Technology’s role in a climate solution

Human-induced climate change is a reality—already happening. If emissions of greenhouse gases are not reduced drastically in the next couple of decades, the situation will get significantly worse by century's end. What's needed is a set of changes in the global energy economy so that it is based on non-polluting resources instead of, primarily, on fossil fuels. As with most things, though, the devil is in the details.

The details are quite complicated where climate change is concerned. Each country must devise an energy-transition strategy that is both appropriate to its national circumstances and consistent with global emissions goals.

After years of disappointing climate commitments from nations around the world, lately some positive momentum has been evident. Ahead of the major international climate conference scheduled to begin in Paris in November, about three-quarters of the world's nations have submitted plans—known as intended nationally determined contributions—describing how they will, over time, manage a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. But so far these plans, taken together, would only reduce the trajectory of global temperature increase to about 3 degrees Celsius above pre–Industrial Revolution temperatures—well above the internationally agreed target of 2 degrees. In Paris, it's hoped that nations will commit to reductions greater than they've already promised. But if the conference fails to deliver aggregate reductions that would limit warming to 2 degrees, the idea is that national targets would be "ratcheted up" in the future at five-year intervals.

Low emissions as a co-benefit. If the world is to achieve a successful clean-energy transition, nations must significantly alter their outlooks toward technological approaches to climate change. Technological options for a clean-energy future mustn't be seen as burdens or costs—rather, they are opportunities for nations to deliver a better, cleaner, and more efficient future to their citizens.

My own country, Bangladesh, is highly vulnerable to climate change. With its flat topography, propensity to flooding, and dependence on the annual monsoon, Bangladesh has much to fear from stronger cyclones, increased drought, encroaching salinity, and the like. Complicating matters is that Bangladesh's 170 million people, more than 30 percent of whom live below the poverty line, inhabit a country of about 130,000 square kilometers, giving Bangladesh one of the world's highest population densities.

But though Bangladesh is a poor country—and is responsible for less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—it is making major strides in providing solar energy to its people. Well in excess of 3 million solar home systems have already been installed, and an additional 70,000 are coming on line each month. This makes Bangladesh's program for solar home systems the fastest-growing in the world.

Solar power isn't expanding in Bangladesh primarily for mitigation purposes—though that is a welcome co-benefit. Rather, Bangladesh is investing intensively in solar home systems in order to satisfy demand for household electricity, even for the poorest households. Thus the most popular systems are relatively small—sufficient to power some light bulbs, a radio, and a television. For customers, the main attractions are enabling children to do homework after dark and dispensing with dirty kerosene lamps. In fact, customers often purchase solar home systems using loans that are cheaper to repay than kerosene is to buy.

This is possible in part because of a public-private partnership. A company called Infrastructure Development Company Limited provides low-cost loans to private franchisees around the country, who then provide customers with solar home systems (usually bought on credit) and service after the sale. The government and the private sector are now exploring ways to provide larger photovoltaic systems that could provide energy for pumping irrigation water and for other commercial and industrial uses. The bottom line is that solar energy has become a major part of the energy mix in Bangladesh, and though fossil-fuel power generation is still required, dependence on fossil fuels will diminish over time.

Such transitions from fossil fuels to clean-energy technologies must become the norm in every country—rich and poor alike—if climate change is to be tackled successfully. Circumstances will differ from nation to nation, as will the technologies that countries choose to invest in. But the most successful countries will be those that make the quickest transition to the post–fossil fuel era.

To address climate change, the world needs to shift away from fossil fuels and move toward predominantly low-carbon, renewable-based energy systems. Clearly, this requires technological innovation—but technological change is not the hardest part. The necessary technologies already exist. They are improving rapidly as they are deployed at scale.

The difficult parts of the renewable energy transition are shifting away from the existing infrastructure for fossil fuel–based energy systems and overcoming political, institutional, and cultural resistance to change. Such resistance is quite strong—because fossil fuels are deeply embedded not only in the technology of energy systems but also in financial systems, geopolitics, institutions, and culture. Responding to climate change, therefore, requires not just investments in technological innovation but also a commitment to changing institutions, economic systems, and social systems—and a commitment as well to parallel political change. These changes can in turn decrease reliance on carbon-intensive fossil fuels and enable renewable technologies to flourish.

