Powering Up to Cool Down Climate Change: Tripling Renewable Energy to Meet COP28 Pledge in the EU

The EU can contribute towards the COP28 pledge by tripling renewable energy capacity through investments in expanding infrastructure. This will involve boosting the capacity of current renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics (PV), which is a cost-competitive and scalable technology for electricity. The unprecedented growth in PV makes it the only RES capacity in the EU that is on track to triple in the given timeframe with the present policies, and it can scale up even more. The technical potential of three applications (1) Large-scale installation of rooftop PV, (2) floating PV coupled with hydropower and (3) bifacial PV along roads and railways are presented here which offer multiple benefits, including reducing competition for land, installation cost reduction etc. Results derived from using publicly available datasets reveals that the total installed capacity of photovoltaics in the EU could surpass 1 TWp by 2030 using innovative PV applications. This exceeds the 2030 photovoltaic capacity of estimated 720 GWp predicted by the EU Solar Energy Strategy, and could be a stepping-stone for the several TWs needed for an overall transition to net-zero by 2050.