This outlook highlights climate-safe investment options until 2050, policies for transition and specific regional challenges. It also explores options to eventually cut emissions to zero.

This study presents options to fully unlock the world’s vast solar PV potential over the period until 2050. It builds on IRENA’s global roadmap to scale up renewables and meet climate goals.

This study presents options to speed up the deployment of wind power, both onshore and offshore, until 2050. It builds on IRENA’s global roadmap to scale up renewables and meet climate goals.

Increased use of renewable energy, combined with intensified electrification, could prove decisive for the world to meet key climate goals by 2050. This study from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) highlights immediately deployable, cost-effective options for countries to fulfil climate commitments and limit the rise of global temperatures. The envisaged energy transformation would also reduce net costs and bring significant socio-economic benefits, such as increased economic growth, job creation and overall welfare gains. The report - the second under the Global Energy Transformation banner - expands IRENA's comprehensive roadmap, which examines technology pathways and policy implications to ensure a sustainable energy future. Ramping up electricity to over half of the global energy mix (up from one-fifth currently) in combination with renewables would reduce the use of fossil fuels, responsible for most greenhouse-gas emissions.

The world is currently undergoing an historic energy transition, driven by increasingly stringent decarbonisation policies and rapid advances in low-carbon technologies. The large-scale shift to low-carbon energy is disrupting the global energy system, impacting whole economies, and changing the political dynamics within and between countries. This open access book, written by leading energy scholars, examines the economic and geopolitical implications of the global energy transition, from both regional and thematic perspectives. The first part of the book addresses the geopolitical implications in the world’s main energy-producing and energy-consuming regions, while the second presents in-depth case studies on selected issues, ranging from the geopolitics of renewable energy, to the mineral foundations of the global energy transformation, to governance issues in connection with the changing global energy order. Given its scope, the book will appeal to researchers in energy, climate change and international relations, as well as to professionals working in the energy industry.

The energy transition is fundamentally transforming geopolitics, with renewable energy and other decarbonization options reshaping existing energy markets, trade flows, and energy security strategies. What new opportunities and challenges await us? Will it pacify global energy relations or bring a perilous transition?