Acceleration of renewable energies must be stronger in countries of the South, says report

A report which will not fail to brighten up the discussions on the sidelines of COP28. According to Irena, renewable energies must progress “more quickly in developing countries” to limit global warming to 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era, recommends the intergovernmental organization in a report published Monday .

“Renewable energy capacities must be increased more rapidly in developing countries, given the growing demand for electricity and the important role of renewables in addressing the significant energy access deficit in these countries,” writes the International Renewable Energy Agency a few weeks before the climate summit in Dubai.

The Agency makes it one of its main recommendations to “triple” the world's renewable energy production capacity by 2030 in order to help limit global warming, in accordance with the objective set by Sultan Al Jaber, president of COP28 which is to be held from November 30 to December 12, under the auspices of the UN in Dubai.

These measures “should be complemented by a gradual reduction in fossil fuel production, by the improvement, modernization and extension of physical infrastructure, as well as by greater flexibility of the network”, adds the report in conclusion.

While the average annual investment to produce renewable electricity in the world must reach 1,300 billion dollars in 2030 compared to 486 billion in 2022, it will be necessary, in developing countries, to “reduce to a minimum the risks of investments and allow access to low-cost financing,” underlines Irena.

With this in mind, the agency is calling for a “reform” of the global financial architecture that would support the energy transition of countries in the Southern hemisphere. “Climate-related financing from development banks must be increased” and public capital “redirected from the fossil fuel sector to renewable energies,” say the authors of the report.

They underline that over the period 2000-2020, of the 2,841 billion dollars of cumulative investments in the world for renewable energies, Africa received only 60, or a little more than 2% of the total. In order to change this trajectory, Irena particularly advocates the use of innovative financing models, such as “mixed financing”, combining public donors and private financing, for the modernization of electricity networks, among others.

The report also calls on a global scale to urgently increase and modernize existing electricity networks in order to adapt them to renewables. He suggests in particular “increasing cross-border cooperation and developing regional electricity networks”.