For anyone who thinks that EVs just aren’t all that, I would strongly recommend you confront your really obvious biases

Michael

<h2>The perils of motivated thinking</h2>
Recently,&nbsp;Visual Capitalist&nbsp;published an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/life-cycle-emissions-evs-vs-combustion-engine-vehicles/">infographic of EV vs hybrid vs ICE vehicles</a>&nbsp;that was pretty misleading. It showed EVs having full lifecycle emissions barely better than hybrids, and over 70% of those of internal combustion vehicles. They were still better by 29% or so, but the gap was narrow.
Naturally, a bunch of the usual suspects immediately started promoting this as proof that EVs weren&rsquo;t all that and that their preferred solutions were obviously much better. Hydrogen types undoubtedly like it. Personally, I spotted it on LinkedIn, where a UK internal combustion engine emissions testing CEO and honorary researcher of internal combustion emissions at one of the UK&rsquo;s top universities, i.e., a person whose livelihood is entirely bound up with the continued existence of internal combustion engines, posted it with little context except for the gloss that clearly EVs weren&rsquo;t all they were stacked up to be, and that other alternatives should be pursued. I won&rsquo;t name and shame.
Yes, there was a lot of motivated thinking there. Of course, 29% better is about what the internal combustion vehicle industry has managed in the past 50 years, so claiming it&rsquo;s not all that or that there is a lot of wiggle room in engines for lowering emissions is nonsense. The motivated thinker was grasping at straws, which is where things are at these days.
<h2>The veracity of the data</h2>
So what&rsquo;s the provenance of the data underpinning&nbsp;Visual Capitalist&rsquo;s infographic. Is it accurate? Well, no, at best it is deeply misleading and misrepresents the report it was based on. They took the worst case global scenario from the report and used that as the basis for the infographic. It still showed battery-electric vehicles were better than the alternatives, but not by nearly as wide a margin as the actual reality, or what the report was talking about.
The report itself was by the management consulting firm <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/kearney/" data-attribute-index="4" data-entity-type="MINI_COMPANY">Kearney</a>. It is a leading global consultancy with over 4,200 people working in more than 40 countries. It works with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500, as well as with the most influential governmental and non-profit organizations. Not BCG, not Accenture, not McKinsey, but&nbsp;<a href="https://managementconsulted.com/top-consulting-firms/#rankings">in the top 10 or 15</a>.
The report in question is the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.kearney.com/industry/automotive/article/-/insights/polestar-and-rivian-pathway-report-">Polestar and Rivian pathway report</a>, and it&rsquo;s worth reading. The numbers that&nbsp;Visual Capitalist&nbsp;cherry-picked from it are the worst case scenario with current global electricity CO2e emissions and unabated steel manufacturing emissions. Oh, and&nbsp;Visual Capitalist&nbsp;might have done some other fudging, as the numbers they use are pretty hard to spot in the report that it is basing its infographic on. They assume best case car mileage from Europe and kWh per 100 km for EVs that are inflated by a third or so, for example. Best case in the world on one hand, and inflated and wrong on the other.
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What&rsquo;s that worst case scenario? Well, all current electrical generation emissions globally and current unabated steel emissions globally. This is distinctly not the case in the rapidly decarbonizing West. Let&rsquo;s take the USA for example, where the UCSUSA has been updating its reporting annually for years and finding <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/driving-cleaner">much better full lifecycle emissions</a>, and increasing gaps every year.
The Kearney report&rsquo;s purpose is not to say that EV emissions are a problem, even in the worst case scenario. That&rsquo;s not what the report is about. Its focus is on continuing to decarbonize electricity, decarbonize supply chains, and decarbonize steel and other metals. You know, what the world is already doing. It&rsquo;s more of a reminder that every electric car is going to become lower carbon over time and that every year the embodied carbon in a car will be declining as well.
It wasn&rsquo;t meant to provide the usual suspects with ammunition to attack a major decarbonization wedge, but that&rsquo;s how the usual suspects are using it of course. No good deed goes unpunished.
<h2>Why share it?</h2>
I&rsquo;ve used&nbsp;Visual Capitalist&nbsp;material without thinking much about it. Sometimes it&rsquo;s good, like its look at&nbsp;<a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/11/comparing-the-us-china-on-climate-economy-other-outcomes-should-be-deeply-humbling-for-america/">10 years of global EV sales</a>, or its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-2021-visualized/">minerals mining volumes infographic</a>. Sometimes it uses credible sources and provides credible infographics as a result.
And sometimes it doesn&rsquo;t. Why might that be? Well, let&rsquo;s ask about&nbsp;Visual Capitalist&rsquo;s&nbsp;reason for being. Is it a dispassionate assessor of data, like&nbsp;<a href="https://ourworldindata.org/">Our World In Data</a>? Is it a tracker of a major decarbonization effort, such as Germany&rsquo;s energiewende-like&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cleanenergywire.org/">Clean Energy Wire</a>? Well, no. It&rsquo;s a profit-focused infographic company that&rsquo;s using publicly available data to make infographics to drive ad revenue and as a freemium marketing tool for consulting and insight gigs with Fortune 500 companies. It&rsquo;s a business, not an academic institute or NGO. It&rsquo;s in the business of taking data it finds and making pictures from it.
Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they get it wrong. But they have to churn out infographics to stay fresh. And infographics don&rsquo;t lend themselves to post-publication expert review and revision, as text does. It takes a lot more to whip an infographic into shape, and once it&rsquo;s done and published, there&rsquo;s very little value in going back and correcting it. So&nbsp;Visual Capitalist&nbsp;doesn&rsquo;t generally respond to or fix any of its problems.
But still, results like this that pretty much counter what every other independent assessment and publication has found are pretty hard to accept. What gives with the people like the aforementioned motivated thinker amplifying it without nuance and with a bad hot take to its thousands of followers on a professional networking site? Don&rsquo;t they realize how much that damages their credibility?

Well, no. That&rsquo;s not the way that humans work. We&rsquo;re subject to cognitive biases that mean we often do stupid things for bad reasons and think that they are smart things for good reasons. And often we are encouraged in this.
Comments on the LinkedIn post were split between people pointing out the challenges with the infographic, and people loudly supporting the poster&rsquo;s message and saying of course EVs were terrible, and we really needed synthetic fuels or hydrogen or ammonia, or that EV batteries were toxic waste that was going to end up in land fills. Did the poster edit their original post to add nuance or soften their claim that &ldquo;BEVs are better, but not so much better, than ICE and especially hybrids?&rdquo;
No, no they didn&rsquo;t. They were sufficiently supported in their bias that they felt they had provided sufficient nuance already. That&rsquo;s how confirmation bias works. Highly credible material that disagrees with your opinion is considered to be not authoritative. Very weak material that supports your opinion is considered to be more authoritative. A sprinkling of supportive statements outweighs a thick coating of statements opposing your perspective.
For anyone who thinks that the recent Visual Capitalist infographic proves that EVs just aren&rsquo;t all that, I would strongly recommend you confront your really obvious biases. Start here:&nbsp;<a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/05/06/seeing-climate-solutions-clearly-through-biases-missing-data-is-challenging/">Seeing Climate Solutions Clearly Through Biases &amp; Missing Data Is Challenging</a>. Still not naming names, but an honorary research fellows at a top 15 university really shouldn&rsquo;t be so transparently grasping at straws.
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This article is also published on <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/06/30/artificially-inflated-ev-emissions-amplified-by-usual-anti-ev-types/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CleanTechnica</a>. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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Artificially inflated EV emissions amplified by usual anti-EV types

Dreams of soaring through the air and out of the atmosphere entirely have inspired humans for thousands of years. And unsurprisingly, those dreams have attracted innumerable people who want to cash in on starry-eyed investors. But the space also attracts clear-eyed engineers and business people working to move people and goods around the world and into orbit.

Aerospace and aviation is a space flush with sexy nonsense, but there’s solid work being done

Marine shipping is considered to be a hard decarbonization target, but that actually isn’t true. It’s a small fraction of ground transportation in terms of fossil fuel consumption, a lot of it is pretty short haul, and there are obvious wedges. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of hype and hopium in the space.

And so, a walk through a simple taxonomy of various marine transportation overhyped fluff and practical but often ignored solutions.

Marine Shipping has to decarbonize and hype is strong around sexy but foolish solutions

The answer for virtually all ground transportation outside of niches like the military and a fraction of the offroad market is the same: direct electrification. Everything will have electric motors powered by batteries or grid-ties or a combination of the two. And every form of ground transportation will look pretty much like current vehicles.

All ground transportation will be electric, but you wouldn’t know it from media and investors

Outside of pipelines, a transportation segment which will be going away with peak fossil fuel demand and be replaced by HVDC transmission, railroads offer the lowest carbon form of moving freight, and of course move people too. But being relatively low carbon does not mean that rail doesn’t need to decarbonize further. Locomotives are burning diesel and diesel is still a fossil fuel with carbon emissions that cause global warming.

Outside of pipelines, a transportation segment which will be going away with peak fossil fuel demand and be replaced by HVDC transmission, railroads offer the lowest carbon form of moving freight, and of course move people too. But being relatively low carbon does not mean that rail doesn’t need to decarbonize further. Locomotives are burning diesel and diesel is still a fossil fuel with carbon emissions that cause global warming.
Mode shifting freight to rail from road makes a great deal of sense where that’s viable. That’s one of the intentions of the new US transportation blueprint, although the <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/03/01/us-transportation-blueprint-good-intentions-weak-diagnosis-possibly-irrelevant/">diagnosis of freight transportation mode challenges</a> in the blueprint is weak, so the reality will be more road freight in North America. As Richard Rumelt’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/208668/good-strategy-bad-strategy-by-richard-rumelt/9780307886231">Good Strategy / Bad Strategy</a> points out, if you misdiagnose the situation, it doesn’t matter how good your policies or action plans are.
Having had Canadian National Railway (CNR) and Canada’s VIA Rail as clients in the past, a stint which included <a href="https://www.insidelogistics.ca/features/working-on-the-railroad/">clambering over a diesel electric locomotive in one of CNR’s yards while taking a rail operations course</a> with them to understand the business, I have some insight into the transportation mode and its challenges. A key point is that locomotives are diesel-electric hybrids. The diesel engine is a generator of electricity for electric traction motors. And just like electric cars, when the motors are used for braking, they generate electricity. Unlike cars, most diesel-electric locomotives don’t store the electricity in batteries, but divert it to rooftop resistance coils to get rid of it.
Diesel electric locomotives are bad neighbors in urban areas. Due to the nature of the diesel generator, it’s usually left running when it will be used again within several hours, and if it’s on a siding near residences, the low-frequency sound is challenging for those trying to sleep nearby. Similarly, the large diesel generator pushes a lot of particulate matter and other air pollutants into the air. In rural areas, this is generally an acceptable situation, but trains deliver goods to where people and industry are, and humanity has been moving into cities for centuries, a trend that’s accelerating.
But the electric part of the diesel-electric locomotive leads to a simple answer, one which will be absolutely no surprise to the roughly 3.3 billion people who live in India, Europe, China and Russia. Overhead catenary lines like those frequently used in electric light rail and streetcars in cities can power the electric motors instead of the diesel generator. And shipping containers full of batteries can power the electric motors too.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/12e309c6acb765622059612e97f8d4aad29e0066.png" alt="Map of electrification of rail penetration in major geographies and economies globally by author">
Most of the biggest economies in the world have a majority of their rail lines electrified, with increasing electrification with each passing year. India is leading in this, with an aggressive strategy that has led to 83% broad-gauge electrification and a target of full electrification in 2024. China has built 40,000 km of high-speed, grid-tied passenger and freight rail since 2007, and is at 72% overall rail electrification. Europe is at 60%, and major sub-national jurisdictions like <a href="https://www.railtech.com/rolling-stock/2022/11/03/german-state-baden-wurttemberg-finds-battery-to-be-best-solution-for-diesel-alternative-trains/">Baden-Württemberg have performed test deployments</a> of hydrogen, grid-tying and battery-grid-tied hybrid models and have made it clear that the answer is grid-tied and batteries, as they are a third the cost of hydrogen. The longest rail line in the world, the 9,289 kilometer Trans-Siberian Railway is grid-tied.
The advantages of electrification are obvious. Renewable electricity powering electric motors is incredibly efficient, with the only losses being transmission and distribution. With HVDC transmission, losses are a meager 3%-3.5% per thousand kilometers, and so it’s mostly distribution losses. Renewable electricity is obviously very low-carbon full lifecycle and non-polluting. Not using the diesel generator in the locomotive means that locomotives are much quieter, emit no pollution and emit no greenhouse gasses. When batteries are required, for example in tunnels which are too expensive to heighten and electrify, the 85% round trip efficiency is not problematic.
As rail operators are required to decarbonize by some combination of carbon pricing and regulatory pressure, electrification with its clear advantages is chosen globally.
Except in North America.
Canada and Mexico have historically followed the rail lead of the USA. Tracks cross borders in multiple locations, and carriers such as CNR run operations in all Canadian provinces and a third of US states. Other operators cross the Mexican border just as frequently. The hundreds of thousands of freight locomotives might operate one month in Mexico, another six months in the USA and then two months in Canada. Interoperability of the system is required, so the two smaller countries sharing the continent might find it hard to go their own ways. Given the advantages of electrification and the obvious strategy of pairing HVDC along rail lines with electrification, these countries may choose to do so regardless. As the rest of the world shows, mixed electrified and non-electrified rail interoperates just fine, and one hopes that Canadian and Mexican freight strategists and policy makers choose the more rational option, because the USA isn’t.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/90361348665015e895e5090c1821ad4b6aa7074b.png" alt="US transportation decarbonization blueprint January 2023">
The USA released its <a href="https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-01/the-us-national-blueprint-for-transportation-decarbonization.pdf">transportation decarbonization blueprint</a> recently. It’s much better than the USA’s hydrogen strategy from late 2022, but the bar that strategy set was low as it was assigned to and released by the Department of Energy not the Department of Commerce with input from the other agencies such as Agriculture, Energy and Transportation. The transportation blueprint, on the other hand, was a collaboration between Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency. As such, it frames decarbonization much better, but still has significant strategic misses.
The blueprint authors appear to have listened too much to the Association of American Railroads (AAR), which has a <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/20/association-of-american-rail-aligned-with-us-dot-in-derailing-electrification/">strong anti-electrification position</a>. That association represents the owners of the rails and operators, and there are about 700 rail owners in the USA. In Canada, rail is owned by CNR or CPR, while in Mexico it’s nationally owned as is the case in the rest of the world, but the operators are private. And all of those private operators are heavily resistant to change.
It’s understandable, if wrong-headed. When I was dealing with CNR in 2010, it touted its green credentials as the lowest carbon form of freight transportation, and considered the requirement for change to be something other industries had to deal with. As an example, <a href="https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/the-csx-advantage/fuel-efficiency/#:~:text=(19%20tons%20x%20500%20miles,3%2C049%20gallons%20of%20diesel%20fuel.">rail operator CXR’s reports</a> claim that they are about four times more efficient at moving freight than road transportation with a metric of 492 road ton miles per gallon (RTM/gallon), compared to road freight’s 134 RTM/gallon. That’s about 189 rail metric tons per liter vs 51 rail metric tons per liter in more globally friendly metrics, although Europe uses MJ/tonne-km of freight. It’s actually only 3.67 times as efficient, but you can understand CXR’s impetus to round up.
But that was 2010, it’s now 2023 and the climate crisis is upon us. Tesla has delivered its first electric Semis, and Pepsi is using them to run loads of chips 500 miles (800 km) and loads of its carbonated sodas 400 miles (640 km) on a single charge with today’s battery energy density. Other manufacturers such as Daimler, Volvo and BYD are delivering electric semis. In China, there are 400,000 to 500,000 electric trucks of all sizes on their roads.
The economics of electrification of road freight suggest that it&#x27;s about <a href="https://www.torquenews.com/14335/staggering-economics-tesla-semi">80% cheaper</a> to operate Tesla Semis than diesel semis. The efficiency of wind turbines to electrically driven wheels is in the range of 80% as well, while well to wheels for diesel is about 23%.
Rail’s RTM/gallon advantage is disappearing, and it’s going to disappear fast. Meanwhile, the cost per gallon is going to increase. Whether there is a price on carbon finally in the USA, or the railroads are regulated to use biofuels, or irrational behavior actually drives very expensive hydrogen or synthetic fuels into locomotives, the cost for a rail freight ton mile is going to increase.
There’s another factor. Rail has managed to get freight train labor down to two on-train staff, a conductor and an engineer. They’re trying to get rid of the conductor, which might or might not occur.
Freight trucks have a much higher ratio of people to tons of freight, which is one of the ways in which they remain more expensive and hence represents a competitive gap. And those people have regulations requiring them to take breaks, 30 minutes for every cumulative eight hours of driving, along with caps on total driving in a day. Sleeper berths allow two drivers to keep on the road longer.
But autonomous driving capabilities will permit platooning on highways, and that will mean labor flexibility with on duty and sleeping drivers across 3-5 trucks. Trucks will operate more with lower overall labor costs, once again making road freight less expensive per ton.
Rail freight costs go up. Road freight costs go down. Freight tonnage moves off of rails and onto roads. Exactly the opposite of what the US transportation decarbonization blueprint wants to happen.
This is not chaos theory math. This isn’t even calculus. This is the basic economics of freight transportation. And the electrification of freight and passenger rail globally isn’t a secret either. Electrification of rail of all types has been a common theme for approaching 200 years. The economics of electrification aren’t a secret either.
And while much quieter electric freight trucks are going to be delivering goods into major urban areas at night when roads are empty, freight trains are still going to get noise and pollution complaints and restrictions.
This won’t be a problem in the major economies of the world that aren’t in North America, of course. They are rapidly electrifying their trains so freight is operating on a level playing field of carbon, fuel cost and the negative externalities of noise and air pollution.
The countries electrifying rapidly with their populations eleven times that of the USA, four times the land area, two times the total rail length but much more efficiently used, almost five times the freight tonnage and almost 100 times the passengers, aren’t wrong while the USA is right. This is not the fallacy of appealing to the majority.
This is US rail being severe laggards on decarbonization, and as a result derailing themselves. And this will have negative consequences other than bankruptcies in US rail companies in the coming decades. Every kilometer of lower revenue rail will have less money for maintenance and less money for upgrades. At what point does US rail enter a death spiral where it can’t afford to keep rail safe, and more and more derailments like the one in Ohio, or things like the horrific Lac-Mégantic disaster occur?
America is having significant problems maintaining its massive highway infrastructure, and is still expanding it with 23% of expenditures going to adding to it instead of maintaining what exists better. A lot more freight tonnage crossing those highways will cause significantly more degradation of them, and that will cause road freight to have challenges of a different nature.
All of this means more expensive freight transportation in the USA than in major competitive regions in the rest of the world, so domestic supply chain costs will be higher, leading to reduced competitiveness. It’s quite remarkable that the US transportation decarbonization blueprint and the AAR don’t see this writing on the wall, especially as it doesn’t take much stepping back to read it clearly.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
<h6>Cover image: DALL·E generated image of people walking and playing beside quiet electric freight train with overhead lines, digital art</h6>

Rail is electrifying globally, with one major exception

Global shipping, deep-water, short-sea and inland, is a major contributor to global warming emissions, roughly 750 millions tons of CO2e annually before COVID. Moving tens of thousands of tons of goods tens of thousands of kilometers takes a lot of fuel, currently it’s all fossil fuels, and frequently the filthiest of them.

