In the first two quarters of the previous year, 2023, that figure was only 44%. Moreover, the percentage of electricity coming from wind, water, solar and batteries increased even though total electricity output grew by 7%.

Turkey has now overtaken Morocco as having the cleanest grid in the Middle East. In Morocco, about 40% of electricity comes from renewables. Turkiye, moreover, has a much bigger economy and has much more in the way of industry. Turkiye is in the G20, the twenty states with the largest gross domestic product.

Turkiye’s grid is still very dirty, and it burns more coal than do Poland or Germany, other big coal users in Europe. What is remarkable is that so far this year Turkish companies have cut coal’s share of the grid by 5%. Likewise, Turkiye purchased much less fossil gas this year, which is expensive in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the move to renewables reflects popular discontent with high Turkish electricity costs.

TRT World Video: “Türkiye ranks 11th in renewable energy in the world”

Renewables are cheaper. Turkiye saw a substantial increase in hydro-electric power this year, and both wind and solar surged as well.

In mid-June, the share of solar in Turkiye’s electricity reached about 16%

Turkiye plans to add 3.5 gigawatts of solar annually for the foreseeable future.

Likewise, Turkiye now has 12 gigawatts of wind power, accounting last year for 11% of its electricity generation capacity. Ankara plans, however, to add 28 gigawatts of wind power by 2035.

Turkey’s elite appears to have decided that the country’s energy dependence on Russia, from which it received the bulk of its petroleum, fossil gas and coal, is too dangerous and expensive.

The IEA found that emissions from the advanced economies actually fell in 2023, although global emissions increased slightly, by 1.1%. The report says, “After falling by around 4.5% in 2023, emissions in advanced economies were lower than they were fifty years ago in 1973.”

Emissions have fallen in the advanced economies before, as with the 2020 COVID pandemic, the 2008-2009 deep recession, and during economic downturns in the 1970s and 1980s.

The reason the new findings are so heartening, however, is that in 2023 emissions from the advanced economies fell even though they experienced economic growth. A 4.5% fall in emissions from countries with an expanding GDP is unprecedented in the hydrocarbon era. The advanced economies grew by 1.7%.

The fall in emissions would have been even greater, but drought in China and elsewhere caused hydroelectric production to fall last year. This finding should reinforce for us how, the longer we leave the climate crisis unsolved, the harder it becomes to solve it.

This finding is a slap in the face to figures such as past COP chairman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber of the United Arab Emirates. In a testy exchange with Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders, last fall, Al-Jaber said, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Mr. Al-Jaber, meet the IEA. In 2023, the advanced economies grew and developed, but they cut their carbon dioxide production by over 4% nevertheless. And that is the future of the world. Petroleum will still have a value, for instance in petro-chemicals such as fertilizer, but it will increasingly not be burned for fuel to power vehicles.

Carbon dioxide emissions are produced in lots of ways, from burning gasoline in vehicles, from heating homes and businesses, and from electricity production. Some 2/3s of the reduction in CO2 last year took place in the electricity sector. This is a testament to the vast build-out in the US, Europe, and China, of wind and solar power. Renewables accounted for over a third of electricity generation in 2023.

At the same time, coal fell to only 17% of electricity production. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and needs to be phased out entirely. Some coal was replaced instead by fossil gas, which isn’t as good, but still cuts CO2 emissions by half. Replacing coal with solar and wind would cut them to almost zero.

A piece of very good news is that coal use in the advanced economies has fallen to 1900 levels. That is still way too high– we need to get back to 1750 and drop coal entirely. But it is a remarkable accomplishment compared even to a decade ago.

The figures for Europe are even more striking. There, CO2 emissions were reduced by nearly 9% last year! These countries, however, experienced weaker growth than the average of the OECD, at 0.7%. In Europe, fully half of the decline of carbon dioxide output was owing to growth in clean energy.

One takeaway from the finding that emissions fell in advanced countries but still rose by a percentage point globally is that the wealthier nations must now increasingly invest in green energy in the developing world. The climate doesn’t care where you live. The moment we hit 2.7° F. above the preindustrial average, there is some reason to think that there will be an immediate big crop failure. Greening our global energy isn’t an abstract ideal. We have to do it to keep our children and grandchildren from starving or becoming climate refugees.

Featured Image: “Clean Air and Earth,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3, 2024.

<( Tomdispatch.com ) – We live in a world of dangerous, deadly extremes. Record-breaking heat waves, intense drought, stronger hurricanes, unprecedented flash flooding. No corner of the planet will be spared the wrath of human-caused climate change and the earth’s fresh water is already feeling the heat of this new reality. More than half of the world’s lakes and two-thirds of its rivers are drying up, threatening ecosystems, farmland, and drinking water supplies. Such diminishing resources are also likely to lead to conflict and even, potentially, all-out war.

