On June 24th, 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping chaired the High-level Dialogue on Global Development during the 14th BRICS Summit. After the Dialogue, the Chair's Statement was issued, presenting a list of deliverables (the “List”) based on the priority cooperation areas in the Global Development Initiative (the “Initiative”) as a crucial measure jointly taken by all parties to implement the Initiative. Regarding the energy sector, the List provides that “promoting to establish the Global Energy Cooperation Partnership (the “Partnership”). China will hold the International Forum on Energy Transitions and explore the establishment of the International Coalition for Energy Transition.”
The Initiative and the List, aiming at achieving the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and advancing global energy transition, has injected fresh impetus globally into green and low-carbon energy development and closer cooperation. They have also shown China’s unwavering commitment to carrying on with energy transition, expanding high quality exchanges and cooperation, and taking active steps to share development opportunities with the world. The Partnership will serve to improve and optimize the operating mechanisms on international clean energy cooperation in a comprehensive manner, strengthen the international collaborative synergy among China and all parties in clean energy development, bring up more public goods to support global green and low-carbon energy development, contribute to the green recovery of global economy and the realization of the 2030 Agenda in due time.
I. Focusing on the Development Goals and Gathering Strengths for Cooperation: the Imperative of Establishing the Global Clean Energy Cooperation Partnership
1. The Partnership will be a solid measure to support the realization of SDGs in due time
(1) The realization of SDGs requires arduous work. Energy provides both the basis and the momentum for the progress of human civilizations. The seventh goal of SDG aims at ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all and sets clear targets for energy development. With the uncertainties brought by the unprecedented pandemic and the complexity under traditional and emerging threats, the global economy is staggering on its way to recover, resulting in negative impact on the existent development outcomes. According to the UN’s statistics for 2020, about 120 million people in the world fell into poverty and the population trapped in extreme poverty increased for the first time after 1998. In the same year, 733 million people still lacked access to electricity and 2.4 billion to clean cooking. There is a long way to go to realize UN SDGs, a consensus reached among 193 countries, before its due time in 8 years. The Partnership reaffirms the imperative of SDG7, the energy development goal, and the difficulties ahead. It will mobilize direct global efforts in more sensible and rational manner against the obstacles and challenges.
(2) The realization of SDGs needs the support of clean energy. Unlike fossil fuels, the resources of hydropower, wind power, solar power and other types of clean energy exist extensively over the world. With relatively even distribution in each country, all economies enjoy equal development opportunities. Take China as an example. It takes, in theory, less than 100,000m², or 7% of China’s desert area in the broader sense, of Solar PV installation, to meet the country’s total electricity demand of society in 2021. With accelerated technological progress, constant cost reduction, and continuously expanding utilization scenarios in recent years, clean energy as a solution to the lack of energy access and repeated energy poverty has been further widened and strengthened. Distributed utilization of clean energy will play an increasingly prominent role and become a vital tool for poverty alleviation, climate change response and green development in the mountainous areas beyond the reach of main grids and small regions with fragile environment and relevantly sparse population in the middle and late stages to realize SDGs. Being linked by clean energy development, the establishment of the Partnership underlines the leading role and importance of clean energy in sustainable economic development and will endeavor to build the solidest common ground for global energy cooperation.
(3) The realization of SDGs is premised on joint efforts. To achieve large-scale application of clean energy， universalize energy access, and reverse repeated energy poverty, it is necessary to deploy effective policy implementation, technological application, funding support, project demonstration and risks prevention. The lack of energy access mainly exists in economically underdeveloped regions with insufficient infrastructure and weak industrial development. Due to the low rate and long term of investment return, these regions are scarce of both inherent impetus and external appeal to international funding support to solve the above problems. Defining energy poverty as spending more than 10% of personal income on energy, repeated energy poverty may become the sword of Damocles hanging over the development of every country and region as the prices of global fossil energy rising constantly. Therefore it has become the common issues in which all economies need to dedicate continuous attention and efforts to ensure energy security, personal income, and appropriate energy pricing and improve household energy efficiency. The solutions entail experience, innovation, and more importantly, sharing, through which the common experience of economies at different development stages can be integrated into diverse business models customized for different problems. The Partnership will foster a dialogue platform for experience sharing and business mode developing, and thus create opportunities for working out pathways and solutions to the SDGs.
