clearance for energy production purposes.

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Germany’s energy consumption in 2022 fell by 4.7% year-on-year to the lowest level since its reunification, thanks to spiking energy prices, mild weather, and a government appeal to citizens to save energy in light of a sudden drop in Russian gas imports.

“However, the increased use of coal and oil nullified the reductions in emissions through energy savings,” the Berlin-based think tank said in a statement on Wednesday (4 January).

Although renewable energy reached a record 46% share in Germany’s electricity mix, the greenhouse gas emissions of Europe’s biggest economy totalled around 761 million tonnes last year, overshooting the target of 756 million tonnes and falling behind the 2020 benchmark of a 40% cut compared to 1990, Agora said.

Berlin aims to become carbon-neutral by 2045 and cut emissions by 65% by 2030 compared with 1990, but short-term measures to ensure energy security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine left it behind schedule, Simon Mueller, Agora’s director in Germany, said.

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Last summer, Germany agreed to allow the reactivation of coal-fired power plants or an extension to their lifespan to compensate for declining gas deliveries.

CO2 emissions from the energy industry in 2022 amounted to 255 million tonnes, up 3% from the previous year, but slightly below the sector target of 257 million tonnes.

In April, Germany is slated to turn off its last three nuclear reactors, which is likely to add to its electricity sector woes.

The industrial sector also met its goal, cutting emissions by 8 million tonnes last year due to saving measures and a decline in production, but the transport and building sectors missed their annual targets, Agora added.

“This is an alarm signal with regard to the climate targets,” said Mueller.

Transport sector spat

Germany’s government is currently in the midst of an extended climate protection row in the transport sector. Volker Wissing, a liberal politician belonging to the FDP, who is the minister of transport and digitalisation, has long resisted strict plans to cut emissions in the sector.

This has caused some discomfort with the FDP’s green coalition partners, who accuse Wissing of failing to uphold the landmark constitutional climate protection ruling from 2021.

“We all agree that there is a big gap that still needs to be filled,” explained Robert Habeck, the green minister of economy and climate action, on Tuesday.

But, he conceded, “the ministry of transport says: it’s a little less. We say: a little more.” In Germany, ministries whose sectors fail to meet the ordained climate targets must present measures to address the gap.

An independent expert committee refused to assess a past proposal by Wissing on the grounds that it was entirely unfit for purpose. Yet, as the differences in opinion within the government persist, an updated plan continues to be delayed.

This article was produced by Euractiv and republished under a content sharing agreement.

The post German CO2 cuts stall as coal, oil use cancel out renewable gains appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Beijing-headquartered development bank is considering support for a 584MW gas plant in Narayangonj on the outskirts of Dhaka. A report from the Bangladesh Power Development Board shows the plant will be fuelled by LNG.

Dwindling domestic gas resources, efforts to shift away from coal and phase out polluting diesel plants and the lack of renewable capacity has led Bangladesh to increasingly rely on LNG to meet its energy needs.

But soaring prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have left the South Asian nation priced out of the market and facing regular power outages.

“There’s no gas to supply this new power plant. It’s not justified and ridiculous,” Hasan Mehedi, secretary of the Bangladesh Working Group on External Debt, an alliance of 43 local organisations, told Climate Home News.

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Standard Chartered Bank is lead lender on the $613 million project, which is under construction. AIIB’s proposed contribution is a $110m loan.

To build the plant, project developer Unique Meghnaghat acquired 21 acres of agricultural land from local villages, affecting 343 landowners and fishers, according to project documents.

The fast-tracking process allows the bank’s president to greenlight support without going through the board. He could make the decision this month.

Paris alignment

AIIB found the project to be in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Petra Kjell Wright, a development finance campaigner at Recourse told Climate Home this was the first time the bank had mentioned a Paris alignment assessment. But it has not published its methodology.

The bank has pledged to fully align its operations with the Paris goals by July 2023. According to E3G analysts, it has work to do to get there.

The International Energy Agency has warned that “a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels” is needed to limit warming to 1.5C – the more ambitious end of the Paris Agreement’s goals.