“Competition over limited water resources is one of the main concerns for the coming decades,” warned a study published in Global Environmental Change in 2018. “Although water issues alone have not been the sole trigger for warfare in the past, tensions over freshwater management and use represent one of the main concerns in political relations between… states and may exacerbate existing tensions, increase regional instability and social unrest.”

The situation is beyond dire. In 2023, it was estimated that upwards of three billion people, or more than 37% of humanity, faced real water shortages, a crisis predicted to dramatically worsen in the decades to come. Consider it ironic then that, as water is disappearing, huge dams — more than 3,000 of them — that require significant river flow to operate are now being built at an unprecedented pace globally. Moreover, 500 dams are being constructed in legally protected areas like national parks and wildlife reserves. There was a justification for this, claimed the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) some years ago. Such projects, it believed, would help battle climate change by curbing carbon dioxide emissions while bringing electricity to those in the greatest of need.

“[Hydropower] remains the largest source of renewable energy in the electricity sector,” the IPCC wrote in 2018. “Evidence suggests that relatively high levels of deployment over the next 20 years are feasible, and hydropower should remain an attractive renewable energy source within the context of global [greenhouse gas] mitigation scenarios.”

The IPCC acknowledged that unceasing droughts impact stream flow and that climate change is unpredictably worsening matters. Yet its climate experts still contended that hydropower could be a crucial part of the world’s energy transition, arguing that an electric dam will produce seemingly endless energy. At the same time, other renewable sources like wind and solar power have their weather- and sunlight-bound limitations.

A Crack in the Dam Logic

Well-intentioned as it may have been, it’s now far clearer that there is a crack in the IPCC’s appraisal. For one thing, recent research suggests that hydro-powered dams can create an alarming amount of climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions. Rotting vegetation at the bottom of such reservoirs, especially in warmer climates (as in much of Africa), releases significant amounts of methane, a devastating greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

“Most of this vegetation would have rotted anyway, of course. But, without reservoirs, the decomposition would occur mostly in the atmosphere or in well-oxygenated rivers or lakes,” explains Fred Pearce in the Independent. “The presence of oxygen would ensure the carbon in the plants formed carbon dioxide. But many reservoirs, particularly in the tropics, contain little oxygen. Under those anaerobic conditions, rotting vegetation generates methane instead.”

While CO2 also seriously harms the climate, methane emissions are far worse in the short term.

“We estimate that dams emit around 25% more methane by unit of surface than previously estimated,” says Bridget Deemer of the School of Environment at Washington State University in Vancouver, lead author of a highly-cited study on greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. “Methane stays in the atmosphere for only around a decade, while CO2 stays several centuries, but over the course of 20 years, methane contributes almost three times more to global warming than CO2.”

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And that’s hardly the only problem dams face in the twenty-first century. At the moment, Chinese financing is the most significant global driver of new hydropower construction. China has invested in the creation of at least 330 dams in 74 countries. Each project poses its own set of environmental quandaries. But above all, the heating of the planet — last year was the warmest in human history and January 2024 the hottest January on record — is making many of those investments look increasingly dubious. On this ever-hotter globe of ours, for instance, a drought in Ecuador has all too typically impacted the functionality of the Amaluza Dam on the Paute River, which provides 60% of that country’s electricity. Paute was running at 40% capacity recently as its river flow dwindled. Similarly, in southern Africa, water levels at the Kariba Dam’s reservoir, located between Zambia and Zimbabwe, have fluctuated drastically, impairing its ability to produce consistent energy.

“In recent years, drought intensified by climate change has caused reservoirs on all five continents⁠ to drop below levels needed to maintain hydroelectric production,” writes Jacques Leslie in Yale E360, “and the problem is bound to worsen as climate change deepens.”

Even in the United States, the viability of hydropower is an increasing concern. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, for example, has been impacted by years of drought. Water levels at its reservoir, Lake Mead, continue to plummet, raising fears that its days are numbered. The same is true for the Glen Canyon Dam, which also holds back the Colorado, forming Lake Powell. As the Colorado dries up, Glen Canyon may also lose its ability to produce electricity.

Driven by dwindling water resources, the global hydropower crisis has become a flashpoint in the far reaches of Northern Africa, where the creation of a giant dam could very well lead to a regional war and worse.

A Crisis on the Nile

The lifeblood of northeastern Africa, the Nile River, flows through 11 countries before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. Measured at 6,650 kilometers, the Nile may be the longest river on Earth. For millennia, its meandering waters, which run through lush jungles and dry deserts, have been irrigating farmlands and providing drinking water for millions of people. Nearly 95% of Egypt’s 109 million people live within a few kilometers of the Nile. Arguably the most important natural resource in Africa, it’s now at the epicenter of a geopolitical dispute between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan that’s brought those countries to the brink of military conflict.