Global shipping, deep-water, short-sea and inland, is a major contributor to global warming emissions, roughly 750 millions tons of CO2e annually before COVID. Moving tens of thousands of tons of goods tens of thousands of kilometers takes a lot of fuel, currently it&rsquo;s all fossil fuels, and frequently the filthiest of them.
Over the past two years, I&rsquo;ve been finalizing my first pass of likely decarbonization pathways of all transportation through 2100. As I noted in a <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/02/yes-there-will-be-enough-biofuels-no-they-wont-impact-food-supplies/">recent article</a> where I articulated why biofuels were the primary replacement for any transportation mode that couldn&rsquo;t be electrified, that we had enough carrying capacity and that food supplies wouldn&rsquo;t be impacted, this has been a nine-year process. And to be clear, everything except a portion of marine shipping can be electrified directly by 2100 in my opinion.
All ground transportation will be electrified, either grid-tied for trains and potentially some heavy freight trucks, or with batteries or a hybrid of the two. As I noted in a separate article, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/07/europe-china-india-can-electrify-all-rail-why-cant-the-us/">China, Europe and India are electrifying all rail</a> rapidly, with North America as the sole outlier. <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/9d348f39-edc6-4238-85bf-3cbd991d6b59">Aviation will depend on a mix of biofuels and batteries</a> to decarbonize, with battery energy density by mass and other innovations allowing pan-Pacific flights by perhaps 2060 or 2070, and most airframes replaced by 2100 in my assessment.
But until recently, I had not completed my assessment of the likely pathway for marine shipping decarbonization. I had <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/">already assessed</a> the global freight megatons for inland, short sea and deep water shipping. I&rsquo;ve updated my earlier projection through 2100 to reflect my learnings and feedback I&rsquo;ve received since that initial publication. Note that I started in 1990 to provide context for the very rapid growth of shipping through 2017.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/48509436a712aca9329e44e52ccbd7290e358896.png" alt="Global Shipping in Megatonnes of Freight, chart by author" />
COVID, of course, changed shipping substantially, although not nearly as much as in the case of aviation. But there was still a dip. The return of shipping, however, is temporary. A decline is coming. Why? 40% of deepwater shipping is bulk coal, gas and oil. Most of that is going away. By 2100, perhaps 5% of oil will still be being extracted, processed and refined, but it will be almost entirely for high-value industrial feedstocks, not for burning as fuel. And as my assessments of transportation make clear, replacement liquid and gaseous fuels will not be replacing the sheer mass of fossil fuels we move across the seas today.
Coal demand peaked in 2013, with a brief return to those levels during the energy crisis of late 2022. But it&rsquo;s dropping again. Among other things, the rise of renewables in China has been massive, with the <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-trend-upward-while-nuclear-trends-flat/">13 years from 2010 to 2022</a> adding about 1,400 TWh of renewable electricity to the grid every year and a further 240 TWh of nuclear energy. And China isn&rsquo;t slowing down on deploying low carbon electricity, although the analysis makes it clear that they are doing much better at adding renewables than nuclear, unsurprisingly. India too has been aggressively transforming.
Most major analysts are now projecting a good likelihood, especially with the European energy crisis, that <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/10/a-glimpse-into-the-post-oil-era-how-the-uneven-impacts-of-2025-2030-peak-oil-demand-will-shape-the-future-of-energy/">peak oil demand will occur between 2025 and 2030</a>. That means the start of a massive market shift for oil away from the heaviest, sourest and furthest from water sources like Alberta&rsquo;s, but it also means that reduction in bulk oil shipping likely will occur in the next decade and then accelerate in the coming decades.
And my assessment of the <a href="https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/d128ef1d-c130-405f-9a11-67e027997350">silver linings of Europe&rsquo;s energy crisis</a> is that it will accelerate peak natural gas demand as well, which I project is likely by 2035. All three bulk fossil fuels will see tumbling shipping megatonnage in the coming decades, which is a good news story as all of the fuel required to push them through the ocean goes away as well.
Another 15% of bulk shipping is raw iron ore. That too will be diminishing, for three reasons. The first is that much more of the world&rsquo;s steel will be coming from existing steel that is scrapped and fed through electric steel minimills to make new steel. With the coming reductions in fossil fuels, all of the massive amounts of steel in fossil fuel infrastructure and distribution will become available as scrap. The USA alone has over 5 million kilometers of pipelines, as one example. Those pipelines, pumping rigs, processing facilities, refineries, marine tankers, rail freight cars, road freight vehicles and the like are all becoming obsolete, easily mined sources of valuable steel. The fossil fuel industry is likely the single biggest demand center for steel, that&rsquo;s all going away and it&rsquo;s a resource that&rsquo;s already processed.
The second is that the price of fuel for shipping will be increasing. There is no alternative that is cheaper than the left overs from refineries that are burned today when we allow the atmosphere to be used as an open sewer. The age of free negative externalities is ending, and the replacements are all more expensive. More expensive shipping means more local processing, on balance.
The third is that current new steel manufacturing requires coal, and much of the iron ore is steaming to the same ports as the bulk coal. However, in the future, the only requirement is electricity and perhaps water. Direct reduction of iron ore using green hydrogen or even electricity is being demonstrated today, and so running electrons to where the iron ore is extracted and processed to make sponge iron or steel for shipping becomes much more sensible in most cases. Much lower volumes and mass, most likely containerized instead of bulk.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/eaa209af9e5f57e99c3fdf2648b129e4d5b37644.png" alt="Global Shipping in Megatonnes of Freight by category of shipping, chart by author" />
The impacts will be felt differently by different modes of shipping. As I could find no available integrated data set for marine shipping that included deep water, short sea and inland shipping, I aggregated my own data set and calculated and projected tonnage in those categories through 2100. It was enlightening. I had not realized how large-scale inland shipping was, and shouldn&rsquo;t have been but still was surprised that China had 50% of the world&rsquo;s inland shipping. The full work up for how I did that is <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/">in the earlier publication</a> and I encourage informed readers to go there to help me improve upon it.
Of course, there are also multiple efficiency measures that are completely viable, levers which will be pulled for shipping as fuel prices increase. Simply slowing ships down saves a great deal of fuel, and container ships will likely no longer be sprinting through the water quite as rapidly as they do today. Hull innovation continues, with the Ulstein X-Bow being top of mind, and suitable for container shipping as well. Container ship front aerodynamic additions are being used to smooth air flow around the stack of containers already. Advances in defouling including ultrasonic fouling prevention technology and defouling robots will keep hulls slipperier, reducing fuel demand. I&rsquo;ve factored efficiencies into the projections as well.
All of this, of course, was in aid of understanding the CO2e concerns for marine shipping going forward. But as with other modes of transportation, the first question is what portions of marine shipping could be electrified with batteries. And the answer is quite a lot, in my opinion, especially given the significant reduction in deepwater shipping and the increasing shift to containerization, a trend documented in the recommended book by Marc Levinson, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408">The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger</a>. Why does containerization matter? Because standard twenty-foot equivalent (TEU) containers are perfect for packing with batteries as is already happening for stationary grid and behind-the-meter storage. My assertion is that they will be used by both trains and ships, being winched on and off of both and stacked in transshipment ports for charging.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/8d2f9ba78ad98aa55cc8635c2c732fe7b429d445.png" alt="Global megatonnes of liquid fuel demand by category of shipping, chart by author" />
That&rsquo;s going to take a while, as while battery energy density today is just fine for a multitude of marine uses, it needs to increase to enable larger ships and longer distances. And ships last a long time, as well.
And even with the reductions of deepwater bulk freight and electrification of significant portions of the segment, that still leaves roughly 70 million tons of fossil fuels worth of energy that has to be supplied in 2100. Obviously that&rsquo;s not an acceptable carbon debt, and so will have to be mitigated as well with low-carbon fuels of some sort.
That&rsquo;s where I left it last year. I knew that hydrogen wouldn&rsquo;t be the fuel. Its energy density by volume and other characteristics made it deeply unsuitable as is. Biofuels were certainly an option as we&rsquo;ve been making the stuff since Rudolph Diesel himself manufactured the first version of it in 1890. The chemistry and process is very well understood. But others are betting on other options.
One excellent conversation I&rsquo;ve had recently was with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynn-loo-1711562/">Lynn Loo</a>, currently the founding Chief Executive Officer at the <a href="https://www.gcformd.org/">Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD)</a>, based in Singapore. Loo has a PhD in chemical engineering from Princeton, founded and was the initial Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton, and was a professor at Princeton for years as well. Setting up the GCMD, which has a similar budget but quite different goals than the Andlinger Center, fell into Loo&rsquo;s lap while she was on sabbatical in the Little Red Dot and COVID struck.
Loo had reacted to my recent publication on biofuels, saying that while she was bullish on biofuels as well, in the opinion of the GCMD and the industry that they weren&rsquo;t the only answer. And that&rsquo;s a reasonable opinion. I spent nine years and a lot of brain cells coming to my conclusion, but the GCMD is running three multi-million dollar trials at present. One is biofuels, a second is ammonia bunkering and the third is on ship carbon capture. Maersk is betting on green methanol, and has purchased dual fuel ships and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/24/maersk-delivers-150-million-pr-win-for-shipping-industry-with-methanol-ships-purchase/">some green methanol supply</a>. Others are on the ammonia bandwagon as I documented in my report on the <a href="https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/18e03794-3b5f-4a3d-9711-02463b949794">EU&rsquo;s hopes for green hydrogen from Africa</a> filling their energy void. Others still haven&rsquo;t got the memo on hydrogen, and think that there&rsquo;s going to be a big business in shipping it in liquified form to replace LNG, and using the boil off to run the ships as LNG shipping often does today.
I fully support the projects the GCMD is undertaking, and expect two of them to prove that ammonia and on ship carbon capture are dead ends. That&rsquo;s a worthwhile undertaking, to run experiments that can concretely demonstrate that. It&rsquo;s money well worth spending. And well worth doing as efficiently and quickly as possible, so that when port transformations start, they don&rsquo;t waste time on the wrong things. Even in my projections ports are going to transform substantially, with much larger amounts of electricity flowing in, set aside for battery-filled TEUs, biofuel bunkering and a transformation away from bulk toward greater container shipping. That&rsquo;s a very large number of very large infrastructure projects.
Thinking slow so that the port industry can act fast is what the GCMD is in the business of, which is why I introduced Loo to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/flyvbjerg/">Bent Flyvbjerg</a>, global megaprojects expert, Danish knight, inaugural Chair of Oxford&rsquo;s Said School of Business&rsquo; BT Professor of Major Programme Management and author of the book, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/077109843X/ref=asc_df_077109843X/?tag=googleshopc0c-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=578819592852&amp;hvpos=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=4674838738896802318&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvdvcmdl=&amp;hvlocint=&amp;hvlocphy=9060815&amp;hvtargid=pla-1745437472361&amp;psc=1">How Big Things Get Done</a>, which I highly recommend, and would even if a bit of my material weren&rsquo;t in it. Ports currently aren&rsquo;t in Flyvbjerg&rsquo;s data set and that&rsquo;s a gap that funding would enable his team to overcome. And the port industry could really use Flyvbjerg&rsquo;s insights to deliver transformation faster and with lower risk.
But having done the underlying chemistry, math and economics, I&rsquo;m betting on batteries and biofuels. There&rsquo;s vastly more than enough minerals necessary for batteries as they are highly reusable, and highly recyclable. Once we&rsquo;ve mined the metals once, they&rsquo;ll be good for potentially centuries, unlike the fossil fuels that they will displace.
And I&rsquo;ve done the math for global transportation total fuel demand with longer haul aviation and marine shipping as the outliers that can&rsquo;t electrify. And built the fuel demand curves aligned with long term strategic drivers including solving climate change, the end of population growth between 2070 and 2100, diminished demand due to higher prices of fuel, increased demand due to higher global affluence, and more. The megatons of biofuels required for the two areas where they have value is lower than the feedstock capacity of one of eight or so biofuel pathways, stalk cellulosic ethanol to biofuels, where corn, wheat and rice stalks are diverted to fuel while the ears remain calories for animals and humans.
I&rsquo;m satisfied that biofuels are fit for purpose, we have enough of them, they won&rsquo;t interfere with food for humans or animals, and that they&rsquo;ll be cheaper than any alternatives. And that there are seven more biofuel pathways. They&rsquo;ll also be lower carbon. The thing about all synthetic fuels is that they multiply the CO2e per MWh of electricity used to manufacture them. While energy will trend lower over time as industry and distribution electrifies, biofuels are much lower CO2 than fossil fuels right now and rapidly improving. With improvements in agriculture &mdash; precision agriculture, low-tillage agriculture, agrigenetics for nitrogen fixing and moving subsistence farmers off the land &mdash;, stalk cellulosic carbon debt will trend to zero. I don&rsquo;t project, as some do, that it will trend negative, but to zero yes.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/2b478068ed2f8ad658fba6cf183570e56af63db1.png" alt="Global megatonnes of liquid fuel demand by category of shipping, chart by author" />
And so, the chart I couldn&rsquo;t complete in 2022. A projection of global CO2e from marine shipping through 2100 that is aligned with a reasonable projection of what all freight shipping will look like decade by decade, all the levers that will be pulled, global freight demand changes, electrification and biofuel decarbonization.
Is this what will happen? No, of course not. Obviously the error bars are large. Obviously the global marine shipping industry is not going to do this voluntarily. Obviously governments have to force pricing of the negative externalities of CO2e emissions or regulate bunkering, most likely both. Obviously there are going to be fits and starts as green hydrogen and synthetic fuels from it run their course and fail (and as a reminder, there are numerous people who think they won&rsquo;t). Obviously there will be local variances within the big world we live in. Obviously the fossil fuel industry will be working to delay transition, and to make blue hydrogen the solution despite its massive downsides and costs. Obviously it will be faster or slower in different components at different times.
But I think that this scenario is closer to correct than most. And it&rsquo;s a good news story. This represents very significant decarbonization of this segment by 2050. As a reminder, with 11% of global energy flows going to extract, process, refine and distribute fossil fuels, and with the much higher efficiency of electrification, we are a lot closer to a decarbonized future than most people realize, and the transition will be faster.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
<h6>Cover image: DALL&middot;E generated image of a futuristic streamlined electric container ship under blue skies, digital art</h6>

Marine shipping will change radically, electrify and consume biofuels to decarbonize

In August and September, Europeans were understandably concerned that they might be freezing in the dark this winter due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the disruption to natural gas supplies. Thankfully, this is not what has transpired. Unlike many, however, I’m not surprised that Europe is doing fine.