Unanticipated shifts. Deploying renewable energy at scale means fundamentally changing the ways in which energy is produced, used, and distributed. It means re-evaluating and reframing long-held cultural and institutional assumptions about energy planning. It also requires learning-by-doing as utilities, regulators, renewable energy developers, communities, and customers gain experience in implementing renewable energy systems. With this practical experience, individuals and organizations can let go of some of the conventional wisdom surrounding the energy sector.

The good news is that conventional wisdom is already being challenged. Assumptions are already changing. Social learning is already happening. And all this is occurring as renewable energy expands at a rate faster than anticipated under almost all projections.

Indeed, a striking demonstration of the need to change assumptions and let go of conventional wisdom can be seen in many of the forecasts regarding renewable energy growth that were ventured over the last 15 years or so. Well-informed energy organizations including the International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information Administration, and the Global Energy Assessment Scenario Database grossly underestimated how quickly renewable capacity would grow. The 1999 US Annual Energy Outlook, for example, projected that only 800 megawatts of wind power would be added in the United States between 2000 and 2020 because wind was too expensive compared to other resources. But in fact, due to an interlinked set of policy incentives, technology advancements, decreases in cost, social acceptance, and market shifts, almost 70 gigawatts of wind power have already been added in the United States—nearly two orders of magnitude more than projected, and more than five years quicker. (Surprisingly, the projections that have most closely matched renewable energy's actual growth rate have come from the environmental advocacy organization Greenpeace.)

A real-life example of social learning and changed assumptions comes from the Upper Midwest of the United States, where massive deployments of large-scale wind power have changed how electricity markets operate. Major shifts in energy market rules and in methods for controlling wind turbines—unanticipated 10 years ago—now allow wind power generators to place bids in day-ahead electricity markets, just as would happen with electricity produced through any other technology. Wind power generators can then "true up" their bids 10 minutes before dispatch, allowing for accurate bids despite the variability of wind resources.

Rooftop solar photovoltaic energy provides another example. Rooftop solar, by allowing people to generate their own electricity, has provided individuals, households, and communities with a fundamentally new mechanism for engaging with energy systems. This amounts to a cultural shift in energy production. New notions of the "prosumer"—an individual who produces his or her own electricity—have changed the roles of (and empowered) individual citizens in energy systems.

In Austin, Texas, rapid development of solar photovoltaic energy has challenged and ultimately altered assumptions, for instance about the optimal orientation of solar panels. It's true that, over the course of a year, south-oriented solar panels produce the most electricity. But during hours of peak demand, when electricity production is particularly valuable to electric utilities, west-facing panels produce more. This realization has created an alignment between utilities' incentives and the expansion of rooftop solar.

But though some utilities accept and even embrace distributed generation sources such as photovoltaic energy, others are less accommodating. In fact, political mobilization against solar energy is growing rapidly. Unfortunately, due to renewable energy's association with the "controversial" subject of climate change and its potential to destabilize fossil fuel dependencies, renewables in general have become divisive and partisan in the United States.

Nonetheless, due to the interplay between technological innovation and political, institutional, and cultural change, the frontiers of the possible are shifting. And while no one can predict exactly how energy systems will evolve as the world attempts to respond to climate change, this much is clear: Scaling up renewable energy will continue to challenge conventional wisdom, will upset long-held assumptions about the energy sector, and will require ongoing social learning.

Humans have a unique ability to develop technology that results in conversion of energy. When hunter-gatherers adopted agriculture, they gradually increased their energy use 1,000-fold through technology developments such as domesticating draft animals and using fire to clear land, make bricks, and smelt metals. The emergence of industrial societies entailed another 50-fold increase.

Human beings habitually prioritize their own right to nature over other species' rights to it; energy growth has depended on this habit.  It has also depended on private ownership of nature, which allows an investor—individual, enterprise, state—to make small energy investments that deliver large amounts of surplus energy. Surplus energy spurs human development and lifestyle changes, and the desire for development drives further energy growth.

Fossil fuels, with their high energy density, have played a major role in the human growth story. In 2012, the most recent year for which International Energy Agency figures are available, fossil fuels provided 82 percent of the world's primary energy—and they are responsible, along with land use changes, for annual emissions of about 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Half of those emissions are not sequestered back to the Earth. This is the main cause of global warming.

What's the solution? It comes in two parts—one technological and the other political and philosophical. Both halves of the solution must be implemented if the more serious ravages of global warming are to be avoided.

