The strong global expansion of renewables and electric vehicles should limit carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion to 1% growth this year, according to the International Energy Agency.
New IEA analysis of the latest data from around the world shows that these CO2 emissions are on course to increase by close to 300m tonnes in 2022 to 33.8bn tonnes.
This is a far smaller rise than their jump of nearly 2bn tonnes in 2021, which resulted from the rapid global recovery from the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic.
This year’s increase is driven by power generation and by the aviation sector, as air travel rebounds from pandemic lows, IEA found.
The rise in global CO2 emissions this year would be much larger – more than tripling to reach close to 1bn tonnes – were it not for the major deployments of renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles (EVs) around the world.
Solar PV and wind are leading an increase in global renewable electricity generation in 2022 of more than 700 terawatt-hours (TWh), the largest annual rise on record.
IEA said, without this increase, global CO2 emissions would be more than 600m tonnes higher this year.
The rapid deployment of solar and wind is on course to account for two-thirds of the growth in renewable power generation.
Despite the challenging situation that hydropower has faced in several regions due to droughts this year, global hydropower output is up year-on-year, contributing over one-fifth of the expected growth in renewable power.
Even though the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has propped up global coal demand in 2022 by making natural gas far more expensive, the relatively small increase in coal emissions has been considerably outweighed by the expansion of renewables, IEA found.
IEA executive director Fatih Birol (pictured) said: “The global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a scramble by many countries to use other energy sources to replace the natural gas supplies that Russia has withheld from the market.
“The encouraging news is that solar and wind are filling much of the gap, with the uptick in coal appearing to be relatively small and temporary.
“This means that CO2 emissions are growing far less quickly this year than some people feared – and that policy actions by governments are driving real structural changes in the energy economy.
“Those changes are set to accelerate thanks to the major clean energy policy plans that have advanced around the world in recent months