Solar and wind capacity in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region increased by 20% in 2023, bringing the total to more than 28 gigawatts (GW).
The technologies now make up 9% of electricity generating capacity in ASEAN countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – according to a new report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
Combined with a large base of hydropower, the growth in wind and solar takes the bloc close to its renewable energy capacity target of 35% by 2025, GEM says.
Building an additional 17GW of utility-scale solar and wind projects in the next two years – those that feed power directly into the electricity grid – would be sufficient to reach the goal, it adds.
In fact, it says the region is on track to sail past its target, nearly doubling wind and solar capacity in the next two years by adding a further 23GW of new projects
An even larger 220GW pipeline of new utility-scale wind and solar capacity has been announced, or entered pre-construction or construction stages, according to GEM’s analysis, though only 6GW of this is currently being built.
However, ASEAN countries collectively have one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and have seen very rapid recent electricity demand growth of 22% per year between 2015 and 2021. This has translated into continued support for gas and coal power in the region, even though demand growth is expected to slow.
While renewables have the potential to temper the growth in fossil fuel demand, wind and solar expansion face regulatory hurdles and a lack of supportive policy, GEM adds.
Success so far
ASEAN added 3GW of solar capacity in 2023, increasing installed capacity by 17% over 2022 levels, according to GEM’s report.
Despite solar seeing a larger overall capacity increase, operational wind capacity saw a larger comparative rise, growing by 29%, or 2GW, since January 2023.
Offshore wind now accounts for 2GW of the operating 9GW of utility-scale wind capacity in the region.
Given the technical challenges and associated higher costs of offshore wind, this is particularly noteworthy, GEM states.
Vietnam has by far the most utility-scale solar and wind capacity of all the ASEAN nations, as seen in the chart below.
The increase in utility-scale solar and wind capacity over the past year has come as a result of a supportive policy environment across many countries in the ASEAN region, says GEM.
In 2017, Vietnam deployed a series of investment policies designed to bring utility scale-solar projects into operation, for example. Two feed-in-tariff (FiT) programs were deployed by the country’s state-owned utility between 2017 and 2020.
However, when these programs expired, Vietnam failed to administer a replacement, GEM says. As such, despite the nation adding 12GW of utility-scale solar capacity between 2019 and 2021, gaps in energy policy have started to limit progress.
Just 1GW of utility-scale solar and wind was commissioned in Vietnam in 2022, in comparison with nearly 4GW in 2021.
Thailand and the Philippines currently have the second and third highest utility-scale solar and wind capacity in the region, with 3GW of operating capacity each.
Thailand is the second largest economy in ASEAN after Indonesia and has benefitted from being seen as a “low-risk country”, notes GEM, with few barriers for investment.
The Philippines, meanwhile, hosts a “streamlined project bidding system”, which allows for an “unencumbered pipeline of project development”, GEM says. Currently, around three-quarters of its operational utility-scale solar and wind capacity comes from solar.
Future growth
There is currently a total of 222GW of announced, pre-construction and construction-stage utility-scale wind and solar capacity in ASEAN countries, according to GEM’s research.
More than 185GW of this pipeline of projects is in the Philippines and Vietnam, meaning they account for more than 80% of prospective capacity in the region. This is shown in the figure below.
More than 60% of the pipeline in Vietnam and the Philippines comes from planned offshore wind development, GEM says, of 72GW and 52GW respectively.
The Philippines is responsible for 45% of prospective capacity in ASEAN countries. Its Green Energy Auction Program (GEAP) aims to facilitate the development of more than 11GW of renewable energy.
In March 2023, it held an auction securing just over 300 bids to develop 3GW of solar, onshore wind and bioenergy with 2024–2026 start dates.
This capacity fell short of the level targeted, but represented a 75% increase on the amount secured in 2022’s auction, notes GEM.
Offshore wind comprises 52% of the Philippines’ prospective utility-scale renewable capacity, with five times more offshore wind than onshore.
In April 2023, the nation issued an executive order, outlining cooperation between private investors and the government on offshore wind. Since then, offshore wind contracts have more than doubled to nearly 80, representing 61GW of capacity, GEM notes.
Vietnam has more than 86GW of prospective capacity, including 72GW of offshore wind. However, just 2% is currently being built, due in part to the country’s “lack of concise and reliable renewable energy policies that could serve as a crucial roadmap for project implementation”, states GEM.
A further 40GW of utility-scale solar and wind projects in Vietnam are considered by GEM to be “shelved”, because they have seen no progression or announcements in the past two years.
Vietnam is working on a just energy transition partnership (JETP) with a group of developed countries. It also released its latest national electricity development plan for 2021–2030, also known as the power development plan 8 (PDP8).
The alignment of these policies and funding schemes is still in development, and therefore their impact cannot yet be determined, notes GEM.
Laos is aiming to “punch above its economic weight” in the development of utility-scale solar and wind capacity, GEM says. At more than 3GW, its prospective capacity rivals that of Thailand, despite the country’s economy being only 2% of the size.
Laos’ prospective utility-scale solar and wind capacity surpasses that of Malaysia by more than 150%, despite having an economy that is more than thirty times smaller. This ambition is being driven by financial collaboration with ASEAN partners, according to GEM.
Laos is set to house the region’s largest onshore windfarm. Monsoon windfarm is currently under construction and expected to have a capacity of 600 megawatts (MW) when complete.
Despite this large pipeline of ASEAN wind and solar projects, however, only 6.3GW (3%) is currently under construction, notes GEM.
Reaching renewable ambitions
The target for renewables to make up 35% of electricity generating capacity by 2025 is “easily attainable and ultimately unambitious for ASEAN”, according to GEM.
Renewables already make up 32% of electricity capacity in ASEAN countries, GEM says, meaning the 35% target can be met easily.
Moreover, while annual growth in electricity consumption is expected to slow from the annual 22% since 2014 to just 3% a year out to 2030, GEM says rising demand will continue to drive expansion in fossil fuel power infrastructure in the region.
Hitting the 35% target would only require ASEAN countries to commission 17GW of new renewable capacity by 2025, GEM says, of which 6.3GW is already under construction.
Yet there is in excess of 220GW of prospective utility-scale solar and wind in development, with a total of 23GW set to be operational by 2025.
This means the region is on track to beat its target and nearly double its installed wind and solar capacity in just two years, according to GEM, with scope to go even further and reduce the need for fossil fuel expansion.
For now, fossil fuels remain entrenched in the region, restricting new investment in utility-scale wind and solar, GEM states.
Gas and coal each account for approximately 30% of ASEAN countries’ total installed capacity, and coal-fired power capacity has seen an annual growth rate of 7% since 2017.
With electricity demand growth currently outpacing the rollout of renewable energy capacity, gas and coal are expected to continue to grow in coming years, GEM says.
National energy policies have touted the use of gas as a “stepping stone” in the energy transition and ASEAN countries are likely to be net importers of gas by 2025.
Insufficient grid infrastructure investment is also a “persistent hurdle” for integrating utility-scale solar and wind, notes GEM.
As such, while there is a clear effort being made to ramp up renewable energy, this continues to be complicated by a buildout of fossil fuels and low solar and wind construction rates, concludes GEM. The report adds:
“By doubling down on bringing as much of the 220GW of prospective utility-scale solar and wind projects into fruition, ASEAN countries will be poised to not only meet regional renewable energy targets, but pave the way to transition from fossil fuels.”
The post Wind and solar capacity in south-east Asia climbs 20% in just one year, report finds appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Wind and solar capacity in south-east Asia climbs 20% in just one year, report finds
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
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Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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