At the 2021 COP26 in Glasgow, 45 countries launched the Breakthrough Agenda – a commitment to work together internationally this decade to accelerate the development and deployment of the clean technologies and sustainable solutions needed to meet Paris Agreement goals. To kick-start this Agenda, countries endorsed Breakthrough goals to make clean technologies and sustainable practices more affordable, accessible, and attractive than their alternatives by 2030 in the power, road, transport, steel, hydrogen, and agriculture sectors.

The first annual 2022 Breakthrough Agenda Report provides an assessment of progress towards each Breakthrough goal and a framework for tracking progress in the future, a pathway of coordinated international actions through to 2030, and a set of recommendations on the most urgent and highest-impact opportunities to strengthen international collaboration that can accelerate progress across each sector.

The report’s power sector chapter notes that renewable capacity needs to dramatically and rapidly increase in the coming years to meet Paris Agreement goals by 2030. To get there, the report calls on governments to:

  • Agree a clear set of strategic priority projects to demonstrate and test power system flexibility solutions, including energy storage
  • Increase the scale, coordination, and accessibility of international support for the power sector transition, building on established frameworks and successful models
  • More strongly align development funding with targeted support for local jobs, skills, and investment, for the repurposing of fossil fuel assets and for environmental restoration
  • Reassess the opportunities for cross-border and regional power interconnection to support the transition to clean power systems
  • Agree to higher minimum energy performance standards for high energy-consuming appliances.

A response from signatory governments of the Breakthrough Agenda to this report is expected at the upcoming COP27 in Egypt.

The G-PST Consortium is highlighted in the report by name as an industry body supporting international collaborative work to increase the share of renewables on the power system. G-PST’s work is directly contributing to the Breakthrough Agenda’s efforts by helping solve technical issues at the system operator level, disseminating lessons learned to scale best practices for power sector decarbonization, and enabling system operators to deliver these accomplishments with confidence in the system reliability, affordability, energy security.