Here I would like to take the development of China as an example. China experienced and solved the problem of lacking energy access, effectively contributing to the accelerated realization of SDGs. China, as the world’s largest developing country, once faced a severe energy shortage. At the end of the last century, about 40 million people were not power-connected. However, China achieved universal electrification with the whole population of 1.4 billion in 2015, in spite of the challenges posed by large population, diverse terrain and unbalanced regional development. In 2020, all county-level administrative regions were connected to the main grid, and three-phase power was available to every village. After meeting the basic electricity demand, China took an innovative step to combine the work of electrification with poverty alleviation, promoting Solar PV application based poverty relief programmes nationwide. In retrospect, China’s success in realizing energy access, on the one hand, roots in the coordinated and collaborative actions between the central and local governments, feasible and phased energy development plans, and clearly outlined targets, purposes, target beneficiaries, and safeguard measures of energy access projects. On the other hand, it stems from the well-classified policy development and implementation and the adoption of multiple working methods, such as main grid extension, rural grid upgrading, and distributed power supply by renewable energy, based on the indigenous features of geography, economy and population in the eastern and western regions. China followed a result-oriented approach by setting aspirational policy goals and effectively implementing policies, while timely summarizing experience and lessons, and adjusting the pathways and plans. China also provided effective dialogue platforms for provinces, cities, and financial institutions in achieving the goals by channeling the human resources with the dedication, capacity and persistence to handle the obstacles, thus creating new driving forces to relieve the impoverished areas with leapfrog development.
Apart from the above, China has deeply benefited from the international community in clean energy development and is willing to offer more solutions and public goods to realize energy access and clean energy development to the international community. In the establishment of the Partnership, China will stay open in sharing the policy plans, solutions, demonstration projects, business models, and cooperation methods gained from realizing energy access, such as micro-grid system technologies that incorporate wind power, solar power and energy storage and “small yet high quality” projects purposed at benefiting people. Such experience will help less developed countries overcome the difficulties in achieving power access. As the world’s largest renewable energy market, China also boasts relevantly full-fledged industry chains and manufacturing capacities. China is willing to support all countries in exploring their distinctive local-reality based clean energy development paths, providing China’s development experience and strengths as a reference. Nevertheless, the development of China's clean energy market cannot sustain without cooperation with global partners. Therefore the Partnership will become an important platform for global clean energy knowledge and experience sharing.
2. The Partnership will give full backing to consistent action towards global energy transitions
The international community has gradually reached a consensus on energy transition, with the concerted efforts of many countries. By the end of 2021, 137 countries and regions had put forth their “zero-carbon” or “carbon neutrality” goals, more than 100 countries clean energy supporting policies, and 146 countries renewable energy targets. China has always been an active promoter and a reliable partner in pursuing carbon neutrality. In September 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping solemnly announced at the United Nations General Assembly that China will strive to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Since then, the Chinese government, with the consecutive release of the Working Guidance, the Action Plan and the Opinions, has placed particular focus on the action for green and low-carbon energy transition, pointing out the direction and setting a timetable for the systemic energy transition in China. In September 2021, President Xi Jinping pledged at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly that China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy.
Although the world shares a common goal of green development, we should recognize that the technology storage for clean energy development is still insufficient. In Asian and African, in particular, developing countries, the proportion of clean energy, and the development of clean and low-carbon technologies are relatively lagging behind. In contrast to the high dependency of fossil energy on endowment, clean energy development rests in strengthened support from policies, technologies, and funding. In the 2021 Tracking Clean Energy Progress (TCEP) reports, International Energy Agency (IEA) assessed the status of 46 critical energy transition technologies in 6 sectors. The results show that the progress of 18 technologies needs to be facilitated and 26 technologies have not yet been on track with the IEA’s scenario for net zero emissions by 2050. The world needs to enhance cooperation for the joint solutions in key issues, such as high overall costs of energy transition and inadequate technology storage, and therefore achieve the national low-carbon development goals respectively.
The current world situation reminds that the progress of global energy transition has been constrained by the COVID-19, rising fossil energy prices and other global issues. In particular, the efforts to invest in clean energy industry will be undermined under the economic downward pressure due to its capital-intensive nature. The Partnership will provide a mutual learning platform for solving global problems, which can help all parties save wasted efforts and extend cooperation, and will ensure shifting global energy transition from a consensus to be sought to actions to be implemented.
