(MENAFN- Asia Times) The Group of Seven Summit that kicked off in England on Friday is an opportunity to cooperate in support of countries emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic with a common-sense approach to what a green recovery means in practice.
Establishing major solar-power targets nationally and through multilateral cooperation can be an immensely powerful move to contain global emissions and revitalize employment in sectors stagnating under coal, oil and natural gas.
Shift fossil fuel spending to solar
Implicit in this argument is that the world's richest nations stop funding fossil-fuel projects. Together they received US$3.8 trillion in new financing from 2016-2020 despite the signing of the Paris Agreement in late 2015 and the fuels'' faltering market competitiveness against new solar and wind capacity.
Extended support for fossil fuels could also defeat the target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are still in their infancy. Shifting our focus to a developing and unproven set of technologies would perpetuate the myriad inefficiencies built into the fossil-fuel ecosystem and may even encourage their continued extraction.
On the other hand, consensus has been building for years that solar power and storage is the strongest global solution for the climate crisis, and the International Energy Agency recently reinforced that along with its sister technology, wind power.
The solar PV (photovoltaics) industry alone accounts for 4 million jobs annually around the world, and millions more can be added by 2030 if the right political decisions are made.
Batteries powering solar growth
With the declining cost of battery storage – it dropped 70% in the US alone between 2015 and 2018 – solar presents the most financially prudent path forward to meet incremental capacity addition. It is cheaper than building new coal- or gas-fired units, decentralized, infinitely scalable and energy storage eliminates the intermittency of raw solar power.
Sweeping change in the global energy industry is thus inevitable. Within the past year alone major institutional investors like BlackRock and the International Finance Corporation have weighed in to throttle coal financing, and oil and gas shareholders tired of the industry's lack of meaningful climate action are starting to demand immediate steps forward.
Mobilizing billions for solar
In contrast, support for renewable energy has multiplied year on year. Countries have committed to installing 826 gigawatts of new non-hydro renewable energy capacity by 2030 at a cost of $1 trillion, and solar now accounts for a third of the world's clean energy workforce.
The International Solar Alliance therefore intends to proliferate solar for net zero global emissions by mobilizing $5 billion by 2025 in multi-trust-fund financing and extending programmatic support to its member nations through a network of qualified implementing agencies.
Its goal is to enable solar-based systems to power all manner of applications, including community-level power plants, rooftop systems for domestic and industrial customers and agricultural pump sets that were previously run on costly and polluting diesel fuel.
Solar for survival
The benefits of solar power make it an ideal vehicle to unlock billions of dollars in green financing and assist every nation in meeting their sustainable development goals. It would also obviate the need to recapture and store excess carbon and instead generate future-ready employment, even for individuals affected by the transition to clean energy.
We have much to correct if we are to honor the Paris Agreement, and reports indicate that we may overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius in global warming by as soon as 2025, but energy investments centered on solar power present an excellent opportunity to focus international climate action.
MENAFN11062021000159011032ID1102249339
Legal Disclaimer:
MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.