Climate sceptics often argue that the UK’s efforts to cut emissions are pointless while countries of the Global South (also referred to as ‘developing countries’) do little, when in fact many of them are building some of the most ambitious renewable energy systems on the planet, at a scale and speed few rich countries have matched. Three brief case studies make the point.
China (still classed as ‘developing’) is the world’s largest renewable energy investor by far. Renewables now make up over 60% of the country’s total installed generation capacity.
With its many massive wind and solar farms located far inland, but with urban and industrial centres in the middle and east, the Chinese have installed ultra-high voltage (UHV) lines connecting the two, thus solving ‘the remoteness from demand’ problem at a scale no other country has attempted.
To support both their domestic and overseas markets, China is the global leader in the manufacture of batteries and of solar panels, of which it is also by far the world’s largest exporter.
Notably, Chinese exports helped to kick-start one of the world’s largest off-grid, grassroots solar electrification programmes in Bangladesh, facilitated by micro-finance at the household level.
Domestically, Chinese battery deployment has tripled in three years. In 2024, the country added more storage capacity than the US and EU combined, thus addressing the intermittency problem of solar and wind that trips up other countries.
With all this surge in renewables, China’s fossil fuel generation declined in 2025, the first year without an increase since 2015. Wind and solar now provide about one fifth of the country’s electricity, and together they overtook coal for the first time in early 2025.
Turning now to Latin America, Costa Rica has become a global leader in renewable energy by investing heavily in clean power of all kinds: hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar, of which it has a natural abundance. For many years, these have generated almost 100% of its electricity, cutting its carbon emissions from power generation to near zero.
Now to Africa. In pursuing its quest for renewables, Kenya has made the most of its geology. Lying astride the East African Rift Valley, the country sits on massive geothermal reserves. As these can be very risky, failure-prone and expensive to explore, the government undertook to finance initial drilling (partly with World Bank money). Once wells proved viable, then private investment followed. Now around 45-50% of the country’s energy is from geothermal sources.
In the semi-desert of north Kenya lies Africa’s largest wind farm, Lake Turkana Wind Power, financed partly with EU and private money, with a government-guaranteed power purchase agreement making it viable.
Kenya now gets 85-90% of its electricity from renewables, thus, like Costa Rica, successfully decoupling its development from fossil fuels. Its aim is to have 100% renewable power generation by 2030.
Three countries, one clear lesson: development and decarbonisation need not be a trade-off.
Joe Human
sustainablekeswick@gmail.com
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