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The UN Environment Programme's annual Adaptation Gap Report reveals that developing countries will require significantly more funding than previously estimated to withstand the impacts of climate change. The report presents two assessments of the investment required for adaptation: the "modelled" cost of adaptation, which amounts to $215 billion per year this decade, and the "country adaptation finance needs," which is nearly double the modeled cost at $387 billion per year. The report also highlights regional disparities, with Latin America and the Caribbean reporting a need for less funding than the modeled costs, while South Asian countries require more. The report emphasizes the importance of international support for low-income countries, as they face a higher adaptation investment burden as a percentage of GDP. Additionally, the report emphasizes the continuous need for adaptation investment in the future, even if net zero greenhouse gas emissions are achieved by 2050. [Extracted from the article]

According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), government research and development (R&D) budgets for energy in developed countries have fluctuated over the past 50 years. R&D for nuclear energy has decreased significantly since the 1980s, while renewable energy has seen steady growth since 2002. Energy efficiency has consistently received increasing funding and is now the largest recipient of IEA member countries' energy R&D budgets. Fossil fuel R&D peaked in the 1970s, and R&D for cross-cutting technologies and hydrogen has been on the rise. In 2022, IEA members spent a total of $24.7 billion on energy R&D. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- Last month, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published its annual revision to US national accounts - key economic figures such as gross domestic product, national income and household savings rates. Mehrotra pointed it toward data from the US Energy Information Administration, the US Census Bureau and other sources, which showed more or less flat costs for natural gas plants and falling costs for wind and solar. He found that the BEA's downwards-revised cost estimates resulted in a 65% upward revision in the amount of real investment in the US power sector. [Extracted from the article]

Reduce its capture rate by 10%, and its levelized cost of capture increases by 8%; boost that rate by 10%, and its costs only decline 6.5%. Together they are the most important source of demand for the carbon capture and storage (CCS) market, which aims to create an industry of removing CO2 from significant industrial processes and storing it stably for decades or centuries. BNEF notes two other factors that carbon capture facilities will be highly sensitive to: plant utilization rates and the percentage of carbon that is captured. [Extracted from the article]

Boston Metal raised $262 million of venture funding for its electricity-based steel- and metal-making technology, while Sweden's H2 Green Steel assembled €1.5 billion in equity to build its first plant that will use hydrogen to create steel. Boston Metal's series C round will not go to building a series of full-scale production plants, or even one: Instead, the company will spend it on growing its team and demonstrating its technology commercially. Global Energy Monitor counts 1,016 steel plants in 89 countries that combined have an annual capacity of 3 billion tons. [Extracted from the article]

Were the world to raise prices to the level that accounts for both their explicit and implicit costs, then carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels could fall more than 40% below their baseline levels (and a third lower than emissions in 2019) by the end of the decade. About one-quarter of the total - $1.33 trillion - is made up of what the IMF terms explicit subsidies, or undercharging for the cost of supplying a fossil fuel or electricity. The IMF's data itself, though, also suggests a path toward reducing implicit subsidies without a coordinated global effort of raising prices to efficient levels. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- In the run-up to the (almost but not quite) four-day weekend over July 4th, US air travel set a new record. Commuter, regional and short-haul (up to 2-hour) flights, on planes with between nine and 150 seats, together are responsible for about 27% of total aviation emissions. But removing the emissions from every last mile of today's commuter, regional and short-haul flights would only shrink aviation's current climate footprint by about one-quarter. [Extracted from the article]

1. Energy demand is growing in non-OECD countries Global primary energy consumption reached an all-time high last year, at more than 600 exajoules. Or, coal is. (Or maybe gas) Global demand for fossil fuels is also at an all-time high, and coal and gas individually are both in demand at record levels. For the high- and middle-income economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, primary energy demand peaked 15 years ago - coincidentally the same year that demand in the rest of the world surpassed the OECD's. [Extracted from the article]

BP and Shell have also pulled back on their strategies to cut fossil fuel production. In other words, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP Plc, Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE "choose cash over climate", as Bloomberg reporter Kevin Crowley wrote recently. To put it another way: Oil majors retreating from clean-energy investment means more to oil majors than it means to the energy transition. [Extracted from the article]

