The UN has rallied behind plans to accelerate investment in electricity infrastructure in Africa and Southeast Asia, boosting efforts to tackle one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the shift to clean energy.
UN boss António Guterres launched the Global Grids Accelerator on the sidelines of the UN Climate Summit in New York on Wednesday. The initiative aims to turn government plans to expand and modernise grids into investment-ready projects and bring together the expertise, finance and support needed to build them.
Guterres said the accelerator will help countries build "the arteries of the energy transition" to expand energy access, strengthen energy security and power growth in developing countries.
The initiative will not create a new financing institution, the UN said, and no additional funding to boost grid upgrades was announced. Instead, it will act as a broker by bringing together UN agencies, development banks, investors and utilities around grid priorities identified by governments.
Renewable energy deployment is happening at record speed but the infrastructure required to move clean electricity from where it is generated to consumers is not keeping pace. As a result, record amounts of green electricity that cannot be absorbed by the grid are being wasted.
In addition, more than 2,500 GW of renewable projects – nearly twice the electricity generation capacity of the US – are currently stuck in queues worldwide, waiting to connect to the grid, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Source: Climate Home News
