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Governments, businesses and citizens around the globe are facing the challenge of climate change and how to accelerate global clean energy transitions to reach net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest. Central to reducing energy-related emissions are the move away from fossil fuel use to electrified systems; significant and sustained improvements in energy efficiency; and an increase in renewable electricity generation capacity.

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, as part of Japan’s Presidency of the G7, asked the International Energy Agency (IEA) to examine the evolution of energy efficiency policy in the context of the clean energy transitions. This acted to support discussions among G7 countries to provide insights and direction for the G7 energy and climate agenda.

This report reflects the findings of these discussions, and uses them as a basis for guiding policy makers towards the development of policies to hasten the delivery of the energy system required for clean energy transitions. The challenge is considerable but, as this report demonstrates, governments have already begun the process of transforming their energy efficiency policies to address it.

The report outlines the ways in which energy efficiency polices can develop to incorporate flexibility and engagement levers and provides insights into policy developments in major economies, with examples in three main sectors: demand flexibility in appliances and buildings, vehicle fuel economy standards, industrial energy and carbon reporting.

The global oil and gas industry encompasses a large and diverse range of players: from small, specialised operators to huge national oil companies. These producers face pivotal choices about their role in the global energy system amid a worsening climate crisis fuelled in large part by their core products.

The Oil and Gas Industry in Net Zero Transitions analyses the implications and opportunities for the industry that would arise from stronger international efforts to reach energy and climate targets.

It also examines how transitions increase the likelihood of boom and bust cycles for oil and gas producer economies. It highlights strategies for producer economies that could complement broader reforms to build macroeconomic stability and the role of international partners to support this process.

The report sets out a fair and feasible way forward in which oil and gas companies and producer economies take a real stake in the clean energy economy while helping the world avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.

Since the publication of its latest Power Development Plan (PDP) in 2020 (PDP 2018 Revision 1), Thailand has considerably increased its emissions reductions objectives, announcing a net zero greenhouse gas emissions target for 2065 and carbon neutrality for 2050. As the power sector is a large part of the country’s emissions, and because it has a key role to play in decarbonising other sectors, meeting these targets is possible only if the power sector is decarbonising too. This report hence analyses how Thailand can achieve its clean electricity transition, by comparing the planned trajectory of the PDP with the emissions targets, and providing an assessment of the gaps. Building upon the current PDP, this report analyses how the Thai power system can decrease its emissions to meet the targets by increasing the amount of wind and solar PV in its system, and how it can integrate these variable renewable energy sources efficiently.

This report concludes work area one of the joint work programme among the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), the Ministry of Energy of Thailand and the International Energy Agency (IEA), and has benefited from data and input from the Thai counterparts. The analysis is based on a PLEXOS model of the Thai power system that has been developed by the IEA in cooperation with EGAT.

All low-carbon solutions will be required to achieve the world's net zero targets. Nuclear energy has a role to play in meeting this need. A wave of innovation in small modular reactors (SMRs) is advancing quickly with the potential to help decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors. Progress is real and is positioned to accelerate pathways to net zero. SMRs could replace coal on-grid, fossil fuel cogeneration of heat and power for heavy industry, diesel at off-grid mines, as well as producing hydrogen and synthetic fuels.

Looking beyond technical feasibility, The NEA SMR Dashboard defines new criteria for assessing real progress in six additional dimensions of readiness: licensing, siting, financing, supply chain, engagement, and fuel. The first volume of the NEA SMR Dashboard assessed the progress of 21 SMRs. This second volume tracks the progress of an additional 21 SMRs around the world.

Technology manufacturing plays a pivotal role in the energy transition required to meet climate, energy security and economic development goals. Deploying clean energy technologies at the pace required to put the world on a trajectory consistent with net zero emissions by mid-century will demand rapid expansion in manufacturing capacity, underpinned by secure, resilient and sustainable supply chains for their components and materials.

The State of Clean Technology Manufacturing: Energy Technology Perspectives Special Briefing provides an update on recent progress in clean energy technology manufacturing in key regions. It focuses on five technologies – solar PV, wind, batteries, electrolysers and heat pumps – that will be critical to the energy transition. Manufacturing capacity for these technologies is expanding rapidly, driven by supportive policies, ambitious corporate strategies and consumer demand. The aim is to keep decision makers informed of investment trends and the impact that recent industrial strategies are having in these highly dynamic sectors.

This special briefing was produced to support deliberations at the 2023 G7 Leaders’ Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, from 19-21 May 2023. It builds on analysis in the latest edition of the IEA’s flagship technology publication, Energy Technology Perspectives 2023 (ETP-2023), published in January 2023, to take into account the latest announced expansions in manufacturing capacity.

Towards Hydrogen Definitions Based on their Emissions Intensity is a new report by the International Energy Agency, designed to inform policy makers, hydrogen producers, investors and the research community in advance of the G7 Climate, Energy and Environmental Ministerial meeting in April 2023.