The growing skilled labor force of today's manufacturing boom can lead by example with fast, efficient project timelines, and ideally provide the impetus for the same pace in other sectors. With the US government providing potentially $1 trillion of capital under the energy and climate provisions of the IRA, employment in skilled construction, engineering and electrical roles will almost certainly increase further. [Extracted from the article]

But growing those companies demands the same general business roles, and skills, that any successful enterprise does. (Bloomberg) -- Since the start of 2023, more than 700 tech companies around the world have laid off a total of almost 200,000 employees. Growing Climate Tech Firms Need Engineers - But Also Sales and HR Pros. [Extracted from the article]

The resulting low prices in Zambia sent the wrong price signals to other African governments, which would be unable to match the economics of Scaling Solar's Zambia projects without those subsidies. Considering all of these benefits together, Emery finds that no private-sector bidder could come close to the same pricing that the IFC's participation enabled in Zambia. That record low was the result of the International Finance Corporation's Scaling Solar program, designed to help the world's least wealthy countries develop and build solar power without drawing on subsidies. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- Over the past five decades, the US has installed about 140 gigawatts of solar power generation capacity, enough to provide more than 3% of its power. First Solar has substantial manufacturing capacity in the US; its solar technology is exempt from the tariffs that vex many international companies and impede climate progress. [Extracted from the article]

Shipping Has Largely Relied on One Fuel. Yes, regulations and emissions standards will be essential, but company-level action will most likely determine the shipping industry's complex future fuel mix. While emissions in the global power sector may be close to peaking, international shipping emissions show no signs of doing the same. [Extracted from the article]

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released a study on the project connection queue for the nation's grids, showing just how much new power companies want to build, what type of power and where. The US power grid includes everything from 100-year-old hydro dams to brand-new batteries. [Extracted from the article]

Shell examined the four major energy technologies to emerge in the past six decades: nuclear power, liquefied natural gas and solar and wind power. Shell Plc recently published two energy security scenarios, its latest in a long series of thorough and (at least to energy analysts) memorable views into energy's possible futures. Growth of energy technologies after supplying 1 exajoule/year Wind is growing more rapidly than liquefied natural gas. [Extracted from the article]

Energy R&D was only $1.72 billion in 1972, before the first oil price shock; by 1979, it was nearly $11 billion, bigger than the health outlay, nearly the spending on space and a quarter of defense. Peaks in total R&D have generally corresponded with peaks in defense outlays, although that has changed in the past five years - both defense and non-defense spending have been increasing, and non-defense outlays have taken a sustained lead for the first time. [Extracted from the article]

For that dynamic to continue, it might be the case that there's need for more robust financial regulation to keep banks as secure as possible, so climate companies can focus on their business rather than their bank. Banking is a business that borrows short and lends long, and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has just put thousands of startups - including dozens of emerging climate-tech businesses - through a crash course about what bankers call "duration risk.". [Extracted from the article]

No electricity grid in the US has added more renewable power over the past decade than the Texas grid has. Bitcoin mines use electricity in such a quantity, and with such consistency, that we can express that in terms of electricity demand. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- Last week Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, began home hospice care at the age of 98. Carter is also the president who put solar panels on the White House and suggested that Americans wear a sweater and keep the thermostat down to save energy. [Extracted from the article]

Per the US Department of Agriculture, thanks to REA work and loans, by 1950 almost 80% of US farms had power. (Bloomberg) -- A century ago, the US electric power industry was well on its way to providing service to every building in every town and city. The Rural Electrification Administration was created in 1935 with the express purpose of bringing electricity to farms. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- Last year was a bit tumultuous for the global carbon offsets market. BloombergNEF sees three scenarios for the types of offset markets that could run to mid-century. Or perhaps it's better to say that the future market is actually a set of markets, each possible, and each quite different. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- Four years ago Guy Debelle, then the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, delivered a speech on climate change and the economy. Commenting on the BP report online, Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at the research nonprofit RMI, said the oil major "calls time on the fossil fuel era.". [Extracted from the article]