<h2>The misguided frenzy</h2>
In August and September, Europeans were understandably concerned that they might be freezing in the dark this winter due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the disruption to natural gas supplies. Thankfully, this is not what has transpired. Unlike many, however, I&rsquo;m not surprised that Europe is doing fine. I published an assessment in September that the <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/09/europes-energy-crisis-will-be-short-lived-reap-benefits/">energy crisis would be short lived and reap significant benefits</a> for Europe, and coincidentally the world.
My thesis had multiple points, and it&rsquo;s worth looking back at each one to consider how things have turned out over the past five months. But to start, I&rsquo;d like to lean into the future of energy flows, with the concept of strategic energy interdependence.
<h2>The future of energy</h2>
Energy independence and the overlapping term energy autonomy are archaic strategies that made sense when grids were dumb, all electricity generation was from local burning of fossil fuels, and long distance transmission was a gleam in the eyes of people who saw the potential of massive hydroelectric projects. That&rsquo;s going back a century.
Since then, projects like the Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington State, the James Bay hydro facility in northern Quebec and modern dams like China&rsquo;s Three Gorges site have been built in remote locations and linked to demand centers often 1,000 kilometers or more away. Electricity from James Bay, for example, flows over 1,500 kilometers as the crow flies to power New York City. Electricity from the Three Gorges Dam flows 940 kilometers through HVDC lines to Changzhou.
About 132 GW of new hydroelectric capacity has been added since 2000, with 113 GW of it in China alone. For context, in the same period China added roughly 450 GW of wind energy capacity, 400 GW of solar capacity and only 49 GW of nuclear capacity. Just as with wind and solar, China&rsquo;s hydroelectric grid connections have been accelerating over the past decade, while nuclear peaked in 2016 and is limping along by comparison for the past five years, with <a href="https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/facdd2f1-e9d9-45c0-b80a-303e174e3a2e">only 1-3 GW of new capacity per year</a>.
Distances like these are larger than most countries&rsquo; geographical extents, and around 2012 the last barriers to <a href="https://medium.com/predict/future-of-electricity-transmission-is-hvdc-9800a545cd18">wide-scale HVDC transmission</a> dropped with ABB&rsquo;s development of a hybrid electronic-mechanical breaker which had the characteristics of sufficient response speed combined with sufficient robustness. China alone has built tens of thousands of kilometers of HVDC to move wind, solar and hydro power from the remote reaches of its land area to its power demand centers, mostly in the lower two-thirds of the eastern side of the country. Most offshore wind farms are connected to shore by HVDC.
Remote and barely populated areas of the world abound, have cheap land and lots of it. There are no constraints on our ability to build renewable projects. As Professor Bent Flyvbjerg points out in his excellent new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/077109843X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=16Z84026YMTHF&amp;keywords=how+big+things+get+done&amp;qid=1675622389&amp;sprefix=how+big%2Caps%2C171&amp;sr=8-1">How Big Things Get Done</a>, wind, solar and transmission projects are highly modular and very low risk compared to most other major project types, based on his data set of 16,000 projects spanning 25 categories. They tend to get done on time and on budget once the shovel hits the ground. And there are a lot of transmission lines, wind farms and solar farms that are fully planned and just waiting to find funding and approval to start construction.
On a related note, many are attempting to imply that pipelines can transmit much more energy than HVDC transmission lines, in an attempt to make it seem as if transmitting lots of hydrogen long distances that way is a foregone conclusion. As I <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/11/studies-showing-hydrogen-pipelines-carry-far-more-energy-keep-making-the-same-mistakes/">pointed out last year</a>, you have to draw the systems boundary of assessments very narrowly and use artificially low HVDC transmission capacity assumptions to get those results. HVDC is completely fit for purpose for delivering the massive amounts of energy our society needs, especially as we <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/07/the-unused-energy-all-around-us-how-rejected-energy-can-help-us-go-green/">electrify everything and stop wasting so much of it</a>.
As a result, the future of electricity is lots of wind, solar and water, connected with lots of HVDC across large distances and borders, firmed with much less grid storage than most assume is required, <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/a248729b-5af9-409e-89b3-f28dd2abbbf2">mostly in the form of pumped hydro</a>.
Which brings us back to strategic energy interdependence. When those HVDC lines go in, they can&rsquo;t come from bad actor states as pipelines, LNG tankers and petroleum tankers so often do now. Picking the countries to link with to share electricity becomes important.
<h2>Transnational links</h2>
For Europe, that&rsquo;s the non-Russian parts of Eastern Europe and the northern countries of Africa. As I pointed out when I assessed <a href="https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/18e03794-3b5f-4a3d-9711-02463b949794">EU green hydrogen plans in Morocco, Algeria and Egypt</a>, it made much more sense to lean into MEDGRID and link Europe with the Maghreb with HVDC across the Mediterranean in three places. And now both of those are going ahead, with the recently announced HVDC connections from <a href="https://balkangreenenergynews.com/georgia-romania-plan-power-interconnection-under-black-sea/">Georgia to Romania</a> and <a href="https://tyndp.entsoe.eu/tyndp2018/projects/projects/29">Tunisia to Sicily</a>.
For other countries, such as the ASEAN nations, South Korea and Japan, it&rsquo;s China and each other, and hopefully Australia. For North America, it&rsquo;s America, Canada and Mexico, and Joe Biden&rsquo;s early proposal to put an HVDC backbone through Central America to South America is still a great idea for multiple reasons. China seriously proposed a transpolar HVDC grid linking the northern continents in 2016, something that likely makes sense but is unlikely given the geopolitical tensions being caused by America and Europe being surpassed economically by that rising giant.
No country can have a high standard of living without massive cross border flows of goods, services, energy and data in the 21st Century. It&rsquo;s impossible to wind back the clock to pre-trade isolationism without also winding the social and economic clock back decades or further. As Peter Stearns, a leading academic in the relatively new discipline of world history says in his lecture series, <a href="https://www.audible.ca/pd/A-Brief-History-of-the-World-Audiobook/B071F6HJNV?ref=a_library_t_c5_libItem_B071F6HJNV&amp;pf_rd_p=9262d717-a682-4b54-8e37-a6039fe5956e&amp;pf_rd_r=QP328JV26X1BCJF0FNR8&amp;pageLoadId=g9rFEXieNB0wvWJJ&amp;creativeId=4ee810cf-ac8e-4eeb-8b79-40e176d0a225">A Brief History of the World</a>, globalism really started about 1,000 C.E. We aren&rsquo;t going to move back to isolationism except in fragments here and there around specific goods and technologies.
Assuming that electricity is somehow different and that cross-border energy flows must be in the form of molecules is a deeply odd perspective given the observable reality of rapidly increasing HVDC interconnections and massive deployments of renewables across broad geographic regions.
<h2>But what about Europe&rsquo;s energy crisis?</h2>
As I wrote in September, it was a perfect storm. Natural gas prices were going to become more volatile even without the Russian invasion of Ukraine due to the Saudi Arabian-Russian price war on oil that was going to put a lot of shale oil and hence its related natural gas production out of business, and the debt economics of fracking failing to actually turn into profits. But the invasion amplified that pre-existing trend and Russia&rsquo;s destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2 cemented the loss of supply.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster combined with the empirical evidence of grid reliability with high penetrations of wind and solar meant that a lot of nuclear generation had dropped off the grid in Germany. In France, COVID-19 had deferred maintenance on some reactors to 2022, other reactors required refueling, and then the N4 series of reactors were found to have unexpected corrosion on critical pipes leading to that line being taken off the grid entirely until safety could be assured. In total, 30 of France&rsquo;s 56 reactors were offline.
France&rsquo;s nuclear fleet when operating could contribute about 13% of Europe&rsquo;s electrical demand every year, which is a good amount for relatively inflexible generation. With continental energy markets and grid interconnects to neighboring countries, France didn&rsquo;t have the problems of less well connected jurisdictions like Ontario with its oversized nuclear fleet. France exchanges TWh of electricity annually in all directions, getting more from their neighbors when they need it, and providing more at night when they can&rsquo;t shut their reactors down anyway. In 2017, for example, France imported a net 13.7 TWh of electricity from neighboring Germany, and obviously a lot more TWh flowed in both directions. (France and nuclear advocates tend to portray this as France being a massive exporter of electricity, but the reality is that they couldn&rsquo;t have remotely inexpensive electricity without massive cross-border flows in both directions.)
Meanwhile, European energy buyers and strategists had been seduced by relatively cheap Russian natural gas, and pretending that it was &lsquo;low-carbon&rsquo; compared to coal. They ignored the upstream methane emissions that put it in the range of better coal generation as a climate change issue. Europe became overly dependent on a country that was increasingly obviously heading to being a destructive, rogue state again. That was short-sighted.
So, diminished online capacity and a looming winter.
While France&rsquo;s nuclear woes were and are a problem, as expected France acted quickly to get many of these reactors online again, something fairly straightforward for ones being refueled or undergoing minor maintenance. At present 18 of the 30 offline reactors have re-entered service, significantly increasing available electricity. While EDF is no longer competent to build new reactors, it&rsquo;s capable of maintaining and operating existing ones reasonably well.
Europe&rsquo;s natural gas reserves were <a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/UKRAINE-CRISIS/EUROPE-GAS/zdvxozxzopx/">82.5% refilled</a> in September, above the 80% target for the beginning of the heating season. Diplomatic and professional communication lines were humming as Europe reached out to anybody who might have a spare tanker of LNG to ship up into the northern Atlantic. Incidentally, global natural gas prices went up due to that as well, as domestic demand had to compete with export prices.
All of Europe&rsquo;s states were working on efficiency programs to reduce demand, just as Japan met about half of its loss of electricity supply with efficiency programs including relaxing the until then still strict and formal dress codes in business so they could reduce air conditioning during sweltering summers in Tokyo.
And it wasn&rsquo;t as if most of the coal plants had been demolished, or the piles of coal had been put on barges and dumped in the mid-Atlantic. Coal generation was running at significantly reduced capacity factors prior to 2022 as much as not, and there was lots of coal lying around with owners wondering what to do with it. So the coal plants were put back into service temporarily, increasing coal back up to 2013 levels briefly.
Every one of the European countries stepped up in the crisis. None of them shut their borders. They knew that they were strategically interdependent on one another for energy and trusted one another. And it&rsquo;s paid off.
All of this was combined with a fairly mild winter, a lucky break the continent deserved. But I don&rsquo;t think there would have been much of an issue if the winter had been more severe. Europeans are like Canadians, for the most part, in that most of them are equipped to deal with cold a lot more than they are equipped to deal with heat. More warming centers for the worst off would have been required, but it&rsquo;s unlikely anyone would have frozen at home.
The biggest benefit was for the least economically well off, as they didn&rsquo;t have to spend as much as they would have otherwise. Energy poverty is a concern in Europe, and the rising and much more volatile price of natural gas is another reason to get off of it.
<h2>So what are the benefits?</h2>
What&rsquo;s clear is that Europe is accelerating decarbonization, renewables, transmission and electrification initiatives due to this crisis. Heat pump sales are up massively (along with especially UK anti-heat pump FUD campaigns). Insulation retrofits increased a lot. Many more offshore wind farms were approved. HVDC interconnects to the east, west and south were announced. Europeans re-learned to put on sweaters and close windows instead of just turning up the heat.
And European energy strategists learned the lesson of strategic energy interdependence, yet again. Don&rsquo;t rely on rogue states for energy. Build markets and connections with stable and rational regimes. And with HVDC, make them two-way flows.
The crisis accelerated Europe&rsquo;s movement away from fossil fuels, which is going to mean its GHG emissions will be lower than they would have been without the shock for every year and decade going forward. And every energy strategist and policy maker around the world is realizing that depending on natural gas is a bad idea, which will cause similar ripple effects elsewhere.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
<h6>Cover image: European energy crisis, as imagined by DALL-E</h6>

Europeans are weaning themselves off fossil fuels thanks to the energy crisis

Roughly a year ago I updated my data set on the natural experiment of wind, solar and nuclear generation capacity additions in China for illuminem. On February 7th, 2023, a version of that material will be published as an inclusion in Professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s new book, How Big Things Get Done. With that publication and the passing of another year, it’s worth seeing if 2022 changed the results in any meaningful way.

<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/661dc49b524b0dd9f1ad1d746c43465741b069f6.png" alt="Additional TWh of generation adjusted for capacity factors for wind, solar and nuclear deployments in China from 2010 to 2022">
Roughly a year ago I updated my data set on the <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/a7cb961f-c820-40f3-b3fc-7048f6282a37">natural experiment of wind, solar and nuclear generation capacity additions in China</a> for illuminem. On February 7th, 2023, a version of that material will be published as an inclusion in Professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/077109843X/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=CjwKCAiAuOieBhAIEiwAgjCvcvGMjDd3cXV3YILlnDGRsxxvemfIYfWUjNCSAuvnIa9t4T7nVA5TsBoC0AgQAvD_BwE&amp;hvadid=620827371345&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvlocphy=9060815&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvrand=5665230372604731673&amp;hvtargid=kwd-1679793795516&amp;hydadcr=24668_13553108&amp;keywords=how+big+things+get+done&amp;qid=1675273571&amp;sr=8-1">How Big Things Get Done</a>. With that publication and the passing of another year, it’s worth seeing if 2022 changed the results in any meaningful way.
But first, Flyvbjerg’s book, co-authored with Dan Gardner. The full title is How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between, and it’s topping Amazon pre-order charts in its category. That’s well deserved, and I would say that regardless of whether my material was included in it.
As part of my somewhat eclectic background, I was a project management thought leader, working with Max Wideman, primary leader on the PM-BOK, on iterative and incremental methods for major program delivery, and an international estimation SME, transformation project leader and troubled project fixit guy for with a global technology firm, working on programs up to a billion USD in value. As an occupational hazard of that line of work, I’ve read more about project management successes and failures than most, and experienced virtually every failure condition Flybjerg documents in his extensive body of work. And yes, some of those experiences of failure were self-inflicted.
Why is my data in there? This diagram from the book tells a story.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/bec9c2fac68a654ecc091060392d71eca20a314a.png" alt="Chart of 25 categories of ~16,000 major projects by cost success rates from Bent Flyvbjerg">
Flyvbjerg and team have been assembling a cleansed data set of roughly 16,000 projects where initial cost, budget and benefit estimates were known, and final cost, schedule and benefits outcomes are available. It’s taken over 20 years, but the information is startling and useful.
A key aspect Flyvbjerg leans into is fat-tailed risks, which are potential failures with high-impacts that occur toward the edges of bell-curve distributions. His thesis, very well supported by data, is that many project types are subject to much greater occurrence of fat-tailed risks than other project types, and hence are much more likely to go over schedule and budget, often by very large amounts, and much less likely to deliver benefits.
In fact, he and his team refer to this as the iron law of projects, in that only 0.5% of the 16,000 projects were completed on time, on budget and delivered the promised benefits.
And so, to wind, solar and nuclear. Looking back at the chart, we can see that solar and wind projects are #1 and #2 in projects most likely to meet cost targets. And that nuclear power construction projects — and Flybjerg’s data includes decades of them from countries outside of China — are third from worst projects by that metric, only being outstripped by Olympics and nuclear storage facility construction efforts.
That point about China is why Flyvbjerg and Gardner reached out to me to ask to include my assessment on China’s deployment. As he and I discussed recently, getting data on specific Chinese projects is close to impossible. While summaries are available, China doesn’t publish or share details like that. It’s clear to me that they know the numbers very well, and use them to assess their five-year targets and adjust to what works best, but they adhere more to Sun Tzu’s teachings about holding things close to your chest, rather than to the USA’s more Kardashian-style approach.
So why is China a good natural experiment for the three generation technologies? Well, there are a lot of claims in the west that nuclear generation would clearly scale much faster than wind or solar and be much cheaper than it is, if it weren’t for western over-regulation and the fears of the population. But China clearly has advantages as a more top-down managed economy, with the national government able to override provincial and local concerns, align regulatory requirements across the massive country — 1.4 billion citizens in a contiguous land area the size of all of the United States —, and attend much less to the opinions of local citizens. And China established national strategic programs for each of wind, solar and nuclear as well. For each of the three technologies, China is deploying Chinese-designed and manufactured versions of them.
The conditions are about as controlled as it is possible to get. Multiple variables have been eliminated. And the data is publicly available. It’s an excellent natural experiment, although not as titillating as the one where half of an island lost electricity for six months, and researchers used that to predict and test variances in birth rates among people with mod cons like tvs and the internet vs people who had to rely on more traditional means of entertaining themselves.
When I published initially on this experiment in 2014, it was clear to me that wind and solar would outstrip nuclear, for the same reasons that Flyvbjerg strongly recommends modularity in his work, consulting and now the book. Wind and solar are much more like the computers that power most of the internet — smaller, networked and in vast numbers — than the mainframes that preceded them (and which still exist and are doing very useful work today). And that value proposition of what is called horizontal scaling in computer systems makes a huge difference.
A bunch of identical manufactured objects being built in highly repeated, highly parallelized processes will always be faster and lower-risk to construct than single, massive, complex, bespoke engineering efforts. Strings of solar panels can be built with unskilled day labor picked up on street corners. Wind farms are heavily automated construction sites where the foundation is laid in a day, the mast goes up in a day and the nacelle and blades are up on the third day. Both wind and solar farms can start generating electricity as soon as the power management solution is in place and connected to the grid, as well.
But what was clear to me (and many others) was not clear to everyone. A tremendous legacy group of energy analysts were stuck in a paradigm of major generation assets close to energy demand areas, and couldn’t see the advantages of modularity and parallelization. And most of them considered too much transmission to be a bad thing.
That’s another point worth noting in Flyvbjerg’s data. Transmission projects are in the #4 spot in his data set. They have a strong tendency to complete on time and budget as well. As Flyvbjerg and I agreed, we were both relieved and delighted to see that the major technologies required for decarbonization of the grid were so low-risk and empirically successful, relatively speaking. China, by the way, has also installed tens of thousands of kilometers of HVDC transmission to go with its masses of wind and solar.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/4a384c9d5004a5c352aee499ba29bd54d2772445.png" alt="GWs of capacity of wind, solar and nuclear generation added annually in China from 2010 through 2022">
And so to the updated results of the experiment. China’s 2022 deployments are in. Two nuclear reactors, about 2 GWs of capacity, were connected to the grid last year. About 38 GWs of capacity of wind generation was added. And 87 GWs of solar generation was added. What that means using Chinese capacity factors for additional TWh of actual electricity provided in every subsequent year is in the chart that leads this article.
China’s nuclear program peaked seven years ago in 2016, when seven reactors were connected to the grid, something it also managed in 2018. Since then, it’s only been able to add 1-3 reactors a year. This is not a program that’s accelerating. This isn’t a program which is succeeding.
As I noted in earlier discussions of this material, China’s wind and solar programs both radically outperformed their 2020 targets, by 25% and 100% respectively, while the nuclear program failed to achieve its goals. Since 1978’s special economic zones were created, China’s policies toward transformation have been shaped by Deng Xiaoping’s maxim 摸着石头过河 or cross the river by feeling the stones. Small tests in part of the country. If successful, expand. If unsuccessful, adapt and try again or drop.
And so my expectation is that China’s nuclear program’s relative failure means that the nuclear industry’s rosy projection of a China-lead nuclear renaissance globally is deeply unlikely. Instead, I expect China to scale back its nuclear program and lean into wind, solar, transmission and storage like their massive pumped hydro program more fully. They repeat what succeeds.
And my recommendations: buy Flyvbjerg and Gardner’s book. Pre-order it on Amazon or Audible. Buy it for yourself. Actually read it. Buy it for people who need to read it. For investors, energy strategists and energy policy makers, put the project failure rates chart on the walls of your offices and boardrooms. For project delivery executives and managers, put the Coda of rules of thumbs for project success on the walls of your offices, planning rooms and war rooms. How Big Things Get Done is the most useful and accessible book on project success and failure that’s been written to date.
Editor&#x27;s note: The author states no conflict of interest and receives no financial benefit from the contents of this article. 
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

China’s success with wind and solar vs nuclear is explained by Bent Flyvbjerg’s new book

Energy Vault has challenges in addition to its ineffective, expensive, carbon-debt laden, mechanical failure of an electricity storage solution. As such, it’s a poster child for cleantech special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), where lack of required investment due diligence has been compounded by a lack of basic physics and engineering due diligence and an angel investor class one collaborator refers to as guilty old rich people trying to make their grandkids like them.