A major dam being built along the Blue Nile, the river’s main tributary, is upending the status quo in the region, where Egypt has long been the preeminent nation. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD for short) is to become one of the largest hydroelectric dams ever constructed, stretching more than 1,700 meters and standing 145 meters tall, a monument many will love and others despise.

There’s no question that Ethiopia needs the electricity GERD will produce. Nearly 45% of all Ethiopians lack regular power and GERD promises to produce upwards of 5.15 gigawatts of electricity. To put that in perspective, a single gigawatt would power 876,000 households annually in the United States. Construction on the dam, which began in 2011, was 90% complete by last August when it began producing power. In total, GERD’s cost is expected to eclipse $5 billion, making it the largest infrastructure project Ethiopia has ever undertaken and the largest dam on the African continent.

It will not only bring reliable power to that country but promises a culture shift welcomed by many. “Mothers who’ve given birth in the dark, girls who fetch wood for fire instead of going to school — we’ve waited so many years for this — centuries,” says Filsan Abdi of the Ethiopian Ministry of Women, Children, and Youth. “When we say that Ethiopia will be a beacon of prosperity, it starts here.”

While most Ethiopians may see the dam in a positive light, the downstream countries of Egypt and Sudan (itself embroiled in a devastating civil war) were never consulted, and their officials are indignant. The massive reservoir behind GERD’s gigantic cement wall will hold back 74 billion cubic meters of water. That means Ethiopia will have remarkable control over the flow of the Nile, giving its leaders power over how much access to water both Egyptians and Sudanese will have. The Blue Nile, after all, provides 59% of Egypt’s freshwater supply.

As it happens, fresh water in Egypt has long been growing scarcer and so the country’s leadership has taken the threat of GERD seriously for years. In 2012, for instance, Wikileaks obtained internal emails from the “global intelligence” firm Stratfor revealing that Egypt and Sudan were even then considering directing the Egyptian Special Forces to destroy the dam, still in the early stages of construction. “[We] are discussing military cooperation with Sudan,” a high-level Egyptian source was quoted as saying. While such a direct attack never transpired, Stratfor claimed that Egypt might once again lend support to “proxy militant groups against Ethiopia” (as it had in the 1970s and 1980s) if diplomacy were to hit a dead end.

Unfortunately, the most recent negotiations to calm the hostility around GERD have gone distinctly awry. Last April, the embittered Egyptians responded to the lack of any significant progress by conducting a three-day military drill with Sudan at a naval base in the Red Sea aimed at frightening Ethiopian officials. “All options are on the table,” warned Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry. “[All] alternatives remain available and Egypt has its capabilities.”

Seemingly unfazed by such military threats, Ethiopia plans to finish building the dam, claiming it will provide much-needed energy to impoverished Ethiopians and limit the country’s overall carbon footprint. “[GERD] represents a sustainable socio-economic project for Ethiopia: replacing fossil fuels and reducing CO2 emissions,” the Ethiopian embassy in Washington has asserted.

GERD, however, falls squarely into the category of being a major problem dam — and not just because it could lead to a bloody war in a region already in horrific turmoil. Once filled, its massive reservoir will cover a staggering 1,874 square kilometers, making it more than three-quarters the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake (after it started to shrink).

Unfortunately, GERD never underwent a proper environmental impact assessment (EIA) despite being legally required to do so. No EIA was ever carried out because the notoriously corrupt Ethiopian government knew that the results wouldn’t be pleasing and was unwilling to let any roadblocks get in the way of the dam’s construction, something that became more obvious when upwards of 20,000 indigenous Gumuz and Berta natives began to be forced from their homes to make way for the monstrous dam.

Publicly coming out against the dam has proven a risky business. Employees of International Rivers, a nonprofit that advocates for people endangered by dams, have been harassed and received death threats in response to their opposition. Prominent Ethiopian journalist Reeyot Alemu, a critic of the dam and the government’s actions concerning it, was imprisoned for more than four years under draconian anti-terrorism laws.

Electric Water Wars

While GERD has created a dicey conflict, it also has international ramifications. China, which has played such a pivotal role in bankrolling hydropower projects globally in these years, has provided $1.2 billion to help the Ethiopians build transmission lines from the dam to nearby towns. Since it has also heavily invested in Egypt, it’s well-positioned, if any country is, to help navigate the GERD dispute.

Military analysts in the United States argue that China’s involvement with the dam is part of a policy meant to put the U.S. at a distinct disadvantage in the race to exploit Africa’s abundant rare earth minerals from the cobalt caverns of the Congo to the vast lithium deposits in Ethiopia’s hinterlands. China, the world’s “largest debt collector,” has indeed poured money into Africa. As of 2021, it was that continent’s largest creditor, holding 20% of its total debt. The growth of Chinese influence internationally and in Africa — it has large infrastructure projects in 35 African countries — is crucial to understanding the latest version of the globe’s imperial geopolitics.

