 Hello and welcome to the launch of the International Energy Agency's new Renewables Market Report. With this being our first report launch of 2024, we at the IEA would like to wish you all a very happy new year and all the best for the year ahead. I'm Jethro Mullen, head of the IEA's communications team and I'm joined today by IEA Executive Director, Dr. Fatih Birol and by Senior Energy Analyst, Hami Baha, who is the lead author of this new report. I'd also like to note that you can read the full report and take a look at the new online renewables data explorer, both of which are freely available on our website, IEA.org. So during today's event, Dr. Birol will make some opening remarks and then Mr. Baha will present the key findings of the report. We'll then take questions from journalists. For the journalists taking part in this press webinar, we invite you to send your questions via the Q&A function in the Zoom. You can do this at any point during the presentation and we'll also take a two-minute break right after the presentation for you to enter your questions. With that, I'll hand over to our Executive Director, Dr. Birol. Thank you very much, Jethro. Let me join my colleague, Mr. Mullen, to wish all of the colleagues following this event a happy, healthy and peaceful 2024. Dear colleagues, dear friends, we are here today to share with you some of the key findings of our annual renewable market report. But if I may, I want to go one step back and to tell you a few things about the very important COP28 meeting. In this COP28 meeting, we provided a lot of input in terms of our analytical reports. Convening Power brought several governments together to have a convergence for key findings and also organized high-level meetings together with the COP28 presidency. In all these meetings in our reports, which we made clear well before the COP28 taking place, we had five criteria to say that this COP28 would be a successful one. What are those five criteria that I had thought and made clear well before the meeting in order to consider the COP28 to be a successful one? The first one, we wanted countries to commit to have a global renewable power capacity increase by a factor of three between now and 2030. This is the subject of today's report. Then similarly, the second one was, again, the countries committing to doubling the rate of energy efficiency improvements globally. And the fossil fuel industry to make commitments in a few areas, but most importantly, and cutting the methane emissions in a drastic way. And fourth, we wanted to make sure a message, a signal coming from COP28 so that there are large-scale financing mechanisms for the clean energy transition in developing and emerging countries. And finally, we would like to see that the governments agree for a plan or at least understanding, give the signal that if we want to reach our climate goals, we have to decrease our fossil fuel use in an orderly manner. So these were the five areas that we thought we should get from COP28. And what I can tell you that our assessment is there are a lot of good results, good signals going from the COP28 to the energy world, to the investors' world, to the finance world, which would, in our view, put the global energy sector in the right direction. This is not taken for granted, but they are very good signals. And the direction of travel for the global energy sector has been signed off by 200 countries last month in Dubai. So these are a lot of areas to look carefully, renewables, energy efficiency, methane, investments, fossil fuel use. And we thought in the IAEA, there is a need in a consistent and a clinical way to monitor what was set and what the countries are doing. So today I would like to announce that the International Energy Agency will monitor all the pledges made by over 200 countries in Dubai, what was pledged, and what is happening in the real life, in the energy sector. And we are going to share the comparison of the pledges versus the real life with the international community on a regular basis. And today it is the first installment of that. I am going to tell you soon, and my colleague, Mr. Bahar, will tell you more in detail this tripling of the renewable capacity vis-à-vis what will happen with the current policies in place. So, but the first message I want to share with you is that we are going to monitor it in a careful, clinical and objective way, pledges versus what is happening in the real life. Now, of course, the very first thing I wanted to share with you when it comes to numbers is the following. What happened last year, 2023, when it comes to renewables? So when I look at the numbers, it is definitely a wow effect because last year, 2023, we see that the renewable capacity expansion in the entire world, 2023, was over 500 gigawatts, which is equal to current entire power capacity, electricity capacity of Germany, France, Spain put together. And this means 500 gigawatts, over 500 gigawatts increase means close to 50 percent increase of capacity of renewables compared to 2022, a huge historical jump. It's a very good news and a big chunk of this growth comes from solar and followed by wind and other renewable technologies. Now here, many countries broke records in terms of their capacity additions, new renewable capacity additions. We have seen records in the United States, in Europe, or in Brazil here, and many countries met huge additions including, for example, India. But if there is one country, I need to single out here is China. Dear colleagues, when I look at the numbers, you will do yourselves when you have the chance to look at our website, which is all these numbers and the report is freely available. China is the single most important driver of this spectacular growth 2023 when it comes to renewable energy, both solar but also wind and the others. So this is, of course, a great news for those people who