<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/energy-vault-inc/">Energy Vault</a> has challenges in addition to its ineffective, expensive, carbon-debt laden, mechanical failure of an electricity storage solution. As such, it&rsquo;s a poster child for cleantech special purpose acquisition companies (<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp">SPACs</a>), where lack of required investment due diligence has been compounded by a lack of basic physics and engineering due diligence and an angel investor class one collaborator refers to as guilty old rich people trying to make their grandkids like them.
Recently a legal firm, Hittelman Strunk, filed a <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/on-behalf-of-investors-hittelman-strunk-investigates-energy-vaults-nrgv-public-claim-to-landing-520-million-dollar-revenue-deal-from-dg-fuels-301542007.html">class action lawsuit on behalf of investors in Energy Vault</a> due to an alleged stock price inflation scheme. Per the announcement, Energy Vault paid a million dollars to a firm called <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/dg-fuels/">DG Fuels</a>, and in return DG Fuels agreed to buy $520 million worth of Energy Vault products. The lawsuit asserts that DG Fuels has no revenue and has nothing in operation at present, and that this was not disclosed to investors. This would constitute a violation of securities laws in the US, per the announcement.
I had ignored Energy Vault for a couple of years, as a quick initial glance had it coated in so many obvious red flags to my eyes that it was clearly doomed to failure. However, due to my publications on low-carbon transformation, including end game challenges such as <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/04/23/grid-storage-winners-part-1-assessing-the-major-technologies/">grid storage</a>, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/15/how-aviation-will-decarbonize-decade-by-decade-until-2100-part-2/">aviation refueling</a>, and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/">marine refueling</a>, people kept asking me about it. Then Energy Vault secured a reverse-takeover SPAC deal that saw it on the stock market at around $3 billion at peak, dropping to $0.88 billion at present.
The combination led me to <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/20/energy-vault-loses-1-2-billion-40-market-cap-co2e-kwh-worse-than-natural-gas/">analyze the technology</a> in its initial incarnation &mdash; deeply absurd &mdash; and its purported later incarnation &mdash; imagine a massive 25-story heavy steel building hoisting multi-ton blocks up to the top couple of floors and not collapsing under the weight of its hubris. Like many bad technical ideas, attempting to engineer solutions to the glaring problems results in more and more glaring problems. Most organizations do not have tens or hundreds of millions thrown at them to perpetuate the bad idea however, as wise money does due diligence which includes getting a sensible third-party assessment done and paying attention to it.
Among other things, they claimed in various ways that they were able to manufacture 30 ton blocks with the same technical qualities as engineered concrete with close to no carbon debt and at least as cheaply as engineered concrete. If this were true, the world would be ecstatic, as it would solve one of the biggest and most glaring climate problems we have today, the vast emissions of the essential infrastructure material we use lavishly, concrete. We wouldn&rsquo;t be wasting this magical substance on a silly elevator energy storage product, we&rsquo;d be building bridges, dams, wind turbine foundations and high rises with it everywhere.
At that, it&rsquo;s not the silliest gravity storage proposal going. <a href="https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/05/05/storing-renewables-with-high-rise-buildings-lifts/#:~:text=Lift%20Energy%20Storage%20Technology%20is,produce%20electricity%20in%20discharge%20mode.">Lift Energy</a> proposes &mdash; proving that they don&rsquo;t understand the basics of either physics or building elevator systems &mdash; to repurpose high rise elevators for energy storage when the buildings are empty. They received favorable press for this nonsense.
Pro tip: gravity storage is a proven, economical and viable technology called <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/a248729b-5af9-409e-89b3-f28dd2abbbf2">closed loop pumped hydro</a>. Everything else is nonsense compared to pushing dirt cheap, zero carbon water a long way up hill with regenerating pumps.
That said, SPACs are the 2020s version of IPOs and ICOs. I also looked at the <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/24/pure-play-urban-air-mobility-company-stocks-lost-over-16-billion-in-2021/">absurd market capitalization of electric vertical takeoff and landing air taxi firms</a>, and their amazing loss of market capitalization, and saw the same pattern. Lilium, one of those firms, is also targeted with a <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lilium-shareholder-alert-claimsfiler-reminds-investors-with-losses-in-excess-of-100-000-of-lead-plaintiff-deadline-in-class-action-lawsuit-against-lilium-nv---lilm-lilmw-301542099.html">class action lawsuit</a> related to non-disclosure of critical information after Iceberg Research dropped a report on the deficiencies. This is common, with 85 legal actions underway against 34 of the SPAC firms.
The air taxi bubble and subsequent completely predictable &mdash; tiny market today, fantasy of massive market growth, <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/f5492d62-1005-4d8f-aa9a-45ba0b899346">three different technical and regulatory maturation processes</a> required before even remotely viable &mdash; collapse has a seriously dampening effect on funding sensible aviation decarbonization ventures such as ELECTRON Aviation with its four-passenger, high-aspect ratio, streamlined regional air mobility on-demand solution and a stealth firm I&rsquo;m affiliated with that has a electric propulsion system 20% more efficient than a standard electric motor plus propellers. Solutions in this space which will deliver high growth revenue this decade are finding it hard to find sufficient capital given the detrimental effects of SPACs.
In the cleantech space, the SPAC founders &mdash; money people who put investments into a company with no purpose except to do a reverse takeover of some willing startup with much less due diligence &mdash; were taking larger and larger bites of the money raised. As I pointed out, the publicly available information indicates Energy Vault was left with only a couple of hundred million of the raised money. Others will remember Nikola, another SPAC venture, and its <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/21/nikola-to-pay-125-million-to-settle-fraud-charges-as-sec-cracks-down-on-spac-claims.html">$125 million securities fraud payout</a>.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/b1eec3df2d61965dbebe03260202a5a643429764.png" alt="Figure 1: Cleantech SPAC stock prices over time by author" />
As the cleantech subset of SPAC investing shows across the 56 closed deals I was able to identify, the combination of lack of due diligence and lots of capital looking for cleantech led to massive pump and dump problems. The firms with decent solutions among the 56, and there are a few, are left with investors expecting revenue aligned with peak valuation, and typically with at best enough money to keep going, but not enough money to change the world.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/38aa5485c29256d5b3f6c8a11a4048dc3de793e0.png" alt="Figure 2: Energy Vault stock prices pre-reverse acquisition to present" />
Energy Vault&rsquo;s claims as it went public through a reverse takeover SPAC did not withstand the slightest of technical or business scrutiny, yet it inflated to a market capitalization of $3 billion USD.
There&rsquo;s a lot of excellent work going on in cleantech, and there are a lot of good investments. But there are also a lot of people attempting to cash in without moving the climate action needle forward. Caveat emptor.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Energy Vault is a poster child for why SPACs have become a destructive influence in cleantech investing

Shipping hydrogen on marine tankers is a somewhat hot topic these days. The EU currently thinks it is going to massively expand the role of hydrogen in its economy, especially for energy, and as a result wants to get it from other countries. Japan similarly thinks that hydrogen will displace its natural gas and coal imports, and has already received its first tiny shipment of liquified hydrogen. Fossil fuel majors are working hard to make a hydrogen economy a thing as they know that the vast majority of new hydrogen would have to come from natural gas and coal, turning their increasingly likely to be stranded assets into much more expensive hydrogen. Countries like Namibia are creating strategies to become green hydrogen superpowers, and it will take marine shipping to get it to market.

Shipping hydrogen on marine tankers is a somewhat hot topic these days. The EU currently thinks it is going to massively expand the role of hydrogen in its economy, especially for energy, and as a result wants to get it from other countries. Japan similarly thinks that hydrogen will displace its natural gas and coal imports, and has already received its first tiny shipment of liquified hydrogen. Fossil fuel majors are working hard to make a hydrogen economy a thing as they know that the vast majority of new hydrogen would have to come from natural gas and coal, turning their increasingly likely to be stranded assets into much more expensive hydrogen. Countries like Namibia are creating strategies to become green hydrogen superpowers, and it will take marine shipping to get it to market.
And it’s with Namibia that this assessment starts. How comparable is shipping hydrogen to other fuels? How much energy will be able to be carried on a ship in the form of hydrogen? What will it cost? These are important questions as the marine shipping industry seeks a product to replace the coal, gas and oil that constitutes 40% of all deepwater shipping, and as countries consider how they will replace the energy they currently get via ships and pipelines.
Liquid natural gas (LNG) is the best comparison, as it requires liquification, a freezing process which consumes about 10% of the amount of energy embodied in the LNG and is the closest variant of oceanic shipping to the requirements for hydrogen. A Wärtsilä-powered Q-Max ship, the biggest LNG tanker I’m aware of, carries 266,000 cubic meters of LNG. The liquified gas is cheap, with average delivered import prices in the US of $109 per cubic meter of LNG, or about $0.18 per cubic meter of natural gas, although prices are obviously spiking in late 2021 and early 2022 around the world. Those 266,000 cubic meters amounted to about $29 million USD in value before the recent spikes.
The first thing to know is that while hydrogen is energy-dense by mass, it isn’t energy-dense by volume. Assuming the same-sized ship, the delivered BTUs of energy would be about 27% of the LNG. This is because even when liquified, hydrogen has less energy by volume than LNG, but also because liquifying hydrogen takes about 33% of the energy in the liquified hydrogen, as opposed to the 10% required for LNG. Different gases, different temperatures required for liquification. Liquid hydrogen makes a lot of sense for rockets going to orbit, but its questionable economically for anything less demanding.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/9f71510dbcdcd12cdf0610056c5ec6c1cad323e4.png" alt="Figure 1: Lazard’s LCOE for hydrogen using alkaline electrolyzers
">
The second problem is that hydrogen by itself is expensive. The absolute best case from Lazard’s hydrogen LCOE, with dirt cheap electrolyzers, $10 per MWh electricity and 100% capacity factors, gives a cost for hydrogen of about $0.78 per kilogram at the point of production, and that excludes a large number of capital costs. A cubic meter of liquified hydrogen masses 71 kg. That means that just the absolutely best case cost of the liquified hydrogen, excluding the energy costs of liquification or getting it into the ship, would be 1.9 times as high as the delivered price of LNG. And that delivered price includes extended ocean journeys with daily LNG ship charter costs averaging of $150,000 per day, currently peaking over $200,000 per day, with a high of $350,000 per day in January 2021. There’s a bit more on the cost of a cubic meter of liquid hydrogen for liquification, but as we are pretending that electricity will cost $10 per MWh, it’s not very much, about another dollar per cubic meter.
Currently, the average for trip durations, excluding loading and unloading periods, is around 23 days, and the pre-berthing, loading, and unloading add another 4-5 days. Calling it 28 days results in an additional cost of $4.2 million.
That brings the total costs of the delivered hydrogen to roughly $19 million for 27% of the delivered energy. One assumes that the people doing this would like to make a profit as well, so assuming 10%, the total price delivered will be in the range of $21 million for the load.
That means the price per delivered unit of energy is roughly 5 times that of liquid natural gas, in the best possible case.
More realistic numbers from Lazard’s LCOE with still low $20/MWh electricity, still high 90% capacity factors, and more realistically priced but still cheap electrolyzers, would be 40% more expensive, around 7x the price of LNG per unit of energy. Doing the math with the numbers that most favor hydrogen shows how starkly bad the economics of using it for energy really are.
Of course, this is before the liquid hydrogen is converted to actually useful energy, at a maximum of 60% efficiency, which is about the same as a good combined cycle gas turbine.
What does all this mean for the actual sunshine falling in Namibia? Well, take 20% off for electrolysis, 33% off for liquification, 10% for efficiency losses for long-haul cooling and handling, and 40% off for conversion back into electricity, and the solar energy energy in Namibia turns into perhaps 29% of the energy being useful.
Of course, this doesn’t address the problem of distributing hydrogen in the country that imports it either, or the complete and utter lack of any large-scale hydrogen distribution network. 85% of hydrogen consumed globally is manufactured onsite because it’s so expensive to ship.
Delivering the same energy in the form of electricity through high-voltage direct current cables is vastly more efficient, with HVDC losses running about 3.5% per 1000 kilometers. Of course, Namibia being in southern Africa next to South Africa, it would make more sense for it to deliver the electricity there instead. Northern African solar, wind, and storage linked to fat HVDC pipes crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, crossing from Tunisia to Italy, and crossing the Bosphorus — as transmission lines already do today — makes much more economic sense. There’s a Moroccan project proposed with 20 GW of wind and solar firmed by storage, and a proposed 3,500-kilometer HVDC transmission line to the UK. Assuming the entire route is underwater, that would deliver about 88% of the generated electricity to market, not 29% — more than 3 times as much. Similarly, the Australian green hydrogen proposal originally ran HVDC transmission to Singapore, but has been distracted by the hydrogen hype and now proposes to manufacture hydrogen and ship it.
Of course, there are even less efficient ways to ship hydrogen. It could be chemically converted into a stable liquid at room temperature, and then extracted at destination, stepping on the electricity a few more times, at great loss of useful energy. It could be converted into a liquid hydrocarbon with the addition of CO2 from somewhere and upgraded to a useful plug-compatible fuel, then shipped, at only multiples of the cost of just running things off of electricity, and with the added “benefit” of air pollution.
This isn’t to say that Namibian green hydrogen can’t be useful. The country is dependent on South Africa for urea fertilizer, and could be manufacturing that itself to supply the 9% of its economy dependent on agriculture. Fertilizer needs lots of hydrogen, and once manufactured is easy to distribute, unlike hydrogen. That’s part of the reason why my projection of hydrogen demand is contrarian, with it falling over the coming decades.
Yet another straightforward analysis that accounts for the physics, the engineering, and the costs makes it clear that hydrogen is not an economically viable store of energy for our future decarbonized economy. All of the projects proposing to manufacture hydrogen where sunshine and wind are constant and cheap, and then ship it to countries that currently consume fossil fuels to replace them as an energy source fail basic tests of economics, and stack up very poorly compared to significant electrification.
Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem. 
<h3>References:</h3>
<ul><li><a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/418d4ca0-e051-413e-93b1-58fca3aa4109">Green hydrogen’s rise will coincide with falling demand</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.offshore-energy.biz/suiso-frontier-brings-worlds-1st-lh2-shipment-to-japan/">Suiso Frontier brings world’s 1st LH2 shipment to Japan</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/hydrogen/namibia-stakes-its-future-on-the-green-hydrogen-market">Namibia stakes its future on the green hydrogen market</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/saudi-arabias-hydrogen-industrial-strategy">Saudi Arabia&#x27;s Hydrogen Industrial Strategy</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/news-and-insights/press-releases/bp-plans-uks-largest-hydrogen-project.html">bp plans UK’s largest hydrogen project</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/">Global Shipping Less Of CO2e Problem Today Than Aviation, More By End Of Century</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9103us3A.htm">Price of US Natural Gas Imports - IEA</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.wartsila.com/encyclopedia/term/lng-tanker">Wärtsilä Q-Max LNG Tanker</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://energies.airliquide.com/resources-planet-hydrogen/how-hydrogen-stored#:~:text=In%20the%20liquid%20form,-A%20state%2Dof&amp;text=At%20%2D252.87%C2%B0C%20and,to%2071%20kg%2Fm3.">How is Hydrogen Stored? Aire Liquide</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.lazard.com/media/451779/lazards-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen-analysis-vf.pdf">Lazard’s LCOE for Hydrogen</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL1138547/LNG-carrier-rates-top-260000-per-day-as-arbitrage-profits-exceed-100m">LNG Carrier Rates - Lloyd’s</a>​ </li></ul>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.elengy.com/en/contracts-and-operations/ship-related-procedures.html">LNG Vessel Procedures - Elengy</a>​ </li></ul>

Hydrogen shipped for energy would be at least five times as expensive as LNG

We may all be made of stars, but that doesn’t mean we all spread light in the darkness when it comes to effective and economically viable climate solutions. Kahneman’s Nobel-prize winning work in cognitive science along with many others, captured in Kahneman’s excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow, helps us understand our own biases to a certain extent, and helps us spot others’ biases more easily.