This report assesses the greenhouse gas emissions intensity of the different hydrogen production routes and reviews ways to use the emissions intensity of hydrogen production in the development of regulation and certification schemes. An internationally agreed emissions accounting framework is a way to move away from the use of terminologies based on colours or other terms that have proved impractical for the contracts that underpin investment. The adoption of such a framework can bring much-needed transparency, as well as facilitating interoperability and limiting market fragmentation, thus becoming a useful enabler of investments for the development of international hydrogen supply chains.

The Breakthrough Agenda Report 2022 is a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions, focused on supporting stronger international collaboration to drive faster reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions. Without international cooperation, the crucial global transition to net zero emissions could be delayed by decades. The faster the transition advances, the faster it will deliver clean technologies at lower cost, making them available for all. This is all the more urgent in the context of recent sharp spikes in energy and food prices around the world.

This inaugural report assesses progress on reducing emissions in five key sectors – power, hydrogen, road transport, steel and agriculture. The authors make recommendations to strengthen collaboration between governments, business and civil society in areas such as common standards, technology R&D, reaching a level playing field for trade, and improving technical and financial assistance.

This is a first-of-its-kind annual progress report, requested by world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in November 2021 as part of the launch of the Breakthrough Agenda. The Breakthrough Agenda currently covers more than two-thirds of the global economy, with endorsement from 45 world leaders, including those of the G7, China and India. The report is designed to inform policy makers, business leaders and civil society organisations of the most urgent ways to strengthen collaboration in and across major emitting sectors ahead of the Global Clean Energy Action Forum in Pittsburgh in September 2022, the next UN Climate Change Conference COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and beyond.

This International Energy Agency (IEA) energy sector review of Tajikistan was conducted under the auspices of the EU4Energy programme, which is being implemented by the IEA and the European Union, along with the Energy Community Secretariat and the Energy Charter Secretariat.

With abundant water potential from its rivers, natural lakes and glaciers, Tajikistan is almost exclusively reliant on hydro for electricity generation. It is home to some of the world’s largest hydropower plants and is ranked eighth in the world for hydropower potential with an estimated 527 terawatt-hours (TWh). Currently only 4% of the country’s hydro potential is exploited. Tajikistan’s geographic proximity to some of the world’s fastest-growing energy markets means that investing in developing its hydropower potential can contribute to regional energy security and the clean energy transition, in addition to addressing Tajikistan’s high vulnerability to climate change and natural disasters.

Coupled with the IEA roadmap on cross-border electricity trading for Tajikistan, published in October 2021, this report aims to give a holistic overview of Tajikistan’s energy sector and to assist policy making at all levels in order to facilitate the effective delivery of the National Development Strategy for 2030 and its ambitious goals, which include increasing hydropower generation capacity by 10 gigawatts and raising annual electricity exports by 10 TWh. It also supports government efforts for ongoing energy sector reforms, aimed at restructuring the state-owned vertically integrated electric utility with financial viability issues, introducing market mechanisms to alleviate power sector challenges and updating its regulatory and tariff regimes.

The report commends the government of Tajikistan for setting clear goals for its national development strategy and the subsequent sectoral development programmes, caveats the introduction of domestic coal as a key support for national energy security structures, and advocates for the introduction of other renewable sources and enhanced regional co operation for achieving energy security and sustainable development goals.

Acceleration of clean energy innovation, supported by effective innovation policies, is critical for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, and the technology development in the business sector will be to success. As their ambitions for technological change rise, governments are increasingly asking how they can measure the performance of their energy innovation systems, prioritise technologies and benchmark progress internationally. However, in most countries, information about private energy innovation is much less readily available and less reliable than that for the public sector. In addition, the available approaches to filling this gap have never before been compiled in a single place.

By presenting a wide variety of different approaches to tracking clean energy innovation in the business sector, this Overview demonstrates that governments and other analysts already have a range of practical options open to them. For example, the wealth of existing experience with surveys of business sector innovation, including R&D, has been applied to questions of energy by several countries. The different approaches that have been followed provide invaluable insights into their advantages, as well as the main challenges of gathering reliable energy-related innovation data from the private sector. These challenges can include the need for upfront investment, institutional capacity building and consistent classification of technologies. However, the advantages in terms of policy-relevant insights can outweigh the drawbacks, especially when data is complemented by other sources of quantitative and qualitative information.

A wide range of countries make efforts to track their entire national public energy research, development and demonstration (RD&D) activity on an ongoing basis, also sharing the collected data with the IEA through a standardised template. However, the approaches adopted to collect data vary significantly across countries.

This roadmap describes the variety of country approaches, also identifying the most important common components: the institutional arrangements; the methods for collecting, classifying and validating the data; the data management and technology processes; and, finally, the dissemination. It is intended not only as a guide for countries near the beginning of their journeys towards the collection of energy RD&D, but also for countries with more advanced systems looking to strengthen specific areas.

