Geopolitics

While Donald Trump grapples with the result of the election, Europe’s highest officials have moved on, and demonstrated new optimism for the four years ahead by setting a preliminary agenda for cooperation aimed at president-elect Joe Biden with key topics including work on renewables, battery storage and carbon pricing.

The in-country analyst has revised up its expectation for this year and says a healthy unsubsidized project pipeline will keep the numbers ticking over in 2021. The spending plans necessary to ramp up renewables targets in the next five-year plan, though, could put the nation on a collision course with the EU.

The Norwegian polysilicon maker has been been frozen out of the Chinese solar market by political tensions between Beijing and the U.S. and mothballed its Washington State production line last year. However, two recent business agreements could change all that.

As the bloc pushes its digital and green transition agenda, policymakers have looked at the raw materials required. Little is mined, processed or assembled in Europe at present but the European Commission has a plan…

KilowattSol CEO Xavier Daval has criticized the absence of references to solar in the French government’s post-Covid recovery plan, which has allocated €30 billion to the energy transition. The head of the PV technical advisory says solar must become more central to France’s strategic choices and China must not be allowed to retain its near-monopoly on PV panel manufacturing.

As nations begin to move towards clean energy, fossil fuel exporting countries will need to rethink and reshape their economies. Taking Russia as an example, an MIT study has examined the likely impact on oil, gas and coal exports and the opportunities the energy transition could offer.

An Ernst & Young report has found power and utility deals fell off markedly in the Americas during the first half of the year because of the Covid-19 pandemic but commitment to clean energy investment appeared to remain strong.

RES4Africa’s plan to offer a one-stop-shop to tap consolidate all the European sources of funding for African renewables aims to de-risk investments in large-scale renewable energy projects in the continent. The 171-page report entitled “Scaling Up Africa’s renewable power” provides an update on the “renewAfrica Initiative” launched by the RES4Africa foundation together with a range of European stakeholders one year ago.

A study into the clean energy tech innovation rate required to keep global heating under control may suggest concepts such as lithium-air could yet keep us to the mid-century ambition, but it is also starting to contemplate the temperature rise to be expected if we only achieve net-zero by 2070.

U.S. thinktank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says the nation should reorder its power network to harness cheap, modular renewables after existing power station overcapacity was worsened by plunging electricity demand during the Covid-19 shutdown.