We may all be made of stars, but that doesn&rsquo;t mean we all spread light in the darkness when it comes to effective and economically viable climate solutions. Kahneman&rsquo;s Nobel-prize winning work in cognitive science along with many others, captured in Kahneman&rsquo;s excellent book <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0385676530">Thinking, Fast and Slow</a>, helps us understand our own biases to a certain extent, and helps us spot others&rsquo; biases more easily.
Policy makers, decision makers and influencers on the core climate action file, where we will be investing trillions in transformation in the coming years and decades, need to have clearer eyes than the average person on the street. They need to work harder to understand their own biases and blind spots, and also ensure that they work with teams and advisors who have different biases and blind spots to ensure that groupthink doesn&rsquo;t lead them down an unfortunate path.
The things we do and don&rsquo;t know and the things we refuse to know are top of mind for me as I look through a glass darkly into the future, trying to articulate where <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/15/how-aviation-will-decarbonize-decade-by-decade-until-2100-part-2/">aviation</a>, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/">marine shipping</a>, hydrogen and the like will go. I see clear evidence of cognitive biases in multiple fields among senior and influential people.
And, of course, I&rsquo;m subject to biases as well. This is not just about other people, but about my failings as well. For example, I live in one of the most densely populated area codes in North America, perhaps the most densely populated. Sixteen condo buildings of twenty or more stories are visible from my home office window. British Columbia has the highest penetration of electric vehicles of any state or province in North America. Bike share is everywhere. The two primary car shares have hybrid-electric and now fully electric cars with Zerocar&rsquo;s new Tesla Model 3 service. Vancouver&rsquo;s transit is second only to Singapore&rsquo;s of the places I&rsquo;ve lived, and the Skytrain continues to have by far the best views of any light rail system in the world. I&rsquo;ve driven perhaps once in the past year, walking everywhere, using bikeshare regularly and occasionally taking transit.
When I write about <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/04/15/vw-vehicle-to-grid-is-15-years-too-early-except-maybe-in-texas/">vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home technologies</a>, my starting assumption is multi-unit residential buildings in denser urban areas, not detached suburban homes. That&rsquo;s a more useful frame, as even in the suburban sprawl of the US, 20% of the inhabitants live in multi-unit residential buildings. In Asia, it&rsquo;s 90%, and there are a lot more people in Asia. I am accidentally an outlier among North American transformation strategists, which means my biases are more aligned with the conditions in the rest of the world. By contrast, many of the people I interact with are affluent people, often thought leaders, who have 2- or 3-car garages with EVs parked in them and solar panels on their roof tops, and who start with the assumption of detached homes and hence consider V2H and V2G as obvious choices, even if they would likely never agree to vehicle-to-grid arrangements because they would pay vastly less.
For a clearer external frame on this, only 0.8% of the world&rsquo;s population lives in detached homes in America&rsquo;s sprawling suburbs. Frequently it seems like much more as those detached homes get far too much airtime both in popular media and in climate solution circles.
One of the other biases vehicle-to-grid advocates often get wrong is Kahneman&rsquo;s prospect theory, for which he won the Nobel Prize.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/5947cad944f1ee0a7d520c6e3560c7cb95958e7e.png" alt="Figure 1: Kahneman&rsquo;s prospect theory diagram, courtesy of Sandia Labs" />
Cognitively, humans fear loss much more than they value gain. For vehicle-to-grid, that means that they fear loss of range and loss of the money that is sunk into charging their vehicle more than they value the potential money that they might earn from a utility. This discontinuity would mean that utilities would have to pay much more to the vehicle owners than the electricity is worth to overcome the loss aversion. An 80 kWh EV that sells 10 kWh back to the grid at $0.30 per kWh would make less than the price of a good cup of coffee, making the economic transaction and required hardware and handshakes bafflingly unlikely. The odds of detached home owners valuing three-quarters of a cup of coffee more than potential range loss are very low. It&rsquo;s an interesting technology, but it runs into a brick wall of human nature. Vehicle-to-home is more likely, but once again it&rsquo;s vastly overstated as a value proposition by many simply because they live in detached homes and as a result think it&rsquo;s much more common than it is. Advocates assert that utilities will pay many dollars per kWh in the most demanding periods, but that still equates to only dozens or a couple of hundred dollars per year, insufficient to overcome loss aversion for most people unless they don&rsquo;t get the choice and are automatically opted in.
And people in the US have 3 other biases which come clearly through when I speak to them and read what they write and publish. First, the US has the least reliable grid among developed countries, with over 4 hours of outages per customer per year on average, compared to under 15 minutes per year in Germany and Denmark. Second, many American electrical utilities are among the most grasping and greedy, and among the ones with the worst customer service in the world. Third, Americans have a dysfunctional myth of rugged individualism. This leads many of them to assume that taking a suburban home completely off-grid, or at least loading it up with expensive storage, makes rational sense, and that the desire to do so is common. It isn&rsquo;t economically rational, isn&rsquo;t an effective climate change strategy, and globally this perspective is deeply unusual. There are aspects of the availability bias here, the cognitive bias where what easily springs to mind is assumed to be much more statistically common than it really is.
When I write about building integrated solar panels, especially the nonsensical and recurrent idea of <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michael-barnard-42446_transparent-solar-panels-could-replace-windows-activity-6927023265852915712-5guZ?utm_source=linkedin_share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop_web">solar windows</a>, it&rsquo;s in context of vast global urbanization, with urban windows that are not remotely aligned to the sun but to the street grid, windows which are frequently in shade from other buildings, and large building energy requirements that can&rsquo;t even begin to be met from deeply inefficient, poorly aligned, shaded, transparent solar panels. Of course, there are lots of windows in suburban sprawl in the US, but the suburbs are mostly low-rises with fewer windows, and as noted, suburban US buildings are a tiny fraction of global building stock.
When I talk with thought leaders such as <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/17/transitioning-the-world-to-100-renewable-energy-part-2/">Mark Z. Jacobson</a> or <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/21/local-solar-storage-present-opportunities-solar-inventions-ceo-bill-nussey-cleantech-talk/">Bill Nussey</a>, both stronger advocates of distributed solar than I am, or in Nussey&rsquo;s case provide feedback on a late draft of his book, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Freeing-Energy-Innovators-Local-Scale-Batteries-ebook/dp/B09L6HCNRR">Freeing Energy</a>, I&rsquo;m doing it in context of massive and dense urbanization and the much denser urban patterns that exist around the world than they are used to. Like many Americans, they live in detached homes, and of course both have solar panels on their large roofs. It&rsquo;s very easy for them to think, unless they engage Kahneman&rsquo;s system two slow thinking and look at external data, as both do, that rooftop solar will be much more dominant than it can be. This doesn&rsquo;t make their work problematic, but it can skew it, especially their initial thinking on subjects. However, I&rsquo;m just as subject to undervaluing rooftop solar because the examples immediately available to me &mdash; high-density, low-insolation Vancouver &mdash; don&rsquo;t make it a reasonable choice.
While I&rsquo;m a strong advocate of electric vehicles, I&rsquo;m also someone who has been carless &mdash; this time &mdash; for a decade, and during that time lived in Toronto, S&atilde;o Paulo, Singapore, Calgary, and Vancouver, cities with vastly different patterns of urbanization and sprawl. I&rsquo;ve lived with the downsides of being carless in the deeply car-centric city of Calgary, and the downsides of owning and driving a car in Toronto&rsquo;s rush hour and around downtown in general. I&rsquo;ve had a single day which would make an urban transit nerd glow with happiness, taking six separate modes of transportation, from bike share to subways to car shares to walking on different legs of my journey. As such, I&rsquo;m struck by the naivet&eacute; of people at both ends of the spectrum, the ones who think everyone will go car free, and the ones who think electric cars are far more of a climate solution than they are.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/ace67ce8a295157aa239804d1ff187116262a251.png" alt="Figure 2: Energy flowchart made by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories." />
A number of people who should know better seem to be unaware that our society throws away two-thirds of primary energy, people including Vaclav Smil it seems, who recently published another book and was interviewed on his deeply and inaccurately pessimistic book by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/25/magazine/vaclav-smil-interview.html">New York Times Magazine</a>. I <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/42661613-2c0f-47ad-9a52-cb939786195c">assessed Smil&rsquo;s take on renewables</a>, and when there was zero mention of rejected energy or the much greater efficiency of all electrified energy services provided with renewable electricity, went looking for any reference in any of his works to it. Nothing. Nada. Zip. This is one of 3 major gaps for Smil, so his perspectives should be taken with a grain of salt.
I constantly run into people in discussions &mdash; investors, VCs, technologists, economists &mdash; who are dealing with the transformation to a low-carbon future who don&rsquo;t know this. My <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/09ca08ea-3345-4b90-b6f5-8762cd3933da">Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work</a> gets attacked regularly because I exclude efficiency as a top line item. Electrifying everything and using renewable electricity comes with a 50% efficiency bonus, vastly more than any other efficiency gains possible. This seems obvious to me because I&rsquo;ve internalized this perspective, but Smil and others are still living in a world where all the energy in primary energy sources has to be replaced. As I wrote a couple of years ago, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/26/ec2019-part-3-is-building-energy-efficiency-overrated/">building efficiency is overrated and more of an economic concern</a>, and we should be looking at embodied carbon much more seriously. This doesn&rsquo;t mean efficiency in existing buildings doesn&rsquo;t have a part to play, but low-hanging fruit insulation typically suffices, and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/28/for-co2-reduction-from-existing-buildings-heat-pumps-are-better-than-efficiency/">heat pumps add much more climate value</a>.
Similarly, grid storage is a major topic these days, and I speak to energy experts globally pretty much every week these days. And yet virtually all of them are unaware that <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/a248729b-5af9-409e-89b3-f28dd2abbbf2">pumped hydro storage</a> is by far the largest source of grid storage today, that it&rsquo;s by far the biggest under-construction storage technology today, that China is building far more pumped hydro than any other country in the world, that it&rsquo;s not an environmental problem, that it doesn&rsquo;t take much water, that there are 100 times the resource in convenient locations as is required globally, and that it is a 100+ year infrastructure asset. This includes major energy investors with billions to spend, and who need to be guided to spend that money wisely. Thankfully, I&rsquo;m now speaking to investor groups with hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions to invest around the world fairly regularly, so I am assisting the right people to overcome this blind spot. (A major pumped hydro development win is still under wraps pending more negotiations, so watch this space).
Similarly to urban sprawl, Americans assume that the rest of the world&rsquo;s regulatory structure for hydro is as dysfunctional as theirs, so it can&rsquo;t be easily built anywhere else either. As such, they are making investment decisions in the absence of critical knowledge. That doesn&rsquo;t, by the way, mean that they would make substantially different decisions, but that they are operating in ignorance of data which would shape their choices, and hence are making sub-optimal ones.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/917bca28bcefca95481f0ebe992a8aad79a7e8e0.png" alt="Figure 3: Hydrogen demand projection through 2100, chart by author." />
When I speak to Paul Martin, a chemical processing engineer with 30+ years of hydrogen experience, and a founder of the <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/01/paul-martin-talks-h2-science-coalition-more-problems-with-hydrogen/">Hydrogen Science Coalition</a>, he refers to people having &lsquo;burner boxes&rsquo; on their heads. This refers to people who work with liquid or gaseous fuels today who are stuck inside the paradigm of burning things for heat. This could be natural gas generation utilities, or industrial concerns, or transportation policy makers and analysts. But their bias due to long familiarity is that the only energy that counts is energy that you light a match to. This is a deeply false proposition, and one that&rsquo;s very damaging to useful discourse.
That&rsquo;s shaping the thinking of governments and corporations around hydrogen right now, as a pervasive belief is that natural gas, diesel, Jet A-1, and other fuels must be replaced by something that burns, and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/shrinking-hydrogen-demand-hydrogen-decarbonization-will-have-major-climate-benefits/">hydrogen</a> is the only clean-ish candidate. The EU&rsquo;s energy policies are leaning on hydrogen in the absence of any particularly rational reason for this. I&rsquo;ve recently published a report on the <a href="https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2022-05/Assessing_EU_plans_to_import_hydrogen.pdf">skewed energy policies that Europe and European corporations are promoting</a> in northern Africa, and the biases are clear.
Certainly when it comes to hydrogen, there are people who became pot-committed to hydrogen for road transportation sometime in the past couple of decades, and just can&rsquo;t let it go. Whether they work for Ballard, or just think fuel cell vehicles are neat, their biases shine through when you speak to them. They just can&rsquo;t accept that hydrogen is inefficient, ineffective, and expensive. I&rsquo;m sure that I&rsquo;ll have the usual suspects and more chiming in with comments on this article. Their confirmation bias &mdash; Kahneman writes of this in Thinking, Fast and Slow of course, and I&rsquo;ve spoken to cognitive scientists like John Cook, famous for <a href="https://skepticalscience.com/">Skeptical Science</a> and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/01/13/cranky-uncle-vs-climate-change-john-cook-is-a-cognitive-scientist-climate-communicator-cartoonist/">Cranky Uncle vs Climate Change</a> about it &mdash; prevents their acceptance of data which contradicts their preconceptions, and means that they vastly over rely on weak data that supports their preconceptions.
Similar to hydrogen fuel cell advocates are those who see nuclear energy as a much bigger solution, or perhaps even the only viable solution, to decarbonizing energy. As I&rsquo;ve written before about people like Bill Gates and Michael Shellenberger, they reached this pro-nuclear conclusion in the early to mid 2000s, when it was truly uncertain whether wind and solar could scale, be reliable on grids and be cost effective. They haven&rsquo;t updated their priors on the subject. As a result, they ignore &mdash; in Shellenberger&rsquo;s case actively and intentionally &mdash; empirical reality from the past dozen years that show clearly that nuclear is, at best, something which might be useful for the last 5% to 20% of electrical generation, not 50% to 80%. Many people are holding onto perspectives that they reached often decades ago, and for a variety of reasons are not updating their data sets and analyses.
Finally, for at least this brief listing, is the odd perspective that countries can get fossil fuels from anywhere, but that electricity is difficult to trade across borders and risky. HVDC and other transmission is not conceptually or economically different than pipelines except that it&rsquo;s vastly cheaper to move electrons than to push molecules. Electricity is just energy, and no harder to hedge than fossil fuels, and renewables just generate electricity that can be moved across continent+ scale grids. Yet for some reason people keep telling me that electricity transmission across borders is too risky and difficult to hedge, despite events like the natural gas freezing failures in Texas in February of 2021, the massive natural gas price volatility that crippled Europe in the winter, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Fukushima&rsquo;s disruption of nuclear generation globally. We can trade eggs, grain, coal, steel, iPhones, and everything else across borders without concern, but electricity transmission is somehow a step too far.
My awareness of the blindspots and biases in others does not prevent me from having my own cognitive lapses. However, I work hard to overcome them. I engage system two thinking by digging into the underlying numbers and doing calculations personally, and I find external perspectives and data to extend and challenge my thinking. And, of course, as I publish regularly, people challenge my blindspots and biases constantly, something for which I&rsquo;m grateful.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Being human means we have biases. Rapid decarbonization requires us to confront them

For something which produces 2-5% of global CO2 emissions depending on how you count it and who you ask, you’d think that aviation fuel would be a commodity that every country taxed heavily, especially more rational entities like the EU. However, that’s just not true in most places.

