G7 Ministers Vow to Accelerate Offshore Wind Deployment to Reach 150 GW by 2030

April 17, 2023, by Adrijana Buljan

The G7 (Group of Seven) Ministers of Climate, Energy and the Environment have pledged to speed up the buildout of renewable energy projects, including offshore and floating wind, and reaffirmed the seven countries’ commitments to their existing 2030 offshore wind targets, which together amount to 150 GW of capacity.

The energy ministers of the G7 (consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US) held a meeting in Sapporo, Japan, on 15 and 16 April, ahead of the G7 Hiroshima Summit next month.

According to a communiqué issued after the meeting, the G7 will focus more strongly on reducing greenhouse emissions and energy security, while enabling economic benefits, not only for the seven nations but also for their G20 partners and developing and emerging countries.

The efforts aim to address the triple crisis (climate change, greenhouse emissions, and biodiversity loss) and the ongoing global energy crisis.

Among the concrete actions outlined in the communiqué is accelerating the buildout of renewable energy projects. in this regard, the ministers expressed their concern about the findings of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in its World Energy Transition Outlook 2023, according to which existing global renewable energy deployment rates are insufficient to reach 1.5°C.

“We reiterate the importance of significantly increasing the pace and scale of deployment of renewable energy in the decarbonization of our economies as effective means of enhancing our energy security through diversifying energy supply, reducing the dependency on fossil fuels, and achieving the goal of net zero by 2050 at the latest whilst driving economic growth and creating jobs”, the G7 ministers state.

While the current energy crisis has significantly accelerated investments in and deployment of renewable energy, more is needed to address both challenges in energy security and the path to net zero, including a drastic increase in electricity generated by renewable energies, as well as the use of renewables in heating, cooling and the transportation and industrial sectors.

“The G7 contributes to expanding renewable energy globally and bringing down costs by strengthening capacity including through a collective increase in offshore wind capacity of 150GW by 2030 based on each country’s existing targets and a collective increase of solar PV to more than 1TW by 2030 estimated by the IEA and IRENA through means such as each country’s existing targets or policy measures”, the communiqué reads.

“We will accelerate the deployment of renewable energies such as solar, onshore/offshore wind, hydropower, geothermal, sustainable biomass, biomethane, tidal using modern technologies, as well as investing in the development and deployment of next-generation technologies and developing secure, sustainable and resilient supply chains”.

The G7 ministers committed to promoting improvement in innovative technologies such as floating wind and stated that the G7 would ask the IRENA to prepare an analysis on innovation and sustainability of floating offshore wind.