Problems everywhere. First, the technological side. Human beings must quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But will any of the major technological approaches to reducing emissions actually work?

One candidate solution is to derive energy from biomass, which already provides 10 percent of the energy people use. Biomass is a widespread resource and can easily be converted to provide energy services. Unfortunately, biomass is already over-harvested—people use 16 percent of the energy that plants produce each year. Further harvesting will only exacerbate the ugly environmental gashes on the planet that biomass extraction, through deforestation and other land use changes, has already caused.

Hydropower provides 2.4 percent of the world's primary energy, but 40 percent of hydropower's deployable potential has been tapped. Resistance to dams has increased because dams destroy upstream forests and agricultural land; downstream areas can flood when excess water is released from reservoirs. Hydropower is unlikely to be expanded much except in some hilly regions.

Nuclear energy, meanwhile, provides about 5 percent of human beings' energy requirements. But the world is moving away from thermal nuclear energy. It is dirty—uranium mining carries serious health consequences, and about 300,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel are stored at reactor sites around the world. It is unsafe—already there have been three major accidents at power reactors. It is open to misuse—enriched uranium can be diverted to make bombs. And it is expensive—much costlier than fossil fuels.

Next, concentrated solar power and photovoltaics, along with wind, provide about 1 percent of global energy. These sources are growing at 15 to 40 percent a year, but have several drawbacks. They suffer from intermittence. They can only be sited at favorable locations. They cannot be used directly for locomotion. They have environmental impacts that aren't often discussed. Wind facilities and photovoltaic plants require significantly more land than do fossil fuel plants. Realistic estimates suggest that deployable wind energy can satisfy only 5 percent of today’s global energy demand, and significant amounts of carbon dioxide are emitted in the manufacture of both wind and solar equipment. And these energy sources are still more expensive than fossil fuels.

What about capturing and storing carbon dioxide so it's never released into the atmosphere? For several reasons, enthusiasm for carbon capture and storage (CCS) has waned. To begin with, only 14 CCS projects are operational, with eight more under construction. Together, their capacity represents only one-tenth of 1 percent of current carbon dioxide emissions. And many of these projects are combined with enhanced oil recovery projects—which neutralize the reductions in emissions achieved by capture and storage.

Energy efficiency, meanwhile, is sometimes seen as an easy route to decreasing emissions. But there is a limit to how much can be achieved through efficiency. Moreover, the Jevons paradox comes into play—if energy availability increases due to greater efficiency, energy will become cheaper and consumption will rise.

A different approach. So far, the countries that have experienced the most success in moving away from fossil fuels are Germany and Cuba. Germany guarantees fixed tariffs to producers of renewable energy. Cuba has focused on efficiency and also organic farming, which conserves energy through its lower water requirements, reduced use of farm equipment, and rejection of fertilizers and pesticides. The German model might be replicated in developed countries, but not in developing ones. A large percentage of Germany's renewable-generator owners are individuals, cooperatives, or communities, and such entities in developing nations lack the capital to invest in renewable energy. The Cuban experience is even more difficult to replicate, as organic farming is not as remunerative as commercial cropping.

For civilization to continue sustainably, human beings must shift from fossil fuels to solar energy—despite the technical problems. And investments are needed in biotic and other low-energy innovations. But in the end, global energy consumption must be reduced by something on the order of 60 percent. This will require a number of profound non-technological changes. Energy equity must be established among the world's nations—people in wealthy countries should not, as they do today, use hundreds of times as much energy as people in the poorest countries. Ownership rights over nature must be discarded in favor of the right to use nature without destroying it. The global economy must prioritize "risk minimization for all" over "gain maximization for a few." A steady-state economy—a sustainable economy that maintains nature’s balance—must be established.

The implications of these changes are radical. The United States and Canada must reduce their energy consumption by about 90 percent; Europe, Australasia, and Japan must do so by about 75 percent. Cities must shrink drastically and energy differentials between urban and rural areas must disappear. Localism must be prioritized and governance decentralized. Uniform risk and emissions standards must be implemented for everyone.

Technological solutions to climate change will be difficult to implement, but these political and philosophical challenges will be even tougher. They can be overcome, however, if people themselves fight for the demands that many made at last year's climate marches: "Keep the climate, change the economy!"

If such demands result in quick and concrete change, hope remains that human beings can form sustainable, equitable, and peaceful societies. Otherwise, global warming will enforce its own set of extremely painful changes.