However, both grew significantly in relative terms: Carbon capture investment almost tripled while hydrogen investment more than tripled. It was the first year when investment in the energy transition equaled global investment in fossil fuels, according to the latest data release from clean energy research group BloombergNEF. Inflation did play a role in the increase in invested dollars last year - but not that much of a role, given that inflation in the range of 8% is less than a third of the total year-on-year dollar increase. [Extracted from the article]

A good example of this approach is a Google data center built on the grounds of the former Widows Creek coal power plant in Alabama. (Bloomberg) -- It is now five months since the US Inflation Reduction Act created hundreds of billions of dollars in support for decarbonization technologies. [Extracted from the article]

High residential power prices in Europe (and government incentives for households there) are also a factor; last year more than half of all installed batteries in Europe were for residential applications. As commodity price increases and inflation hit the battery sector (along with everything else), prices rose for the first time in at least 12 years, by 7%. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- The start of the year is a boon for the data-minded in the climate and energy world: We get the full wrap on the prior year's investment flows and indicators, and a raft of outlooks on the year ahead. That price movement was significant enough to drive lithium-ion battery prices up for the first time in at least a decade. Lithium prices also began to come down, though not quite as steeply as polysilicon prices did, and are starting the year about 13% off their 2022 high. [Extracted from the article]

Then, with so many generators offline for economic reasons and insufficient supply to meet demand, the grid operator suspended all spot trading - leaving the country a market without a market. The IEA expects 460 terawatt-hours of new wind and solar power generation this year, about as much power as France consumed from all sources in 2019. With demand for natural gas soaring, the national grid operator capped gas prices to protect consumers. [Extracted from the article]

Investors have also allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to ESG-focused equity and debt exchange-traded funds. (Bloomberg) -- In the past five years, the world's sustainable finance markets have expanded from niche products a decade ago, to more than one and half trillion dollars of bonds and loans issued last year. [Extracted from the article]

Firm power will not leave the net zero grid. As these variable technologies become highly prevalent in the global power mix, they also create the need for so-called "firm power" - generators that are always available and reliable during periods when wind and solar are less available. There is a wrinkle, though, for any company or government planning its fossil fuel power fleet in a net zero world. [Extracted from the article]

A couple of weeks ago, the UK announced a new windfall tax on what the government calls "excess" profits of nuclear and renewable energy generators. But if power prices fall back in either market, then the UK's tax could become much harder to bear. [Extracted from the article]

At the New Economy Forum I caught up with Parag Khanna, the Singapore-based author and himself the chief executive of a climate company (it uses AI to forecast climate risks to real estate). Some of the largest and most established firms have laid off tens of thousands of employees, bringing the total so far this year to more than 120,000 layoffs at close to 800 companies. [Extracted from the article]

Although the US stepped rates up prior to the Covid-19 pandemic (to a level that was still historically low compared to the 1980s or even 2007), the eurozone and the UK never had rates above 2% during any COP gathering in the past decade. At COP27 this week, negotiators and executives will address the urgent need for trillions of dollars of climate finance to help the world through what the UN organizers call a "polycrisis era.". [Extracted from the article]

On Sunday, the global climate summit COP27 will convene in Egypt. The first is that if growth in wind and solar generation exceeds growth in global power consumption, the conditions IEA expects next decade are already arriving for the power sector. This year's new wind and solar power are equal to about 1.6% of total electricity consumption in 2021. [Extracted from the article]

There is a succinct way to describe the development of the global power sector over the past decade: more of almost everything. A decade later, oil-fired power expansion shrank to 30 countries, gas-fired power to 42 and coal-fired power to just 15. Just two markets - China and India - made up a combined 78% of all new coal-fired power generation capacity in the past 10 years. [Extracted from the article]

Firstly, most new power generation planned in the US is renewable. In California, 42% of wind capacity in the queue includes batteries - and in Texas, 27% of the gas-fired power does too. At the end of 2021, the US had 1,144 gigawatts of utility-scale electricity generation capacity. [Extracted from the article]

