BAKU, Azerbaijan, February 4
By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:
Many governments still do not have a clear renewable energy policy, Executive Director at NGO Forum on ADB, Rayyan Hassan told Trend.
Commenting on what steps need to be taken in order to accelerate the pace in battling climate change in 2022, Hassan first pointed out that the coal industry is not dead yet, although it is dying.
"Local governments are starting to take the position of moving away from coal, but very big power generation companies, which have invested billions of dollars into coal don’t want to leave it behind. So shifting that conversation is needed," he said.
As an example, he brought up the Japanese government that is still heavy on the coal through JICA and other Japanese financial institutions. Hassan emphasized that collective push on ending this approach immediately still has to be done and there is still work to do.
Talking about replacing coal with gas, he pointed out that gas is equally as problematic.
"There is a lot of interest in combined cycle gas power plants, there is a lot of interest in LNG import, creation of LNG gas terminals, and such. But the problem here is that emissions are not being lowered," Hassan said.
As far as renewables are concerned, Hassan said that it's not something that one can just plug in and expect industries to run on it in 2022 and 2023.
"This would be highly ambitious," he said.
Hassan also pointed out that work on renewable energy is actually not as deeply being talked about as one would want and many governments do not have a clear renewable energy policy.
"There needs to be renewable energy planning. How are you going to shift the grids and upgrade them? There needs to be research on the development and bringing of new technology into the renewable energy sector. We need more efficient solar panels, we need better batteries," he asked.
Hassan believes these are some technological obstacles that, have not been solved in a commercially viable economic manner.
"So there is definitely work on the policy side and on the research and technology side. Obviously with new money in the climate finance, if one puts money in these areas, then hopefully in 5 to 10 years we will find world solution to these issues," Hassan concluded.
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