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The REN21 Renewables 2019 Global Status Report, which was recently published on 18th June 2019, provides an overview of the latest developments on the renewable energy transition through the end of 2018.

The report confirms that the global energy transition is well underway in the power sector as more renewable capacity was installed than fossil fuel and nuclear power combined for the fourth consecutive year. The cost of renewable electricity continued to decrease throughout 2018.  

Unlike the power sector, the heating and cooling sector and the transport sector, which together account for about 80% of global total final energy demand, are still lagging behind. The breakthrough could be achieved by cutting fossil fuel subsidies and implementing ambitious policy and regulatory frameworks to drive decarbonisation across these sectors.

The status report highlights the some of the main political developments in Europe:

• More than 15% of annual electricity generation came from wind power and solar PV as a result of renewable deployment, and
• Emissions related to electricity production fell 5%.

The European Union become the only region in the world, where heat demand is declining, given the supporting policies of energy efficiency that continued advancing the share of renewable heat in buildings to 22%. In addition to that, the shares of renewables in district heating rose above 50% in Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, France and Denmark. 

Some highlights of the report were:

• More than 1 GW of renewable power capacity was installed by more than 90 countries, and 30 countries had more than 10 GW;
• The global renewable energy uptake no longer depends on just a few countries;
• Cities are becoming significant drivers in renewable energy deployment due to their ambitious targets, which in several cases exceeded national and state or provincial initiatives
• Several incentives were implemented in the transport sector, such as sustainable biofuels, EVs and fuel economy policies that are reducing overall fossil fuel dependency in the transport sector;
• Despite the efforts of 44 national governments, 21 states/provinces and 7 cities, which implemented carbon pricing policies, just 13% of global CO₂ emissions were covered by the end of 2018;
• The imbalance between energy sectors (especially heating, cooling and transport sectors) is largely due to insufficient or unstable policy support. Therefore, there is a significant opportunity for countries to scale up support of renewables

The executive summary of the REN21 report can be found under the following link: https://www.ren21.net/gsr-2019/pages/summary/summary/

Infographics, Figures, National and Regional Fact Sheets can be downloaded here: https://ren21.filecloudonline.com/url/ysphuvhv4tyxcpm4

The full report can be found here: http://www.ren21.net/gsr-2019/pages/foreword/foreword/