The UAE will grow its renewable energy portfolio four times from the existing 25,000 megawatts to over 100 gigawatts by 2030. UAE aims to achieve this with the help of Masdar. This was dislcosed by Dr Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber, Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and COP28 President-Designate while speaking at the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue Conference 2023 (BETD). He also invited other international firms to work with the UAE to deliver commercial renewable energy projects across the world.
He informed that UAE has built three of the largest and lowest-cost, single-site solar plants in the world. The nation will be hosting the conference COP28 later this year with commitment to correct the course, and enable meaningful, practical, pragmatic, transformational progress.
“We have a small window of opportunity to make a massive course correction. There is still time, but we must act now and we must act together. We must reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030. We have to make these cuts while meeting the energy needs of a population that will grow by half a billion by 2030,” said Al Jaber.
He stressed on the need to explore every available option such as renewables, hydrogen, nuclear, or carbon capture. Al Jaber also stressed on the need to triple renewable energy capacity in seven years and expand it six times by 2040, that makes it a huge target of 250,000 terawatt.
He added, “There are more than 5,000 steel, cement and aluminium manufacturing plants in the world today. Along with heavy transportation, these hard-to-abate sectors make up over 30 per cent of global emissions. This is where solutions like hydrogen come in an option we have been exploring proactively with our partners here in Germany.”
He informed that there are only 44 million tonnes per annum of operational carbon capture worldwide and opined that carbon emissions are an industrial-size problem that requires industrial-scale solutions.
“We need to multiply that amount 30 times. But we also know that the main barrier here is cost. We need smart, progressive government intervention through policies and regulations to attract and incentivise private sector investment. We need to explore emerging carbon capture technologies like direct air mineralisation and osmosis,” said the UAE Minister.