Most of China’s African ventures are connected to Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a program of this century to fund infrastructure deals across Eurasia and Africa. Its economic ties to Africa began, however, with Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s push in the 1950s and 1960s for an “Afro-Asian” alliance that would challenge Western imperialism.

So many decades later, the idea of such an alliance plays second fiddle to China’s global economic desires, which, like so many past imperial projects in Africa, have significant downsides for those on the receiving end. Developing countries desperately need capital, so they’re willing to accept rigid terms and conditions from China, even if they represent the latest version of the century’s old colonialism and neo-colonialism that focused on controlling the continent’s rich resources. This is certainly true in the case of China’s hydropower investments in places like Ghana’s Bui Dam and the Congo River Dam in the Republic of Congo, where multi-billion-dollar loans are backed by Congo’s crude oil and Ghana’s cocoa crops.

In 2020, the U.S. belatedly inserted itself into the GERD feud, threatening to cut $130 million in aid for Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism efforts. The Ethiopians believed it was related to the dam controversy, as they also did when, in June 2023, the Biden administration directed USAID to halt all food assistance to the country (upwards of $2 billion), claiming it wasn’t reaching Ethiopians, only to reverse course months later.

The dispute over Ethiopia’s enormous dam should be a warning of what the future holds on a hotter, drier planet, where the rivers that feed dams like GERD are drying up while the superpowers continue to jockey for position, hoping to control what remains of the world’s resources. Hydropower won’t help solve the climate crisis, but new dam projects may lead to war over one thing key to our survival — access to fresh, clean water.

Copyright 2024 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com

1. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reports that the European Union’s carbon dioxide emissions fell 8% in 2023, to a level not seen since John F. Kennedy told people that he was a Berliner in 1963.

The bulk of the decline — 56% — was driven by wind, water, solar and nuclear, all low-carbon sources of energy. It also helped that use of the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, declined by 25% in just one year, and is down by half since 2016. So the emissions fell in part because there are far more renewables in the European mix now, and in part because there is much less coal. Good weather also contributed to a decrease in electricity usage.

This finding is great good news because if we take the whole world into account and not just the EU, NOAA is predicting that we’ll have put out 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, a 1.1% increase over 2022. Instead, the world needs to cut CO2 emissions by 1.8 billion metric tons every single year from here on out.

What the EU is showing is that with deliberate climate policy you can actually start significantly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide– a dangerous greenhouse gas that helped cause 28 disasters in the US last year that did $1 billion in damages each. That is, unfortunately, only the beginning.

Only if Europe ups its game further and only if the US, China and India follow Europe’s lead can we avoid tipping the planet into a chaotic, violent climate that threatens orderly human civilization.

The New Futurists Video: “Germany’s Green Revolution – A Hopeful Climate Change Story ”

2. Another piece of good news is that the International Energy Agency is saying that all the new demand for energy generated throughout the world for the next three years — through the end of 2026 — will be met by wind, water, solar and nuclear.

By 2025, a third of global power will be produced by renewables, which will outstrip coal for the first time.

3. Clean energy has gone from being something exotic to actually making a difference in a country’s gross domestic product. According to The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, China wanted 5% growth in 2023, but would only have achieved about 3% growth without wind and solar. With them, the economy grew 5.2%.

That is, some 42% of China’s GDP growth was generated by renewables. That is an astonishing statistic.

Moreover, virtually all of the country’s investment growth was in the renewables sector, as real estate and heavy industry turned soft.

This $890 billion investment in green energy matched the investments of the entire world in fossil fuels last year, and equaled the annual GDP of a G-20 member such as Turkey.

The clean energy sector generated $1.6 trillion for the Chinese economy, an increase of nearly a third over the previous year.

There are many milestones to pass in the transition from a high to low-carbon sustainable energy system. There is the first hour without coal, or oil, or gas generation (or all of them together) and the point when the last coal, oil or gas power plant (or all of them together) are finally retired.

Another milestone that feels important is the first year when renewables generate more electricity than fossil fuels. For the past three months we have been tracking the data for Great Britain (not Northern Ireland, which shares an electricity grid with the Republic of Ireland) and we believe it is on track to pass this milestone in 2023, but it will be very close.

Using the broadest definition, renewables actually first overtook fossil fuels in the odd, COVID-affected year of 2020 (although not in the subsequent years of 2021 and 2022). However, that includes 5% or so of Britain’s electricity that is generated through “biomass” plants (which burn wood pellets, often imported from forests in America).

Trees can of course be regrown, so biomass counts as renewable. But the industry has its critics and it’s not globally scalable in the same way as the “weather-dependent” renewables: wind, solar and to a certain degree hydro power.

