BIOENERGY AT THE IEA

BIOENERGY AT THE IEA

The activities of the International Energy Agency (IEA) cover bioenergy across the electricity, heat and transport sectors. On July 19th the IEA, India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and the Council on Energy Environment and Water hosted the India Bioenergy Workshop. The workshop hosted nine international speakers and eight Indian speakers who shared their biogas and municipal-solid-waste to energy experiences. Over 400 people joined the webinar, half from India and half from outside India. The workshop highlighted India’s significant biogas and MSW-to energy opportunity as well as the challenges facing India including feedstock aggregation, policy design, measurement and financing. Across the international examples, framing, ownership models, well designed policies and institutional coordination have all been critical to expanding biogas and MSW-to-energy.

In October 2021, the IEA released the 2021 edition of its World Energy Outlook. The report finds that a net zero pathway will require a rapid scale up of low-emissions fuels like bioenergy. Bioenergy plays an important role in sectors where direct electrification is most challenging. Biofuel demand triples in the net zero scenario by 2030 from 2020 levels while modern, solid bioenergy increase by 70%. Biogases provide 400 million with access to clean cooking by 2030.

Figure 1: The rising share of low emissions fuels in the energy mix, WEO 2021

In advance of COP 26 the IEA released its updated Tracking Clean Energy Progress report that assesses 46 critical energy technologies and provides recommendations on how they can get “on track” with the IEAs net zero scenario. The technology assessment includes several biofuel pathways including those for power, heat, aviation and road transportation.

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