Keep knowledgeable with free updates
Merely signal as much as the Renewable power myFT Digest — delivered on to your inbox.
The author is a professor within the Institute for Housing and City Analysis at Uppsala College and writer of ‘The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet’
The view that the world is lastly profitable within the power transition away from fossil fuels is more and more outstanding. It tends to be buttressed by charts displaying “exponential growth” globally in renewable-power capability and technology lately.
Comforting as this take could also be, we have to throw chilly water over it. We’re emphatically not but profitable, and it’s time to cease pretending that we’re.
Taking a look at international renewables development charges is vastly deceptive. There may be not one single power transition however a collection of regional transitions of broadly various type, tempo and scope. The outsized materiality of 1 — China’s — means international figures veil greater than they reveal. They at present look spectacular as a result of, and solely as a result of, China’s do.
In 2023, in response to figures printed by the Worldwide Renewable Power Company, China accounted for a unprecedented 63 per cent of worldwide web additions in whole renewable capability — 298 gigawatts of the 473GW whole. Much more extraordinary was its share of year-on-year development in international additions of web capability, which was 96 per cent. Exclude China and 2023’s web additions of renewable capability had been a mere 7GW larger than in 2022. Varied phrases might be used to explain such development, however “exponential” shouldn’t be considered one of them.
The issue is that we’d like speedy development in renewable funding in every single place, not simply in China. In reality, once we break down the “global” power transition into its part regional components, the issue appears starker nonetheless.
Contemplate Africa and Asia-excluding-China. These areas have probably the most urgent want for funding in low-carbon power sources. Their energy sectors are among the many world’s most fossil-fuel intensive and they’re anticipated to guide international development in electrical energy consumption. But they’ve solely restricted funding in renewable capability. Between 2018 and 2023, annual web additions of renewable capability grew by a compound annual charge of 10 per cent globally, however solely by 5 per cent in Africa. Examine that with 16 per cent in China. The tempo of progress is slowest exactly the place it’s wanted most.
And so, a number of many years after governments all over the world started to take measures to actively assist renewables funding, greenhouse-gas emissions from electrical energy technology — the one largest supply of anthropogenic emissions but additionally the one factor that we all know find out how to simply decarbonise — proceed to climb.
Debunking the “exponential growth” narrative is essential not simply because it’s deceptive in as far as it errors a Chinese language story for a worldwide one. It’s also essential as a result of the narrative is politically salient and harmful.
If we’re reaching exponential development with our current approaches, why would we modify something about how we’re presently going about issues? Exponential development bespeaks success, not failure.
Certainly, the narrative of exponential development in renewables underpins a slew of Pollyanna-ish current books that implicitly or explicitly endorse what are largely business-as-usual approaches to the local weather disaster. Extra particularly, they endorse what passes for enterprise as standard within the bulk of the world exterior China, the place, in fact, enterprise as standard appears notably completely different.
Decarbonising electrical energy technology as quickly and as broadly as attainable absolutely ranks as considered one of humanity’s most urgent duties, not least provided that the electrification of transportation, buildings and trade is on the core of current methods for mitigating international warming kind of in every single place.
For higher or worse, coverage and our economies run on narratives. The duty of decarbonising is made more durable, not simpler, when these mischaracterise progress and fail to confront uncomfortable details.
