Food security needs renewable energy

Many developing countries lose 30-40% harvest due to lack of storage facilities

Adoption of renewable energy will help ensure food security across the globe, apart from fighting climate change, a top official of the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) said here on Tuesday.

“Many developing countries lose 30 to 40 per cent of agricultural harvest due to lack of storage and processing facilities in rural areas,” said Adnan Z. Ameen, director-general of Irena on the sidelines of the 18th meeting of the agency’s Council, one of Irena’s two governing bodies.

He said renewable energy could power such facilities to avert such food waste.

The governments and businesses have to take urgent action to check climate change, he said while addressing the Council meeting that has brought together Irena member countries from across the world and observers to discuss the global energy transformation.

“The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report released in October highlighted the accelerated deployment of low-carbon energy technology and energy efficiency as central to decarbonisation strategy and called for fundamental shifts in investments and mindset,” Ameen said.

Irena’s latest statistics released in June 2018 showed that renewable energy generation worldwide increased by 6.7 per cent in 2016. Further, a record 167GW of the new capacity was installed in 2017, the biggest growth ever and 8.8 per cent increase compared to the previous year. Solar and wind accounted for 85 per cent of this growth.

“Our database of 17,000 projects representing some 1,000GW of capacity in almost 150 countries indicates that they are well within the cost range of power generated by fossil fuels. Irena’s report also estimates that, by 2020, all commercialised renewable energy power generation technologies will be fully competitive with traditional sources. This is a watershed moment for the agency,” Ameen said.