United Nations

Tripling clean energy generation capacity to 11 TW by 2030 was a leading pledge from the United Nations’ (UN) climate change conference in Dubai. With few details about infrastructure and energy storage and no clear PV targets, however, it is hard to judge the effectiveness of the 28th global Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting. Angela Skujins considers possible impacts for the solar industry.

With utility scale solar installations accelerating, Philip Wolfe, founder of PV data consultancy Wiki-Solar, drills into the data to highlight some interesting variations in relative progress around the world.

The international development entity has already invested $1 billion in local, off-grid electricity networks over the last decade – and attracted a further $1.1 billion in matched funding – and has predicted mini-grids could supply electricity to 490 million people by 2030.

The latest edition of a clean power jobs survey produced by IRENA and the International Labour Organization has stressed the important role which will need to be played by the public sector if the energy transition’s employment benefits are to be shared equally.

Energy efficiency, electrification of heating and transport, and the provision of clean cooking facilities are all going in the wrong direction as the Covid crisis deprived millions in sub-Saharan Africa of electricity use, according to a report by the IEA, IRENA, WHO, World Bank and UN Statistics Division.

As it prepares to lift the nation out of its list of the world’s least developed countries, the supranational body said the country should turn its back on coal and other fossil fuels.

The private sector arm of the multilateral development bank has offered a $200 million credit line to Nedbank, the first commercial bank in South Africa to offer a green bond, which it did on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2019.

An assessment of the human rights performance of the world’s leading solar and wind power companies has painted a grim state of affairs, with the only dedicated solar manufacturer analyzed scoring 7%.

Rio Tinto Chairman Simon Thompson is urging governments across the world to take “urgent” action on climate change despite the twin evils of Covid-19 and economic recession. The call comes amid criticism that Rio Tinto’s own emission reductions schemes are too weak.

The airline industry has been among the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic; carriers are in ‘freefall’ as Glen Peters, research director at the Center for International Climate and Environment Research in Oslo recently wrote, with governments mulling stimulus packages for airline bailouts. How we react to the coronavirus outbreak is crucial for society as a whole and the solar and energy storage industries can lead the charge in rewriting the status quo.