Company A has a plan for switching fuels, rotating capital stock toward lower-emission technologies, purchasing zero-carbon electricity and purchasing carbon offsets. A Salesforce marketplace for carbon offsets is nice for Company A, but it could be elemental for Company B. Rather than setting up new accounts in order to access ratings, or research individual offset projects one by one, it can see them all - and pay for them, via Stripe - in one place. [Extracted from the article]

In mid-August, Europe's carbon price hit an all-time high of just over 99 euros for a ton of carbon dioxide emissions. There are other significant carbon markets around the world, while more than 2,000 companies have, or are planning to set, so-called "internal carbon prices" that place a monetary value on their own emissions as part of a decarbonization strategy. [Extracted from the article]

Amazon.com Inc. played an enormous role in overall corporate clean power purchasing, signing 25 contracts for 5 gigawatts of capacity on its own. While Chinese companies dominate global clean power portfolios, Amazon uses more clean power than Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. owns, and more than French power giant Electricite de France SA (EDF). [Extracted from the article]

Energy research firm BloombergNEF recently published its first global copper outlook, factoring in demand from the technological changes needed to wean the economy off fossil fuels. Copper is one of the essential elements of today's economy, and tomorrow's. [Extracted from the article]

Venture capital flows into climate tech, for instance, look quite like VC in general. According to a report by Climate Tech VC, nearly a quarter of the 1,000-plus early-stage climate companies it tracks are located in California. [Extracted from the article]

As independent researcher MichaelGiberson notes, any time that electricity trends above the overallCPI excluding energy, its real price is increasing; any time it isbelow CPI excluding energy, its real price is falling. The chart above represents all energy consumption, but thecontours of the line really mostly show the price of gasoline, themain driver of energy price trends. [Extracted from the article]

Keywords: ALTNRG; BUSINESS; CLIMATE; CMD; COS; ELC; INDUSTRIES; NRG; OIL; UTI EN ALTNRG BUSINESS CLIMATE CMD COS ELC INDUSTRIES NRG OIL UTI (Bloomberg) I like a deep data set, and in energy there are few deeper than the US government's on national energy consumption. The combination of flat total primary energy consumption and rising non-fossil primary energy consumption means that the non-fossil share of US energy has been increasing steadily. [Extracted from the article]

Meanwhile, in Texas, the operator of the state's main electricity grid reported record power demand on Tuesday, thanks to temperatures well into the 100s. At the time, its findings suggested that at some point in 2022, California batteries could be a bigger contributor to electricity system peak demand than the state's remaining nuclear plant. From 7:25 to 7:55, batteries supplied more to the grid than the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant This event was a first for California, but as with so many things in the state's energy sector, it is almost certain to happen many more times. [Extracted from the article]

Renewable power prices are rising along with all energy prices, while still being the lowest-price option in most markets, with the ability to lock in those prices for years. The UK's latest renewable energy auction, in which developers of renewable energy projects offer their lowest feasible prices for selling power in the future, is the clearest indication we have that the industry expects lower costs. [Extracted from the article]

Nathaniel Bullard is a senior contributor to BloombergNEF and Bloomberg Green. Solar and wind have expanded by orders of magnitude and now make up more than 10% of global electricity; that also means that these two technologies need to scale up market share by several factors - as the electricity system as a whole grows too - in order to decarbonize power substantially. Two key findings from BP Plc's annual deep dive on global energy statistics are that renewable electricity has grown at an extraordinary clip in the past two decades, and it still has very far to go. [Extracted from the article]

Asia has accounted for 70% of global LNG trade for the past decade, during which time China's shares of both global LNG trade and of Asia LNG trade have more than tripled. China is now the world's biggest importer of liquefied natural gas BP has tracked trade in liquefied natural gas since the year 2000. Renewables are now 13% of global power generation In 1985, coal-fired power was 38% of global electricity generation. [Extracted from the article]

Less than two weeks ago, Australia's electricity market stopped working. In this sense, Australia is a front-runner, Quong says, with an "old, decrepit baseload-power-generation fleet", but many markets will find themselves in the same spot eventually. [Extracted from the article]