The Deputy Director General of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Gauri Singh, said that despite the world achieving a new record high in the value of renewable energies investments in the past year, which reflected positively on the volume of renewable energies that have been installed on the ground, it is unfortunately “Not enough” to reach the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.
She added that the value of these investments does not put us on the path to reaching the goal of one and a half degrees Celsius that we aspire to achieve.
And she continued, “I think that some countries that have declared their targets should take the necessary next steps in terms of legislative policies and licensing transactions, so that they can witness the implementation of the required projects on the ground.”
She mentioned that from our side in IRENA, we estimate that 3,000 gigawatts of renewable energies have been added globally, but this number must be tripled to reach 10,700 gigawatts, and this is not easy, as it requires the construction of flexible electrical networks, which we overlook. about him sometimes.
“Building and investing in infrastructure is just as important. Just as we must focus our efforts on adding renewable energies to the ground, we must also at the same time build and invest in infrastructure to make room for these additions and this transformation,” Singh said.
She explained that we see a rise in interest rates, and this requires facilitating climate finance further so that the necessary investments reach the renewable energies and energy efficiency sectors, but we must not forget that the energy transition process will be very complex, and it will not be a smooth process.
She stated that we will find challenges and fluctuations, and we have to be ready for those challenges and deal with them, so we are expected to witness challenges in assembling the required climate financing and in delivering the necessary investments to networks and increasing their resilience.
“We have to find the necessary tools and channels to direct this liquidity to the sites that need it, and I imagine that this point will be the biggest challenge in the discussions of the upcoming climate summit meetings, as we have to know how to provide these channels to deliver funds to developing and emerging countries and integrate them into the transformation process,” according to Singh. .
She said that what we refer to when we talk about directing investments is that we still see a gap in the amount of funds that we will need to reach our desired targets by the end of the current decade.
“We need to double the value of investments directed towards renewable energies, and the challenge in this regard is not the technologies. The required technologies are available today, and the challenge is to deliver investments to projects in countries that are ready in terms of their policies to move forward in building additional capabilities of renewable energies in their electrical networks,” Singh said.
And she continued: “This challenge will be one of the most prominent files that we hope, not only to discuss in COP28, but to find solutions to it in order to move forward.”
