In early April 2022 the IPCC published the third of three reports as part of their sixth assessment
of the state of our climate. That third report was all about mitigation. In other words what
can we do to prevent the worst consequences of the climate emergency we're now facing, and the IPCC
made it clear that we need very radical root and branch change in every aspect of society, industry
and commerce, not by 2050, but by 2030 if we're to stand any chance of keeping global temperatures
within safe limits. The most common questions I've received from you folks since that report came out
are "how exactly is this apparent revolution going to be achieved?"
and "how will it be measured so that the countries and corporations are held accountable for their
actions?" They are tricky questions that's for sure. And they're questions that are currently
taxing far greater minds than mine! One of the global organizations wrestling with the problem
and seeking solutions is the International Renewable Energy Agency or IRENA. They've
just published this report focused 100 percent on what needs to be done in the next
eight years and how it can be achieved. So let's just dive straight in and see what they say.
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. IRENA is an intergovernmental body established in 2011
which is now a fully integrated sister organization to the globally recognized
International Energy Agency. The IREAN mission statement
tells us that its purpose is to provide the principal platform for international cooperation
in driving action on the ground to advance the transformation of the global energy system
towards the use of all forms of renewable energy. And energy really is what it's all about isn't it?
Not just the way we produce it in the first place but also the way we consume it and the way we
distribute it equitably around the world. If we get that right then pretty much everything else
slots into place behind it. This latest report shows us the fastest path to emissions reductions
prioritizing existing solutions and those with the best chance of becoming viable before 2030,
and it demonstrates how a holistic global policy framework coupled with some serious investment and
more concerted international cooperation can lead to the creation of millions of new jobs,
a more inclusive global economy, and a more equal world. Now if you live in Ukraine or
Yemen or Afghanistan or Syria or Sri Lanka, or any one of a host of catastrophically afflicted
nations around the world today, then you'd perhaps be forgiven for thinking that IRENA's position
is hopelessly idealistic given the current state of our geopolitical turmoil. But then again, if
the world could somehow find a way to achieve what IRENA sets out in this report then it may actually
prove to be the fastest and most effective way to make those regional conflicts become a thing of
the past. The first step on that journey though is to properly quantify the challenges and the
opportunities. So here's some headline numbers from the report to kick us off. By 2030 the share
of direct electricity and total final energy consumption or TFEC will have to go from 21%
in 2019 to 30$ by 2030. 65% of that electricity generation will need to be from renewable sources
compared with only 26% in 2019. That equates to an additional 8,000 gigawatts of renewable capacity
within eight years. Onshore wind capacity will need to increase to 3,000 gigawatts - more than
four times what it was in 2020. Offshore wind capacity will have to be 11 times more than the
2020 number, reaching 380 gigawatts by 2030. Solar PV is targeted to reach 5200 gigawatts of capacity
by the end of the decade. That's more than seven times 2020 levels. IRENA also says we'll need a
thirty percent increase in hydro power to fifteen hundred gigawatts plus a six-fold increase in some
of the more controversial technologies like hydrogen power, carbon capture and storage,
and bio energy with carbon capture and storage, all of which we'll come back to later.
On top of all that there'll need to be at least a 250 percent improvement in energy efficiency
through far more stringent standards in new building construction and widespread retrofitting
of existing buildings as well as massive process changes in industry that among other things
fully embrace the principles of a truly circular economy. That means at least a nine-fold increase
in direct investment by 2030 compared with 2019 levels according to the reports analysis.
Even though fossil fuels will still be in the mix at the end of this decade their role will have
been greatly reduced and emissions from the energy sector will have fallen from 37 billion tons
to 25 billion tons if all the numbers we've just looked at are achieved.
So let's just talk about those controversial technologies I mentioned a moment ago,
starting with hydrogen. There's been an awful lot of media hype around hydrogen in recent years.
It's already produced in large volumes, mainly for chemicals and fertilizers,
via the process of steam reforming methane or from the gasification of coal, both of which release
enormous quantities of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. The fossil fuel industry says it's
developing technologies to capture all that CO2 to produce what they call Blue Hydrogen. There's
a lot of scepticism about this approach, which I talked about at length in that video there,
so I won't labour the point here. Suffice to say, producing hydrogen from fossil fuels
plays absolutely no part whatsoever in any of the IRENA pathways. Instead, the report tells us that
clean green hydrogen, produced by splitting water molecules in massive industrial-scale
electrolysers powered by wind and solar, will need to be ramped up significantly in the coming years.
The world produces less than a million tonnes of green hydrogen today, compared to more than
60 million tons from fossil fuels. By the end of the decade green hydrogen production will
need to hit more than 150 million tons. Achieving that goal would result in a reduction of carbon
dioxide emissions of nearly four billion tons a year, driven by a drop in the cost of industrial
electrolysers that will be very similar to the precipitous falls in the price of wind and solar
that we saw in the last 10 years. By 2050 IRENA projects that hydrogen will be contributing 12% of
total final energy consumption. It'll also account for 12% of energy consumption in transport,
mainly in large vehicles like trucks, trains, boats and planes,
and about another 8% of transport energy will come from hydrogen derivatives like ammonia, methanol
and synthetic fuels. That means a market moving from roughly zero dollars in 2019 to more than 130
billion dollars by 2030 and nearly 180 billion by 2050 with a massive opportunity for existing net
energy importing countries with lots of sunshine and wind to become future green energy exporters
Arguably far greater challenges exist around increases in the use of bioenergy with carbon
capture technologies. Technically, bioenergy already makes up about 50%
of energy from renewable sources, although there are many people who argue that calling biomass a
net zero renewable resource is highly questionable in the very short timeline we're now dealing with.
