(Beijing) – Energy Ministers and other senior officials recognised recent progress to scale up renewable energy and examined opportunities for even greater action today on the sidelines of the G20 Energy Ministers meeting taking place this week in Beijing.
Before the start of the official meeting, participants joined the International Renewable Energy Agency, IRENA, to take stock of work completed under the G20 ‘Toolkit of Voluntary Options for Renewable Energy Deployment’, adopted last year at the first-ever G20 Energy Ministers meeting in Istanbul.
“The dramatic and ongoing shift in the global energy sector accelerated in 2015. Renewable energy costs have declined dramatically and will continue to do so, investment reached record levels, and global capacity additions set new record highs,” said IRENA Director-General, Adnan Z. Amin. “Much of this can be attributed to the G20’s strong commitment to renewables.”
In 2015, Energy Ministers endorsed an 11-point Communique, including the adoption of a renewable energy toolkit, which provides options for G20 countries to increase their deployment of renewable energy. Led by IRENA under the guidance of the G20 Energy Sustainability Working Group, the toolkit focuses on five areas.
During meeting, IRENA Deputy Director-General, Sakari Oksanen, highlighted progress achieved to date in each area, including driving down technology costs (prices for solar PV modules and wind turbines have fallen roughly 80 percent and 30 to 40 percent respectively since 2009), and exchanging good practices on enabling policy frameworks and power system integration, in that as of 2016, 173 countries have renewable energy targets, up from 43 countries in 2005.
To facilitate the sharing of best practices, IRENA and the International Energy Agency, IEA, continually update the joint IRENA/IEA Policy and Measures Database, which contains more than 700 policies for G20 countries.
(Courtesy WAM)
