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- The recent U.N. climate conference (COP30) in Brazil resulted in the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) to bring about a just energy transition that embraces renewable energy and expands access to power.
- But details on how the transition will be accomplished remain elusive.
- Economist Fadhel Kaboub contends that the transition should not reinforce existing inequalities in Africa and other parts of the Global South.
- Kaboub sees an opportunity in the energy transition to remedy those power imbalances, which he calls “the bargain of the century.”
Many observers see industrialization as the key to boosting clean electricity access for people living in Africa and across the Global South. They argue that building up economies with industry will bring about the investments needed to upgrade the power grid and related infrastructure to provide power to the 600 million people in Africa who currently lack any electricity.But making sure the transition is fair means thinking about the coal workers who could lose their livelihoods and also about those who mine critical minerals essential for the renewable energy sector. The “just transition” toward renewable energy and away from fossil fuels got a boost at the November U.N. climate conference (COP30) in Brazil with the approval of the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM). The details of the BAM have yet to be sorted out, beyond a foundation of integrating existing endeavors toward low-carbon energy. But advocates applauded mentions of the rights of workers and Indigenous communities, as well as the inclusion of calls for more grants — as opposed to loans — to ease the transition. However, delegates failed to include a plan for phasing out oil, coal and gas.
“The move to establish a just transition mechanism is positive and shows the power of civil society organising,” Friederike Strub, a climate finance campaigner at the Netherlands-based nonprofit Recourse, said in a statement. “But to make the just transition happen we need public finance backing, systemic economic reform, and a clear roadmap to end fossil fuels.” Even amid these signs of progress, the question of how to best accomplish the transition remains. Tunisian-American economist Fadhel Kaboub, however, cautions that a general push to bring “green industrialization” to African countries runs the risk of reinforcing, rather than addressing, the very structural inequalities that have kept so many Africans underpowered. The emphasis in this approach has been on maintaining Africa as a place from which to extract raw materials and cheap labor, not on building up African countries’ capacity, Kaboub, an associate professor of economics at Denison University in the U.S., told Mongabay. Pursuing a similar path — even with the goal of expanding power access — could saddle Africa with more debt and stranded investments in outdated sources of dirty energy, while other countries pluck what they need from the continent to decarbonize their grids at home. An alternative “bargain of the century,” which Kaboub sketches out in a recent paper, relies on African nations banding together to forge more equitable partnerships with countries in other parts of the world. He sees a continent brimming with promise: It holds some of the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals like cobalt, lithium and copper, which are needed to build out renewable energy infrastructure reliant on batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles. The continent has enormous potential for solar, wind and hydropower generation. And a growing population of young workers and consumers could provide the leverage necessary to demand that skill-building, capacity and technology are invested in African countries.
Fadhel Kaboub recently spoke with Mongabay’s John Cannon about the energy transition. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.Mongabay......What is the historical context of Africa’s need for a just energy transition? Can you explain that line of thinking?.....read on https://news-mongabay-com.
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Supply boom in cheaper renewables will seal end of fossil fuel era, says IEA Watchdog’s flagship report says rise in low-carbon electricity will make transition ‘inevitable’, despite Trump’s calls to carry on drilling. Guardian Jilliann Ambrose Fiona Harvey 12 Nov 2025 Renewables will grow faster than any major energy source in the next decade, according to the world’s energy watchdog, making the transition away from fossil fuels “inevitable”, despite a green backlash in the US and parts of Europe. The world is expected to build more renewable energy projects in the next five years than has been rolled out over the last 40, according to the flagship annual report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The report shows that this increase in renewable energy could meet nearly all the world’s growing appetite for electricity, which is on track to rise by 40% over the next decade, fuelled by the growing demand for electric cars, heating, cooling and to power AI data centres. It also points to a “renaissance” for nuclear power, driven by major tech companies seeking a steady supply of low-carbon electricity to power their data centres. The IEA has predicted that global investment in data centres will reach $580bn in 2025, surpassing the $540bn being spent on global oil supply. The rise in low-carbon electricity is expected to seal the transition away from the fossil fuel era, despite calls from the Trump administration to retreat from green investments in favour of drilling for oil and gas.
David Tong, a campaigner at Oil Change International, said the IEA’s report had confirmed that “no single country can stop the energy transition”. He called on world leaders gathered at Belém in Brazil for the UN’s Cop30 climate talks to reject “Donald Trump’s dystopian future” in favour of a “fast, fair, and funded fossil fuel phase-out”. The IEA’s findings are expected to embolden leaders who plan to use the Cop30 talks to push for progress on reaching the global target to triple renewable energy by 2030 and transition away from fossil fuels, agreed to at Cop28 in Dubai.The Paris-based agency has reportedly come under pressure from US Republicans to use its flagship report to present a more positive future for the fossil fuel industry than in previous forecasts. In response, the IEA reintroduced a scenario from previous reports that offers “a cautious perspective” on the speed of the energy transition.