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The project documents show that renewable alternatives were barely considered. They state that renewable energy “remains a niche area that does not have the capacity to provide the power delivery at the scale and reliability in view of the existing power deficit scenario”.

Land scarcity, high initial cost and the lack of infrastructure for large-scale generation are listed as barriers.

Kjell Wright described the assessment as “very weak” and with “loopholes so big that a gas-power plant can jump through them”.

“This is public finance and taxpayers money and it should play a role in the trajectory towards renewable. Public finance should help countries leapfrog to renewables and not pull them back to the fossil fuel economy,” she said.

A spokesperson for AIIB said the project will help the government avoid using more polluting and less efficient plants and complement the development of renewable energy.

‘Clever framing’

Multilateral development banks, including AIIB, have been working on a joint framework to assess projects against the goals of the Paris Agreement.

A draft from November 2021 rules that mining or burning coal isn’t aligned with the Paris deal but it doesn’t explicitly exclude support for oil and gas. Instead, banks are asked to answer a series of broad questions to determine whether the project is Paris-compatible.

“With a bit of clever framing and number crunching, there are ways of showing that nearly every project apart from coal and peat is Paris-aligned,” said Sonia Dunlop of think tank E3G.

The approval of the Narayangonj gas project could set a precedent for how other MDBs assess similar project, she added. “This is hugely concerning”.

Last month, AIIB approved an updated energy strategy restricting financing for coal and oil projects and gas drilling. But it allows funding for gas infrastructure and power generation in certain circumstances, including if it displaces more polluting fuels and doesn’t displace clean ones.

Delaying the energy transition

More than half of Bangladesh’s electricity generation comes from gas, while grid-connected solar accounts for just over 1% of the mix.

To keep up with growing electricity demand, Bangladesh’s LNG imports have surged. A recent analysis by Ember found that, based on current plans, Bangladesh could spend $11 billion on spot market LNG between 2022 and 2024. Investments in solar power could have reduced this by a quarter and saved up to $2.7bn.

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Shafiqul Alam is the lead energy finance analysts for Bangladesh for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa).

He told Climate Home: “Given high LNG prices on the international market and the fact Bangladesh is already facing a gas shortage… this is an opportunity for Bangladesh to transition and design a clear pathway for renewable energy.” Growing the fossil fuel pipeline will only delay that transition, he said. “The government should keep space for renewables and not invest in new LNG-based plants apart from the ones are under construction.”

As of August 2021, AIIB had invested $605m in the energy sector in Bangladesh. According to analysis by the Bangladesh Working Group on External Debt, none of this went to solar or wind projects.

Mehedi, of the working group, said Bangladesh had installed nine grid-connected solar plants. “Solar is bankable and profitable so why are we going for LNG?”

The post AIIB finds gas plant in Bangladesh compatible with Paris goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

The good news is that – despite the views of some vocal skeptics – it can be done. But there’s a bunch of things that need to happen first to smooth the way for the power system – for so long dependent on coal and gas – to be capable of running, at times, entirely on renewable energy.

AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman says operating a gigawatt-scale power system at 100% instantaneous renewable generation is a feat unparalleled in the world.

South Australia has already operated at “net 100%” renewables, but never without any fossil fuel generation. It exports excess wind and solar to Victoria, and in a few years will do so also to New South Wales through a new transmission link.

By 2025, however, Australia’s entire main grid is expected to reach that landmark event of 100% instantaneous renewables, initially for a half hour period, with nowhere to export to.

Coal exit

And it will quickly move from half hour periods to hours and days as the amount of wind and solar and storage increases to the levels required to meet Australia’s new target of 83% renewables (over a whole year) by 2030, and as more coal generation leaves the grid in the years that follow.

The AEMO report makes clear that the NEM will likely have plenty of occasions when the grid could be powered entirely by wind and solar, but there might be many reasons why it is not.

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This includes market behaviour, such as some renewable generators choosing not to generate at their full available resource potential when the wholesale price of energy is negative, or non-renewable generators bidding themselves into the market for commercial reasons.

There may be network constraints, such as limits on transmission line capacity, that mean not all this resource potential can be dispatched in the market and carried by the network to consumers.

