COP30 closed in Belém, Brazil, at the end of November with a mixture of reiterated ambitions and familiar policy stalemate. While negotiators announced greater financial commitments for renewable investment and support for developing nations’ energy transitions, the summit ended without a set road map to phase out fossil fuels.
The omission has been labelled by many as predictable, yet for the global power sector, which sits at the heart of both climate action and economic development, the absence raises the question of how global energy transitions can, and should, progress.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
The timing of the summit makes the question particularly pertinent, coming ten years after nations signed the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015. A decade on, power systems are cleaner and more expansive, but a lack of coordinated policy and investment are still hindering the progress required.
Power Technology speaks to power industry figures who attended the summit about what the outcomes mean for the sector and where it fell short.
The fossil fuel omission
One of the most divisive issues in Belém – as it was at the most recent COPs – was the inclusion of explicit language on a fossil fuel phase-out. A number of nations argued for clarity on the issue, but pushback from oil and gas-heavy states meant the final text ultimately avoided specifics, instead reiterating the “transition away from fossil fuels” agreed at COP28.
For some, the omission was a disappointing sign of reluctance to turn promises into tangible change. “Rather than a concrete path forward on an equitable fossil fuel phase-out and rich countries paying their fair share for climate action and impacts, we are still deep in the woods,” Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at Oil Change International, tells Power Technology.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataFor others, the outcome was an “unsurprising” reflection of our geopolitical realities. “A number of governments are opposed to enacting an international agreement on such a phase-out for a variety of reasons – some because they don’t plan to phase out their own fossil generation, others because even though they themselves are engaged in the clean energy transition, they see it as a matter purely for national decisions,” says Richard Black, director of policy and strategy at think tank Ember.
But despite this dire reality, Black argues that for utilities and power investors, the absence of a road map will not significantly alter the decarbonisation plans that individual countries have for their power sectors.
“The decisions of governments and regulators are legally binding within the country concerned, whereas COP agreements in general are not,” he adds.
Cosima Cassel, programme lead of climate diplomacy and geopolitics at E3G, echoes this hopeful sentiment: “For the first time at a COP, we saw more than 80 countries come out strongly in favour of a fossil-fuel phase-out road map, that political signal should not be underestimated.”
This year’s summit also saw South Korea and Bahrain formally join the Powering Past Coal Alliance to phase out coal power, a key move, especially for the former nation, which currently operates the seventh-largest coal fleet in the world.
Still, the lack of consensus leaves a gap at a crucial moment. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global fossil fuel demand must decline 25% by 2030 to keep 1.5°C within reach – but without a shared trajectory, countries and companies are moving at different speeds to meet this timeline.
A push for storage, grids and funding developing nations
While the fossil fuel debate dominated headlines, Belém delivered commitments on storage and grid infrastructure – arguably some of the most important bottlenecks in the clean power transition.
This year’s summit saw the Utilities for Net Zero Alliance – a coalition of the world’s leading utilities – raise its investment target for renewables, grids and storage to $148bn per year, an increase of nearly 27% from its COP29 target. The move directly supports COP29’s energy storage and grids pledge, which aims for 1.5TW of global energy storage, doubling grid investment and adding 25 million kilometres of grid infrastructure by 2030.
The Global Grid Catalyst also pledged $7m to mobilise investments for new grid and storage projects, while the Green Grids Initiative led a group of stakeholders to launch the Plan to Accelerate the Expansion and Resilience of Power Grids, a framework to help catalyse grid investments in emerging economies.
Further supporting power system infrastructure in the developing world was the launch by the Inter-American Development Bank Group of the Power Transmission Acceleration Platform for Latin America and the Caribbean, designed to support grid expansion and modernisation in the region, and the pledge of $12.5bn by the Asian Development Bank and World Bank to strengthen South East Asia grids.
In addition, COP30 advanced adaptation finance, calling for developed countries to triple contributions for developing nations’ climate infrastructure by 2035.
Although the target was deemed largely insufficient and not much of an improvement from last year’s summit, it marks another step in addressing the flaws in financial architecture required for a global transition; developing countries, regardless of their clean energy ambitions, often have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels as the most cost-efficient option.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare reinforces this argument, telling Power Technology: “Achieving clean energy goals – including the tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency goals of the COP28 Global Stocktake – will require scaled-up financial support for many poorer countries as a critical first step in the global transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”
However, although these commitments are promising, Cassel says it is still “not quite the level of investment that we need to be seeing globally”. Notably, the IEA estimates that for grids to be able to meet rising power demand and integrate more renewables, annual global grid investment must double to more than $600bn by 2030 – a target the new COP30 commitments still don’t bring the world close to.
Nevertheless, she notes: “Overall, we are not moving as fast as science tells us we need to be, but I think given wider geopolitical situations, which have pushed climate commitments down on priorities, and additional roadblocks like the perceived financial risks of investing in developing nations’ infrastructure, these [COP30 decisions] were as ambitious as we could realistically hope for while still providing hooks to strengthen ambition over time.”
Soenke Kreft, senior expert at the UN University Institute for Environment and Human Security, agrees that the outcomes were significant in “establishing concrete steps to reducing costs and mobilising finance”, especially for developing nations. “All of the [COP30] decisions should contribute to better environments for grid financing in developing countries,” he says.
“There is still a lot unanswered about how all of these plans will actually work but they have a lot of potential,” says Cassel.
“Whether they succeed, however, will depend entirely on how they are carried forward.”
COP30 and a clean energy future
The good news is that amid the disappointing outcomes of COP30, the world continues on a positive trajectory for renewable energy.
“Costs for wind, solar, batteries and other clean energy systems are continuing to drop and will keep getting cheaper, whereas fossil fuel energy prices will continue to be volatile. Clean technologies can now out-compete fossil fuels on price,” Black notes.
“This year, renewables grew faster than global energy demand, while fossil fuel consumption fell,” Cassel adds. “The Paris Agreement has already shifted projected warming from 4°C to about 2.7°C. While we still have a long way to go, this is a sign that global cooperation is working.”
What is missing, she argues, is concrete road maps to turn this potential into genuine change. “We need more forums where countries can openly discuss how to sequence and schedule fossil-fuel phase-out timelines,” she says. “Once those conversations happen, it becomes easier to identify where support is needed and where roadblocks are happening internationally, then establish concrete actions to move forward.”
A decade after Paris, renewables are cheaper, grids are attracting much-needed attention and investor appetite for clean energy is continuing to rise – but greater investment and internationally coordinated action is needed to truly power a clean energy future.
While COP30 may have failed to deliver such “concrete actions” and “genuine change”, the power industry and general public’s response to the outcomes demonstrate a strong will to push forward.
“Calls are growing for a fair and funded fossil fuel phase-out, a global transition to clean energy, and that is not going to stop,” Ioualalen concludes.