When we use this narrower, weather-dependent definition that is more appropriate for a global transition, then there is a very good chance these renewables will overtake fossil fuels for the first time ever in 2023. Once this milestone has been passed, we also think it is unlikely (though not impossible) that gas and coal will ever again generate more of Britain’s electricity than wind, solar and hydro over a full year.

Whether Britain passes the milestone in 2023 will come down to the final few days of the year (from here on we’ll use “renewables” to refer to the tighter, biomass-excluding definition).

The chart above can be used to track progress and will update with the latest data each day. The lines show the running total of the difference between how much electricity has been generated by renewables and fossil fuels.

When the line is increasing, this shows more renewables than fossil fuels for that period. The horizontal axis shows the day of the year, so, if at any point the line is above the zero axis, that indicates that the year so far has had more renewable than fossil fuel generation. If the red line ends the year above zero, then Britain will have achieved the milestone.

Image by Roman Grac from Pixabay

(One caveat is that we know from the official statistics published later that there are some differences from “missing” and estimates for embedded generation; this typically only accounts for around 1%-2% of the final total.)

It depends on the weather

As we write this, with ten days of data left in 2023, renewables are very slightly ahead (by just over 1000 GWh – about the same level as a peak day of electrical demand). However if they are to stay ahead it will depend on the weather – especially the wind.

The reasoning here is that Britain uses less electricity over the holiday period due to less industrial and commercial demand. As wind power is clean and has become cheaper, it tends to be used first, meaning when demand is low or it is sufficiently windy there is less need to generate electricity with fossil fuels.

There are nuances around this such as where the generation is located, and the amount of electricity imported from other countries, but the general principle of renewables taking market share away from fossil fuels is a factor of Britain’s electrical market.

An important area to also highlight is the continued drop in electrical demand. 2023 is on track to have a lower demand than 2022, which itself was lower than the COVID-impacted year of 2020 (against our predictions) due to record prices. The drop in electrical demand means that additional generation was not needed, much of it inevitably from fossil fuels.

Additional milestone also likely to be passed

However 2023 could be the first year where renewable generation exceeds domestic electricity demand (homes comprise 36% of total electrical demand). This means the annual electricity generated by Britain’s wind turbines, solar panels and hydro resource will now be greater than that consumed over the year by its 29 million households.

The above bar chart demonstrates the trend towards this point since 2009. In the first half of 2023, renewable output was less than domestic electrical demand by 1.5 TWh (1500 GWh), but strong renewable performance since then means it is likely to end the year with total generation in excess of household demand.

If either of the milestones described here do not happen for 2023, then they will almost certainly occur in 2024, during which another 1.7 GW of offshore wind capacity will begin generating and Britain’s last coal-fired power station is scheduled to cease producing electricity altogether.

Grant Wilson, Associate Professor, Energy Systems and Data Group, Birmingham Energy Institute, University of Birmingham; Joseph Day, Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Energy Systems and Data Group, University of Birmingham, and Katarina Pegg, PhD Student, Energy Systems and Data Group, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The really exciting news, however, is that ACPA says that the government incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act of the Biden administration are beginning to have an impact on future projects in the pipeline. As a result, there are plans on the books to install a gargantuan 145 gigawatts of clean power. Some 56% of it — 81 gigs — is expected to be solar.

As of January of this year, the US only had 73.5 gigawatts of utility-scale solar operating. So there is more solar power now planned than we have installed in this country to date, basically over the past two decades.

Five gigawatts can power about a million homes, so the planned 81 gigs will power 16 million homes. There are about 130 million households in the US, and between what we already have and everything that is in the pipeline, solar alone could power 30 million households, or nearly a quarter of them.

If you add existing wind power, some 141 gigawatts, and what is in the pipeline, we could soon see enough electricity from clean energy to power over half of American homes.

For reasons I don’t understand, the government statistics only count utility-scale solar — big solar farms — and not rooftop solar, which presently generates about 6 gigawatts and accounts for 4 percent of US households. We can expect this sector to grow enormously, especially in the deep south and the southwest. Nationally, 67% of US households are seriously considering putting up solar panels. Even in Michigan, my solar panels have saved me loads of money over the past decade, more than paying for themselves– especially since we can also fill up our electric car from them in the daytime.

The report underlines that the most impressive growth in projects in the pipeline is in battery storage, which has burgeoned 45%. That development surely reflects Biden’s incentives and subsidies, which has impelled companies to plan several huge battery plants.

Texas, for instance, has over 3 gigawatts of battery storage, which can be filled during the day when solar panels operate. As the sun sets, these kick in, taking up slack until the evening wind starts turning wind turbines. At present batteries are only 1% of Texas’ electricity generation capacity, but that percentage is slated to grow rapidly.

