United Nation’s secretary-general António Guterres has called for a global coalition on battery storage as part of a five-point “critical action” drive to ensure Europe meets its decarbonization goals.
Guterres proposed five critical actions to jump-start the renewable energy transition during a speech at the launch of the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization’s ‘State of the Global Climate 2021’ report.
Guterres said in his speech: “The management and shareholders of multilateral development banks and development finance institutions must take responsibility and be held accountable.
“I call on them, including their private arms, to fully align their entire lending portfolios with the Paris Agreement, by 2024 at the latest, and to end all high-emissions high-pollution finance.
“Commercial banks and all elements of the global financial system need to dramatically scale up investments in renewables as they phase out fossil fuels.
“Every country, city and citizen, every financial institution, company and civil society organization has a role to play. But most of all, it’s time for leaders — public and private alike — to stop talking about renewables as a distant project of the future.”
His action points included:
- Treating renewable energy technologies, such as battery storage, as essential and freely available global public goods. He suggested that removing obstacles to knowledge-sharing and technological transfer— including intellectual property constraints— was crucial for a rapid and fair renewable energy transition
- Calling for the introduction of a global coalition on battery storage to fast-track innovation and deployment, led and driven by governments, tech companies, manufacturers, and financiers
- Securing, scaling up and diversifying the supply of critical components and raw materials for renewable energy technologies, and driving the concentration of materials away from a “handful of countries”
- Calling for governments to invest in skills training, research and innovation, and incentives to build supply chains
- Calling for governments to build frameworks and reform bureaucracies to level the playing field for renewables in many countries that favour fossil fuels.
- Removing red tape preventing gigawatts of renewable projects being deployed. He called on governments to fast-track and streamline approvals of solar and wind projects, modernise grids and set 1.5o-aligned renewable energy targets that provide certainty to investors, developers, consumers and producers
- Calling for governments to shift subsidies away from coal, oil and gas firms— where half a trillion dollars is placed to artificially lower the price of fossil fuels, more than triple what renewables receive
- Calling for private and public investments in renewable energy to triple to at least $4 trillion a year.