There could be system requirements, such as the need to maintain sufficient essential system services, that may currently result in fossil fuel generators being dispatched to provide essential system services in the absence of capabilities being available from non-fossil fuel alternatives.

Limits to rooftop PV

And there could be limitations on the level of distributed photovoltaic (DPV) generation to manage power system security. AEMO is especially keen to ensure all new rooftop solar systems have inverters that can be controlled or “orchestrated” so it has more levers to pull to manage the grid.

Source: AEMO. Please click to expand.

“In this case, the system can securely operate at 100% renewable penetration during the middle of the day, with gas fired generation coming online later in the day to cover afternoon demand,” it notes.

AEMO makes it clear that it will take a cautious approach, and may only allow 100% renewables penetration across the whole grid if it has renewable resource potential well above the level required to meet customer load at that time, and the system needs.

Reserve margins needed

“The first period where renewable resource potential is sufficient to satisfy 100% of demand may not lead to an instantaneous penetration of 100%, if that would risk reserve margins becoming too low to meet future demand in that day,” it says.

Indeed, AEMO notes that on October 16 this year, in the South West Interconnected System in Western Australia, a gigawatt scale grid with no connections, there was more than enough renewables in the system to reach 100% instantaneous penetration.

But it didn’t happen, mostly because a significant amount of renewables was curtailed for economic reasons – project owners dodging negative prices.

And, in any case, the grid operator doesn’t yet have all the systems in place to allow this. The maximum penetration of renewables to date has been 81% in November, and 74% distributed PV in October.

AEMO also notes there is a lot more engineering work to do in the future. The point where the NEM can operate at 100% instantaneous penetration of renewables will occur many years in advance of the time where it can operate at 100% renewables on an extended basis (over many weeks or months).

This article was produced by RenewEconomy and republished under a content-sharing agreement. Read the original here.

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Japan and the US coordinated financial contributions from seven other national governments and the EU, as well as private sector partners.

The money will be spent retiring some of Indonesia’s huge, young fleet of coal-fired power stations and installing renewable energy to meet the country’s electricity demand instead.

Indonesian minister Luhut Pandjaitan announced the “just energy transition partnership” (JETP) on the sidelines of a G20 leaders summit in Bali on Tuesday.

It is a “groundbreaking model of international cooperation,” Pandjaitan told media, which would fulfill a promise to his granddaughter to “make policy that would benefit future generations”.

Fabby Tumiwa is director of the Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR) and advised the Indonesian government on the deal. It “could help Indonesia to meet its net zero emissions goal by 2060 or sooner,” he said. “As one of the largest emitters, this means a lot to global climate efforts to limit warming to 1.5C.”

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Indonesia will aim to peak emissions from its power sector by 2030 rather than the previous target of 2037. It has raised its 2030 target for the renewable share of electricity generation from 17% to 34%.

The government will “freeze the existing pipeline” of coal-fired power plants. Those already under construction are expected to be completed, but others in early stages of development will not go ahead.

Mafalda Duarte heads the Climate Investment Funds, which supported the deal. She told Climate Home: “If we were to allow these [already operating] plants to continue their economic life, then certainly we are out of this Paris Agreement goals of 1.5[C] and even more so if they continued to develop them.”

Financial terms unclear

Roughly half the $20bn package is to come from governments: the US, Japan, UK, Canada, Denmark, the EU, Germany, France, Norway and Italy. Banks are mobilising the rest.

The joint statement between Indonesia and its partners did not reveal who was contributing what, or on what terms. It said the package includes grants, loans at both concessional and commercial rates, guarantees and technical assistance.

Gas is casting a long shadow over green development in Africa

The partners will continue talks on the financial terms and investment plan in the next three months.

The share of grants, as opposed to loans, is a point of contention – as with a similar deal in South Africa. In June, Tumiwa told Climate Home: “The government expects to have grants. It doesn’t really want to have a loan – for sure.”

Esther Tamara, from the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia, told Climate Home: “Any financing is good news at this point. I am just wondering what kind of financing the JETP will be.”

She said that South Africa’s JETP “was much lauded at first but then not so much afterwards”. In both, there was “no transparency, little room for civil societies to contribute,” she added.