California is up to 5.6 gigawatts of battery storage, which has helped it avoid blackouts. Some 60% of California’s electricity now comes from renewables.

Q2 was a good quarter for clean energy, better than all but one previous quarters (Q2 2021). But if we consider what is in the pipeline, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Depending on how cold the winters are, the IEA expects renewable sources of energy to outstrip coal in 2024, and forever thereafter. It calls this change “structural.” That is, it isn’t a blip or something that could easily be reversed. We are entering a world where people will routinely get more electricity from wind, solar, water and battery than from dirty coal. While Asia is still somewhat wedded to coal and China is even still building new coal-fired power plants, this slight increase in use will be more than offset by the rapidly dwindling numbers of coal-fired plants in the US and Europe. So IEA expects coal use to decline over the next couple of years, and that renewables will go on growing from strength to strength.

China and India account for 80% of all planned coal plants, and as renewables fall in price and the true cost of coal in the form of global boiling becomes ever more apparent, both may scale back coal projects. In fact, India is considering halting all new coal plant planning except for those facilities already committed to. Right now, coal accounts for about a third of global power generation, but it is on a steep path to decline.

Global electricity demand growth is muted in 2023, but may take off again next year. IEA expects all extra electricity demand to be met by renewables this year and next.

And next year, for the very first time fully 33% of global power will be generated by renewables. And coal generation will fall below that benchmark, heading toward zero by 2050 (if we know what is good for us).

The world has made incredible progress on the renewables front in the past decade, as this IEA chart demonstrates:

IEA, Renewable electricity generation by technology, 2010-2025, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/renewable-electricity-generation-by-technology-2010-2025, IEA. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

Carbon dioxide pollution from burning coal and fossil gas are expected to fall this year and next. If this expectation is met, it could signal that our CO2 emissions are leveling off in preparation for declining. If you look at the period 2019-2024, the report says, fossil fuel use will have fallen in 4 out of the 6 years. The authors expect coal and gas will just go on declining from here on in, even in years when demand for electricity increases. The extra demand will be met by renewables.

There are some paradoxes in the current situation to which they attend.

Because of extensive use by Australians of roof-top solar along with utility-scale solar, the price of electricity fell below zero 20% of the time in 2022, compared to 1% of the time in the Netherlands and Germany. For the price to fall below zero means that there is not enough storage capacity to smooth out the ups and downs of production, and states need to up their megabattery game substantially.

Another problem is that global heating is causing people to run air conditioners more. But if they run their ACs off coal and fossil gas, they are putting more heat-trapping CO2 into the atmosphere, which will heat up the earth more, so that they’ll have to turn up the AC more, and on and on in a vicious cycle. Obviously, everybody should be running their AC off renewable electricity, and probably this ideal can only be attained with government investment. Still, individuals can pitch in. In most parts of the US, e.g., if a homeowner is going to be in their house for 10 years or more, they will save money by putting up rooftop solar panels. If they drive an EV and fuel it from the panels that will speed the pay-back time even more. The panels can pay for themselves in as little as 6 years.

Finally, global heating causes drought as well as faster evaporation from bodies of water, so one of the three biggest sources of renewable power, hydro, is actually in danger of declining. Globally, hydropower has dropped from 38% to 36% since 1990. Governments should plan on continued decreases in hydropower, ensuring that it is replaced by wind and solar, not by fossil fuels.

Bussewitz notes that the climate emergency itself is getting in the way of our attempts to fight the climate emergency. The heating of the earth has intensified drought conditions in some parts of the world, such as the American Southwest, which caused water levels to fall in hydroelectric dams and reduced the amount of electricity that could be produced in this low-carbon manner. People turned to fossil gas instead. Likewise, the heat waves that are made worse and longer by the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere caused people to run their air conditioners more, which caused the production of more carbon dioxide, which causes it to get hotter. . . in a vicious circle.

This finding is bad news because we need to be going in the opposite direction, reducing how much CO2 we put into the atmosphere by burning gasoline, fossil gas and coal by 7% a year. That is the only way to avoid our climate system going chaotic, as it will if earth gets too hot. What happened last year is like a person in danger of dying from obesity vowing to take off 14 pounds in a year and instead putting on two pounds.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that emissions grew less than 1% last year, whereas in 2021 they had grown 6%. Moreover, 2022 challenged the energy industry as have few other years in recent memory, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the boycott of and sanctions against Russian oil and gas. Some analysts had predicted a big return to coal in Europe to deal with this crisis. On the whole, with a few exceptions, that did not happen. Coal use did tick up slightly in Asia, with a 1.6% increase, but that after all is not very much.

So in a way it is good news, given the high prices for fossil gas caused by the war and the boycotts, and given the further post-COVID opening of major economies, that Europe and the U.S. avoided any significant revival of coal and that emissions were only up 0.9% globally for the year.

