In late 2023, a group of us in the COP28 Presidency were staring at a sentence no headline could carry: “tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling the rate of energy efficiency improvement by 2030.” Accurate. Also a mouthful. You cannot put that on a badge, a press release, or a wall.
We needed something short enough to survive a hallway conversation and still mean the same thing on the way out as it did on the way in. Working with our colleagues in the Global Renewables Alliance and IRENA, we compressed it — triple the renewables, double the efficiency — and “Triple Up, Double Down” came out the other end. It became the logo, the shorthand, the thing negotiators actually said to each other in the corridors. It stuck because it was true and because it was fast to say. That combination is rarer in climate diplomacy than it should be.
Three years on, the pledge is still the reference point for global renewable buildout. It gave the world a number to aim at and a target that governments, utilities, and financiers could plan against. That’s the job a name like that does. It doesn’t replace the delivery mechanism. It gives the delivery mechanism something to rally around.
Now there’s a second number, and it’s about demand, not supply
The COP31 Presidency, working with IRENA, has put a new target on the table: 35 by 2035. Electricity’s share of total global final energy consumption rises from about 20% today to 35% by 2035, on a path past 50% by 2050. It’s one of three targets the Presidency is carrying into Antalya as part of its Action Agenda — alongside city resilience and efficiency, and cutting waste. But electrification is the one that decides whether the clean power we’re building actually gets used.
Triple Up, Double Down was a supply-side pledge. Build the clean generation, use it more efficiently. 35 by 2035 is the demand-side half of the same equation, and it’s the half that’s been missing. You can build out the renewable capacity and still burn coal in a steel furnace, oil in a car, and gas in a boiler, because that generation never actually displaced anything. Electrification is the mechanism that turns clean power on the grid into fossil fuel that stays in the ground.
The target names three sectors where that switch has to happen: transport, where EVs displace the internal combustion engine; heavy industry, where electrified furnaces replace direct fossil combustion in production; and heating and cooling, where heat pumps take over from gas and oil boilers. These are the sectors where fossil fuels aren’t generating electricity somewhere else in the system — they’re being burned directly, at the point of use. No amount of clean power on the grid touches that unless the point of use itself goes electric.
The scale is the honest part
IRENA’s own modeling puts hard numbers on it. To stay on a 1.5°C-compatible pathway, the world needs around 18.4 TW of installed renewable power capacity by 2035 — that’s 18,400 GW — rising to 38.2 TW by 2050, alongside transmission grids built out and upgraded to actually move that power to where the furnaces, chargers, and heat pumps are. That’s not a rounding adjustment to Triple Up, Double Down. It’s a step change, and it comes with a grid buildout most countries haven’t fully costed yet. (IRENA, May 2026: Transitioning away from fossil fuels: A roadmap powered by renewables, electrification and grid enhancement)
I’d rather see that number stated plainly than smoothed into something more comfortable. A target that’s hard to reach and honestly stated is more useful than one that’s easy to reach and vague about what it actually requires.
The negotiation track just stalled. That’s exactly why this one matters.
The June talks in Bonn — the last major staging post before Antalya — ended in what observers openly called gridlock. Countries couldn’t agree conclusions on at least three major areas, adaptation and emissions-cutting among them, and pushed them to COP31 under the procedural fallback known as Rule 16. Adaptation was the rawest: developed countries refused to carry over a target to triple adaptation finance by 2035, and a Fijian delegate called the stalemate “further salt in our wounds.”
Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, named the cause plainly in his closing statement: “a familiar tendency towards you-first-ism — groups refusing to deliver commitments or allow the process to move forward unless others go first.” A recipe for gridlock, he said, “when we need all negotiating tracks moving in the fast lane.” It’s the free-rider problem I wrote about in the last article in this series, playing out in real time. Everyone waits for someone else to pay first, and the equilibrium holds where nobody moves.
And yet, in that same fortnight, electrification was the bright spot. 35 by 2035 didn’t come out of the deadlocked negotiating rooms. It came through the Global Climate Action Agenda — the track that brings in cities and the private sector alongside governments, built around what can be done now rather than what can be extracted at 2 a.m. on the final night. When the formal negotiations lock up, that is where momentum has to come from. Electrification is a good place to build it, precisely because for most countries the self-interested move and the collective move are now the same move: cheaper power, less exposure to fuel imports, and the industries and jobs that follow the buildout. That overlap is real, and it doesn’t need anyone’s permission to start.
What I’ll be watching
The same test I named for the finance pledge and Article 6 applies here: does the number turn into a delivery mechanism, or does it stay a number. For 35 by 2035, that means three things. Whether grid permitting and transmission investment move at the speed the electrification targets assume, because a heat pump or an EV fleet is only as clean as the grid it plugs into. Whether industrial electrification gets real capital, since furnace conversion is a harder sell to a CFO than a rooftop solar array. And whether the countries furthest from 20% electrification today — not the ones already close to 35% — get financing terms that make the switch possible, not just theoretically available.
Some analysts already argue a demand-side goal means little without a global plan to phase out fossil fuels on the supply side. They’re not wrong that half a strategy is half a strategy — Brazil is drafting the other half now. But an electrification target that actually moves does something a phase-out pledge on its own never has: it makes the clean choice the cheap choice, and lets the phase-out follow the money instead of fighting it.
Triple Up, Double Down taught me that a name is only as good as what it survives contact with. It survived two years of financing rounds, project pipelines, and government targets, and it’s still standing. 35 by 2035 hasn’t been tested yet. The number is right. Whether the delivery mechanism catches up to it — while the negotiation track is stuck — is what I’ll be watching between now and Antalya.
The window is open. Let’s make this count and let’s never forget. Action fuels hope, hope fuels action.
The views expressed in this article are solely my own and do not represent the positions of any employer, company, or institution with which I am or have been affiliated.
