Call to G20 leaders to triple renewable, double energy efficiency targets: COP28 Presidency

New Delhi, July 23 (IANS) Recognising the climate emergency affecting large parts of the planet, be it heatwaves or extreme rainfalls leading to floods, the COP28 Presidency on Saturday called for a consensus and commitment for tripling of renewables and doubling of energy efficiency targets from the leaders of G20.

Speaking at a side-event of Clean Energy Ministerial under India's G20 Presidency in Goa, Simon Birkebaek, Director of Energy Transition at COP28 Presidency, said: "While each country must tailor its own approach, commitment must help scale at the pace needed."

He said countries need to address barriers like finance and infrastructure.

"While global investments across at energy transition technologies have reached $1.3 trillion, the COP Presidency called out for the quadrupling of the amount."

The UAE is hosting the UN climate summit in November and the president of COP28 is Sultan Al Jaber, who is also chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc).

Global Renewables Alliance CEO, Bruce Douglas, "fully supported" the COP28 President's goal to triple the total global renewables energy capacity, that comes to about 11TW by 2030.

IRENA noted that the share of renewables will grow from 16 per cent in 2020 to 77 per cent in 2050.

"We think there needs to be 8TW of additional renewable energy capacity installed in the next eight years over 3.4TW in 2022. The total will be over 11TW of renewables by 2030," said Nicholas

Wagner, Programme Officer at IRENA.

The additions will focus on 5TW of solar PV over 2020 levels (eight-fold increase), 3TW of onshore wind over 2020 levels and 500GW of offshore wind over 2020 levels, using the three pillars of energy transition -- physical infrastructure, policy and regulatory enablers, and skills and capacities.

Carlos Toro Ortiz, Head of Energy Planning and Innovations Unit, Ministry of Energy, Government of Chile, noted that the fall in coal capacity wasn't easy.

Chile plans to reach 80 per cent by 2030. "By 2050 we will be 100 per cent renewable or more."

Adding further Chile claimed that there has been a lot of doubt over integrating large scale renewable, grid issues and energy

security challenges.

However, they are working on system innovations and are confident that to achieve 100 per cent clean or more by 2050.

The EU said recognising a global renewable target is a milestone.

Paula Pinho, Director for Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency, and Innovation, European Commission said "from the European Commission perspective we would like to see tripling of renewable to be linked with energy efficiency (doubling the rate of energy efficiency in this decade compared to the previous decade), which should be coupled with phase down of fossil fuels".

Recognising the progress made by the EU, Pinho added first EU's renewable share was 20 per cent then went to 40 per cent.

"But the challenge of Russian war has made us reconsider 40 per cent to increase it to 42.5 per cent of final energy consumption coming from renewables in 2030."

Recognizing the need for finance, Ravidner Singh Dhillon, former CMD with the Power Finance Corporation, said: "In the next eight years if we need to add a power system the size of the European Union, private sector funding needs to be scaled up 10 times."

Sumant Sinha, Chairperson, ReNew Power, added the wind energy is cheaper in some geographies in comparison to solar.

"As we look at scaling up all renewables, it needs to happen with wind as well. Wind cost reduction will not continue to happen like in solar. Issue of costs will always be there to some extent. Fundamental issues like permitting and land acquisition remain, but wind doesn't have supply chain issues like solar and off-shore wind is promising with the ability to execute constraint due to limited capacity," he added.

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