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SINGAPORE: Asia boosted clean electricity output and slashed its share of fossil fuels faster than North America and Europe from 2015, data shows, underscoring resistance by Asian nations to a western push to choke private financing for coal-fired power.
There is wide agreement that increasing clean power, such as wind and solar, is central to curbing carbon emissions to fight climate change. On Saturday at the UN climate summit, 118 governments, led by the US and the European Union, pledged to triple the world’s renewable energy capacity by 2030.
However, China and India did not back the COP28 pledge as it was twinned with curbing use of fossil fuels, which they see as essential to reliably meeting rapidly rising power demand.
Bolstering their view, even with coal, higher financing costs and weaker access to funds, Asia outpaced Europe and North America in fighting climate change by key measures since the Paris climate agreement of 2015, a Reuters analysis of data found.
Asia boosted clean power, including hydro and nuclear, as a share of overall power output by about 8 percentage points to 32 per cent between 2015 and 2022, a review of data from energy think tank Ember showed.
By comparison, clean energy’s share in the power mix in Europe rose over 4 percentage points to 55 per cent, while in North America it climbed by more than 6 percentage points to 46 per cent.
“There cannot be any pressure on India to cut down emissions,” India’s power and renewable energy minister R.K. Singh said on Nov 30.
Asia slashed the share of fossil fuels in power generation by 8 percentage points to 68 per cent in 2022 from 2015, abating more gas and coal use than Europe and North America.
Over the same period, Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels fell 4 percentage points while North America’s narrowed by 6 percentage points.
“The data shows that the West is not moving fast enough on scaling up renewables and storage,” said Hogeveen Rutter, who works with private companies on behalf of the International Solar Alliance (ISA).
Rutter said delays in approvals for renewables, storage projects and grid interconnections in Europe and the US have hampered growth of clean energy use in the West.
ASIAN EMISSIONS RISE
To be sure, fast-growing Asia, home to half the world’s population, accounts for three-fifths of global emissions from power generation, including from sectors exporting goods and services to the west.
And India and China continue to build new coal-fired plants to meet rapidly growing electricity demand.
That means power generation emissions by Asia will continue to climb, after having risen nearly 4 per cent annually since the Paris accord as electricity demand has soared, while emissions in Europe and North America declined, the Ember data showed.
However, Asian governments have argued that the world’s wealthiest countries should help poorer countries cut emissions, citing rich nations’ higher per capita emissions and their unabated fossil fuel use in the last century.
This year, western nations expressed unwillingness to fund early retirement of polluting plants in Indonesia – the world’s seventh largest coal-fired power generator, despite commitments to help it decarbonise.
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