would like to see a better planet, a better future for everybody. Now why it is happening this big growth, first of all, it looks like that the policies consistent and stubborn policies to support the renewable energies means they do work as other results. And what's also good, and it comes also from the analysis of Mr. Bahara and his team, very clear that the economics do work as well. The analysis show that almost everywhere in the world, the cost of electricity generation from renewables is cheaper than it is alternatives. And in some cases, maybe I should say in many cases, cost of generation of electricity from renewables is even cheaper than existing fossil fuel power generation. So this is the good news about last year. And of course the other part of our work is, of course, look at the future. We always look at the future at the IEA. When we look at the future and again compare the trends, the trajectory of the renewable capacity additions with the COP28 pledge of tripling three times increase in renewable capacity, our report funds out that the existing trajectory, existing policies, global renewable capacity will increase by a factor of 2.5. It is not yet there, but it is not miles away from that target. As such, it is definitely an encouraging result and it is something that we need to build on. And if you ask me where we have to put more efforts, the answer is clear, we should be getting more renewable capacity additions from several low and medium income developing and emerging countries. Therefore, as we always say, the financing clean energy transition developed in emerging countries of a crucial nature. In my view, it is one of the important missing items in the COP28 agreement in addition to all these positive steps we have seen coming from Dubai. Now this is again, I'm sure my colleague Mr. Bahar will detail out, but 2.5 times increase is very good coming from China, US, Europe, India, Brazil and other countries. Now what are some disappointing news if I have to pick up one of them? It is on the side of the green hydrogen or a clean hydrogen in other words. We at the IEA believe that hydrogen can and should play a very important role to address our climate challenge and also to diversify our energy mix. And we are seeing that there is a huge excitement in the energy world, in the industry sector and there is not one day passing that we don't read that there is a trade agreement with country X and country Y in terms of the clean hydrogen trade or project announcements. It is there is a lot of excitement there. So I ask my colleagues to look into these projects carefully how much we think in realistic terms of these projects which are announced would see the light of the day between now and 2030. And my colleagues made a project by project, all the hydrogen projects around the world to analyze them, look at where the construction is, how the financing situation is and they came up with the result that of all the projects today in the pipeline announced with the current policies, current financing and construction level, only 7 percent of the project announced would see the light of the day would come online before 2030. So the main problem here as we see is the creating demand for those projects and having the right regulation in order to give a stimulation for the consumption aside. Again, we hope to see that the governments and the regulators take the necessary steps to create the demand as we think hydrogen can play a very important role in our fight against climate change and for energy security and to diversify the energy mix. Dear colleagues, when I look at the report from A to Z, I see a very encouraging message coming from renewables starting with solar. More need to be done in the emerging and developing countries in terms of the financing. But we know that the increasing renewables is a good news, but it is not enough to address our energy and climate cause. Therefore, to look at what is happening on the energy efficiency, how to deal with the methane emissions, how to make sure that the fossil fuel use needs to decline in orderly manner are other preoccupations and we will be monitoring them on a regular basis and share the results as we do now with the international public on a regular basis. With this, I would like to stop here and turn my colleagues, Mr. Baha, first of all, with my thanks to him and the team working on this and asking him to share some of the key findings of our reports. Thank you very much, Dr. Biral, for these great introductory remarks. And I would like to go through some of the important findings of the report a bit more detail to share to you what we are observing in the renewable energy markets in the coming five years. First of all, renewables breaking records is not news, but this year we observed when we look at the numbers over the past year that there is the increase that we see is 50%, which is much higher than since more than two decades. And this jump is related to China's acceleration, which we can see that China's share in global renewable capacity addition reached almost 60% the highest level ever we have observed. And also the other part of the story is obviously solar PV, where the prices is going down and competitiveness is improving. Many countries are deploying solar PV projects for decarbonization purposes to achieve climate goals. And we observed this jump last year with solar PV capacity additions almost reaching 400 gigawatts, which is an incredible development that we observe for the future as well. One important note that China has phased out renewable energy subsidies few years ago and now is fully moving on competitiveness for solar PV and onshore wind, which is an important driver going forward as well. When we look at the future, the coming five years, the solar PV's role is going to increase actually drastically. We expect around 3,700 gigawatts of new capacity