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As of July 2022, Indonesia had 19GW of new coal capacity under construction and 7GW in planning stages, according to data compiled by Global Energy Monitor.

The partnership agreement states that support is “contingent on no new coal power capacity for instances where timely, zero-emissions, affordable, and reliable alternatives are available”.

The $20bn is due to be invested in the next three to five years. IESR estimates the total cost of Indonesia’s energy transition at $1.2 trillion – 60 times what’s on offer here.  Duarte told Climate Home “this is a first move – a first package of support and more will be needed”.

The post Rich nations, banks pledge $20bn for Indonesia’s coal-to-clean switch appeared first on Climate Home News.

Africa, where climate vulnerability is higher than any other region. Where renewable energy deployment is going backward, and where, despite having 60% of the world’s solar resources, we are only home to 1.7% of the world’s investment in renewable energy.

Africans know we are vulnerable to climate change, because many still intrinsically depend on the land for their livelihoods. And we can feel the climate shocks: drought in the Horn of Africa. Flooding in Nigeria. Cyclones in Madagascar.

We’re already dealing with reduced food production, reduced economic growth, increased inequality and poverty, increased human morbidity and mortality and major biodiversity loss – all of which will intensify and compound as temperatures creep higher.

Cop27: ‘Oil and gas trade show’ promotes carbon capture

Limiting global warming to 1.5C is fundamental for development, with clear economic benefits from a low emissions pathway emerging for Africa by 2030. The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) calculates that compared to current plans, a path to 1.5C would deliver an additional 6.4% in GDP growth by 2050, 3.5% more jobs and a 25.4% higher welfare index.

But in the current energy crisis, lobbyists, companies and governments are pushing another option: gas.

At Cop27, a significant minority of delegates are seeking gas deals, with development as the moral justification. The reality is African governments taking on outrageous debt to subsidise companies from the global north coming to turn a profit, while local people bear the brunt.

White elephants

If African countries invest in fossil fuel infrastructure, it risks locking in high emissions, burdening their economies with stranded assets, and potentially losing out on major economic opportunities to invest in renewable energy and green hydrogen – for both domestic use and exports.

Most revenues generated from fossil fuel projects go to multinational companies, not the countries where they’re generated. In Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, 55 million people are still without access to electricity: it has the most people in extreme poverty in the world.

Another example is Mozambique, where the government has taken on debt in advance of promised future tax revenue from LNG development.

This can exacerbate developing countries’ debt burdens, worsen poverty and increase dependency on international aid.

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A study by McKinsey shows African gas and oil fields are 15-20% more expensive to develop and up to 80% more carbon-intensive than other fields globally. New African LNG faces significant competitive pressures if not disadvantages from incumbent producers, or producers with intrinsically lower cost structures.

LNG manufacturers want to take advantage of high global prices for their product, creating serious difficulties for domestic access to cheap gas.

Is there room for more gas? The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 1.5C-compatible Net Zero Roadmap projects that African LNG exports would have to peak by 2025 and begin dropping to low levels by 2030.

In this scenario, total African gas production would also need to peak by around 2025 and drop below 2010 levels by the mid 2030s. Importantly, the IEA scenario has significantly higher gas than many other Paris compatible pathways through the 2030s: it’s clear that if the world implements the Paris Agreement the prospects for ongoing markets for new gas from Africa aren’t great.

Barriers to clean development

To achieve sustainable development goals, Sub-Saharan Africa needs stronger investment in renewables. Irena shows the region, accounting for about 14% of the global population, received only around 1.7% of global investment in renewable energy 2010 to 2020.

The IEA says 60% of energy investment in Africa still went to fossil fuels in 2021, with total annual energy investment around $90 billion.

High perceived risks of renewable energy investments mean investors require a higher rate of return. Projects face high financing costs, limited availability of long-term financing, lack of institutional knowledge and must compete with heavily subsidised fossil fuel consumption and production in many countries.

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The average annual investment fossil fuels in Africa in recent years is around $33 billion a year and in $5 billion in renewables. In other words, annual fossil fuel investment is 6-7 times greater than in renewables.