There is more good news buried in the bad. Fathi Birol at the International Energy Agency argues that the reason for which the rate of emissions increase was so small in 2022 was because a huge amount of green energy came online.

At some point in the near future, enough green energy will have been installed to achieve that so far elusive goal of a 7% a year reduction in CO2 emissions instead of an increase, however modest.

In fact, even last year, if some nuclear plants had not closed and if some Asian countries had not turned to coal, CO2 emissions would have fallen. Since coal puts out twice as much CO2 as fossil gas, for countries to dump the latter (made expensive by the Russian war on Ukraine) and pick up the former guaranteed an increase in emissions.

Again, however, there was good news in there. Emissions from fossil gas plummeted a stunning 13% in Europe.

Petroleum use was also up, but about half of the increase was in the aviation sector, as travel continued to rebound. Some 10 million electric vehicles were sold, making up 14% of the world’s car purchases. Since 28% of CO2 is emitted by the transportation sector, the rapid ramp-up in EV sales promises to make a significant dent in petroleum use in coming years.

One reason for which coal’s rebound was so puny was the rapid increase in wind and solar electricity generation. The IEA report says, “Renewables met 90% of last year’s global growth in electricity generation. Solar PV and wind generation each increased by around 275 TWh [terrawatt hours], a new annual record.”

That is, more new electricity was produced by wind and solar in 2022 than ever before, and almost all new demand was met by those sources.

More good news. If Europe were the whole world, we really would have seen a decline in carbon emissions. Europe’s were down for the year by 2.5%!

Wind and solar power generation in Europe grew by a gargantuan 15% in 2022, which forestalled a big move to coal. For the first time, wind and solar together produced more electricity for Europe last year than did either fossil gas or nuclear energy.

In the end, we have to think about the dog that didn’t bark, and the shoe that didn’t drop. Wind and solar grew so fast around the world that they avoided what otherwise would have been 465 Mt CO2 in power sector emissions. EVs and heat pumps also reduced potential emissions, by 85 megatons. If it hadn’t been for green energy, the world’s increase in emissions last year would have been closer to 3%, three times as much.

In the end the good news is good indeed. Despite the likelihood that China will be a big emitter again this year as President Xi Jinping lifts the “zero COVID” policy and the Chinese economy picks up considerably, the IAE notes that government investments in green energy, including the $367 billion in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, are becoming so large that they are producing a rapid greening of the electricity sector. These fixed investments will have a bigger and bigger impact in coming years.

( Third Pole ) – As glaciers shrink and monsoon rainfall becomes more unpredictable due to climate change, uncertainty around the viability of hydropower projects in the Hindu Kush Himalayas is increasing. A recent study on the state of a glacier on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau raises questions about the region’s long-term water supply and the risk of flooding from more meltwater run-off, with implications for the many dams planned in the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra river basin.

The Hindu Kush Himalayan region is warming at almost double the global average rate: 0.32 degrees Celsius per decade versus 0.16C. The study, published in September, found that in the past 20 years this warming has intensified at the Parlung No. 4 glacier, a medium-sized glacier that can be used as a benchmark to track changes in snow and rainfall patterns, and the subsequent shrinking of glaciers, in the area.

Temperatures at Parlung No. 4 have shot up by 0.39C per decade since 1990. “It’s snowing less and raining more instead here,” says Achille Jouberton, one of the lead authors of the study, which was conducted by a team of European and Chinese researchers.

Jouberton tells The Third Pole that between 1975 and 2019, the glacier’s snout, or terminus, retreated by about half a kilometre. On average, the glacier shrank by 0.32 metres water equivalent a year over this period, the researchers found. Since 2000, snowfall during the monsoon at the glacier has declined by 26%.

“The study uses data from the glacier’s surface that is more accurate than the satellite data sets used by many studies. Surface data explains the phenomenon that is shrinking these glaciers and its most likely impact on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in China and Brahmaputra in India,” Jouberton says.

Impact on hydropower

Rivers originating from Hindu Kush Himalayan glaciers are a significant source of water and energy in 10 countries, including China, India, Pakistan and Nepal. Hydropower generated from these rivers is an important part of many countries’ ambitions to become carbon neutral.

The Tibetan Plateau’s glaciers feed a major, 2,880km, river system. The Yarlung Tsangpo, which originates here, runs from this high elevation, with a heavy load of fertile soil, through India as the Brahmaputra and then into Bangladesh as the Jamuna.

China and India are the largest hydropower producers in Asia, but the former dwarfs the latter. In 2021, China generated around 1,300 terawatt hours of electricity from hydropower and India one-tenth of that.