becoming operational and almost 75% of this will be provided by a single technology, solar PV. And there are important trends that we see that the forecast is more optimistic for solar PV. First, I mentioned the costs. The second one is the increasing adoption of small-scale rooftop systems in many countries, both residential and commercial level, because these affordable systems are helping people to save money on their electricity bills, which have increased since 2001 drastically in some countries. We also look at other technologies such as wind. The wind sector is struggling with some challenges. However, the growth is accelerating there as well, driven by China in this case, as China's decarbonization goals is pushing renewables forward, while the other technologies such as hydro power, geothermal, CSP and ocean, we see not increasing very rapidly due to the challenges that they are facing. This year, as our executive director mentioned previously, we looked at renewable capacity for hydrogen production, and we see important developments, important announcements. However, we expect only around 45 gigawatts to become operational in the next five years. As you can see from the figure, compared to the overall deployment of renewables, this is really small. It's about one to two percent. And compared to last year, we are less optimistic as we follow the developments of financing and project development. And we expect only around 7 percent of announced projects to become operational in the next five years. And policies matter, and policies matter not in terms of providing money to renewables, but to create an important framework that they can operate. The good example here is China, where the policies make renewable capacity in China to almost triple in the next five years, in terms of the growth. However, in many regions, we will see the growth accelerating, starting from European Union, where the Commission and the countries are pushing renewables forward to reduce the gas consumption and for decarbonization and improve energy security. United States Inflation Reduction Act helps to double renewable energy growth. India's acceleration is tremendous in terms of their policies, how they translate both large-scale and small-scale solar PV deployment going forward. And Latin America, especially Brazil, there is an important acceleration going forward thanks to the government policies supporting distributed solar PV. However, the world, these countries represent the significant important developments outside of these large markets in Southeast Asia, Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the deployment finally is taking good steps forward in terms of the acceleration. And for the first time, we see Middle East and North America deployment equal to Southeast Asian deployment, which is an important news that I would like to share with you. However, in terms of the potential, obviously, these regions have much more potential that we see in the forecast. However, challenges remain in terms of financing, which I will come later. So, tripling renewable capacity in the coming towards 2030 is the pledge that more than 200 countries basically signed. Our forecast basically takes us to 2.5 times the global capacity when we project to 2030. The gap to 2030 still remains, but we are just talking about here the policies that we see and market developments that we see today. This massive deployment needs to be spread to many countries and with the challenges to be addressed, especially on permitting, financing and social acceptance, especially focused on emerging and developing countries. One important development about the cost of renewables. Renewable supply, especially solar PV manufacturing, is ready to deliver much accelerated growth. Only in 2023, solar PV manufacturing doubled in the world in all the manufacturing segments. 97% of this came from China and this doubling creates an important supply glut in the solar PV market. As a result, we saw at the end of 2022, towards at the end of 2023, 50% decline in solar PV module prices. Slight increase due to the supply chain challenges and inflation happened in 2021 and 2022. Now we are back on low cost solar PV market and with a lot of capacity ready to be deployed. We will also see in addition to China, United States, India and European Union to deploy more renewables and diversify solar PV manufacturing market with the incentives provided via inflation reduction act and the PLI scheme in India. And we will see some diversification, but it's important to remind that China will remain a global player in the market, at least in the coming medium term that we see today. We mentioned the financing. The macroeconomic environment has changed very rapidly over the past year and historically renewable energy deployment has happened in most advanced economic in an environment where based interest rates were around 1% over the last decade. This was slightly higher in China, but where the costs are lower, China basically remained competitive. But in emerging, other emerging and developing countries, interest rates have been triple quadruple than we see in advanced economies and in some cases even much higher due to multiple risks that these countries face, including currency and macroeconomic challenges and also the policy environment. But however, the trends have changed in the in the last few years, the interest rates for the first time in advanced economies surpassed China, now deploying renewables without any even considering project risk are much more expensive in advanced economies in terms of financing costs than in China. And for emerging economies, the news is not good because there the interest rates are even increasing higher. We are seeing on average around 10% base interest rates for to deploy the projects. In addition to that, we should add other project level risks that will make