For something which produces <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/16/what-can-we-do-about-aviation-related-warming-an-exploration-via-methanol/">2-5% of global CO2 emissions</a> depending on how you count it and who you ask, you’d think that aviation fuel would be a commodity that every country taxed heavily, especially more rational entities like the EU. However, that’s just not true in most places. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/josef-mouris-a9b9b7a2/?originalSubdomain=uk">Josef Mouris</a>, co-founder and CEO of the EU electric airplane startup I’m on the Advisory Board of, <a href="https://flyelectron.eu/">ELECTRON Aviation</a>, pointed out the challenges for the Netherlands to me in 2021. What exists in the Netherlands, however, is just one of a patchwork of aviation fuel pricing adders in the western world.
In the EU, aviation turbine fuels (ATF) including Jet A, Jet A-1, and Jet B were explicitly exempt from taxes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Taxation_Directive">until 2003</a> by EU mandate, and only at that point in time were EU member countries allowed to tax it if they so desired. Since 2008, starting with Germany, about 6 EU countries of the EU27 as well as 3 other European countries have put taxes and levies of various types on the sale of ATF. It’s distinctly not a level playing field, and mostly it’s been a surcharge on ticket prices that’s poorly aligned to emissions. The average cost increase is low as well.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/56765b4ddf854f79c5aec69b7044eb2caff8240e.png" alt="Figure 1: Table of current and potential 2033 aviation turbine fuel taxes by author">
And the EU only allows this tax to be applied to intra-EU flights, not to international destination flights, a major source of global emissions. The EU has historically depended on the <a href="https://www.icao.int/about-icao/FAQ/Pages/default.aspx">International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)</a>, a UN sub-body, to address international flight emissions, something it has completely failed to do so far.
As a side note, all numbers I’ll use are for ATF, as the avgas often used in smaller private planes, crop dusters and the like has its own significant variances in treatment between jurisdictions, and is a smaller concern.
In the USA, <a href="https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/marketing/monthly/xls/aviationtaxes.xls">ATF is taxed at an average of $0.28 per US gallon</a>, of which $0.22 is from the federal government, and the remainder from state governments. This applies regardless of whether the flight is domestic or international, a variance from the EU’s approach. There are state-by-state variances, with some states using sales taxes, others using gasoline levies, others explicitly excluding aviation fuels from taxation, others providing refunds, others capping the number of gallons that can be taxed annually, and yet others giving avgas refunds, but not ATF refunds.
In Canada, there are <a href="https://www.alberta.ca/fuel-tax-consumers-aviation.aspx">province</a>-by-<a href="https://airlinecouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NACC_Submission_OntarioPFT_22Mar13.pdf">province</a> taxes, often aligned with gasoline taxes. And Canada in some cases applies them like the EU, with provinces such as Alberta providing tax rebates on ATF purchases for international destinations. Ontario, by comparison, still taxes aviation fuel for international destinations at around $0.08 per US gallon (note: I’m converting everything into USD and US gallons for ease of comparison).
In other words, chief financial officers in airlines likely spend a lot of their year influencing which jurisdictions to support with how many flights of what types, simply because fuel is currently about 19% of an airline’s annual expenses. Picking airports based on fuel surcharges becomes important.
One thing that these various taxes, levies, and surcharges have in common is that they are dirt cheap compared to the negative externalities of burning jet fuel, which in addition to direct CO2 emissions, include nitrous oxides with global warming potentials 265 times that of CO2, other nitrous oxides which cause ground level smog around airports, contrails in the stratosphere which forces more global warming, and of course noise pollution for everyone around the airport, but especially in the landing and take-off paths.
And the other unusual thing about this is that the US actually taxes aviation fuel more than other countries and doesn’t give the money back if the planes are leaving the country. Momentarily, the US’ aviation fuel policies are ahead, even if still completely misaligned with the scale of their negative externalities.
But that’s changing. Among other things, explicit carbon pricing is being applied to fuels in jurisdictions that have a carbon price. Let’s start with Canada, which has introduced a carbon price that’s rising from about $16 USD per ton of CO2 in 2019 to a current target of about $133 in 2030. I<a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/publications/fcrates/fuel-charge-rates.html">t applies to aviation fuel</a>, at least for the provinces that don’t have their own carbon pricing mechanism, with British Columbia and Quebec being the major exceptions as they are in California’s carbon trading plan. That turned into about $0.27 per US gallon initially, and will be about $2.20 per US gallon by 2030. That’s hefty, about 8 times US aviation fuel taxation. There’s also no indication that it’s going to be subject to a rebate if the planes leave the country.
There’s another good news story about Canada’s carbon price. The Liberal Party has now fought three elections on climate change and a carbon tax, and won them with majority and minority governments. Further, the center and center left parties — the NDP, BQ, and Greens — also support the carbon tax, and, with the Liberals, represent two-thirds of the popular vote and a large majority of seats in Parliament. The federal Conservative Party is in turmoil, having replaced its leader three times in the past eight years, and has no path to potentially gaining power until 2025. Further, they are internally split on climate change and carbon pricing, while the country isn’t, so if they don’t have a reasonable climate policy and maintain the carbon price, they are unlikely to be electable. While the Liberals currently hold a minority, in other words, the carbon price is very unlikely to be overturned in the coming years, unlike the fate of a similar carbon price introduced by the Australian Labor Party, who were ousted in large part due to attacks on it.
The EU has had a movement for years to normalize aviation fuel taxes across the EU countries, and also to stop giving them EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) allowances. Currently, the EU gives large ETS allowances to aviation, enabling them to avoid paying for EU carbon permits which were as high as <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/carbon">$114 USD per ton</a> within the past year. As part of the EU’s plan to reduce carbon emissions by 55% by 2030, they have proposed reducing the allowances starting in 2024 down to zero allowances in 2027. A carbon permit price at the peak of $114 would add about $1.50 per US gallon to the cost of ATF. Like Canada’s carbon price, that’s significant, and if the carbon permit value increases, it may match Canada’s with that measure alone.
However, the EU has another lever it’s also hoping to pull, an actual aviation fuel tax of about $1.40 USD per gallon designed to promote sustainable aviation fuels. The combination would mean that the EU goes from remarkably backward to leading the world, with an increase in the cost of ATF by 2033 of almost $3.00 per US gallon.
There are loopholes in the EU increases. They still only apply to intra-EU air travel, with most international destinations being exempt. The EU continues to rely on the ICAO addressing international flight carbon emissions, which is not something the ICAO has been doing or appears to be serious about. ICAO communications at best reference <a href="https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Documents/EnvironmentalReports/2019/ENVReport2019_pg111-115.pdf">aspirational measures</a> for addressing aviation emissions.
The EU proposals also exclude cargo planes, a significant portion of aviation. Despite these exclusions European aviation firms and organizations are lobbying hard to water these initiatives down further, or block them entirely. It’s not yet guaranteed that the EU will appropriately tax and carbon price aviation fuel, but if they do it will still exclude international destinations and all intra-EU cargo, which is a deeply compromised plan.
In the US, there’s a different measure under way. The Biden Administration’s Build Back Better bill included as of late 2021 a target of increasing sustainable aviation fuels from the current 1% to 14% of total fuels used by 2030 with a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/biofuel-makers-seeks-changes-aviation-fuel-tax-credit-biden-spending-plan-2021-09-16/">$1.75 to $2.00 per US gallon tax credit</a> to sellers of sustainable aviation fuels. Naturally, there is lobbying by various biofuel sectors to make sure that their sector is included, as there are grease and fat vs corn pathways. Of course, the Build Back Better plan has been carved down and down and may not pass even as a shadow of its original self. However, American politicians have a bipartisan love of giving farmers subsidies, so there is some hope that this carrot will remain.
For context, the January 2022 average price of ATF was <a href="https://www.flightdeckfriend.com/ask-a-pilot/how-much-does-jet-fuel-cost/">$2.46 per US gallon</a>. Canada’s carbon price in 2030 will be a 73% increase in the price. The EU’s will be a 120% increase, while the US is unlikely to be able to get a carbon price or increase fuel prices through Congress with the structural and cultural problems they have in that country. If we take doubling the price of jet fuel as the basis for a calculation, that turns the annual airliner expense for fuel from 19% to 32% — a massive business disruption.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/7c656e1e92d81a4a9eaa6f8d213390855d805bb0.png" alt="Figure 2: US Kerosene Jet Fuel Historical Monthly Prices courtesy US EIA">
Of course, ATF has significant price volatility, and that’s only increased in the past 15 years. The 2019-2020 dip was due to a significant drop in demand as COVID curtailed aviation globally, of course. But as the energy transition plays out, volatility in fossil fuel prices will only increase, as was the case with natural gas price spikes in late 2021 and further spikes with the Ukraine invasion by Russia. Airlines will have to hedge potential fuel volatility more and more, and the stability of electricity prices will start to become more attractive.
I’ve been projecting out various aspects of electrifying aviation, with a <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/9d348f39-edc6-4238-85bf-3cbd991d6b59">refueling scenario through 2100</a> and an <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/f5492d62-1005-4d8f-aa9a-45ba0b899346">electrified regional air mobility maturity model</a> projected through 2040. Electrified aviation takes its fuel from rapidly decarbonizing grids, so it will pay less and less carbon tax over time. Global aviation and fossil fuel industries haven’t been lobbying for decades to keep their tax breaks or incredibly low taxes, so electric aviation is currently paying normal taxes on electricity. In the Netherlands, where ELECTRON is based, electricity costs from $0.12-$0.18 per kWh and has a 19% VAT applied, but ATF isn’t taxed at present, a clearly problematic state of affairs.
What this means is that Canada and the EU are appropriately applying market mechanisms to the fuel with negative externalities and allowing competition between replacements such as electricity, SAF biofuels, hydrogen, and synthetic fuels — a competition that I believe electricity and SAF biofuels will win –, while the US appears set on picking a single winner and not using market mechanisms. One assumes that rational decision-making will resurface in the US at some point, per Churchill’s observation on the country. At some point, the US will have to tax aviation fuels and price carbon, but at present it’s unlikely that it will even manage to subsidize better alternatives.
Which leads to the next interesting point. A thread I’ve been pulling at recently, and will return to in future aviation-oriented articles, is that airports are amazing places for behind-the-meter solar and storage. Aviation regulations require that large amounts of open space are everywhere around runways so that planes can actually land and take off safely. Ground-mounted solar has lots of room, with <a href="https://www.groningenairport.nl/en/about-groningen-airport-eelde/about-us/sustainability/the-solar-farm-at-groningen-eelde-2">Groningen in the Netherlands having a 21.9 MW solar array</a> and Edmonton International in Canada developing a <a href="https://www.energylivenews.com/2020/07/08/worlds-largest-airport-based-solar-farm-is-ready-to-take-off-in-canada/#:~:text=Edmonton%20International%20Airport%20in%20Canada,equivalent%20to%20313%20football%20fields.">120 MW solar farm</a>.
Electric aviation and behind-the-meter solar become a virtuous pairing, and combined with the potential for electric fleet vehicle and freight vehicle behind-the-meter charging, turns airports into energy powerhouses, giving them a valuable new revenue stream and role in decarbonization. I suspect that like the Texas Gigafactory, they’ll have to formally become an electricity utility to sell it to plane and ground operators, but regardless, there’s a strong climate win between cheaper behind-the-meter electricity and electric aviation that’s going to change flight economics.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/b657328adac0102fff2d70bfb206b4ae02cadf1f.png" alt="Figure 3: Projected demand for aviation energy through 2100 by author">
All of this to say that the emissions of aviation will be priced so the price of aviation for passengers and cargo will go up significantly, and that’s part of why my projection of aviation demand is relatively flat through 2100. The actual opportunity market is a displacement of current business models and airframes with electrified regional air mobility, electric drivetrains on increasingly large planes, and SAF biofuels.
Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Too little, too late, too many loopholes: pricing aviation fuel for climate impacts

In recent years, hype around hydrogen for energy has been reaching a fevered pitch in the halls of Brussels and European corporations. Their original intent was to displace natural gas for obvious climate change concerns. This uneconomic and inefficient approach was heavily supported by oil and gas firms and economies dependent on them, with the goal being to create hydrogen from natural gas and bandage over emissions with carbon capture and sequestration.

<h2>The rise of hydrogen</h2>
In recent years, the hype around hydrogen for energy has been reaching a fevered pitch in the halls of Brussels and European corporations. Their original intent was to displace natural gas for obvious climate change concerns. This uneconomic and inefficient approach was heavily supported by oil and gas firms and economies dependent on them, with the goal being to create hydrogen from natural gas and bandage over emissions with carbon capture and sequestration.
The EU already uses 9.7 million tons of hydrogen annually, with the majority used for oil refining and manufacturing of ammonia and ammonia-based fertilizers, both of which are substantial climate change problems, and both of which have to decline substantially to achieve climate goals. And whatever remains of those 9.7 million tons have to be shifted from current high-carbon hydrogen, with its 10-12 tons of CO2e full lifecycle, to low-carbon hydrogen. Global hydrogen manufacturing is in the same range as all of aviation as a climate problem to give a sense of scale.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/b810e323fad4ed26a0af12647a2a9c7e36613559.png" alt="Figure 1: Hydrogen demand by demand area through 2100 projection by author (https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/418d4ca0-e051-413e-93b1-58fca3aa4109)" />
<h2>The EU's use of hydrogen</h2>
Instead, the EU thinks it is appropriate to substantially extend hydrogen as a source of energy, with heavy vehicles, trains, ships, airplanes, building heat, industrial heat all considered suitable targets for hydrogen use. Their stated goal is to increase hydrogen use by 10 million tons a year, mostly through import from neighboring countries in eastern Europe and northern Africa. Heavy lobbying by firms and countries with major natural gas resources is suppressing the reality that most of these uses are terrible ideas, with direct electrification being much better options. After all, hydrogen in the best possible case returns a fraction of the energy used to manufacture it, while directly using renewable electricity is very high efficiency, and hence much lower cost. Heat pumps are an especially effective direct use of electricity, as they provide 3-5 times the heat per unit of energy by moving it from place to place.
Into this 2021 hydrogen bubble came first the massive increase in natural gas prices in Europe&rsquo;s winter, something I&rsquo;d predicted in early 2020. The Saudi Arabian and Russian oil price war was aimed at high-cost producers globally, with the intent of ensuring that the last barrels pumped for energy were from those countries&rsquo; wells. That had significant implications for unconventional extraction of oil, where hydrofracturing of shale formations brought up both oil and natural gas, but not cheaply. And it was on the heels of the USA&rsquo;s debt-mired oil and gas industry seeing 2019 foreclosures and drying up of cheap debt financing as it became clear that the industry was overextended and unprofitable.
It was clear to me and analysts such as McKinsey that this would lead to a significant reduction in natural gas on the market, and hence an increase in both the base cost of natural gas over inflation and an increase in volatility.
And then Russia invaded Ukraine.
<h2>The aftermath of the invasion</h2>
The two long decades of natural gas being a cheap and stable commodity were over. Natural gas prices shot up further as the taps from Russia were closed. Blue hydrogen dreams for energy evaporated. Who would consider it reasonable to pay multiples of the price of energy today when blue hydrogen still has upstream methane emissions and a maximum of 85% of its CO2 emissions captured and stored? What strategic economic planner or policy maker would subject their countries and economies to that degree of volatility in energy prices for so little climate benefit?
Ukraine had been considered a major country for manufacturing hydrogen for Europe&rsquo;s needs, whether green from renewables splitting water or blue from Russia&rsquo;s natural gas. Obviously that option was off the table, or at least deferred by potentially years.
The role of North Africa
Enter northern Africa. Europe has long looked south to the massive continent across the Mediterranean for resources. Countries were occupied, became &lsquo;veiled protectorates&rsquo;, overt protectorates or simply colonies. Their resources were stripped and shipped back to Europe.
And now hydrogen is the new resource. The sun, wind and empty spaces, not to mention the natural gas reserves, are being considered for European hydrogen demand illusions.
Against this backdrop, <a href="https://corporateeurope.org/en">Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO)</a> and the <a href="https://www.tni.org/en">Transnational Institute (TNI)</a> reached out and asked me to assess European-initiated hydrogen plans in Morocco, Algeria and Egypt. Each of these countries has different situations, risks and opportunities with this latest wave of European resource extraction. The resulting report, <a href="https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2022-05/Assessing_EU_plans_to_import_hydrogen.pdf">Morocco, Algeria, Egypt: Assessing EU plans to import hydrogen from North Africa</a>, is now published.
Morocco is likely best positioned to find a useful path through Europe&rsquo;s efforts. It is a green leader in Africa, with wind and solar farms and 323 km of high-speed, electrified passenger rail. It&rsquo;s not a fossil fuel economy, although its limited natural gas reserves are being considered for exploitation now. And as an economy that&rsquo;s already spent a considerable amount of time and effort considering decarbonization, it knows where most of the carbon bodies are actually buried, and has seen through more of the greenwashing. As a result, the strategy first targets decarbonizing their own fertilizer manufacturing, and then considering hydrogen for other uses.
But there are risks. Morocco&rsquo;s published documents make it clear that they are still considering hydrogen for transportation and as an energy source themselves. Further, they are considering shipping it to Europe, either on very costly hydrogen tankers or via the decommissioned portion of the Mahgreb-Europe natural gas pipeline that is in their country. None of these portions of their thinking make sense.
Algeria is likely the most deeply challenged of the three countries, with the greatest likelihood of wasted energy, time and money with hydrogen initiatives that don&rsquo;t have merit. It&rsquo;s the most dependent on fossil fuel revenues, with 14.39% of its GDP directly from them. Its electricity is virtually all from natural gas generation. It has virtually no renewable generation at all. It ships its natural gas to Europe through the 1,600 kilometers of the Mahgreb-Europe pipeline.
As such, it&rsquo;s susceptible to the idea that green and blue hydrogen could flow through that pipeline, replacing the revenues from natural gas that will inevitably be lost in coming years. Initially they are considering mixing up to 20% by volume of hydrogen with natural gas. However, that would challenge the pipeline itself requiring investment, the mixed gas would be much more expensive per unit of energy than the natural gas, and the resultant mixture when used would only reduce CO2 emissions by 6-7%.
Their hopes of sending green and blue hydrogen through the pipeline in its pure form are even less likely. Manufacturing green or blue hydrogen with new infrastructure custom built for it would result in energy costs 5-11 times what Europe was used to paying in the summer of 2021 for natural gas. And that&rsquo;s before the cost of distribution through the pipeline triples. These costs are well above the unsustainable peak costs for natural gas during the Ukraine invasion by Russia, and won&rsquo;t be viable compared to electrification.
Egypt is yet again different. Its oil rent is lower, around 4% of its GDP. It has the Aswan Dam, although its contribution of electricity has been a steeply declining percentage of its grid mix as natural gas and oil generation have been built.
And it&rsquo;s on the Suez Canal. That last is important as major initiatives are underway to make synthetic ammonia and methanol to be used as marine shipping fuels. Green and blue hydrogen would, in theory, be combined with CO2 or nitrogen to manufacture alternatives to bunker fuel. However, these substances are both deeply problematic from a human health perspective, and in ammonia&rsquo;s case, deadly in its primary form, reacting with water to make a dangerous caustic solution and finally decomposing into something merely bad for human health. Battery electrification of shipping will cover all inland and most short-sea shipping, but these two fuels are being considered as replacements for deep-sea shipping. The jury is out, but biofuels are likely to be a more economic option.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/61d42c0b8ab293df4628c339fc2b180e12565580.png" alt="Figure 2: MT Fossil Fuels Shipping by decade through 2100, projection by author (https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/)" />
<h2>The perils of Europe's hydrogen policy for North Africa</h2>
But any electricity used to manufacture green hydrogen for Europe and its economy will not be available to decarbonize these countries. They all have significant CO2e emissions from electrical generation using coal, natural gas and oil. They all have significant CO2e emissions from fertilizer for their agricultural sectors, sectors which export up to 60% of their produce to Europe. They all have other industries which require hydrogen.
Manufacturing hydrogen for Europe&rsquo;s decarbonization at great expense, deep inefficiency and in the case of blue hydrogen, more CO2e emissions, makes little sense compared to electrifying and decarbonizing their own economies. It&rsquo;s exactly the type of European extractive economic actions that left a bad taste in countries around the world in previous decades and centuries. And it&rsquo;s antithetical to the Paris Agreement pledge to assist developing countries to decarbonize.
If only there were an alternative to hydrogen for Europe&rsquo;s energy needs. And, of course, there is.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/fe663f4ddfb36ae0d07b87126be86a0c244ab3f9.png" alt="Figure 3: MEDGRID proposed transmission connections with Europe" />
Currently, transmission of electricity occurs between Morocco and Spain and across the Bosphorus Strait through Turkey. MEDGRID proposes to substantially increase these transmission interconnects with high-capacity HVDC lines.
HVDC loses a mere 3.0% to 3.5% of energy for every 1,000 kilometers traveled, meaning that energy can flow very long distances without significant efficiency burdens. North African wind and solar could flow northward to assist Europe, while Scandinavian hydroelectric and North Sea wind could flow south to those countries. One of the best ways to manage the intermittency of renewable generation is to connect them across broader geographical expanses, enabling it to flow from where it is generated to where it is needed with few barriers.
This would assist all European and North African countries to decarbonize. Instead of manufacturing and shipping molecules at great expense in Africa and shipping them north, decarbonized electricity from the grid would manufacture green hydrogen more cheaply at the places it is consumed.
With careful efforts, the leaders of the northern African countries will be able to take advantage of this period of hydrogen for energy hype to gain renewables, transmission and green hydrogen infrastructure for their own needs. With more careful efforts, they should be able to avoid wasting much of their own time, energy and money on shipping, pipelines and the like for European export. When the European hydrogen for energy bubble inevitably collapses, these countries could be left in much better shape, a desire much to be hoped for.
And so, Europe&rsquo;s primary strategy, to create a hydrogen energy economy, is fatally flawed. It would be uneconomic. It would be inefficient. It would be ineffective. And it would be outdistanced rapidly by electrification. With luck and strategic care, good will come of it in northern Africa despite Europe&rsquo;s efforts to the contrary.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Europe hopes to decarbonize Itself with hydrogen at the expense of North Africa

Two major nuclear generation construction projects have recently declared further delays and cost overruns. As the world’s temperature inexorably heats toward 1.5° and 2.0° Celsius increase landmarks, both of which are very likely to be exceeded, it’s important to ask ourselves, “What form of new generation scales rapidly enough to be of value in the crisis we have allowed to occur?”

