Advanced Energy Solutions need accelerating

The World Economic Forum Advanced Energy Solutions Group is the catalyst for bringing together outstanding change makers, entrepreneurs, financiers, and innovators from across the world. Recently, one of its meetings was held to stimulate and encourage this initiative further. Why?

There are enormous opportunities in the clean energy transition but also so many current barriers and pitfalls.

Taking the WEF’s objectives with this group, I quote from their website:

“The World Economic Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions community aims to accelerate, from decades to years, the deployment at industrial scale of advanced solutions such as clean fuels and hydrogen, advanced nuclear, storage and carbon removal. It engages leaders in frontier segments of the energy system that drive the energy transition”.

The community helps build confidence in advanced energy solutions, provides a platform to engage leading innovators with large energy producers, energy consumers and investors, and addresses regulation and policy.

The WEF offers a wide range of communities to build a better future enabled by sustainable, inclusive, and resilient industry ecosystems.

WEF lays out a vision for this Advanced Energy Solution Group

This document proposes a vision for the advanced energy solutions industry and the key factors that will ensure success in achieving the required deployment levels in the coming years. It aims to enhance understanding and support collaboration within industry and across stakeholder groups, inform decision-making and foster best practice-sharing.

The World Economic Forum, supported by L.E.K. Consulting, shaped the vision through meetings of the Advanced Energy Solutions CEO community, interviews with senior executives and in-depth research and analysis.

This group focuses on the central role of energy storage, carbon management, small modular reactors, clean hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels in the global endeavour to reduce carbon emissions and achieve a net-zero future. These may be deemed as advanced but for me, they are critical.

The challenge is well laid out.

The net-zero emissions path in 2030 will need carbon capture and storage (CCS) to scale to 20 times the current capacity, energy storage to 35 times, clean hydrogen production 70 times and sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) 190 times. Additionally, mass deployment of new advanced nuclear reactors will be needed.

Such unprecedented capacity growth will need investment, which must grow to more than $500
billion per year by 2030. However, while progress is being made, it is significantly lagging. Publicly announced plans currently cover only a fraction of the estimated investment needs. The deployment of these advanced energy solutions needs increased speed and scale.

To quote from this vision document

This is not so much a technology readiness challenge. However, that is demanding enough as technology development needs to continue to drive down cost curves and bring new innovations to market.

The WEF sees the primary challenge in deploying advanced energy solutions over the next decade not in their technological feasibility but in confidence in these solutions. Many stakeholders recognize the need for these solutions and the opportunities they offer but are not confident enough to move at the speed and scale required.

The challenge can be broken down into technological confidence, demand confidence, business case confidence and public confidence. In essence, large energy companies, energy users, financial institutions, policy-makers and the general public need to be confident that technologies are proven safe and can deliver the most affordable path to net-zero emissions by 2030.

If confidence is the real key, the conflicting messages create this uncertain environment.

The vision points to the critical enablers of collaboration, policy and community. It is all about informing and unlocking multiple challenges to scale. Essential to driving scale are creating the demand signals, unlocking investment, spreading the risk and informing policy-making.

The ability to speed and scale are essential. Do we have a stable environment for growth and innovation, I think not. Are regulations keeping up with the speed of technical advancement or deployment, I think not. Are the solutions capable for specific needs and local challenges, I think not. Do we have a level playing field for innovation, experimentation and adoption, I think not. Do we have recognized plans that make for some accelerated phasing out of less-than-clean assets that still have “useful life” but hinder the move to clean energy? I think not.

Yes, enabling and informing are both key to the energy transition yet we stay “trapped” or hostage to what we know and have in place. To significantly create change does need a very different approach to energy transition thinking, and that has not emerged; it is highly fractured.

The higher Ecosystem need

If the WEF are one of the bodies to enact the change, we need to think of a higher order as the ones we have all got so caught up in “the weeds” and entanglement catering to multiple pressure groups; they are not enabling and fostering enough this higher-order we need. I shudder when you consider the CoP events each year. Moving the world back to the Charter agreed upon in Paris, known as the Paris Agreement, would peel away much of the entanglements we have weaved into the energy transition.

We need a fresh Natural Ecosystem approach.

In a biological ecosystem, ( I quote) “organisms function independently in that their behaviour is designed to promote their own survival. At the same time, they are deeply interdependent – their individual survival depends on their mutual interactions and exchanges essential to driving scale, creating the demand signals, unlocking investment, spreading the risk and informing policy-making.” We need a new energy ecosystem approach.”

An ecosystem, therefore, requires both grand diversity and collaboration. We need a significant reordering of this for lifting up the Energy Transition into that higher order that is needed to achieve any successful Energy Transformation that enables us in our diversity to have a Climate that we can thrive and not just survive.

***I recommend reading this paper where the quote comes from “What Corporates Can Do to Help an Innovation Ecosystem Thrive – and Why They Should Do It” by Diana Joseph, Susan Windham-bannister and Mikel Mangold.

***To learn more about the ‘How’ of Clean Tech Innovation, listen In to this Edition of ‘Radio Davos‘ Podcast