Energy Production

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^‍Electricity & Heat

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* 23% direct, of which 20% are repeated in industry and buildings as indirect emissions and 3% is lost in the grid.‍

Most emissions in the energy sector come from producing electricity. We burn fossil fuels to create electricity (and some heat), which we use to light our homes and power our factories. To get to net zero, not only do we need to decarbonize all of the electricity we use today, we need to produce a whole lot more. As one of the key rules to get to net zero is to ‘electrify everything’ we will need a whole lot more electricity in 2050 vs today (about 2-3x more)—all of which we’ll have to produce sustainably.

Fortunately, renewables are becoming so cheap that they are scaling rapidly. In 2023 the world built 500 GW of renewable electricity capacity (50% more than in 2022) - bringing the share of renewables in our global power mix to 30%. By 2028, almost all newly added power capacity worldwide is expected to be renewable. Still, we are not yet on track to triple renewable power by 2030. Also, we need to meet the intermittency challenge: how to ensure 24/7 power while the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.
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₀₁ Solar and wind power

Solar and wind power are already the cheapest source of electricity for two-thirds of the world, including Western Europe, the Americas, China and India. The cost of solar power has fallen dramatically - by nearly 90% over the last 10 years - and is expected to become cheaper still. Wind power faces more challenges. While costs have also declined, higher material and labor costs as well as interest rates are currently limiting its growth.
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₀₂ Electricity storage

Solar and wind power are great, but as the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, we need to store this electricity to use later on. There are three types of storage: short-term (day vs night), multi-day (windy vs non-windy day) and seasonal (summer vs winter). However, storing electricity isn’t easy as electrons love to move around. The most mature technology to store electricity today is pumped storage hydrogen, which stores energy by pumping it up, generating power as water flows back down. As we don’t always have the required height differences, there are many other innovations under development.
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₀₃ Low-carbon baseload power

Baseload power refers to electricity sources that can run 24/7. While we might be able to run the grid on only variable renewable power and storage, some consistent power supplies would make our grid more stable and our power supply more reliable.
Today, nuclear power is our main source of low-carbon baseload power. In the near future, ‘advanced nuclear’ power is expected to play a role. These nuclear facilities will be smaller, cheaper, and easier to operate. Next to that, some companies are working to make nuclear fusion (combining rather than splitting molecules, aka what the sun does) a reality. Next to that, geothermal power is expected to play a role. Some places already use this heat beneath our feet, but further innovation is needed to extract this heat in a cost-effective way in more geographies.
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₀₄ Enablers

Next to transforming products and production processes away from fossil fuels, we also need climate solutions to become as efficient and accessible as possible. Enablers (software) can help optimize the performance of hardware climate technologies, and manage and secure our electricity grid better.
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Fuel production

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Fossil fuels have powered our industrialization, and are hence the source of much of today’s wealth. Next to the GHG emissions that come from burning those fuels for power, industrial heat or transportation, extracting and refining fossil fuels to get that fuel also requires a lot of energy, contributing to 10% of global GHG emissions. While there is an increasing shift towards electric vehicles powered by batteries or fuel cells, there are certain applications and processes where full electrification is challenging or impractical. Think about ships, cement production, and airplanes. For these use cases, we still need to produce fuel but then in a cleaner way.
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₀₁ Biomass, -gas and -fuels

Bioenergy accounts for approximately 7% of global energy consumption today - of which more than half comes from burning wood. This number could rise to 18% by 2050, especially if we figure out how to biomass it more efficiently.The first thing to use much more of is organic waste. Organic waste, like household waste, agricultural waste, manure, and sewage water all release methane as they decompose. As methane is a potent greenhouse gas (25x more potent than CO2)*, by letting that methane enter the atmosphere we’re not only wasting that energy, but accelerating global warming.  
However, if we control biomass’s decomposition, and capture the methane this produces, we can transform it into biogas and fertilizers to actually have a positive impact on emissions. Since biomass is limited (there is 11-16x less biomass supply than there is potential demand in 2050*), we ideally need technologies that are highly efficient, for applications where no good net-zero alternatives are available yet, and that do not compete with food & agriculture and forestry markets.
This subsector is discussed under energy production, but its products will be used to solve hard-to-abate sectors including shipping and aviation, as well as carbon capture.
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₀₂ Hydrogen

Today, hydrogen is mainly used in the refining and chemical sectors and produced using fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, and thus responsible for significant annual emissions. We need these dirty-hydrogen demanding industries to commit to clean hydrogen that is produced with renewable energy, often through a process called electrolysis. Clean hydrogen could also fill many other roles in the net-zero transition, including electricity storage, high temperature applications, long distance transport such as shipping and aviation, and it could even replace natural gas in our existing pipelines. For this to happen, we need a bigger global clean hydrogen demand while lowering the cost of producing it.
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₀₃ Synthetic fuels

Synfuels are synthetic fuels that can replace conventional fuels such as kerosene and biofuels. To produce them, processes like electrolysis split water into clean hydrogen (see the ‘Hydrogen’ solution area) and oxygen atoms. The isolated hydrogen is then combined with atmospheric CO2 that is extracted from the air (see the ‘Carbon management’ sector) to make syngas. There are several ways to produce the actual synfuel, ranging from the traditional multi-step Fischer-Tropsch process to more simplified processes, to create liquid fuels with identical properties to fossil fuels.
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₀₄ Gas leakage detection

Gas leakage detection is the process of identifying and locating the escape of gas from a system or a pipeline (e.g. at hydrogen production plants). We need gas leakage detection because it can help us to prevent accidents such as severe gas explosions, reduce emissions (by preventing or minimizing the escape of methane), and improve efficiency which can save energy and resources by avoiding fuel wastage or pipeline damage.
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