Renewable Milestones: Scotland's Excess Energy and China's Solar Surge in 2023

A cartoonish image of climate change could be one of sunbathing in Scotland in January. However, it's no longer a fantasy; you could have done that this weekend when, provisionally, a new UK maximum temperature record for January was set. Not near Torbay's tropical flair and palm trees in the south, but in Achfary, a site in the northwest of Scotland: 19.9 °C (68 F) made it warmer than the Cote d'Azur.

It wasn't the only news from the high north. Scotland's renewable energy sector has achieved a groundbreaking milestone by surpassing 100 percent of the country's electricity demand for the first time. In 2022, Scotland's energy sector generated the equivalent of 113% of the country's gross electricity consumption from green power sources, a remarkable 26 percentage point increase compared to the previous year.

These two stories may be illustrative for our times: some progressive countries make impressive progress towards lowering emissions and ramping up renewable energy while the impact of the changing climate is reminding us daily that we don't have the luxury to wait with a massive global transition away from fossil fuels.

Had we listened to science, we would have been in time to take active measures to prevent climate change at a fraction of the cost we will now have to pay. But the influential fossil fuel industry prevented that. 

Newly uncovered documents reveal that the oil and gas industry was pivotal in funding early climate science as far back as 1954. Among the beneficiaries of this funding was Charles Keeling, renowned for developing the 'Keeling curve,' an iconic and scarily ever-climbing chart documenting the rise in Earth's carbon dioxide levels.

The Southern California, Air Pollution Foundation documents, shed light on the previously unknown sponsorship of climate science by the fossil fuel industry, dating back to a quarter-century before Exxon's internal research program in the late 1970s. This discovery is so important because it underscores the industry's deep involvement in climate science, not only as a contributor to the greenhouse effect but also as a supporter of pivotal scientific breakthroughs shaping our understanding of the Earth's climate dynamics.

Charles Keeling later established continuous global CO2 measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. So the Keeling curve, derived from these measurements and perhaps the most convincing graph about the dangerous build-up of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere that causes the climate crisis, was funded by the fossil fuel industry. 

They knew. Not just Exxon, they all knew it, and that was decades before the rest of the world slowly started to realize that fossil fuel combustion had far-reaching consequences on a global scale. By that time, the same fossil fuel industry combined all its might to deny the science it had funded because it preferred all of us to believe in what some would nowadays call "alternative facts." 

Meanwhile, action to fight climate change continues in Brussels, where yesterday, the European Council adopted two regulations to phase down fluorinated gases (F-gases) and other substances that cause global warming and deplete the ozone layer. These new rules complete another piece of the EU Green Deal for substances representing over 3 percent of the EU's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Many products we use in everyday life, such as refrigerators and air conditioning, rely on highly detrimental substances that undermine our environment. These new rules impose explicit bans and restrictions on such damaging substances to reduce their emissions into the atmosphere further and thus contribute to limiting the rise in global temperature. These rules also encourage the development of sustainable alternatives to protect people's health.

Meanwhile, in an impressive display of commitment to renewable energy, China achieved a remarkable feat in 2023 by installing more solar panels than any other nation has amassed in total. The country added an impressive 216.9 gigawatts of solar capacity last year, surpassing its own previous record of 87.4 gigawatts set in 2022. 

China's massive solar fleet far outpaces the rest of the world. To put it into perspective, the newly added solar capacity in 2023 exceeds the entire solar fleet of the United States, the world's second-largest solar market, which stands at 175.2 gigawatts, according to estimates from BloombergNEF.