With oil prices having rallied up to the $40 mark, some analysts have come out with bullish forecasts for the near-term. Plenty of risks remain however, and there are signs that the latest oil price rally may have hit a ceiling.

The journey towards climate disaster continues, unless we make an immediate switch to efficient and renewable energy in all sectors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The progress in the power sector is only a small part of the picture. And it is eaten up as the world’s energy hunger continues to increase.

The European Union looks set to slightly beat its goal to get a third of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, but public support will be needed to offset a drop in clean power investment due to COVID-19.

The pandemic never really went away, so it is not as if there is a discrete first and second wave. But the resurgence in infections in recent days caused a selloff in financial markets.

Oil prices rose 3% in volatile trade on Tuesday as Wall Street surged and the International Energy Agency (IEA) increased its oil demand forecast for 2020, but gains were capped by worries about a second wave of coronavirus cases.

Covid-19 has allowed many countries to experience a glimpse of what it will be like operating a renewable energy system while facing with the concerns of grids stability under low-demand and low-inertia conditions.

BP will cut about 15 per cent of its workforce in response to the Covid-19 crisis and as part of chief executive Bernard Looney’s plan to shift the oil and gas major to renewable energy. The affected roles announced will be mostly senior office-based positions and not frontline operational staff.

Some of the world’s biggest power companies joined a new group aiming to underpin a massive ramp-up of floating solar – now widely seen as one of the energy transition’s hottest emerging technologies.

The demand for electricity in Vietnam has significantly increased in line with its economic growth and it has also been impacted by pollution and climate change, which requires the country to adopt an effective transition to a renewable energy system.

Carbon emissions have dropped dramatically and the air is clearer, but as demand for energy picks up once again, there are some unresolved questions about how we power our lives in the years to come while making sure we do not spike up carbon emission yet again.

Investment in global energy will fall by $400bn (£324bn) this year, the biggest slump in the industry’s history, as the Covid-19 pandemic fuels a collapse in energy demand. The IEA said the unprecedented investment slump follows the most severe plunge in energy demand since the second world war.

Despite the U.S. and Europe shuttering coal-fired power plants, coal remains a major fuel in global energy systems. The IEA expects generation from coal power plants in Asia will exceed the drop in coal-fired generation in the U.S. and Europe so that coal remains the world’s largest generation fuel over the next five years.