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Electrification for decarbonisation

It is the affordability of renewables that makes direct and indirect electrification of heating, transportation and some industrial processes possible. Ridding the world of carbon pollution is no longer a pipedream, but a job to get done

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Generating electricity from the sun and the wind has become so affordable that despite the extra expense their variable supply incurs for power system management, their cost is undercutting that of fossil fuel

ON THE RISE
Electricity will become the single-largest energy carrier by mid-century STABLE RESOURCE
The world’s renewable energy resource is large enough to produce more electricity than is required even after the electrification of the economy KEY QUOTE
The technologies to affordably decarbonise the world through electrification are already at our disposal

Electrification of the global economy will be the cheapest and cleanest way of getting the world off its dependence for energy on the combustion of fossil fuels, says the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental advisory body. Electricity can carry the energy captured from renewable sources like the wind and the sun directly to its point of use. Indirectly, through the process of electrolysis, renewables electricity can create a secondary energy carrier, hydrogen gas. Hydrogen can be combusted without pollution for industrial processes that require extremely high temperatures hard for electricity to sustain and for energy uses that cannot be powered from the grid or using batteries, such as some forms of transportation. What cannot be electrified, directly or indirectly, will be reliant on bio-fuels, the combustion of which does not upset the world’s fine ecological balance in the way that burning fossil fuels has done.

Time is of the essence, with less than 100 years left to avert climate catastrophe: the world cannot be allowed to warm more than 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. Projections by energy analysts differ in detail, but in broad terms electrification of energy use will need to at least double by 2050, up from 20- 25% in 2020. Necessity is the mother of invention and already human ingenuity has risen to the challenge. The technologies to affordably decarbonise the world through electrification are already at our disposal. By 2050, an astounding 17,000 gigawatts (GW) of installed solar and wind capacity will be generating 62% of the world’s electricity needs,” says Norwegian energy advisory firm DNV GL, a global quality assurance and risk management provider. This is 14 times today’s 1.25 TW capacity of wind and solar. The growth in renewable energy capacity will be driven by increased electricity demand as electrification of transportation and heating ramps up along with demand for green hydrogen. Solar and wind will be the cheapest source of generation and that will be irrespective of the vital shift” to a future with no more carbon emitted than the world can sustain, DNV GL adds.

In its Energy Transition Outlook 2020 report, DNV GL says electricity in 2019 met 20% of the world’s final energy demand. By 2050, the share of electricity will be 41% of final energy demand. Electricity will meet more demand for energy than any other single technology by mid-century, DNV GL says. Demand for electricity will double from 24 petawatt-hours a year (PWh/year) to 48 PWh/year by 2050, demonstrating the growing role of electricity as the main source of energy in the ongoing decarbonisation of the economy. It will also be the catalyst to produce other fuels like hydrogen and ammonia for the transport and heavy industry sectors, says DNV GL. The projections are grounded in realism. Nobody claims electricity can be used to meet every type of energy demand. You can get to a fully decarbonised scenario without fully electrifying everything. Certainly between electricity and hydrogen, that’s where the future is going to be. There’s a lot that needs to be electrified but it’s not the complete answer,” says Dave Jones from Ember, a UK climate think tank.

Even European trade body Eurelectric, concedes that point. We believe the future is electric, that means first of all it’s a bright and exciting future. It’s also one that is much more electric, it’s not all electric,” says Eurelectric’s Kristian Ruby. He believes direct electrification—replacing the use of heat energy with electrical energy—will mean that electricity makes up 50-60% of final energy consumption in Eu- rope. Indirect electrification—using electricity to produce other fuels like hydrogen—will be a significant part” of the rest. That is a very different world to the one we have today where we’re talking more 20-25% of total final energy consumption. There’s a significant ramp up that we need to handle in the next few years,” Ruby says.

By 2030, the European Commission assesses that the share of electricity in total final energy consumption needs to be around 30%. But that’s also a significant lift. It means millions of electric cars on the roads by 2030, it means millions of heat pumps installed in buildings across Europe and a higher uptake of electricity in industrial processes. So we need to see that start happening also with a view to scale it later,” he adds. In another projection, electricity would provide around 45% of final energy demand by 2050, according to BloombergNEF, the new energy finance and research division of news agency Bloomberg, in its pathway to keep global warming to well below 2°C from its New Energy Outlook report for 2020. This share is up from around 20% today. Meanwhile, hydrogen could provide up to 25% of final energy, up from less than 0.001% today. The remaining 30% is a combination of existing bioenergy, as well as residual oil and gas use in aviation and shipping, and coal in industry where neither direct electric technology nor hydrogen act as a substitute,” BloombergNEF says. The IEA says broadening the use of electricity into more areas of the economy is the single largest contributor to reaching net-zero emissions” in its Energy Technology Perspectives report from September 2020. Ramping up renewable technology so that electricity is carbon free is just one part of the challenge. Efficiently integrating vast volumes of variable generation adds complexity to power systems and will require significant investment in grid infrastructure, more intelligent grid operation, energy markets closer to being real-time, and extensive utilisation of flexibility options,” DNV GLs Ditlev Engel wrote in the report.

RENEWABLES APLENTY

While not everything can be powered by electricity, what can be electrified can use a combination of solar, wind and other renewables, supported by much more flexible power systems and more use of energy storage. There is no shortage of resource. Fundamentally, a single 52,000 kilometre-square area of the UKs North Sea covered by large wind turbines with rated capacities of 12-13 MW could produce 600 TWh of electricity a year—more than covering the UKs current electricity demand. Tesla’s Elon Musk says an area of 160 square kilometres—roughly the size of Liechtenstein—covered in solar panels could, theoretically, provide all of the United States’ electricity. An October 2020 report by independent think tank RethinkX—co-founded by Stanford University lecturer and futurist Tony Seba—highlights the ways in which a combination of solar, wind and batteries (SWB) can provide the US with all the electricity required. It also believes its findings can be replicated elsewhere in the world. The report likens the rise of renewables and battery storage to that of information technology. Just as computers and the Internet slashed the marginal cost of information and opened the door to hundreds of new business models that collectively have had a transformative impact upon the global economy, so too will SWB slash the marginal cost of electricity and create a plethora of opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship. What happened in the world of bits is now poised to happen in the world of electrons,” the report states.

POLICY FRAMEWORKS

The IEA sees biofuels and continued combustion of some fossil fuels, but with carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) meeting energy demand that cannot be electrified, either directly or indirectly. Quicker progress towards net-zero emissions will depend on faster innovation in electrification, hydrogen, bioenergy and CCUS,” it says. A third of cumulative emissions reduction in the next three decades will: Stem from technologies that are not commercially available today,” the IEA adds.

Significant research and development support from governments and lawmakers is needed, also to help new technologies find a route to market. It’s really for policymakers to understand that landscape and some of the barriers to innovation and the market,” says Ember’s Jones. Eurelectric’s Ruby advocates a focus on speeding up permitting procedures that will allow new projects, infrastructure and technologies to be built. We have a power system [in Europe] of about 1000 GW today and over the next ten years we need to build 500 GW. Permitting procedures take on average somewhere between four and six years and can easily take more. So you can imagine if we decide to revolutionise the system today and we need to talk about that and do the assessments and permitting for six years then there is not a lot of time to build.”•

TEXT David Weston