the cost of financing even more expensive. That's why it is extremely important to address the financing challenging emerging economies and developing countries in outside of China in order to accelerate deployment in these regions. Macroeconomic challenges also bring affect the financial health of the renewable energy industry. We are looking at the profit margins of the renewable industry following very closely because the healthy financial renewable energy industry is very important for the future deployment and their capability to invest in new capacity to deliver the needs of the tripling goal. In that sense, we see solar PV market quite strong, but with the declining prices, there are risks looming in terms of the lower net margins in the market, especially for the newcomers into the market. The situation in wind manufacturing in China and outside of China is a bit more complicated. And especially Western and United States manufacturers are seeing losses over the past seven quarters in a row, which is not a good news driven by supply chain challenges, higher cost, long permitting timelines, which basically give them not a good signal for the future, where policies remain important to address those challenges. Tripling pledge is not far off, is very close, even with the current policies, but it can be closer and it can be on track if we address several challenges, both in advanced economies and emerging and developing countries. For advanced economies, the upside that we see and the main challenge that needs to be addressed is the grid integration, grid build out and faster permitting is very important for them, but for emerging and markets, the most important component is the financing and policies to risking investment going forward. Indeed, in our upside, in our accelerated case, emerging markets and developing economies only represent maybe 15% of the forecast, but in our upside, they represent one third, which sees their potential going forward in the coming years. One important part, our executive director talked about the energy system, renewables playing only or electricity is playing only one part of it. Biofuels remain the other important part. We are seeing biofuels markets are accelerating, however, it's significantly lower than what needs to happen to reach the global climate goals. One important news that Brazil is dominating by 40% renewable energy growth, biofuels growth that we are expecting, which is 30% faster than last year. However, there are a lot of challenges that biofuels market need to overcome, including supply chain challenges and with acceleration is needed with new policies and the governments supporting the biofuels production and demand in the coming years to decarbonize, especially hard to abate sectors. Thank you very much for this and I will give the floor back to Jethro. Thank you very much for the presentation. So we now have time to take some questions from journalists. We invite the journalists in attendance to send your questions through the Q&A function of the Zoom, if you haven't done so already, and please mention your media outlet along with your question. So we'll now just take a two minute break to give you a chance to enter your questions and we'll be right back. Ron, welcome back. Thank you very much to the journalists for the questions. We've got quite a few and we're going to get through as many as we can in the time we have. So first of all, from Nicholas Kermayer from You're Active, do you think that Europe is heading for a positive feedback circle on grid congestion amid its solar PV boom? Solar is comparatively challenging to integrate. Could this add to existing challenges? And then a broader question from Amina Syed of Cypher News, to what extent is grid congestion and long-interconnection cues holding up this global goal of tripling renewable energy? Is it a major factor or one of many key factors? And then in terms of these challenges, one more question from WDR, Martin Gent of WDR in Germany concerning wind energy in recent months have been an increasing number of reports of technical problems, supply chain problems, fires, accidents, financial losses at the largest wind power companies. How can the companies solve the quality problems, achieve the expansion targets, and ensure the safety of the turbines? So I think this sort of batch of questions about challenges are going to pass to Hemi Baha, our senior energy analyst. Thank you very much for these questions. They are very important challenges that renewable energy industry and the countries are facing. First of all, I'd like to start with the grid connection cues. Previously, we analyzed this topic really in detail, and we found out that around 1,500 gigawatts of projects, wind and solar PV projects mostly, are expecting to connect to the grid or apply to the connected. These are the advanced level projects that are even more in the queue, which are at the nascent stage. Obviously, this is three times more than what entire renewable capacity deployed in 2023, a huge number. And this requires countries to process the grid applications faster, but also build additional grid capacity to connect those. And this is important, but policy needs to give the right signal to invest in grid, and in addition to that, to create more flexibility in the markets. And coming to the solar PV boom, we see already in many European countries, which is also in the report, an increasing curtailment of wind and solar PV in several markets. And these curtailments are happening because exactly an incredible boom has happened over the last few years. But there are a lot of developments at the European level and at the country level to tackle and reduce the curtailment and connect more power plants. And these include, basically, market design changes that will give more signal to flexibility, products using hydro power more prominently, especially