Two major nuclear generation construction projects have recently declared further delays and cost overruns. As the world’s temperature inexorably heats toward 1.5° and 2.0° Celsius increase landmarks, both of which are very likely to be exceeded, it’s important to ask ourselves, “What form of new generation scales rapidly enough to be of value in the crisis we have allowed to occur?”
After all, every GWh of new low-carbon generation displaces a GWh of high carbon gas or coal generation, so we need to deploy a lot of low-carbon generation quickly to avoid 2.5° and 3.0° of heating, with their far worse impacts around the world.
In the USA, the two reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia have just <a href="https://www.powermag.com/vogtle-nuclear-expansion-price-tag-tops-30-billion/">announced</a> another cost overrun of $300 million USD, unlikely to be the last, bringing their budget overruns to more than the total original projected cost, $16.3 billion in overruns compared to $14 billion of original budget. The current schedule overrun is at least 9 years over the initial promise of four years. In the UK, the two reactors at the Hinkley site have just <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220519-new-one-year-delay-at-uk-hinkley-point-nuclear-plant-edf">announced</a> an additional $3.7 billion USD in cost overruns, and will be commissioned at least another year later. The French Flamanville plant which uses the same reactor technology is also vastly over budget and schedule.
There are multiple assertions that are being used to excuse this disastrous set of results in project delivery. Many Americans assert that there’s too much red tape. Many European nuclear advocates argue that protests by environmentalists are causing significant delays. Both are pointing to COVID-19 as a major factor in recent delays.
If only there were a natural experiment, somewhere in the world, to test these claims, including against the obvious candidates to build instead of nuclear generation, wind and solar. Luckily, there is.
China is a major deployer of wind, solar and nuclear energy. It’s had a nuclear generation deployment program since the 1990s, and wind and solar programs since the middle of the 2000s. Its central government has much greater ability to overcome or simply ignore protests, and to streamline red tape. And it’s been living in the same world with the rest of us for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, although it has managed it much better than the rest of the world, with a much lower dip in GDP and far fewer deaths per million citizens. Its results over a dozen years, starting in 2010 when all three programs were mature, should tell the tale of whether nuclear energy, when given every advantage, is more scalable than wind or solar.
In 2014, I made the strong assertion that <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/29/wind-energy-beats-nuclear-carbon-capture-global-warming-mitigation/">China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation</a> deployments showed clearly that <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/29/wind-energy-beats-nuclear-carbon-capture-global-warming-mitigation/">wind energy was more scalable</a> than nuclear. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/21/wind-solar-in-china-generating-2x-nuclear-today-will-be-4x-by-2030/">assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation</a>, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/21/wind-solar-in-china-generating-2x-nuclear-today-will-be-4x-by-2030/">4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030</a> each year between them. Last year, I assessed <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/05/a-decade-of-wind-solar-nuclear-in-china-shows-clear-scalability-winners/">11 years of wind, solar and nuclear deployments</a> in China
My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged:
<blockquote>the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. </blockquote>
This was obvious in 2014, it was obvious in 2019, it was obvious in 2021 and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, China is the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it treats deployments of renewable and nuclear generation as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear), and has the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly with so few confounding factors.
And so, I return to my ongoing analysis of this key question, now with a dozen years of deployment history.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/f08a00dd8aa0dc954ca766f094d17108bbeb561f.png" alt="Figure 1: Commercial operation start of nameplate capacity of wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020 chart by author
">
I’ve aggregated this from multiple sources, including the <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power.aspx">World Nuclear Association</a>, the <a href="https://gwec.net/">Global Wind Energy Council</a>, and the <a href="https://iea-pvps.org/">International Energy Agency’s photovoltaic material</a>. In 2012, China put no nuclear generation into commercial operation at all. It’s adding more this year, but the year is not complete, and is excluded for all three forms of generation.
The solar and wind programs were started in the mid-2000s, and wind energy initially saw much greater deployments. Having paid much more attention to wind energy than solar for much of the past decade, I was surprised that solar capacity deployments exceeded wind energy in 2017 and 2018, undoubtedly part of why solar doubled China’s 2020 target for the technology, while wind energy exceeded its targets by a substantial but lower amount. I’m less surprised by solar surpassing wind energy in 2021 given the rapid decrease in solar energy costs among other factors.
Nuclear lagged its targets substantially. In 2019, the clear indication was that China would make substantially higher targets for wind and solar, and downgrade their expectations for nuclear, which has been borne out.
As a reminder, COVID-19 was in full flight globally in 2020 and 2021, and yet China managed to deploy as much wind and solar as the rest of the world combined in both of those years. Of course, while much of the rest of the world retires nuclear plants as they face costly refurbishments, China is also succeeding in getting new nuclear plants onto the grid, mostly on schedule and closer to budget. This would appear to suggest that the USA and the UK’s excuses around COVID-19 should be taken with a grain of salt.
This also calls into question the claims of regulatory and protest hindrances. Despite the relative ease of regulatory regimes for nuclear in China, and the low disruptions for any protests, China still delivered far less nuclear capacity than wind or solar. It doesn’t appear that the nuclear industry’s protestations of headwinds stand up to scrutiny.
That said, nameplate capacity doesn’t matter as much as actual generation. Wind and solar energy in China have poorer capacity factors than in the United States and Europe at present. This was assessed in a <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaadeb">Letter in the journal Environmental Research</a> by European and North American researchers in 2018.
<blockquote>“Our findings underscore that the larger gap between actual performance and technical potential in China compared to the United States is significantly driven by delays in grid connection (14% of the gap) and curtailment due to constraints in grid management (10% of the gap), two challenges of China’s wind power expansion covered extensively in the literature. However, our findings show that China’s underperformance is also driven by suboptimal turbine model selection (31% of the gap), wind farm siting (23% of the gap), and turbine hub heights (6% of the gap)—factors that have received less attention in the literature and, crucially, are locked-in for the lifetime of wind farms.”</blockquote>
Some of the capacity factor issues are locked in, and some aren’t, but overall wind energy in China’s capacity is below that of the US fleet. For my model, I’ve adjusted capacity factors for wind energy to be 21% in 2010, and rising to 30% for 2021 deployments, still well below US experience. Solar faced some of the same concerns, and as of 2021 had a median capacity factor of 17.6%, which I adjusted down to 15% for early years of deployment, and up to 20% for recent years, again below US experiences.
China’s nuclear fleet has had much better ability to connect to the grid, and as the reactors are new, they haven’t been taken offline for substantial maintenance yet. As a result, the average capacity factor for the fleet of 91.1% for the decade is used.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/680b3a35f7c36529447d677e36855949dafe1843.png" alt="Figure 2: Generation in TWh added each year by wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020">
And this tells the tale. Even adjusted for the poor capacity factor wind and solar experienced and the above global average capacity factor for nuclear, in only one year, 2018, did the nuclear fleet add more actual generation than wind energy. The story is more mixed in the solar vs nuclear story, but since 2016, solar new actual generation of electricity has vastly exceeded that of nuclear. And as a reminder, the Chinese wind and solar deployment programs started well over a decade after the nuclear program, which saw its first grid connections in 1994.
The failures of engineering megaprojects including nuclear generation construction compared to modular projects is a key theme in Dr. Bent Flyvbjerg’s work. Among his roles, he is the First BT Professor and Inaugural Chair of Major Programme Management at Oxford University&#x27;s Saïd Business School. He’s a global authority on major infrastructure projects. His guidance on <a href="https://bentflyvbjerg.medium.com/four-ways-to-scale-up-136eb72a3fbd">how to scale up infrastructure projects effectively</a> is clearly demonstrated by the Chinese experience with the high modular wind and solar farms vs the bespoke singular nuclear plants. I can say this with some certainty, as Flybvjerg and the co-author of his upcoming 2023 book reached out to me to request inclusion of my 2021 analysis in a chapter of that work. Part of my motivation in updating it here is to provide them the best possible version of it.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/911359e4295ba83d47ff0fde5fba08a4b46a8382.png" alt="Figure 3: Modular scaling advantages quadrant chart courtesy Dr. Bent Flyvbjerg">
It’s worth noting that as of today, 7 of the 10 largest wind turbine manufacturers, and 9 of the 10 largest solar component manufacturers are Chinese companies. China remains, as I pointed out a couple of years ago, the <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/14/only-china-has-scaled-manufacturing-leading-practices-for-rapid-low-carbon-transformation-part-4/">only scaled manufacturer of many of the technologies necessary for decarbonization</a>. Further, it’s expanding its market share in those technologies rapidly.
These wind turbine manufacturers have built roughly half of the roughly 400,000 wind turbines and 1.2 million wind turbine blades. They’ve built 80% to 90% of the 3 billion solar panels in the world. These technologies have experienced all the advantages of Wright’s Law, also known as the efficiency curve, which observes that for every doubling of manufacturing volume, unit costs decrease by 20% to 28%. By comparison there are a couple of dozen technologies of varying configurations among the roughly 440 nuclear plants that have been built to date, with each being unique in a variety of ways.
The speed of deployment is a corollary to Wright’s Law, in that not only costs go down, but production speed goes up. Similarly, all along the distribution and construction chain, efficiencies are introduced by innovators and intermediaries for high volume processes. Solar panels, as one obvious example, are shipped in standard shipping containers, but custom ships, train cars and tractor-trailer trucks deliver wind turbine components globally.
My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. While working on my of <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/c1f245f8-d201-498e-9e85-8592095ae2ac">assessment of small modular nuclear reactors</a>, it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.
Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis. But of course, policy makers must pay attention to the on the ground results.
 Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

A dozen years of Chinese wind, solar and nuclear generation show clear scalability winners

Electric vertical take off and landing air taxis dropping into urban vertiports — collectively urban air mobility or UAM — have taken up considerable space in headlines and investment circles, and have collectively lost over $21 billion in market capitalization, 77% of peak. Smart aviation investors and thought leaders are ignoring the Jetsons future that startups and speculators pretend is coming and focus on what electrification will do for the roughly 8,000 smaller, underutilized public airports in North America and Europe alone.

