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There are many things about attending the huge annual UN climate change conferences that are reliably infuriating. Hotels gouge. Cheap flights sell out fast and, once you get inside the sprawling venues needed for the 50,000-plus people at the two-week gatherings, it is almost impossible to keep track of everything going on. At the COP30 conference in the Brazilian city of Belém the other week, that mattered.
It has become a COP cliché to say the pavilions where countries host talks on green projects, technologies and trends are more interesting than the formal negotiations taking place down the corridor. The truth is a lot of what was discussed in past years was speculation about what might happen if policies ever succeeded. Belém showed things are changing in the real world in a way they have not before.
Take Ethiopia, the scheduled host of the 2027 COP. Early last year, its government took the unusual step of banning imports of petrol and diesel cars and since then, the market for electric cars has grown “exponentially”, an official in its pavilion told me.
This was good news for a country that has long spent limited foreign currency to import fuel that drivers queue for hours to buy, he said.
Prices of some Chinese EVs were tumbling, he added, though challenges remain in a country with fewer than 2mn cars for its 135mn inhabitants. EV-ready garages and spare parts are scarce and electricity access is patchy, though the newly launched Gerd hydropower project aims to supply power to millions.
Also, he said, there are fewer than 60 operational charging stations in a nation even larger than France and Spain combined, though more are on the way. The pace of Ethiopia’s EV revolution may be in doubt but it is not the only developing country backing electric cars. In Nepal, EVs have been gobbling more than 70 per cent of passenger car sales, up from virtually zero five years ago, as the government tries to cut smog and dependence on imported fuels.
Far worse problems confront authorities in war-torn nations such as Ukraine, which is why I was surprised to hear what Jeff Oatham had to say when I bumped into him in Belém.
Oatham is the chief sustainability officer at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, and he said the war was accelerating the company’s shift towards renewables and away from the coal-fired power stations that had long dominated its electricity generation. One big reason is resilience. A coal power station was “a large single target” that a single missile could take out, said Oatham. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”
In line with this thinking, DTEK did a deal this year with the UK’s Octopus Energy group to deliver rooftop solar and battery storage systems to an even more dispersed group of Ukrainian businesses and public sector bodies.
War has still taken a toll. Russia has seized three of DTEK’s wind farms since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, but the company pressed on and built the first stage of a new wind farm near the Black Sea coast that should be one of the largest in eastern Europe when completed next year, plus 200MW of battery storage.
In an echo of Ethiopia and Nepal, the motivating factor has not been carbon emissions alone, though the effort surely helps a country hoping to join (and maintain funding from) the EU, home to some of the world’s most ambitious climate policies. Ukraine’s economy ministry has had an advisory body since last year that is working with the UK’s Climate Change Committee to draw up a Ukrainian carbon budget, and Kyiv’s government is due to approve a formal climate council by the end of this month.
Then there is Pakistan, where a combination of soaring domestic power prices and plunging costs of Chinese solar panels has fuelled a solar boom. In Belém, Pakistani officials told reporters that power from rooftop solar panels would exceed demand from the country’s electricity grid in some industrial regions for the first time next year.
The boom has had hitches. A debt-ridden power network is losing wealthier Pakistanis who can afford solar power off the grid while poorer customers struggle to pay rising bills. Grid desertions have affected richer states where solar power and other green technologies began disrupting incumbents years ago. It is striking to see this happening in countries where policies driven by UN climate COPs have long been deemed unaffordable. Belém showed the extent of ground-level change, even if COP30’s glacial, consensus-driven negotiations remain a frustrating reminder of how much faster this shift could be happening.
pilita.clark@ft.com