the storage level and building out more storage. I think these policy changes and market developments will give fruit soon for a better integration of renewables. And hydrogen as a whole will come into this picture as well in the longer term, hopefully in Europe. So these are related to. So coming to the wind industry, wind industry has been challenged by supply chain risks, high inflation, and also the policy designs that we're not reflecting these macroeconomic challenges into the auction schemes that they've been operating on. There are good developments that following under subscriptions in many auctions in European Union, many countries have changed the policy design to reflect this new macroeconomic environment. And we see already a lot of the positive developments for the industry to have a more stable demand coming forward. In terms of the quality issues and the financial health, I think there are a few things to mention here. Wind industry has proven to be extremely innovative in terms of the reducing costs and delivering green electricity to the markets over the past 10 decades. I think these developments will be cyclical and will go away and the cost reduction cycle will come back very soon following those challenges are met. And wind industry in our opinion has a bright future going forward, wants to policy and market conditions adapt to new environment and companies turn back into profitability. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Bahar. So we've got a lot of questions and some of them kind of touch on the issues that Hemi already covered so but we'll try to get to a few more in the time we have. Jonathan Gifford from PV Magazine says in 2023 you noted that concentration of the solar PV supply chain in China represented a risk to accelerating deployment and adoption of solar globally. How do you describe that risk? And are you encouraged with efforts to establish manufacturing outside of China particularly in light of the rapid price reduction seen in the market? I think that's maybe one that Dr. Beryl can address as well as one on another one on COP28. It was good news that COP28 came up with new energy related pledges such as tripling renewables but how confident are you that governments will actually deliver on them? So those two questions to Dr. Beryl. Okay. Thank you, Jethro. Yes, China's role in solar or in general the green energy technologies is very important for example in terms of solar or renewable energy technologies China is making a contribution to global renewable capacity push in two ways one huge amount of renewable capacity installed at home China is a huge country with a lot of challenges including the emissions therefore helping to decarbonize the Chinese energy system and the emissions coming from China so the domestic angle of that and the second is China bus by deploying a lot of green energy technologies brings the cost of these technologies down and make it accessible or affordable many people around the world so it's an international aspect as well so these are two important contributions China is making for the renewable energy deployment around the world having said that for any technology for any country there is one issue that I believes for the security issues we need to diversify the magic word is diversification therefore to rely on one technology one commodity only on one single country one trade route one company might be a risky so therefore diversifying is important and I believe for all green energy technologies in terms of their manufacturing it will be great to see like China other countries around the world also manufacture a lot of clean energy it can be electrolyzer it can be offshore wind turbines it can be heat pumps it can be solar wind it will be good for the global clean energy transitions so this is about China for COP28 the question was how do we what was the question exactly do we expect countries to deliver on the pledges oh yeah so of course it was great that the more than 200 countries sign the COP28 agreement we do it trust the governments if they sign an agreement if their signature is there that they take it seriously and the weight of their signature does count but we believe also in numbers so what we are going to do is we will look all these elements coming from the COP28 outcome document what the governments have pledged as a group we will look at the what happens with renewable efficiency methane financing moving away from fossil fuels and we will share it with the international public on a regular basis who is doing what who is not doing what I think the when I look at those targets set in Dubai and all the government's sign I think those targets will hang over the the hang over the government's companies like the the sort of democlus if I may say so and I will make sure that the governments do what they say they would do in Dubai and help them to support them to reach those targets especially those in the emerging and developing world and to be in line with their commitments in Dubai thank you thank you very much and I'm afraid that's all we have time for today we do and there are one or two questions that we didn't get to and so and we do encourage any journalists who have further questions about the report or questions that we didn't get a chance to cover just now to invite we'll invite you to reach out to the press office press at IA.org and we'll get back to you as soon as we can and so thank you very much to Dr. Birrell to Mr. Bahar thank you to the journalists for the great questions and to everyone following for your interest in our work and a reminder that the full renewables market report and the excellent data explorer that tracks progress on a country level towards the tripling goal both available to read and use for free on our website IEA.org and so I encourage you to take a look and that's all for today thank you and goodbye