The UN has rallied behind plans to accelerate investment in electricity infrastructure in Africa and Southeast Asia, boosting efforts to tackle one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the shift to clean energy.
UN boss António Guterres launched the Global Grids Accelerator on the sidelines of the UN Climate Summit in New York on Wednesday. The initiative aims to turn government plans to expand and modernise grids into investment-ready projects and bring together the expertise, finance and support needed to build them.
Guterres said the accelerator will help countries build “the arteries of the energy transition” to expand energy access, strengthen energy security and power growth in developing countries.
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The UN has rallied behind plans to accelerate investment in electricity infrastructure in Africa and Southeast Asia, boosting efforts to tackle one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the shift to clean energy.
UN boss António Guterres launched the Global Grids Accelerator on the sidelines of the UN Climate Summit in New York on Wednesday. The initiative aims to turn government plans to expand and modernise grids into investment-ready projects and bring together the expertise, finance and support needed to build them.
Guterres said the accelerator will help countries build “the arteries of the energy transition” to expand energy access, strengthen energy security and power growth in developing countries.
The initiative will not create a new financing institution, the UN said, and no additional funding to boost grid upgrades was announced. Instead, it will act as a broker by bringing together UN agencies, development banks, investors and utilities around grid priorities identified by governments.
Renewable energy deployment is happening at record speed but the infrastructure required to move clean electricity from where it is generated to consumers is not keeping pace. As a result, record amounts of green electricity that cannot be absorbed by the grid are being wasted.
In addition, more than 2,500 GW of renewable projects – nearly twice the electricity generation capacity of the US – are currently stuck in queues worldwide, waiting to connect to the grid, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Grid bottlenecks
To meet global climate goals and cut emissions from fossil fuels, electricity demand needs to grow orders of magnitude faster in the next decade than it did in the last. The COP31 presidency has called on governments to endorse a pledge to raise electricity’s share of final energy consumption from 23% today to 35% by 2035.
Grids are essential to support this surge in electricity demand as sectors such as transport, heating and cooling electrify.
The lack of adequate infrastructure to transport electricity can have a major negative impact on economic development by delaying new power generation, slowing down efforts to expand access to electricity and hampering industrial growth.
In contrast, strong grids can help countries connect their renewable energy potential to surging power demand, strengthen energy security and support new industries and job creation.
Meeting national climate goals requires adding or refurbishing more than 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040 – equivalent to roughly the size of today’s entire global network, according to the IEA. Technologies can also help increase the capacity of existing grid infrastructure. The watchdog estimates that annual grid investments need to increase by around 50% by 2030 to meet growing electricity demand.
The IEA has warned that the mismatch between the time it takes to build new power grids – 5 to 15 years – and the much faster buildout of renewable projects, EV charging infrastructure or data centres, makes upgrading grids an urgent task to prevent slowing down the energy transition.
Matching expertise and finance to projects
At COP29 in 2024, more than 60 countries committed to collectively build more than 25 million kilometres of additional grid infrastructure by 2030.
But a key barrier is turning long-term and often complex plans to overhaul electricity infrastructure into viable projects that can be matched to funding.
The accelerator aims to bring together expertise from across the UN system to support countries navigate this fragmented landscape and access the financing they need.
In Africa, the accelerator will focus on delivering national priorities to expand grid infrastructure and regional interconnections to expand access to reliable and affordable electricity. It will build on existing initiatives such as Mission 300, which aims to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.
In Southeast Asia, the accelerator will support initiatives such as the ASEAN Power Grid, which aims to connect different countries’ electricity networks and enable cross-border power trading to meet growing power demand and boost energy security.
Across the region, inadequate grids are threatening billions of dollars in clean energy investment. The lack of grid capacity is part of the reason about 50% to 60% of renewable energy projects in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia were cancelled or stalled between 2021 and 2025.
Alexander De Croo, the administrator of UNDP, said making grids projects investable must be a priority, noting that grids require a big upfront investment but deliver “a stable return over the long-term”.