Both countries plan to become carbon neutral – China by 2060 and India by 2070. Even though hydropower’s low-carbon credentials have been called into question, it is still a substantial component of both countries’ renewable energy mixes.

According to a model developed by China’s National Development and Reform Commission, to achieve carbon neutrality the country’s electricity production will double to 14,800 terawatt hours by 2050, of which 14% will be generated from hydropower. India, meanwhile, has the largest hydropower pipeline in the world. By 2032, it plans to grow its current 52 gigawatts of hydropower capacity by nearly 200% with the addition of projects with a combined capacity of 91GW.

Thus, for both countries, harnessing the energy of the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra is very important. This started to ramp up in 2010, with the construction of the 7.9 billion yuan (USD 1.2 billion), 510 MW Zangmu hydroelectric power station, which became operational in 2015. 

China approved three more hydropower projects: Dagu (640 MW), Jiacha (320 MW) and Jiexu (560 MW), under the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015). In 2020, the government announced plans to build up to 60GW of hydropower capacity on the Yarlung Tsangpo.

Some of the major dams on the mainstream Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River • Map by The Third Pole

Currents of discord

China damming the upper reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo has triggered a response in downstream India. India fears that water availability could be affected in its northeastern states; Zangmu, one of the world’s highest hydropower stations, will be dwarfed once the construction of Dagu is complete.

In May, India announced plans to build the country’s second-largest dam with a storage capacity of 10 billion cubic metres of water at Yingkiong. Water minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said the proposed dam aims to regulate possible water shortages in the dry season and flooding in the monsoon months.

This dam is one of 170 proposed or under construction on the Brahmaputra River and its tributaries for irrigation and hydropower projects. In Arunachal Pradesh alone, hydropower projects with a capacity of 1,115 MW are in operation, with projects of 2,000 MW capacity under construction as of October 2021. One of these proposed dams, Etalin, will be the largest in India if built; campaigners have urged the government to reject clearance for the project, pointing out it will be built in an ecologically fragile and seismically active region.

The rapid construction of dams continues despite researchers sounding warnings over melting glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau triggering earthquakes, avalanches, landslides and floods.

Climate change has already wreaked havoc on people’s lives and hydropower plants in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, points out Li Dongfeng, one of the lead authors of a study published in June on the vulnerability of hydropower projects here.

The paper cites devastating floods in India’s northern Uttarakhand state in 2013 that killed over 6,000 people and damaged at least 10 hydropower projects. In 2021, an avalanche caused a flood in Chamoli district of the same state, damaging two hydropower projects and resulting in more than 200 dead or missing persons.

“When it comes to hydropower projects, a lot needs to change in High Mountain Asia to deal with the catastrophic disasters caused by the rising temperatures,” Li says. He recommends changing the design of hydropower projects so they can deal with the extremes of cloudbursts and droughts, as well as preserving forests and grasslands which act as natural buffers. Cooperation between countries is also vital, Li says.

Glaciers and regional politics

However, collaboration between India and China on the Brahmaputra remains limited. Hydrological data sharing from China only covers the monsoon period from May to October, and it stopped in 2017 reportedly due to problems with the hydrological station. Data sharing only resumed in 2018, weeks before a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The mistrust between the two countries over the river can be gauged from an incident in 2017, when the Brahmaputra turned black and many fish and aquatic animals died. The incident prompted Indian politicians to blame Chinese infrastructure projects upstream for causing pollution. 

Using a series of satellite images, analysis by Chintan Sheth, a research fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, and Anirban Datta-Roy, a doctoral student at the time, now a senior programme manager at the Foundation for Ecological Security, both in India, found that earthquakes on the Tibetan Plateau had led to landslides that filled the river with sediment, which flowed downstream and blackened the water.

“Incidents like these expose the lack of data, study and cooperation on the transboundary Brahmaputra River,” says Anamika Barua, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, in India’s Assam state. 

“It also underlines the dichotomy that exists between researchers and policymakers of both countries,” she says.

Diplomacy and dialogue

A substantial body of research by leading Chinese and Indian researchers constantly warns about the consequences of melting glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, “but there are not enough studies about melting glaciers’ long- and short-term impact on the Brahmaputra River”, says Barua.

While diplomatic negotiations between the two countries are trying to break the stalemate, Barua says Brahmaputra Dialogue is another option – a multilateral initiative between India, China, Bangladesh and Bhutan that ran from 2013 to 2019, bringing bureaucrats, scientists, communities and non-profit organisations together.

“It’s time to continue the dialogue, or begin Brahmaputra Dialogue 2.0, to resolve transboundary river issues to achieve the common goal of becoming carbon neutral and prevent imminent catastrophic disasters in the region,” says Barua.

Alok Gupta is a freelance journalist who has reported from Hong Kong, India and China. Follow him on Twitter @alok227

Via Third Pole

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