Dr Laiz Souto is a lecturer in Electrical Power Engineering at the University of Bath. In this blog post, she reflects on the climate conference in Brazil and explores why the energy sector is central to global climate action.
The energy sector has a pivotal role to play in accelerating climate action globally, from clean energy and energy efficiency to energy access and just transitions. Progress around turning plans and pledges into tangible action was a focus of the recent COP in Belém, Brazil. Labelled as the ‘COP of implementation’, the conference also highlighted the broad challenges that governments, businesses and civil society must urgently address around climate action.
Energy, infrastructure and the COP30 Climate Action Agenda
The COP30 Climate Action Agenda provided a renewed framework to accelerate action in response to the findings of the first Global Stocktake, the tool that assesses progress towards achieving goals set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The Action Agenda is structured around six themes:
- transitioning energy, industry and transport;
- stewarding forests, oceans and biodiversity;
- transforming agriculture and food systems;
- building resilience for cities, infrastructure and water;
- fostering human and social development; and
- unleashing enablers and accelerators, including finance, technology and capacity-building.
Proposed initiatives will be aligned within a new four-stage activation cycle focused on coordination, measurement, showcasing and scale.
This agenda highlighted the prominent role of energy and infrastructure in global efforts to address climate change, either directly or indirectly (for example via cross-cutting climate mitigation and adaptation measures or energy dependency).
Energy highlights
A trillion-dollar investment pipeline to promote new partnerships and innovation to scale finances from the private sector, governments and financial institutions was announced at COP30.
There was also a record number of initiatives and coalitions announced or delivered at the conference, with hundreds aligned to the new activation cycle. Proposed solutions cover the energy, transport and industry sectors in different ways, including expansion and resilience of power grids, improved energy storage, clean energy solutions, decarbonisation plans for different sectors of the economy and transformative climate financing mechanisms. Targets for increasing energy efficiency and energy access were also announced.
This scale of investment and solutions is required to meet ambitions to expand and improve resilience of power grids, to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and quadruple use of sustainable fuels by 2035 worldwide. The commitments made at COP, if met, will create the conditions to transition energy, transport and industrial sectors away from fossil fuels and towards universal access to clean energy.
Reflections on progress
To date, progress has been inconsistent. Slow grid upgrades, concentrated investment, stalled efficiency and technology uncertainty have constrained the expansion of clean power and electrification. Together, these issues show how past investment decisions, evolving technologies and financial incentives affect the feasibility and attractiveness of what can be achieved now and in the future.
They also reveal the scale of investment required to shift existing grids to a decentralised or distributed architecture, and highlight the technical and economic challenges associated with heavy reliance on intermittent electricity generation, increasing interdependency with telecommunication infrastructure, and the resulting vulnerabilities to natural disasters and cyberattacks. As electricity demand increases in a clean-power and net-zero future, these pressures will only be amplified.
Power grid design and investment decisions made several decades ago were based on historically centralised generation and long-distance transmission corridors to supply electrical loads. In some respects, this design still offers important advantages today: it supports economies of scale with high reliability (thanks to interconnections, redundancies and contingency reserves) and access to energy sources that are diverse and stable (e.g. large hydro and nuclear power plants) and complementary (e.g. wind and solar farms). Flexible resources (e.g. energy storage and demand-side management) play an increasingly important role in managing network congestion and making better use of renewable energy. However, the benefits of these solutions still depend heavily on the availability of clean energy and remain limited by existing grid and logistics constraints.
The COP30 Climate Action Agenda highlighted insufficient expansion of energy access and planning for fair clean-energy transitions for regions reliant on fossil fuels. This indicates that gaps in financing for low-income countries and regions and in the development of crucial skills and education for green jobs have not been fully addressed.
While new partnerships were agreed to scale adaptation finance from the private sector, governments and financial institutions, it is still uncertain how plans and pledges will become effective climate action.
Looking ahead
COP30 saw strong but inconsistent momentum across the six themes of the Action Agenda. But the negotiations ended without a deal to phase out fossil fuels, halt deforestation, protect biodiversity or support vulnerable communities.
With energy, industry and transport accounting for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, accelerating progress in these sectors is essential. Clean energy and infrastructure will play a critical role – clean energy will cut emissions to net zero and help mitigate the impacts of climate change, while resilient infrastructure will help economies and societies adapt to a changing climate.
Action on energy and infrastructure should fully support fair and just transitions and more equitable development, ensuring that no one is left behind.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.
