Radical changes needed: experts
Meeting climate targets will require massive technological advances
PARIS— Keeping the average global temperature from rising more than 2 C will take a Herculean effort from the world community.
Holding warming below 1.5 C, a target many countries — including Canada — are now backing? That’s going to require radically new innovations.
That was the take-away message at the Paris climate summit’s “innovation day” panel Tuesday.
The scope of the challenge ahead was best illustrated by Ajay Mathur, the head of India’s bureau of energy efficiency. His country’s middle class — which could double to half a billion people before 2030 — is going to increasingly demand something North Americans take for granted, he said.
“As living standards increase and as productivity increases, one of the largest areas of consumption of energy is air conditioning,” said Mathur.
“We need people to have air conditioning, we need it to be amazingly efficient — possibly using at least half if not a third as much energy as we use today — and affordable as well,” he added. “How do we make that happen?”
It’s the kind of question Bill Gates must have asked himself before assembling a group of 28 billionaires from 10 different countries for his Breakthrough Energy Coalition, announced on the first day of the summit.
That question is why 20 countries, including Canada, revealed the same day they would be doubling their respective national investments in clean energy research and development as part of an initiative called Mission Innovation.
“Energy is at the heart of the Paris agreement, because energy is responsible for two-thirds of the emis- sions causing climate change,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. “We need (energy) technology innovation for at least two reasons. One is to bring the cost of clean technologies down. Second is to make them more effective.
“If we are not able to accelerate technological innovation, we may well fail to reach our climate agreements,” he said.
India has signalled that it will continue to depend on coal for power generation for the foreseeable future as it tries to bring basic grid access to 300 million citizens.
Also, it will increasingly need to supply more electricity to its booming middle class. By 2020, that will make the country the world’s largest importer of coal.
But India isn’t opposed to reducing its dependence on coal. Mathur said earlier in the UN negotiations that his country would restrict coal use if it had help paying for what it currently sees as more expensive green energy. The Breakthrough Energy and Mission Innovation coalitions aim to break down that kind of barrier through public-private collaboration. Capital that’s dedicated to the effort will be “much more patient, and much more risk tolerant than the average energy investor,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz.
“We are still in the very early stages of the program design,” he added, explaining that the creation of a joint innovation road map will likely be one of their first moves. “We’ll be able to map out some of the critical technology directions that we think will be transformational.”
During the panel, Moniz was asked about the strategy he preferred: aggressive deployment of existing lowcarbon technologies today, or a focus on developing better technologies for tomorrow?
“It’s not an either-or,” Moniz said, pointing to a rapid build-out of solar and wind facilities that has accelerated with falling costs and increased efficiency.
He pointed out that just since the 2009 Copenhagen summit there have been cost reductions of between 40 and 90 per cent for land- based wind, solar, batteries and LEDs.
“That’s fantastic,” he said. “Clearly, we have technologies that are experiencing rapid increases in deployment precisely because there has been innovation . . . it creates a virtuous cycle.”
But he said it’s not enough. Energy storage technology, for example, is in desperate need of innovation dollars and will need to become much less expensive for countries to meet their current reduction commitments; and still, it still won’t get us to 2 C.
“We have a lot of tools to work with, but we need to keep driving down that future. With more ambition with time, including cost reduction in technologies, then we’ll be able to squeeze down to those more attractive targets, like 2 degrees and below.” This article is part of a series produced in partnership by the Toronto Star and Tides Canada to address a range of pressing climate issues in Canada during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Tides Canada is supporting this partnership to increase public awareness and dialogue around the impacts of climate change on Canada’s economy and communities. The Toronto Star has full editorial control and responsibility to ensure stories are rigorously edited in order to meet its editorial standards.