It's another subject I've touched on in a previous video which you can jump back to
by clicking up there. Bio energy would make up as much as a quarter of total
primary energy supply in IRENA's 2050, 1.5 degrees Celsius scenario. That represents a
three-fold increase on 2019 levels. By their own admission that's a challenging scale-up!
In fact IRENA dedicates an entire chapter of the report to discussing the implications.
Now there's obviously not enough time in one video to go into all that minute detail but in essence
the kind of expansion that IRENA were proposing would need policies that promote
strong evidence-based sustainability governence procedures and regulations aimed at minimizing
adverse impacts including competition for land, emissions caused by land use change,
biodiversity loss, and air pollution. Those are all massive sustainability risks that present
a challenge to the bioenergy industry and its investors and which are quite understandably
discouraging policymakers from making bioenergy a pillar of their strategies for reaching their
own 1.5 degrees Celsius targets. And by the way, there'll be a link in the description section to
the full report so you can scrutinize that chapter at your leisure. IRENA also spends a whole chapter
discussing critical materials, which are rare metals like lithium, nickel and copper, all of
which are found in most lithium-ion batteries, as well as rare earths like neodymium and dysprosium,
which are used to make the permanent magnets essential to products like electric vehicle
motors, wind turbine generators and electronic devices like hard disk drives. Right now, despite
some effort by the biggest companies to implement ethical and environmental best practice in their
sourcing procedures, the global regulatory framework looks a bit like the wild west.
IRENA argues that governments need to rapidly get to grips with the complex issues involved and work
alongside industry to devise effective strategies that not only build massive efficiencies into the
supply and processing chains to reduce bottlenecks but also fully address the challenges of what
they describe as sustainable exploitation, safe working conditions, local economic development,
respect for cultural and natural heritage, and net zero carbon emissions. They can do that,
says IRENA, by mobilizing finance to support new suppliers entering the market
while creating more efficient globally enforceable regulatory and licensing procedures that enable
the mining industry to react more effectively to unexpected and sudden demand increases.
Product innovation will also play a pivotal role in minimizing how much of these materials we
dig up in the first place. In their latest quarterly earnings statement for example,
Tesla Motors confirmed that half of all the cars they produced last quarter used
lithium-ion phosphate batteries which contain no cobalt or nickel at all.
Now let's be clear-eyed here, they've done that to reduce their own cost base,
not as some kind of benevolent contribution to safeguarding the environment,
but nevertheless it demonstrates a clear path towards eradicating these materials from lithium
batteries as production increases exponentially over the coming years to provide grid-scale energy
storage that will be crucial to the roll out of intermittent power sources like wind and solar.
And of course the recycling of critical materials must be enshrined in law as well
and supported by globally agreed state incentives. Those recycling technologies
have already been developed and they're common practice for metals like copper and nickel,
but governments need to make sure it becomes economically viable for recyclers to carefully
separate batteries and other electronic devices into their myriad constituent
components to cost effectively liberate each one of them for future use as part of the
circular economy we're constantly being told about. And on top of specific policies like those,
IRENA argues that we'll need a broader global policy framework that takes a much more holistic
view of the interconnections between energy, societies, economies and the planet's ecosystems.
The report compares the current state of global policies which they call policy basket zero,
or PB0, against two of their own policy proposals which they call PBA and PBB,
both of which contain strategies for keeping us within the 1.5 degree Celsius scenario.
Current policies have resulted in minimal carbon pricing and negligible genuine international
climate collaboration despite all the fine words from our political leaders at COP 26
in Glasgow last year. Current global distribution is completely inequitable with broad stroke income
tax breaks predominantly benefiting the highest income earners in society. PBA imagines a scenario
with very high carbon prices but with quite limited international cooperation as a result.
PBB suggests lower carbon prices but with a much better flow of international cooperation, but both
policy baskets phase out fossil fuel subsidies and introduce regulatory mandates for technologies
and they both include lump sum tax break payments that overwhelmingly benefit the lowest earners
in society resulting in welfare gains of about 20 percent by 2030 compared to existing policies.
But at the same time both PBA and PBB scenarios generate a net increase in the number of jobs
and growth in global GDP by 2030 that's more than two percent better than current policy
projections. In practice that means that while the rapid phase out of fossil fuels combined with
reductions in nuclear energy will result in something like 15 million job losses in those
industries by 2030 compared to the current planned energy scenario, those redundancies
will be more than offset by almost 50 million new jobs in the renewable sector and other
transition-based technologies resulting in a net increase of workers in the energy sector by 2030
from 106 million in the planned energy scenario to 139 million in PBA or PBB.
Achieving universal access to modern energy by 2030 is a vital pillar of a just and inclusive
energy transition aligned with the 1.5 degree Celsius goal, the report tells us.
An estimated 758 million people were living without electricity globally in 2019.
2.6 billion had no access to clean cooking fuels and technologies. 2022 is presenting
new challenges, says IRENA, with concerns about rapidly rising energy prices and energy security.
At the same time the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate goal is slipping farther out of reach. Short of
dramatic and immediate action it'll slip away for good. Now of course a 10 or 15 minute video like
this can only really give you a snapshot of all the very detailed information provided by IRENA
in their comprehensive analysis, so as I mentioned earlier I'll leave a link in the description below
to both the 20 page executive summary and the 352 page full report! And of course as usual
if you've got views or practical experience you can share with us all on this subject
then jump down to the comments section below and leave your thoughts there.
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As always, thanks very much for watching. Have a great week,
and remember to just have a think. See you next week