Clean energy is increasingly gaining the favor of investors, attracting as much as two thirds of the 2.8 trillion dollars allocated to the sector worldwide this year. A billion a day is spent on solar power, by now the absolute protagonist: for the first time in history, more than to develop the oil supply. The estimates come from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which is now urging us to take advantage of the favorable moment, but avoid dispersing our forces in a vain run-up by China.
“Competing on every single technology is not good,” warns Fatih Birol, director of the IEA, interviewed by Il Sole 24 Ore. And photovoltaic energy is one of those sectors in which «Beijing is now by far the dominant player. Thinking that Europe could succeed in replacing him or taking away a large market share from him is not the correct strategy».
Rather, it is better to collaborate on the one hand and on the other to take different paths, which do not see us defeated from the start: in the case of the EU, according to Birol, «to focus, for example, on technologies for offshore wind power, on electrolysers for producing hydrogen, on pumps heat”.
Global scale
After all, in order to achieve the decarbonisation objectives, we need to think on a global scale. «When you look at clean technologies – recalls Birol – there are two aspects: one is the diffusion and the other the development of the production chain, whether it is solar panels, wind turbines, batteries or other. The diffusion is increasing very fast around the world, but in terms of production capacity, China has assumed a huge dominant role. Impossible to ignore to reality.
Therefore, “a two-dimensional work” is needed, according to the director of the IEA: “On the one hand, we recognize Beijing’s dominant position in some sectors as a fact and find realistic policies that allow us to interact. At the same time, everyone should focus their strategies better, because many countries today are trying to develop their own supply chain in parallel, with strong support policies in Europe, the USA, Japan and also in some emerging countries, such as India and China itself”.