Almost 120 countries vowed to triple renewables by 2030 – how is it going? At Cop28 last year they also pledged to double energy efficiency in an effort to cut the world’s reliance on fossil fuels Guardian Juilian Ambrose Wed 20 Nov 2024  Almost 120 countries came together in Dubai last year at the Cop28 climate talks to pledge one of the most ambitious green energy targets in the history of the UN climate talks. The plan put forward was to triple the world’s renewable energy and double its energy efficiency by the end of the decade in an attempt to cut the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. It was an “ambitious yet achievable goal”, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which could play a pivotal role in cutting the world’s emissions to keep global heating in check.But in a year, the world’s progress has struggled to keep up with the pace required to meet these goals.                                                    

Government renewable energy targets ‘unchanged’...... The world’s renewable energy capacity was about 3.4 terawatts in 2022 – or 45 times the size of Great Britain’s total power system – but to meet the Cop28 targets countries would need to reach just over 11TW by 2030. The global energy think tank Ember said in a January report that a tripling of renewables was “entirely achievable”. But in its most recent report it found that national targets by governments were “almost unchanged” and still added up to just over a doubling of the global renewables capacity by 2030. Of the more than 130 countries that signed up to the pledge, only eight had updated their renewable targets by October, according to Ember, resulting in only a modest increase in overall renewable energy targets globally. To date, the global industry is on track to reach 7.2TW by the end of the decade, according to Ember’s analysis of targets for 96 countries and the EU as a bloc. This is a 2.1-times increase from 2023, which would still leave a shortfall of 3.7TW. The analysis has been confirmed by the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), which is responsible for providing the official progress report of the UAE Consensus energy goals set at Cop28. Francesco La Camera, Irena’s director general, said the organisation was raising the alarm on the “significant gaps” that stand in the way of reaching the Cop28 goals. The new goals set by countries at Cop29 “must mark a turning point and bring the world back on track”, he said......read on   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/20/countries-vowed-triple-renewables-2030-how-going

 Be Careful of the Lessons You Learn In Texas. Texas is building more solar than any state. It also has the state's dirtiest electric grid. DistilledMichael Thomas Dec 13, 2024 If you’ve spent any time online in the last few years, you’ve no doubt seen what I’ve come to think of as “the Texas clean energy story.”You might have seen it in social media posts [that rave about the huge amount of  green energy it's built.] Or you might have seen it in a mainstream news article with headlines like these:

• Can Blue States Build? Texas is a national leader in clean-energy generation. Democrats should take note. (The Atlantic)

• How red Texas became a model for green energy. The state’s solar surge proves that the energy transition defies politics. (Financial Times)

• Solar is bigger in Texas (Axios) Or maybe you read it in my newsletter or one of my own social media posts earlier this year. It’s been hard to miss the story of Texas as the clean energy and climate hero. In the last few years, it’s been shared in viral social media posts, cable news segments, podcasts, and print media. But there’s another side of this story that is often left out of these articles, including in the one that I wrote: While Texas leads the country in building clean energy, it also leads in electricity emissions and pollution. No other state’s electric grid puts as much carbon into the atmosphere each year. Plenty of states have dirty grids, of course. Wyoming, West Virginia, and Alabama all run primarily on coal. But none of these states are put forward as a hero and model in the way that Texas has been in the last two years. The subtext of most stories about Texas’ clean energy success is that America and other states should rewrite their energy policies and regulations to look more like those in the Lone Star state. But before doing that, we’d all be wise to look at the entire energy picture in Texas. Texas’ recent solar boom has helped the state surpass California in having the most installed utility-scale solar. California still leads the country in total solar electricity production thanks to its millions of rooftop solar systems. But at the rate Texas is building new solar, it’s unlikely to keep that lead for long. The growth of solar has helped Texas cut emissions from its grid by 7% over the last five years—a period that saw total electricity consumption rise by 20%.

•  Texas really is building a lot of solar.........There’s no doubt that Texas leads the country in new solar deployment. Over the last 12 months, the state has built more than 7 gigawatts of new capacity—more than any other state by far, as you can see in the Cleanview chart in the article.There are no signs that this growth will slow down in the coming years either. Using data from Cleanview—the tool I built to track clean energy trends and projects—I looked at how much clean energy is expected to come online in the next 18 months. Texas has more planned capacity than the next 9 states combined. No matter how you cut the data, Texas is leading the country in building clean energy. And there are lessons to be learned from this success. One lesson Texas offers is how to manage grid interconnection. When surveyed, clean energy developers often cite interconnection queues and delays as a top barrier to building new solar, wind and battery projects. Texas has figured out a better way of handling this problem than other parts of the country with its “connect and manage” approach to interconnection. As a result, clean energy projects are connecting faster in Texas than in California and the Northeast.

  Texas was an early wind energy leader too.......The recent solar boom in Texas isn’t the first time that renewable energy has grown quickly in the state. In the early 2000s, Texas built more wind energy than any other state. Wind’s growth was due in large part to how Texas managed and planned its electric grid. The state set up a “Competitive Renewable Energy Zone” (CREZ) and passed policies that led to thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines connecting the empty plains to city centers. Texas lawmakers also passed one of the country’s first Renewable Portfolio Standards mandating that utilities build 2 GW of clean power. After the state blew past that goal, they upped the target to 10 GW.

• “All-of-the-above” energy policy has led to a lot of coal.......Former Governor Rick Perry, who led the state during its early wind boom, has said that the state’s renewable energy success can be attributed to something else though: its “all-of-the-above” approach to energy. He’s not alone either......read on  https://www.distilled.earth/p/be-careful-of-the-lessons-you-learn?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=mwxsy&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email 

Current Approach towards Low Carbon Development in Bangladesh.  Bangladesh has emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in the 21st century, and the country has now set an ambition to be a high income country by 2041 (Vision 2041, GoB). The Government of Bangladesh (GoB) is not only focusing on fueling its economic growth but is also making environmental sustainability even more of a priority. For instance, although Bangladesh’s overall contribution to global carbon emissions is very small, the country has been striving for sustainable and low-carbon development. The GoB’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) expresses an enhanced ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) emission reduction target of 89.47 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), i.e., equivalent to 21.85% of business-as-usual emissions by 2030 (NDC 2021, GoB). To diversify the energy generation sources (currently fossil fuel dominant), the Honorable Prime Minister of Bangladesh stated at COP26 that the country would aim to cover 40% of its power generation with renewable energy (RE) by the year 2041 (UNFCCC, 2021). Accordingly, the Government of Bangladesh adopted the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan 2022-2041 (MCPP) in February 2022 where it included a phase-wise target of 40% RE by 2041, 50% by 2060, and 100% in the long term, considering diversified sources of RE, including solar, wind and hydrogen energy sources, subject to receiving support from international resources (MCPP 2022, GoB). The Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan, 8th Five Year Master Plan, Delta Plan, National Adaptation Plan, Perspective Plan, and updated Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan also echo the genuine need for speedier execution of RE, as an effective means for the development of sustainable energy sources while achieving GHG reduction targets of NDC holistically.

Nonetheless, issues like land shortage, absence of integrated plans, limited penetration of innovative RE technology coupled with inadequate grid integration of RE and lack of enabling policies, business models and sources of financing continue to be serious impediments for scaling up different solar-based RE energy solutions in Bangladesh......report available to read but Adobe Acrobat required to download,     https://www.iges.or.jp/en/pub/unlocking-clean-energy-ghg-reduction-and-better-livelihood-potentials-rural-areas-bangladesh/en