REN21 Renewables review

The Renewable Energy for the 21st Century group (REN21) produce invaluable annual overviews.  Their annual renewables review for 2021 reports that renewables generating capacity is still growing globally, with hydro still leading at 1,170GW, PV solar coming next at 760GW, while wind is at 743GW. In terms of output, renewables now supply around 27% of global electricity and about 11.2% of total global energy.  Renewable capacity is likely to continue to expand, given that costs are still falling. IRENA has noted that costs for electricity from utility-scale solar PV fell 85% in 2010-20 and, on the basis of its learning curve projections, it looks to continuing price falls for solar and to a lesser extent wind. 

However, that may not translate into significantly increased renewable shares in the overall mix. REN21 says that ‘despite tremendous growth in some renewable energy sectors, the share of renewables has increased only moderately each year’, which is it says is ‘due to rising global energy demand, continuing consumption of and investment in new fossil fuels, and declining traditional use of biomass (which has led to a shift towards fossil fuels)’. It goes on ‘this slow progress points to the complementary and fundamental roles of energy conservation, energy efficiency and renewables in reducing the contribution of fossil fuels to meeting global energy needs and reducing emissions. With the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere still rising to record levels even as emissions have fallen, it has become increasingly clear that a structural shift is needed to reach long-term climate targets’.                                   

So there is some way to go, with only a quarter of the rise in final 2020 energy demand being met by increased (new) renewables. Clearly, some progress has been made in the power sector, more than in heat and transport, but that is beginning to change, with more attention being paid to green heating and electric/biofuel vehicles.  Some zero net carbon targets are also being set.  However, ‘the targets do not necessarily cover all greenhouse gases or all sectors, nor do they necessarily lead to greater attention to renewables or to success in meeting renewable energy targets’. And REN21 note, ‘only five of the world’s largest member economies in the Group of Twenty (G20) – the EU-27, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom – had set 2020 targets to achieve a certain share of renewables in final energy use.  Of them, several were clearly not on track to achieve these targets by year’s end’.

The case for action to avoid climate and bio-system disaster has never been stronger.  In terms of energy, what is needed is faster deployment of renewables everywhere in all sectors, along with much more emphasis on energy saving and demand reduction.  That should help reduce the pressure for increased use of coal that exits in Asia especially- including coal now being exported from the USA. Chasing coal out of the global economy will however be hard. IRENA says ‘new solar & wind projects are increasingly undercutting even the cheapest existing coal-fired plants’, but for old plants, with their construction costs already met, it may not be so straight forward- there are powerful vested interests.  Francesco La Camera, Irena’s director general, nevertheless says ‘renewables present countries tied to coal with an economically attractive phase-out agenda that ensures they meet growing energy demand, while saving costs, adding jobs, boosting growth and meeting climate ambition.’ 

While IRENA, not unnaturally, stresses the successful expansion of renewables capacity, Rana Adib, Executive Director of REN21, says ‘it’s time to stop talking only about gigawatts of installed capacity,’ given that ‘the share of fossil fuels in overall final energy demand is as high as it was a decade ago. While renewables grew almost 5% per year from 2009 to 2019, fossil fuel shares remained at around 80% over the same period. And with fossil fuel subsidies in 2019 totalling USD 550 billion – almost double the total investment in renewables – the last 10 years of climate policy promises have shown themselves to be mostly empty words’. 

That is not to say the situation is hopeless: emissions are being cut in key sectors and renewables are playing their part. But, Abid says ‘we must emphasise how renewables can support development, economic development and a cleaner, healthier environment. If we are to achieve the energy transition, we need to integrate renewables across all economic sectors’.  That’s obviously true.  However, it may also be the case that we cannot get to zero carbon if we sustain the current type of global economy- based on relentless growth in economic activity.  Fortunately, degrowth pathways may no longer be viewed with quite such horror as they have traditionally been. Indeed, some see degrowth as an easier route forward. For example, a major paper in Nature concluded that ‘degrowth scenarios minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability compared to technology-driven pathways, such as the reliance on high energy-GDP decoupling, large-scale carbon dioxide removal and large-scale and high-speed renewable energy transformation’.

That may be too optimistic. It is true that there are scenarios which avoid carbon capture and carbon removal and also do without nuclear, both of which are seen by some as detracting from the rapid expansion of renewables. But even with a massive commitment to energy saving and reductions in energy demand, it seems unlikely that we could do without a massive expansion of renewables.  LUT University in Finland has a zero carbon non-nuclear scenario with huge 63TW of PV solar installed globally by 2050, supplying 76% of total primary electricity supply by then across the power, heat, and transport sectors- wind supplies most of the rest. That may be wildly over ambitious, but, as renewable costs continue to fall and energy use systems are revamped, expansion on that scale might be viable.  Certainly, in addition to the LUT and other global scenarios, as my last few post have indicated, there are new zero carbon scenarios emerging for the UK, with, along with significant energy efficiency improvements, massive reliance on renewables, although in that case with wind usual dominating over PV solar.