By Tom Cosby

Tom joined Eden in 2022 directly from his BSc in Geography and Environmental Science at King’s College London. Following a stint in the UK office, he joins our New York team in October 2024. In this blog he goes back to basics on climate change and why renewables are part of the solution.

According to the United Nations, climate change is the long-term shifts in global temperatures and weather patterns. These changes affect temperatures, precipitation patterns, sea levels, and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events - as we have been experiencing across the world recently, including more frequent and severe floods in the UK and more wildfires and more intense storms across the US. 

Whilst climate change can result from natural processes, 97%  of scientists agree that the current trend is largely driven by human activities, through greenhouse gas pollution such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O). The biggest contributor is the extraction and burning of fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas.

The earth's energy balance, the amount of energy that the earth holds within its atmosphere, ultimately dictates the earth's temperature. It relies on incoming solar radiation and the re-emitting of infrared radiation (heat) from the earth's surfaces. The enhanced greenhouse effect from human-caused greenhouse gases traps a greater amount of energy by preventing infrared radiation from leaving the earth's atmosphere. The resulting imbalance to the earth's energy budget - where more energy enters the earth's atmosphere than is re-emitted - is warming the planet. The Climate Stripes above visualise how global warming is intensifying over time.

As electricity and heat generation are responsible for 34% of global greenhouse gasses, and transport for another 15%, the obvious solution is to replace them with cheap and clean renewable energy. 

Decarbonising electricity grids directly alleviates the magnitude of the impacts of climate change and is what motivates  Eden Renewables and the wider renewable energy industrys. To date, projects developed and approved by the Eden Renewables UK team are and will be saving  ≈100,000 tonnes of CO2 every year and powering  ≈80,000 homes.  With our deep pipelines of projects, however, we are creating the opportunity for GWs of capacity, paving a path for us to achieve much more in the future.