The paradox? Renewables are already cheaper than coal and gas power plants in most African countries, but they’ve not received promised climate finance required to fund the energy transition – while international support for fossil fuels continues.

Energy access and supply in Africa is not a black and white, either/or decision-making environment – but Africans are not here to be taken advantage of to further subsidise the consumption habits of the north.

This model is all too familiar to us. If developed countries are serious about supporting sustainable development in Africa, they must prioritise support for climate-resilient infrastructure and generation.

Deborah Ramalope, a South African, is head of the Climate Policy team for Climate Analytics.

The post Gas is casting a long shadow over green development in Africa appeared first on Climate Home News.

A Report from Rystad Energy says investment in renewables is forecast to reach US$494 billion in 2022 versus $US446 billion for oil and gas – the first time investment in renewables is set to be higher than for oil and gas.

The Rystad analysts say high spot electricity prices, particularly in Europe, are rewriting the utility wind and solar investment narrative as potential investment payback periods of under a year put extra shine on renewables energy economics.

“Capital investments in renewables are set to outstrip oil and gas for the first time this year as countries scramble to source secure and affordable energy,” says Rystad’s Michael Sarich.

“Investments into renewables are likely to increase further moving forward as renewable project payback times shorten to less than a year in some cases.”

The impact of soaring spot prices on project economics

Typically, returns on new wind and solar PV projects have been unspectacular, often relying on subsidies to get projects over the line.

Cost pressures due to recent commodity and supply chain issues should have made matters worse, as they have reversed years of rapid unit cost improvements in the sector.

But according to Rystad, current spot prices in Germany, France, Italy, and the UK would all result in paybacks of 12 months or less.

To understand the impact of soaring prices on project economics, a generic 250 megawatts (MW) solar PV asset has been modelled in Germany by Rystad in the below graph.

Assuming a long-term electricity price of €50/MWh ($49/MWh), the expected post tax return is approximately 6% with a payback period of 11 years.

Higher prices were then assumed in the start-up year, dropping uniformly in years two and three until returning to the long-term assumption.

The graph shows a price of €350/ MWh or above results in a payback period of only one year while a price of approximately €180 – the European Commission’s proposed price threshold – halves the payback to 5-6 years.

The data shown is for Germany, however €350/ MWh will also result in a payback within 12 months in France, Italy, and the UK.

Good time to get new projects up and running

In June, the International Energy Agency forecast that global energy investment was on track to increase 8% this year to $US2.4 trillion, with investment in clean energy responsible for most of the rise.

The rise in clean energy spending is occurring primarily in advanced economies and China, while in some markets, energy security concerns and high prices are prompting higher investment in fossil fuel supplies, most notably on coal, according to the IEA.

For now, Rystad says most European solar and wind projects are not benefitting from the current high prices, but that is changing quickly.

“Developers and financiers alike should be trying to get projects up and running as quickly as possible and with maximum exposure to wholesale prices – as once the up-front costs are recouped, returns will be very attractive even if prices drop back close to historical levels,” the report says.

The post Thanks to fossil fuel crisis, wind and solar payback time drops to one year appeared first on Climate Home News.

The International Energy Agency said a post-pandemic jobs rebound in the sector has been driven by emissions-cutting technologies such as electric vehicle production, building insulation, solar projects and wind farms.

Clean energy, which under IEA’s definition includes nuclear power, is now estimated to account for more than half the 65 million energy sector jobs globally.

However, the Paris-based agency said high energy prices including for fossil fuels have seen an upswing in employment, notably for liquefied natural gas infrastructure. Many countries in Europe are scrambling to find alternatives to Russian gas supplies due to the war in Ukraine.

It also noted that wages in clean energy jobs lag behind those in the fossil fuel industry, where unionization rates are higher and risky work has been compensated with higher pay. The exception is nuclear, due to the highly skilled labor needed, the agency said.

“Countries around the world are responding to the current crisis by seeking to accelerate the growth of homegrown clean energy industries,” said IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol. “The regions that make this move will see huge growth in jobs.”

