Renewable energies could meet nearly 80% of the world’s energy demand by 2050 – that was the main message contained in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on renewable energy launched last week. The message was spread far and wide: here is a selection of the media coverage from around the globe.
A wind farm in China, is to become the 3,000th project registered under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – a UN mechanism to deliver carbon emission reductions in a way that contributes to sustainable development – a United Nations agency said Thursday.
According to a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) press release, the 41 wind turbines located in Inner Mongolia, will produce up to 49.5 MW of electricity and are expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 101,000 tonnes a year.
I am just returning from Abu Dhabi where negotiations on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on renewable energy – the most comprehensive review of the sector written by the world’s leading experts on energy and climate science – have drawn to a close.
While the negotiations were long and arduous, the message I take home is clear: With renewables, the world will never run out of energy. In fact the total potential for renewables is “substantially higher than both the current and projected future global energy demand,” according to the report.
Significant news for the renewable energy industry in Europe emerged yesterday after Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for Climate Change, again stated that we should “be discussing a renewable energy target for 2030”, in an interview with the Guardian. In April, Hedegaard made a similar statement in a Danish magazine, but again without making a concrete proposal.
This is not the first time a Commissioner has broached the subject of a 2030 target for renewable energy. Günther Oettinger, the European Commissioner for Energy, recently said ”We will have….a proposal from the Commission side for a long-term [renewable energy] target for 2030 and 2040 and 2050”.
Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for climate change, has said she is seeking to extend the EU’s 2020 renewable energy targets to 2030.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, she appears to be making the move following intensive lobbying from the gas industry which is urging the Commission to consider gas production over renewable energies, according to the Guardian.
“We should be discussing a renewable energy target for 2030. We need to have ambitious targets. It would be one way to send a long-term price signal for renewable energy – that renewable energy is not just going to stop growing after 2020,” she said.
Read the full interview here and return to this blog for further reporting soon…
