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Gereltuya Bayanmukh speaks about her motivations to become involved in climate activism. Credit: Leo Galduh/IPS
– Youth activist Gereltuya Bayanmukh still reflects on the events in her formative years that inspired her to become a climate activist. When she was a child, she would visit her grandparents in a village 20 km to the south of the border between Russia and Mongolia.
She was happy to see each of the nomadic people in their traditional gers power up their settlements using solar power.
“I remember seeing my neighbors own a solar panel and a battery to accumulate power. They were turning on lights and watching TV using solar power. Nowadays, they even have fridges,” she says.
She thought the herders made a conscious choice about their lifestyles and understood the need of the hour in the face of the looming climate crisis. That is to say, switch to renewable energy and power a safer future.
“This was the reason I became a climate activist,” she says.
No matter how unwitting her notion about her community achieving self-sufficiency with renewable energy was, the findings about what entailed this system revealed something else.
“I later learned that the solar panels were partially subsidized by the government as a part of the nationwide government to equip 100,000 nomadic households with solar energy,” she says.
What she perceived turned out to be a nationwide renewable energy scheme by the Mongolian government for the nomadic herders.
The scheme, called the National 100,000 Solar Ger [Yurt] Electricity Program, introduced in 2000, provided herders with portable photovoltaic solar home systems that complement their traditional nomadic lifestyle.
At least 30 percent of Mongolia’s population comprises nomadic herders. Before 2000, when the scheme came into effect, herders had limited or no access to modern electricity. By 2005, the government managed to equip over 30,000 herder families through funds from several donor nations.
However, the full-scale electrification effort for herders was beginning to stagnate. The 2006 midterm custom audit performance report by the Standing Committee on Environment, Food and Agriculture of the Parliament carried sobering revelations.
The scheme in its initial phase was poorly managed: there was no control over the distribution process, with some units delivered to local areas landing in the hands of non-residents violating the contract, failure to deliver the targeted number of generators, misappropriation of the program funds, and inability to repay the loans within the contractual period.
However, in the third phase–2006-2012–the program was able to expand its implementation with the support of several international donors, including the World Bank.
“At first, I thought how great that we started out with the renewable energy transition, giving access to renewable energy at a lower price. And it was even in 1999. That was when I was just four years old. I believe we were on our way to building a future like this. Like we visualized here. The future of green nomadism. However, my optimism faded when I read the midterm audit report and discovered that the program had been (just as) poorly managed as the first part. It was only with the assistance of the international partners that the program finished well,” says Gereltuya.
Gereltuya is the co-founder and board director of her NGO, Green Dot Climate, which focuses on empowering youth as climate activists and raising awareness and practical skills for climate action.
One of the mottoes of her NGO is to change the youth’s and Mongolian people’s attitudes and practices around climate change issues as well as solutions.
In the past year, the NGO has been successful in reaching over half a million Mongolians, including nomads, helping them become more environmentally conscious and empowering the youth to be climate activists—makers and doers themselves.
“In the past year, we have reached over half a million Mongolians. Our Green Dot youth community has logged more than 100,000 individual climate actions, saving over 700,000 kg of CO₂, 25 liters of water, and 80,000 kilowatt-hours of energy. Next, we will aim for a million collective actions, a stronger community and a minimum of 50 collaborative climate projects in Mongolia,” Gereltuya said during her delegate speech at the One Young World Summit, a global event that brings in young leaders from around the world to discuss global issues, in 2023.
The state of Mongolia’s nomads in the current energy system
Mongolia as a country heavily relies on coal for energy production, which contributes to 90 percent of its energy production. Coming to just transition, the government aims for a 30 percent renewable energy share by 2030 of its installed capacity, as enshrined in the State Policy on Energy 2015-2030. Mongolia is also committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 22.7 percent by 2030 while the energy sector accounts for 44.78 percent of the total emissions as of 2020 according to Mongolia’s Second Biennial Update Report.
Gereltuya’s NGO, Green Dot Climate, has been mapping Mongolia’s energy systems for the past few years now. As of 2024, Mongolia’s electricity sector relies on CHP [combined heat and power] plants and imports from Russia and China to meet its electricity demands.
Only 7 percent of its total installed energy comes from renewable sources, with the Central Energy System accounting for over 80 percent of the total electricity demand. “We found that about 200,000 households remain unaccounted for in the centralized energy grid calculations. These are likely the same nomadic families or their later generations who likely adopted their first solar systems at least two decades ago,” she explains.
Gereltuya says that her organisation meticulously compared the recent household data cited by the Energy Regulatory Commission of Mongolia to that of the total number of households as per the Mongolian Statistical Information Service to find the numbers that went missing
Mongolia’s backslide into fossil-fuel economy
Although Mongolia has promised to increase its renewable energy share to 30 percent by 2030, it is still far behind in the race to achieve its target.
In the 2020 Nationally Determined Contribution [NDC] submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC], Mongolia set its mitigation target to “a 22.7% reduction in total national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030,” which can increase to a 27.2 percent reduction if conditional mitigation measures such as the carbon capture and storage and waste-to-energy technology are implemented. Further, if “actions and measures to remove GHG emissions by forest are determined”, the total mitigation target would rise to 44.9 percent by 2030.
“Instead of focusing on decarbonizing its coal-based economy, Mongolia shifted to focus on carbon-sink and sequestration processes to reduce its emissions. This suggests that despite our many promises, policies and past efforts to mainstream renewables, we may still end up with business as usual. A case of bad governance, stagnation and vicious cycles,” she says.
Recommendations for Mongolia’s energy sector
Gereltuya’s NGO has been actively engaged in the survey ‘Earth Month 2025’ that is aimed at collecting specific recommendations from the youth voices in the country for the NDC 3.0 that the government is expected to submit in COP30. She shares a few recommendations that she believes can help improve the country’s energy systems.
On the demand side, households not connected to the grid should update and improve their solar home systems, especially now that the solutions are much cheaper and more efficient.
According to the 2024 World Bank ‘Mongolia Country Climate and Development Report,’ the average residential tariff for electricity in Mongolia was estimated to be 40 percent below cost recovery, and subsidies were worth 3.5 percent of GDP in 2022. The lack of cost recovery created hurdles in efforts to enhance energy efficiency and investment in renewable energy. In the context, those connected to the grid should pay more for their energy use to reflect the real cost of energy production and support renewable energy feed-in tariffs. There should be responsible voting of citizens demanding better policies and implementations and not trading in policies for short-term gains.
On the supply side, there is a need to stop new fossil fuel projects immediately: there are at least six such projects, including one international project under Mongolia’s current Energy Revival Policy, underway.
Secondly, Mongolia’s electricity infrastructure needs significant improvement. As the UNDP recently highlighted, Mongolia’s infrastructure is aging, inefficient and heavily subsidized.
Thirdly, fully utilize installed energy capacity, which is at only 30 percent, largely owing to the infrastructure inefficiency.
Fourth is to increase the overall renewable energy capacity five times to meet demand, which means 15 times the energy made in full demand. And phase out coal-based power, replacing it with fully renewable energy.
IPS UN Bureau Report