II. Deepening Practical Cooperation with Green Development Philosophy: the Outlook of the Partnership
1. Playing the pioneering role of the partnership in a concrete manner
The Partnership will maintain the main task of the Global Development Initiative and focus on clean energy, with the aim to contribute to countries’ energy transition and clean energy development. It is therefore necessary for the Partnership to hold the International Forum on Energy Transitions and explore the establishment of the International Coalition for Energy Transition. The Forum and the Coalition will play a vital role in building a shared platform, consolidating consensus, and speeding up efforts in energy transition.
The Partnership willfully harness the existing regional energy cooperation platforms, including platforms between China and Arab League, ASEAN, African Union, China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) respectively, and APEC Sustainable Energy Center, and will actively foster China-Central Asia green energy cooperation partnership. With these close relations, the Partnership will promote policy information communication and coordination among the regional countries, enhance the sharing of clean energy technologies, beef up exchange of talents and capacity building and facilitate the incubation of innovative cooperation projects.
2. Stepping up the industrial integration and technological innovation in the energy industry
The energy industry should fully recognize fresh opportunities for international cooperation brought by the Partnership and involve themselves in the global clean energy market with a broader view and more professional international cooperation capacity.
It is necessary to work on large-scale application of innovative technologies in clean energy and further lower the costs of clean energy use. Science and technology shape the future of energy and creates energy for the future. As main innovators, enterprises should reinforce basic and frontier research, and expand investment in generic technologies R&D to provide higher-quality solutions for energy green and low-carbon transition. At the same time, enterprises should proactively integrate into a global innovative network of clean energy technologies to fully utilize both domestic and international markets and resources and enhance international communication in technology, personnel and projects. By leveraging respective advantages, enterprises will benefit from the synergistic strengths and shorten the process from R&D to commercial utilization, parity, and large-scale application.
It is necessary to follow the trend of deeper integration of global industrial, supply, and value chains and better optimize resource allocation. Enterprises should observe the development laws of their industries and actively integrate into the global industrial division of labor with a more open mind. By efficient utilization of global resource and market, enterprises can promote industrial transformation and upgrading and make its due contribution to maintaining the security and stability of the industrial and supply chains of global clean energy.
3. Giving Full Play to the Strong Support from Think Tanks
The Partnership covers a wide range of countries and sectors. As intellectual resource centers and essential bridges to connect government and the public and link policy communication with academic research, think tanks should leverage their professional advantages to give suggestions for meticulous and concrete implementation of practical cooperation.
It is necessary to play the key role of idea generation in enhancing theoretical innovation and knowledge spreading. Global think tanks under the Partnership will be further united to deliver more research results with high quality and operability, and therefore to offer all-round intellectual support for governments, financial institutions, and energy companies to participate in international clean energy cooperation, and bring technical support for the improvement of global energy governance.
It is necessary to expand the channels of non-official communication in boosting results sharing and people-to-people exchange. Think tanks should carry out knowledge sharing and capacity building activities to promote people-to-people exchanges, seek more and deeper understanding from the international community for the connotation, concept and significance of the Partnership, and help build greater cooperation consensus. At the same time, by conducting complementary cooperation and common development, think tanks under the Partnership will enhance the overall research level and the cultivation of international talents.
4. Exploring the Guiding Role of Financial Institutions
New demand for financial services has been fostered along with the development of green and low-carbon industries. It is estimated that China will need hundreds of trillions of investments to achieve carbon neutrality in the next 40 years. For the world, total annual investment would need to surge to nearly $5 trillion by 2030 to achieve net zero goals. Facing tremendous capital demand and the North-South gap, financial institutions should prioritize green energy and energy access in financial aid, explore new operation and management mechanism that meets the needs of green and low-carbon industries in financial services, and enhance the comprehensive service level of green finance as soon as possible. Financial institutions should also seek effective alignment between projects and capital by utilizing green finance to support the pilot demonstration of clean energy projects, encourage pilot projects and regions to explore new models for green finance development.
As an ancient Chinese statesman observed, "Designs for justice prevail, and acts for people's benefit succeed."The establishment of a global clean energy cooperation partnership is an important measure and early harvest of the Global Development Initiative jointly implemented by China and all parties. It will broaden the vision and path of global clean energy development. Next, the Partnership will continue to carry on with in-depth synergy with countries, cooperation mechanisms, and partners from all sectors, jointly advance the implementation of the list of deliverables to share growth opportunities and unleash more vitality to the efforts against global challenges shoulder by shoulder.