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He urged companies, labor representatives and governments to ensure that clean energy projects provide high quality employment and attract a diverse workforce. Women are significantly underrepresented in the energy sector, which as a whole accounts for about 2% of the global workforce, IEA said.

Where possible, fossil fuel workers should be given the option to retrain for clean energy jobs, the agency said. It predicted could up to 14 million new clean energy jobs could be created by 2030, with an additional 16 million workers switching to new roles related to clean energy.

The post Clean energy jobs overtake fossil fuel sector but wages lag behind appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last year, the small island state of Nauru, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters, until July 2023 to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules.

Countries have discussed mining the bottom of the oceans for years but no commercial extraction has started in international waters. The ultimatum would allow the nascent industry to apply for mining permits as soon as next year.

The move has led to growing calls from nations, scientists and campaigners not to rush the approval of a mining code that risks negatively impacting the deep marine environment, of which still little is known.

During three weeks of meetings at the ISA’s headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, which ended last week, some member states issued multiple calls for a discussion on the implication of the two-year ultimatum to be added to the agenda.

Chile, Costa Rica, South Africa, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Italy and Spain were among countries voicing frustration at being forced to negotiate such a complex piece of international law under an artificial timeline.

But the ISA secretary and officials refused to add the issue to the official agenda, stripping the body’s 167 member states of the ability to meet and express their views before the deadline next year.

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Deep sea mining companies have been carrying out exploration of an area of the Pacific Ocean floor, known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone. 

There lies a concentration of black mineral concretion, known as polymetallic nodules, which are rich in nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese: minerals critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

Following the triggering of the two-year-rule, the ISA secretary has rushed to design a roadmap that could allow the nascent deep sea mining industry to begin commercial operations as soon as next year.

Under procedural rules, the ISA will have to “consider and provisionally approve” requests for exploitation licences regardless of whether the mining code is finalised.

Since then, calls for banning the practice have grown. Scientists have warned that far too little is known about the deep ocean, its biodiversity and the role it plays in storing carbon to allow companies to mine the seabed. Mining would result in biodiversity loss “that would be irreversible on multi-generational timescales,” they say.

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The Chilean delegation, which formally requested for the implication of the July 2023 deadline to be discussed at the meeting, described it as “an elephant in the room”.

In June, Chile called for a 15-year moratorium on adopting regulations, expressing concerns of environmental damage and the lack of scientific data.

“Are we willing to be accomplices to the unknown and irreparable damages submarine mining might cause?” Chile’s ambassador Constanza Figueroa, asked.

“We are not ready” to allow deep-sea mining, Ecuador’s delegation told the meeting in support of Chile’s call for a moratorium. “If we act with haste, we could put ourselves in irreversible situations with respect to the marine environment.”

“The famous two-year clause does not oblige us to move to the exploitation phase if the environmental measures are not adequate,” insisted a representative from Spain.

Gina Guillen-Grillo, Costa Rica’s permanent representative at the ISA, called for “a precautionary pause” on agreeing the rules.

The Seabed Authority has a mandate to effectively protect marine environment.We don’t have the science to take informed decisions,so how can we authorize to start Mining before we can fully comply to protect our Ocean & its biodiversity. We must apply caution! #PrecautionaryDelay https://t.co/fEjeRmi5MJ

— Gina Guillen-Grillo (@gina31854903) August 5, 2022

But the ISA didn’t heed the call to allow adequate time to discuss the deadline and its feasibility.

Instead, it relegated the discussion to “any other matters” to be discussed at the end of the meeting. That conversation lasted just about an hour before it was cut short by officials citing time concerns.

As a result, the assembly body of the ISA, which compromises all 167 states, won’t have an opportunity to discuss the issue again before next year’s deadline.

Campaigners have accused the ISA of being blindsided by the pursuit of greenlighting the industry at the expense of protecting the marine environment.

Diva Amon, a deep-sea biologist representing the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, an observer at the talks, said: “Pushing through regulations without allowing ISA member states and observer organisations to properly debate the mining regulations and the consequences of proceeding without a robust understanding of important but vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems will not be to the benefit of humankind.”

The ISA didn’t respond to Climate Home News’ request for comment.

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