IRENA Urges Major Renewables Commitments

How do we revolutionize the global power system? Follow, then transform, the money.

That’s the thrust of the first edition of the International Renewable Energy Agency’s new series REThinking Energy (PDF). It follows hot on the globally warmed heels of IRENA’s recently released REMap 2030, a roadmap to double renewables by 2030 — but it can’t follow fast enough.

That’s because “the power sector,” the first to attract the analytic scope of IRENA’s first report in its flagship series, “is changing so fast that policy makers are finding it hard to keep up,” according to director-general Adnan Z. Amin. In order to achieve renewable energy’s “full potential with sufficient speed to stave off climate change,” IRENA’s report eventually concludes, “governments need to embrace a new way of thinking, and to do so immediately.”

How to execute that existential mandate is a matter of 100 pages of commentary, graphics and much common sense: Governments, corporations, utilities and consumers must submit to their exponentially increasing demand for electricity by choosing renewable energy, then put their money where their mouths are. As IRENA’s report notes, demand is the prime driver of both the transformation and type of power needed to run an internetworked planet bulging with 7 billion (and rising) people, all of whom face dystopian disasters if we keep using dirty fuels.

Change is coming, but it needs to hit overdrive, like yesterday. Private financing for solar and other clean technologies — from institutional investors to corporations looking to green their energy-intensive operations and products — is quickening the global power evolution. Champion solar crowdfunders like Mosaic are also getting involved, accelerating and evangelizing solarization even further. And of course consumers, many of whom have children that will inherit “irreversible” climate change, are increasingly asking for it, should they be given the choice.

But the responsibility and bucks mostly stop at policymakers and utilities, IRENA notes. “If they make it clear that renewable energy will be a larger part of their national energy mix, and commit to long-term, non-financial support mechanisms, they could reduce uncertainty and attract more investors,” the report argues. “There is also an opportunity for traditional power utilities to do more.”

Apart from mandating renewables at the local and national level, politicians should get behind international efforts like the United Nations’ Sustainable Energy For All Initiative (SE4ALL) and more. With electricity demand projected to increase by 60 percent by 2030, politicians need to adopt “a truly holistic approach” to renewable energy that “not only takes into account the interests of short-term growth, but provides the opportunity of sustainable prosperity for all,” IRENA advises.

At stake, is nothing less than “a new industrial revolution,” IRENA promised. “Policy makers can do much to either promote or hinder this vision.”

All of us have to do much more than simply hope they choose wisely.

This article appeared at Solar Energy