The International Energy Agency released a report on Tuesday that declares reaching net zero CO2 emissions by 2050 will require “huge leaps” in clean energy innovation, including the widespread use of technologies that aren’t on the market yet, but that focus heavily on tapping renewable energy sources.
The report from the top global energy agency is its first comprehensive study examining how to transition to a net zero energy system by 2050 while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth.
The IEA offered a more than 200-page road map for building a net zero energy sector in the next 30 years. The path, it said, would be “technically feasible” but “narrow and extremely challenging” — requiring an unprecedented transformation of how energy is produced, transported and used globally and demanding innovations that haven’t yet come to market.
Ending investment in fossil fuel was among its chief recommendations.
That guidance appeared alongside an important consideration — that “existing technologies will not be able to get us all the way along the path to net-zero emissions.”
The report noted that while some global reductions in greenhouse gases are achievable through 2030 based on existing technologies, new innovations will be required to reach the steep 2050 goals.
Almost half of those mid-century reductions rely on “technologies that are currently at the demonstration or prototype phase,” the report said.
“Major innovation efforts must occur over this decade in order to bring these new technologies to market in time,” the report said, suggesting that batteries, hydrogen electrolysers, and direct air capture and storage were key areas for innovation.
The innovations include infrastructure like new pipelines to transport captured CO2 emissions and systems to shuffle hydrogen around and between ports and industrial zones.
Hydrogen‐based steel production, low-emissions electricity, and the production of biofuels — which would will all likely play a big role in reducing CO2 emissions — are also largely still in demonstration or “prototype” phase the report noted.
The shift toward a fossil fuel-free future was a notable declaration for the energy agency which has not historically warned against the use of fossil fuels in such clear and concise terms. The IEA’s declaration Tuesday, comes in spite of a history of industry accusations that it has underestimated the growth of renewable energy technologies.
The study comes weeks after President Joe Biden met with a group of global leaders in April to pledge the nation’s commitment to fulfilling its role in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change which aims to limit the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.
Biden vowed at that time to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by 2030.
The IEA report also suggested that governmental action would be needed to establish policy that would enable stakeholders to plan for change and facilitate transition for innovations to come.
During a controversial BBC interview over the weekend, the President’s climate envoy John Kerry appeared to resist fully acknowledging an underlying tension between reliance on future technology for solving the planet’s climate troubles and a need for behavior changes amid that transition.
“You don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things that we know we have to achieve,” Kerry said, when asked whether he believed Americans would need to make significant lifestyle sacrifices to preserve the planet.
“I am told by scientists — not by anybody in politics — but by scientists, that 50 percent of the reductions we have to make to get to net zero by 2050 or 2045, as soon as we can, 50 percent of those reductions are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. That’s just a reality,” he said on Saturday.
Even amid that reality, individual behavior was highlighted in the IEA report, which suggested that because people drive demand for energy‐related goods and services, “societal norms and personal choices will play a pivotal role in steering the energy system onto a sustainable path.”
According to the report, just under 40 percent of reductions in the net-zero emissions scenario would require massive policy support while not requiring much engagement from citizens or consumers.
Conversely, more than half of emissions reductions would require a combination of both deploying low‐carbon technologies and engaged consumers, the report said.
The most fundamental thing gating net-zero around the world is the will to change.
That report from the IEA is talking about installing over a thousand gigawatts (presumably nameplate capacity) of wind and solar per year, which is ridiculous. The entire world’s nuclear fleet, that provides 10% of the world’s electricity, is just 400 GW. Check out “Roadmap to Nowhere” to get a data-based idea for where such renewables fantasies get us. And don’t get me started on the environmental impact of such absurdly huge deployments of wind and solar, even if they were economically and logistically possible (which they aren’t). Thanks for nothing, IEA.
I’ll tell you what, the reading I’ve been doing in the last three or four months leads me to believe this is not the case. Granted, I’m an armchair quarterback on the subject. But a couple of big changes are in the mix recently that make the next 20 (not 30) years look pretty doggone bright. Highlights –
Solar cells have plummeted in price. Solar sites are overbuilding their cell-to-inverter ratio by as much at 300% because it’s more cost effective to turn off cells during the mid-day hours and run at 100% inverter-rating earlier and later in the day, and during inclement weather.
Wind has scored several breakthroughs regarding size and yield. Public acceptance of windmills with the exception of the obscenely rich has changed in favor of them. GE has built a 12,000-home windmill, the first at that scale. 15,000 of them could power every home in the United States all on their own.
Geothermal, the renewable that’s been kicked to the curb for the last 20 years has gotten a big boost from fracking technology, with controlled directed drilling making for deep thermal loops that could potentially support 100% of base load, run 24 hours per day and can be deployed anywhere in the world including off-grid locations. I’ll mention that the United States has the most expertise on this technology, a potential money-maker in foreign countries for an industry that has been taking a beating due to declining fuel prices.
What remains is energy storage for transportation. Energy storage for fixed locations is largely solved by the breakthroughs above, but the need for “batteries” for cars, trucks, trains and aircraft remains. Frankly, the idea of being Net-Zero doesn’t require all liquid fuels to be banned, just to be manufactured from raw materials using Net-Zero emission energy sources. Given enough solar over-production during daylight hours the excess could be routed to synthetic fuel generation. The vehicle of the future may already be in your driveway. It may just be a matter of generating its fuel from carbon dioxide that’s in the air.
True 100% Net-Zero may be a tough goal. But I’d wager 99% Net-Zero is well in reach. At this point it’s about which countries and companies figure out they can make a killing taking the lead on this, and what they choose to do.
Nothing like trying, to bring about innovation.
Solar efficiency may be improving, but that’s not the problem right now. The problem is where you do put huge industrial-scale solar farms?
They aren’t going to be placed where the major consumption is, the cities and suburbs. They’re going to be in farmland, and that disrupts communities in those locations.
There was an article about this in the Seattle Times recently, about resistance to siting industrial solar farms East of the Cascades (Trump country), while most of the power would be going West of the Cascades (Biden country) where the major population lives. As one person interviewed put it:
It’s an interesting article that lays out some of the problems:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/solar-farms-are-booming-in-washington-state-but-where-should-they-go/