Dave Jones, the chief analyst of Ember, a think tank, said this scenario’s assumptions appeared to underestimate the rollout of electric vehicles (EVs), leading to higher forecasts for the consumption of oil than in the IEA’s central scenario. However, a rapid expansion of renewables was “inevitable”, he added.......read on https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-boom-in-cheaper-renewables-will-seal-end-of-fossil-fuel-era-says-iea
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As Trump champions fossil fuels, the world is betting on renewable energy. Despite a U.S. retreat, solar and wind are overtaking fossil fuels globally, according to two new reports. Grist Zoya Teirstein 9 Oct 2025 If you live in the U.S., you could be forgiven for thinking that renewable energy is on the outs. In July, Congress voted to rapidly phase out longstanding tax credit support for wind and solar power, and the Trump administration has taken seemingly every step in its power to halt the development of individual wind and solar projects — even as domestic electricity demand rises and new sources of electricity become more important than ever. But even as clean energy deployment hit roadblocks in the U.S., the world overall set a new record for renewable energy investment over the first half of this year. Wind and solar power are meeting and even exceeding a global rise in energy demand. Indeed, electricity output from these sources is increasing faster than the world can use it, displacing some fossil fuel-generated power in the process. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by Ember, a global energy think tank, which mapped this year’s global power supply by analyzing monthly data from 88 countries that are responsible for more than 90 percent of global electricity demand. “Overall — we’re talking globally — renewables overtook coal,” said Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember and a co-author of the company’s report. “And I expect this to hold.” This year marks the first time that renewable energy sources have outpowered coal in the global energy mix. In fact, global use of fossil fuels for electricity actually declined slightly, compared to the same period in 2024. Another report published this week by the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental energy research and policy organization, projects that the quantity of installed renewable power, meaning the maximum amount of energy that can be produced by systems like solar fields, hydroelectric dams, and wind turbines, will more than double by the end of this decade. National policies encouraging the development of green technology as well as astounding drops in the price of solar power — primarily driven by Chinese manufacturers, which build more than 80 percent of the world’s solar energy components — are largely driving the transition. And even that projection may be conservative.
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How inverters can stabilize a renewables-heavy grid. A conversation with Daniel Duckwitz of SMA Solar Technology and Catarina Augusto of SolarPower Europe. Volts David Roberts 5 Sept 2025 Today's electricity grids are kept stable by the inertia of spinning masses — mostly fossil fuel generators. But what happens when those spinning masses are replaced by inverter-based resources like wind, solar, and batteries? The answer is that inverters must take over the stabilizing job, becoming "grid-forming" rather than merely “grid-following.” I chat with two experts about how grid-forming inverters work, how many are out there, and what the future holds for them. And you're right, there is. In the seconds or milliseconds between when demand rises or falls on a grid and a grid operator is able to respond by adding or subtracting supply, the energy to buffer that transition and keep frequency and voltage under control is provided by inertia.
Specifically, almost every electricity generator involves a large spinning mass, rotating coils through a magnetic field. And there is kinetic energy in that spinning mass. Like a flywheel, that inertial energy can be tweaked very quickly. The mass can spin more quickly, thereby absorbing energy, or spin more slowly, thereby releasing energy, keeping the grid in balance in those key seconds. Collectively, spinning masses constitute a kind of shock absorber for the grid. Now here's the first: solar panels, batteries, and most wind turbines, the building blocks of tomorrow's energy system, do not connect to the grid via large spinning masses. Rather, they connect through inverters, which are all electronics. No moving parts, nothing spinning, no kinetic energy. Lacking inertia, inverter-based resources have not, to date, actively contributed to grid stability. In fact, there are widespread worries that replacing (primarily fossil fuel-based) spinning masses with clean inverter-based resources will leave grids with too little inertia, too little buffer, prone to accidents and breakdowns like what happened in Spain and Portugal recently. But here's the second twist. A modern inverter, properly programmed, can effectively mimic a spinning mass, adding or subtracting tiny increments of energy to the grid in milliseconds. This ersatz spinning mass provides what is called in the business "synthetic inertia." Inverters attached to batteries are best at this, for reasons we'll get into. But inverters on solar panels and wind turbines can contribute as well.
So the problem is solved and we can all go home? Haha, of course not. It is never that simple. To get into the details, I have with me today two experts: Daniel Duckwitz works on grid stability products for SMA Solar Technology, a large power conversion company based in Germany; Catarina Augusto is a renewable energy engineer who works on grids and flexibility for the nonprofit SolarPower Europe.
As you could probably tell from the lengthier-than-usual intro, this subject can get somewhat technical. But the larger issue we're circling around here could not be more simple and profoundly important: can we or can we not run a stable electricity grid on renewable energy?
All right then, with no further ado, Daniel Duckwitz, Catarina Augusto, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming......READ OR LISTEN TO THE DISCUSSION.......
https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-
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Trump cracks down on renewable energy The Hill Rachel Frazin - 08/08/25 The moves are expected to create issues for the renewable energy industry, ones critics argue could raise power prices. President Trump’s tax and spending megabill slashed incentives for wind and solar energy that were part of the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is expected to significantly stifle the build-out of the growing industry. And in recent weeks, his administration has taken further actions to hamper wind and solar power.To catch you up:
- Shortly after the bill passed, Trump directed the Treasury Department to take a strict approach in limiting which projects are eligible for the remaining tax credits.
- The Interior Department also recently announced it would subject wind and solar projects to an elevated review process — a move that was expected to slow down their approvals.
- Last week, Interior said it would try to block projects that take up a lot of room, which is expected to primarily hurt solar and wind projects.
- The department said last week that it would weigh “whether to stop onshore wind development on some federal lands and halting future offshore wind lease sales.”
- It also moved this week to try to cancel an already approved wind project in Idaho.
- The Environmental Protection Agency separately announced Thursday it would move to claw back funds under a $7 billion rooftop solar program.
The Interior Department's elevated review processes are expected to pertain not only to wind and solar farm approvals but also include a wide range of activities such as grants and assessments of endangered species impacts.......read on https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm&ogbl#inbox/FMfcgzQbgcXPWLftwJJjQcGRBlMLjrxK
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