The roadmap is the product of interviews held with representatives of 20 governments between November 2021 and March 2022, and it is indebted to their generosity in sharing their experiences with tracking national energy RD&D spending. Case studies based on the interviews are used to highlight noteworthy methods, while complete national systems descriptions are included in the annex. It is hoped that this publication will serve as a reference and inspiration for experts in this important area of tracking clean energy transitions and that new experiences can be added in the future.

Hydrogen is expected to play important roles in decarbonised energy systems, as an energy source for otherwise hard-to-electrify sectors as well as a storage vector to enhance power system flexibility. However, hydrogen is not a primary energy resource and has to be produced using different chemical processes. Water electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water molecules to extract hydrogen, is expected to become a leading solution in this context. Electrolysis will, however, only be a feasible solution

if the electricity used as feedstock comes from low-carbon sources. A significant number of countries are therefore considering a role for nuclear energy in their hydrogen strategies.

This report provides an assessment of the costs and competitiveness of nuclear-produced hydrogen across the hydrogen value chain and explores the impacts of hydrogen production on the overall costs of integrated electricity and energy systems. It shows, in particular, that nuclear energy can be a competitive source to produce and deliver low-carbon hydrogen for centralised industrial demand. The large scale and dispatchability of nuclear power can also improve the cost-efficiency of hydrogen transport and storage infrastructures, and reduce the overall costs of the energy system.

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has had a dramatic impact on the global energy system. Russia was the world’s largest oil and natural gas exporter in 2021, and energy markets have been thrown into turmoil, with major energy security and supply risks worldwide.

Substantial gas resources currently are being produced that do not make it to market because they are lost to flaring and leaks across the oil and gas supply chain. This report estimates that nearly 210 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas could be made available to gas markets by a global effort to eliminate non-emergency flaring and reduce methane emissions from oil and gas operations.

If countries that currently export natural gas to the European Union were to implement these two measures, they could increase gas exports by more than 45 bcm using existing infrastructure, equivalent to almost one third of Russian gas exports to the EU in 2021.

In the last 20 years, the People’s Republic of China (hereafter, “China”) has strengthened its position on the global stage as an energy innovator, as illustrated by the stories of solar power and, more recently, electric mobility. This is the result of several decades of increasing policy focus on technology innovation, which underpin China’s ambitions to become a producer of knowledge and foster innovation-driven socio-economic development. Looking forward, clean energy innovation will play a crucial role to achieve China’s objectives of carbon peaking by 2030 and neutrality by 2060, and ranks among core government priorities for the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025).

This report builds on the IEA Energy Sector Roadmap to Carbon Neutrality in China chapter on “Innovation for carbon neutrality”, and provides complementary and new analysis and information. It maps the institutional and policy landscape of clean energy innovation in China and shows trends for selected metrics to track and explain progress of technology development.

Governments around the world are faced with the challenge of ensuring electricity security and meeting growing electricity uses while simultaneously cutting emissions. The significant increase in renewables and electrification of end-uses plays a central role in clean energy transitions. However, due to the variable nature of solar PV and wind, a secure and decarbonised power sector requires other flexible resources on a much larger scale than currently exists today. These include low-carbon dispatchable power plants, energy storage, demand response and transmission expansion. The availability and cost of these technologies depends on local conditions, social acceptance and policies.

The possibility to combust high shares of low-carbon hydrogen and ammonia in fossil fuel power plants provides countries with an additional tool for decarbonising the power sector, while simultaneously maintaining all services of the existing fleet. The relevant technologies are progressing rapidly. Co-firing up to 20% of ammonia and over 90% of hydrogen has taken place successfully at small power plants, and larger-scale test projects with higher co-firing rates are under development.

Ultimately, using large volumes of low-carbon hydrogen and ammonia in the power sector will help establish supply chains and drive down costs through economies of scale and technological improvements, thereby complementing and mutually reinforcing the use of low-carbon in fuels in other hard-to-abate sectors such as long-haul transport and industry.

Commodity trading presents specific and heightened risks of corruption due to the large amount of money involved in commodity trading transactions, which are source of important revenues for developing countries, and due to the sophisticated mechanisms used to channel corrupt payments. These include complex and opaque corporate structures, the use of off-shore entities, that render the identification of beneficial owners more difficult, the use of intermediaries (including briefcase or shell companies) and joint ventures with politically exposed persons (PEPs).

This report maps out corruption risks of cross-cutting relevance for the sales of oil, gas and minerals that can arise at several points in commodity trading transactions. It contributes to advancing the global transparency and accountability agenda in commodity trading, by improving understanding and raising awareness of corruption red flags and evolving corruption patterns across a wide range of stakeholders, including home jurisdictions of buying companies, trading hubs, host governments, state-owned enterprises and buying companies.