Electric vertical take off and landing air taxis dropping into urban vertiports &mdash; collectively urban air mobility or UAM &mdash; have taken up considerable space in headlines and investment circles, and have collectively lost over $21 billion in market capitalization, 77% of peak. Smart aviation investors and thought leaders are ignoring the Jetsons future that startups and speculators pretend is coming and focus on what electrification will do for the roughly 8,000 smaller, underutilized public airports in North America and Europe alone.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/1d4d904f493b06c59229444e5141e1f8dfa4baa6.png" alt="Figure 1: Map of US contiguous public airports courtesy NASA" />
The economics of air travel have changed radically over the past 40 years or so. Jet turbofan engines have become more and more efficient with each passing year, but only when they are flying at 30,000 feet at optimal cruising speed. They&rsquo;ve become bigger as well, which is why modern jets have two huge engines instead of four smaller ones. Those newest jet engines are 55% efficient at turning Jet A-1 into forward motion, but not when they are taxiing, taking off or landing. When they aren&rsquo;t flying in optimum conditions, it&rsquo;s like pouring kerosene on the airport. By comparison, turboprops on 60-120 passenger propeller-driven commuter planes are around 35% efficient at turning aviation fuel into passenger miles.
That has led to the hub and spoke model of aviation with long legs that exists today, and a significant reduction in percentages and absolute terms of commercial aviation in the turboprop space. The vast majority of passenger and freight aviation flies out of under 1% of airports. The 8,000 smaller airports on two big and rich continents are infrastructure begging for a viable business model.
Electric airplanes unlock that infrastructure, and emerging digital air traffic control and autonomous aviation turbocharge it. There&rsquo;s a disruption coming, but it&rsquo;s not with electric rotorcraft buzzing over our schools, highways, offices and homes.
That&rsquo;s the vision of NASA&rsquo;s <a href="https://sacd.larc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/167/2021/04/2021-04-20-RAM.pdf">Regional Air Mobility study</a> from early in 2021, which draws on cross-industry collaboration and previous economic studies by NASA to find that a 40% reduction in operational costs of airplanes changes the economics of the aviation industry from the bottom up.
That&rsquo;s the realization of startup founders such as Anders Forslund of <a href="https://heartaerospace.com/">Heart Aerospace</a>, and Mesa Airlines, who have put in 200 pre-orders for Heart&rsquo;s 19 passenger fully electric airplane expected in 2026, and United Airlines with its 100 pre-orders. That&rsquo;s the vision of co-founders Josef Mouris and Marc-Henry de Jong of <a href="https://flyelectron.eu/">ELECTRON Aviation</a>, which is developing a four passenger, one pilot electric airplane for the general commercial aviation space, with a cargo offshoot, also aiming for commercial deliveries in the second half of this decade. (Full disclosure: I&rsquo;m on the advisory board of ELECTRON).
Forslund, Mouris and de Jong know that the battery energy density we have today is completely suitable for smaller, fully electric commercial aircraft this decade.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/fcc26b6c545fd71f451be0b988a195cebad3b719.png" alt="Figure 2: Regional air mobility maturity model by author" />
However, the three elements that will turn on the afterburners for those 8,000 airports are combinations of technical, regulatory and procedural innovations and transformations. As such, they proceed at different speeds. After speaking with industry experts including Kevin Antcliff, lead author of the NASA report and now lead product designer for Xwing, which is already test flying autonomous small cargo planes, I developed a maturation model that respects the underlying science, economics and speed of transformation.
I roll a couple of things under the electric airplanes heading. As I&rsquo;ve spoken to aerospace innovators globally and observed electrification of other modes of transportation, the following has become clear.
The first is that most airframes flying today are old, often decades old. They predate sophisticated and cheaply available computational fluid design (CFD) that has enabled significant improvements in aerodynamics with a lower ratio of expensive wind tunnel testing. They predate the advances in composites we take for granted in other domains. They have rivets. They have exhausts sticking out, as well as air intakes. They are lumpy and bumpy and create turbulence that sucks efficiency out of them. They are heavier than what we can build today. Heart, Electron and others are designing new airframes for battery electric weight distributions, but with better aerodynamics, lift to drag ratios and power to weight ratios. That&rsquo;s going to continue. Airframes are entering a new period of innovation, and while electric rotorcraft are getting headlines, that&rsquo;s not where the big wins will be.
The second is that battery energy density is only one of the areas of technical innovation around the drivetrain. New chemistries, new form factors and efficiency curves that are driven by ground-based transportation requirements are rapidly improving the engineering optimization space of cost, energy and weight. Current batteries are fit for purpose for 400-500 kilometer trips with 5-19 passengers, and in the coming decades will rapidly become viable for much longer journeys.
In addition to better, cheaper batteries though, there are additional areas that are going to enable planes to fly bit further with the same energy. I&rsquo;m engaged with a firm, currently in stealth, that has an innovative drive system with 20% greater efficiency than current electric turboprops. Tesla has shown clearly that power management alone, just getting energy from the battery to the motor, has significant opportunities for efficiency improvements, with one over-the-air update giving 10% greater range to owners. Electric drive trains for aircraft are in their infancy compared to Tesla&rsquo;s matured solution, and so there&rsquo;s room there as well. And electrification changes the game for propeller design. With 100% torque at 0 RPM, there&rsquo;s clear potential to change the pitch, size, number and span of propellers to optimize them better for power, efficiency and noise characteristics.
As I was sitting in the passenger seat of the cockpit of a Harbour Air DeHavilland Twin Otter float plane that was flying its regular route to Victoria, BC from Vancouver, BC, recently, I was looking at the aircraft with fresh eyes. I had walked up to the plane and looked at its sheet metal and rivets, and lost count of the aerodynamic drag complexities rapidly. The pilot started the engine and set the RPM to 2,000 with no pitch, the same as if you sat in a car in neutral and revved the engine to 5,000 RPM. Coughs of black smoke were coming from the exhaust that was sticking out of the side of the engine, along with the sickly smell of unburnt Jet A-1. A dance ensued where the pitch and power was increased to taxi, then pitch and power were increased again to accelerate and climb into the air, then pitch, power and RPM were changed again at cruising speed. The dance was reversed for descent and landing.
Modern composite electric aircraft will slip through the air with less drag, and the complexities of pitch may be thrown away completely given the torque advantages of electric motors, just as electric cars have a single gear which covers all speeds. And exhausts and intakes which create their own turbulence will go away as well.
Autonomous flight systems will lag the maturation of electric airplanes to a certain degree, even though as more electronic than physical systems, they have opportunities for iteration and refinement speed that&rsquo;s beyond that of aircraft themselves. And they are necessary to speed the expansion of regional air mobility. A key limiting factor for an order or two greater magnitude of smaller aircraft is pilots. It&rsquo;s not a limiting factor for the next decade, as commercial jet pilots have to get experience and air time somewhere, so smaller commercial operations have a steady stream of new pilots. But after that, there would be more airplanes than pilots for them.
This is a somewhat solved problem already, and it&rsquo;s also an easier problem to solve than autonomous cars in cities. Aircraft taxi at around 30 kilometers per hour. They are never confronted with oncoming ground traffic at closing speeds of over 200 kilometers per hour. They are on highly controlled aprons where the limited number of humans know to watch out for them and don&rsquo;t jaywalk. Deer don&rsquo;t run in front of them. There are no drunk drivers. There are no roundabouts, or five way asymmetrical intersections. There is no one texting and driving, at least not more than once. There are no traffic lights or speed limit signs to interpret.
And once airplanes are in the air, there&rsquo;s precious little around except air. 99% of the time, a flight path is agreed upon, it&rsquo;s set and it&rsquo;s executed without having to avoid anything at all. Potential collisions are observable a long time before they occur as air traffic controllers look at vectors, altitudes and velocity on their glowing screens in airport towers, and give planes nudges to avoid each other.
We have autonomous personal drones already. Throw one of a dozen commercially available follow-me sports action drones into the air and then bomb down slopes or hurtle down single track, and they&rsquo;ll chase you from the angle you requested, all while dodging trees and wires by themselves. Then they&rsquo;ll fly to where you stop, land and present you with a great Instagram clip.
And we have commercial autonomous heavy drones as well. <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/10/05/droneseed-ceo-grant-canary-talks-about-path-to-tree-planting-megadrones-interview/">DroneSeed</a> flies flocks of five 50+ kilogram drones at a time along preset flight paths and out of line of sight with two only two ground operators. They do this to rapidly replant burnt out forest areas in the United States, dropping moss pucks containing seedlings in precalibrated locations to maximize survival and growth.
And obviously we have semi-autonomous military drones, from the USA&rsquo;s lethal Predators to the smaller Turkish and Ukrainian drones doing so much damage to Russian military equipment at present.
The problem here is less the technology than the problem of gaining regulatory acceptance. At present, regulations all assume that there&rsquo;s a highly trained, experienced human being sitting in the pilot&rsquo;s seat of all aircraft. Ground control staff talk verbally to these pilots to give them flight paths through their controlled airspace for takeoffs and landing. Airspace rules clearly articulate which aircraft of which type, from balloons to soaring craft such as the paragliders I&rsquo;ve flown to rotorcraft to propeller craft to jets, have the right of way and which direction each will turn in when they don&rsquo;t have the right of way. Those are rules for humans, and pilot error is a great liability cut out for insurers.
The pathway here is the one Xwing is taking, that of smaller cargo craft following low-risk flight paths that avoid schools and densely populated areas. That will eventually gain acceptance and approval from the FAA, EASA and similar global regulatory bodies, and after that it will expand to higher-risk pathways and eventually to passenger planes. That will take time and a lot of air time.
Initially these will be controlled similarly to the way the US controls its global drone fleet, from ground control pods with constant electronic communication to the flying aircraft, and visual feeds back to the control center. One ground crew will be able to oversee several aircraft, and eventually dozens of aircraft. And unlike pilots, they will be able to leave when their shift is over and hop in their electric cars to get home while a new ground crew takes over.
Just as a lot of air force pilots are now sitting in shipping containers at Creech Airforce Base near Las Vegas instead of in the cockpits of jets, a new generation of pilots will be sitting in commercial operations overseeing multiple cargo and passenger planes, potentially thousands of kilometers away.
The last area of innovation is digital air traffic control. At present, there&rsquo;s a human at the center of air traffic control. They sit in towers at airports, or increasingly in operations centers that are effectively the same but with cheaper locations and more airports under control, they look at radar plots and transponders, and they talk to pilots in English &mdash; the mandated air traffic control language globally &mdash; to tell them what to do to move through airspace safely. But they expect that there will be pilots sitting in the planes to talk to, and they expect that verbal instructions will suffice.
What happens when there are no pilots in airplanes? Xwing solves this with the ground crew, who talk to the air traffic controller via the aircraft&rsquo;s radio as if they were sitting in the cockpit, with the air traffic controller none the wiser. When there are a lot more electric aircraft in the air, from smaller delivery drones to two-ton capacity cargo planes to 19 passenger aircraft, air traffic control won&rsquo;t be able to depend on a few stressed out air traffic controllers.
It will go digital. Every aircraft will have a transponder, as most do today. They&rsquo;ll be good participants in a digital air traffic control system, communicating their vector, altitude, velocity and flight path regularly. Computer systems will monitor radar and aircraft messages, project potential collisions and times when there will be too many aircraft in the same volume of airspace, inform human air traffic controllers, gain instructions or approval from the human air traffic controller, and send guidance to the autonomous systems in aircraft, who will divert to the new headings, altitude and velocity.
A lot more aircraft under better control, with the same number of humans doing less stressful but equally important work.
Once again, there are systems which already do portions of this. The problem will be regulatory and transformational. Standardizing communications protocols will take time. Gaining approval for human-in-the-loop air traffic control will take time. Rolling this out fully will take over two decades. Air traffic controllers have to be brought along on this journey. I project this will take the longest to be fully mature.
But the journey starts this decade. New airframes designed for current battery energy densities will be certified and flying commercially in five years. Airports are already building massive solar farms on the flat land surrounding their runways, creating the infrastructural conditions for fueling electric planes, not to mention nearby ground fleets. Autonomous startups, some wisely decoupled from military aerospace, some unwisely linked to the military, are flying experimentally today. Standards and technologies extending current virtualized and remote air traffic control are underway.
The cost advantages of 55% fuel efficient turbojets will be under massive strain as the cost of carbon is counted, either through carbon pricing on the current fossil fuels, or more expensive alternatives such as SAF biofuels (my <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/9d348f39-edc6-4238-85bf-3cbd991d6b59">projected fuel replacement winner</a> for harder to electrify segments of aviation for decades to come). As Christenson and Raynor clearly showed, disruptive innovations creep in from the bottom while leaders fight to retain increasingly hard to please customers at the top. Current aviation business models will be transformed from below with significant shifting of volume to smaller public airports serviced by electric aircraft.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Aviation will be disrupted from below by electric regional air mobility

Bill Gates could do much better than he has. So the question is, why? He’s a deeply strategic and brilliant man who can afford to surround himself with solid advice. Why does he keep getting it wrong? Well, a lot of the roads lead to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Yes, much of Gates’ climate solutions investments are shaped by Vaclav Smil’s analyses.


A few days after Earth Day this year, my fellow Canadian Vaclav Smil had an extended interview published in the New York Times Magazine about him, his new book and his dyspeptic views on the necessary decarbonization transformation we are accelerating through. Smil was familiar to me due to being one of Bill Gates&rsquo; favorite thinkers, asserting that he&rsquo;s read most of Smil&rsquo;s 39 previous books. My focus on Gates and his influences was due to his tremendous, and mostly ill-advised, efforts around climate action, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and his own companies such as Terrapower.
Gates receives nothing but praise from me for the work that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does on global disease prevention and eradication. That field is one of the three that Gates&rsquo; and I overlap at least slightly in, as I helped build the world&rsquo;s most sophisticated pandemic management solution in the late 2000s in the aftermath of SARS. I appreciate deeply the work that the foundation, funded with Gates&rsquo; billions and guided by the Gates&rsquo;, is doing globally. His efforts through COVID-19 have been stellar, and sadly maligned.
However, this article isn&rsquo;t about that. This is about another area where Gates&rsquo; and I overlap, climate solutions. I&rsquo;ve been publishing stories about Bill Gates&rsquo; engagement in this space for years, and I&rsquo;ve been deeply perplexed as to why he gets disease so right and climate action so wrong. I&rsquo;ve published on his investments in the air-carbon-capture-to-fuel boondoggle Carbon Engineering and the useless industrial component Heliogen. I&rsquo;ve published on his lobbying of Congress to extend federal subsidies for nuclear to small nuclear reactors based on his long investment in Terrapower. I&rsquo;ve published on his funding of research into solar geoengineering. My assessments are almost entirely negative. With the exception of Breakthrough&rsquo;s more recent investment in a redox flow battery company, my take is that he&rsquo;s squandered his efforts and money to little effect. He could do much better than he has.
So the question is, why? He&rsquo;s a deeply strategic and brilliant man who can afford to surround himself with solid advice. Why does he keep getting it wrong? Well, a lot of the roads lead to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Yes, much of Gates&rsquo; climate solutions investments are shaped by Vaclav Smil&rsquo;s analyses.
I haven&rsquo;t read all of Smil&rsquo;s books, but I did analyse his primary publication on the energy transition to gain a perspective on why Gates keeps getting it wrong on solutions to the most important issue of the 21st Century. To be clear, I&rsquo;m not casting aside all &mdash; or even much &mdash; of Smil&rsquo;s work and analysis, just a subset of his perspective on energy, especially around renewables. From my perspective, he gets a few things wrong which leads him to incorrect conclusions. And his influence means that people like Gates end up wasting money. That&rsquo;s a challenge. Neither Smil nor Gates are climate change deniers in any sense of the word. This is a discussion of solutions.
<h2>What are Smil&rsquo;s assertions?</h2>
First, that energy transitions take a long time, 50&ndash;60 years. Second, that the dominant transition right now is to natural gas from coal. Third, that renewables represent a small portion of overall energy supply, so it&rsquo;s going to take 50&ndash;60 years for them to become the dominant form of energy, especially as hydro is a mostly tapped out resource with only remote, and hence much more expensive, sites left to develop.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/3925f4fdb492cf22f20d5868d6f4eec1f96c891d.png" alt="Chart 1: Chart from Smil&rsquo;s The Long Slow Rise of Wind and Solar: The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking
" />
Are any of those assertions incorrect? Well, yes, in at least three ways, Smil gets it wrong.
<h2>The bloom is already off of natural gas growth</h2>
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/742ed430fc46eeb08ff43a9163c50bc701b2a919.png" alt="Figure 1: Image of energy growth historically and projected through 2050 from IEA
" />
Its growth rate has already slowed while renewables have accelerated. 2019 saw massive bankruptcies sweeping the gas sector as fracking proved to be an expensive, debt-laden, revenue-light pipe dream. Foreclosures and even seizing of property was becoming the norm. Then COVID-19 put a global damper on all energy demand, but natural gas was hit hard as well. The Saudi Arabian and Russian price war on oil is aimed as much at North American producers as any, and this year is seeing massively more bankruptcies, shutdowns, and mergers in the oil and gas sector. But the bloom was off those stocks already, starting in about 2015, about a decade after coal stocks started getting hit.
This was before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, and hence acceleration away from natural gas and toward renewables in most of the world. Globally, the transition to natural gas is stalling and being displaced by even cheaper renewables. There will be no great transition to natural gas as Smil seems to think. Instead, there was a mini-transition from coal to natural gas, and now both are being displaced. Capacity factors for gas plants are starting to drop already. In the US and in many other markets, wind and solar PPAs are coming in well under natural gas PPAs, and it&rsquo;s hard to justify a 20-year commitment to spending more on electricity when you could be spending less.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/6d1e76cb040a313d5db2f1e1a717eedd2a5a7224.png" alt="Figure 2: US PPAs for gas vs wind and solar courtesy IEA
" />
<h2>The problem of rejected energy</h2>
Smil is silent on the subject, which is a glaring oversight. I&rsquo;ve searched for Smil commenting on energy flows or rejected energy with no results, and the paper cited where he lays out his thesis that renewables won&rsquo;t cut it ignores this entirely.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/345623e833dafbd0ba8d35b5dcc4f3bf5f6c7fba.png" alt="Figure 3: Energy flows diagram courtesy NREL
" />
See that huge gray box on the upper right, the biggest box on this chart? That&rsquo;s all the primary energy that gets thrown away due to losses in conversion to useful forms of energy, in distribution or in use. The vast majority of that is waste heat from burning fossil fuels.
Why is this important? Well, it&rsquo;s important because we don&rsquo;t have to replace all of the primary energy we use today, we have to replace the energy used productively in energy services as efficiently as possible.
Smil seems to ignore the electrification of everything which is running in lockstep with the growth of renewables. Electric buses are already cutting into oil demand to the tune of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day. Heat pumps are a massive growth market displacing gas furnaces and less efficient air conditions globally, with one of the world leaders, Daikin, building a megafactory for them in Texas.
Primary energy demand is going to shrink, not grow. Electricity is vastly more efficient to distribute and is vastly more efficient to transform into useful electricity services. That&rsquo;s why everything is already trending there. And solid state electronics are making formerly energy gulping electrical appliances and making them vastly more efficient as well, with LED lights being only the most obvious example.
Because Smil misses the shrinking scale of the problem, he overstates it.
<h2>Economies of scale for manufacturing &amp; distribution</h2>
Smil doesn&rsquo;t seem to understand renewable economies of scale, or to weight it sufficiently if he does. This is understandable, as few people have direct experience of horizontal scaling aka scaling by numbers &mdash; building more smaller things in parallel &mdash; and most energy analysts who were experienced dominantly with vertical scaling &mdash; making individual generation units bigger &mdash; got it wrong too. Look at IEA&rsquo;s long history of failed projections on wind and solar growth over the past 20 years, something that they are finally starting to get right. People who like nuclear energy tend to think of the number of wind turbines and solar panels as a weakness, but it&rsquo;s actually a massive strength.
My direct experience with this comes from the computer industry I spent much of my career in. Massive mainframes were outcompeted by lots of small computers running in parallel, and small computers plummeted in price while mainframes remained very expensive.
There is about 840 gigawatts (GW) of nameplate capacity of wind energy right now globally. The average wind turbine is between 2.0 and 2.5 megawatts (MW) in nameplate capacity, as new ones are almost always bigger and often much bigger. That means that there are about 350,000 wind turbines that have been built, and it means that there are over a million wind turbine blades turning today. Similarly, there&rsquo;s about 700 GW of solar capacity globally. The average solar panel is about 200 Watts in capacity, so that&rsquo;s about 3 billion solar panels installed already.
With those big numbers come massive economies of scale in manufacturing, massive economies of scale in distribution, and massive economies of scale in construction. The vast majority of innovation that&rsquo;s caused plummeting costs of wind and solar are due to economies of scale, not technical innovation, although that&rsquo;s been beneficial as well.
I published an analysis last year on the natural experiment in China of how this plays out. It showed that for the decade from 2010 to 2020, both wind and solar fastly outbuilt nuclear. Renewables are vastly more scalable than legacy forms of generation, and Smil misses that entirely.
That analysis was sufficiently compelling that one of the world&rsquo;s foremost academics of infrastructure projects, Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, Chair of Major Programme Management at Oxford University's Sa&iuml;d Business School, is including it in a chapter of his book to be published in 2023. His focus is on increasing speed and decreasing risk with modularity instead of megaprojects, and China&rsquo;s natural experiment was strongly illustrative of his previous research and findings. A key point Flyvbjerg focuses on is Wright&rsquo;s Law aka the efficiency curve. That&rsquo;s a well-known and constantly revalidated finding that every doubling of manufacturing of items leads to 20% to 28% cost reductions per item.
Wind and solars&rsquo; hundreds of thousands and billions of items continue to make costs plummet for them, something Smil seems unaware of.
Side note: for those hoping that this will be to small modular reactors&rsquo; benefit, no it won&rsquo;t. They forego the advantages of vertical scaling required for thermal generation to be inexpensive, the reason why most nuclear plants are closer to a GW in capacity than not
What&rsquo;s the result of all of this? Accelerating demand for renewables, slowing or declining demand for natural gas, and declining primary energy demand coming soon to an energy market near you.
While I agree with Smil that it will take &ldquo;a long time,&rdquo; my assertion is that by 2050, we&rsquo;ll be 90% of the way to 100% renewables. Further, it&rsquo;s entirely possible to be 90% of the way there by 2040 if we put our backs into it. In other words, Smil is off by a factor of two or more in his timeline projections. I don&rsquo;t agree with Professor Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford, best known for his regular publication of updates to 100% renewables by 2050, now covering 143 countries, about everything either, and have discussed this with him in, but he&rsquo;s far more right than Smil is.
And as a result, people like Bill Gates throw away their money on the wrong investments: small nuclear, air carbon capture, and solar geoengineering. Gates and others should listen to Mark Z. Jacobson more, and Smil less.
 Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem nor of their employers. 
<h3>References</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/25/magazine/vaclav-smil-interview.html">This Eminent Scientist Says Climate Activists Need to Get Real</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/05/a-decade-of-wind-solar-nuclear-in-china-shows-clear-scalability-winners/">A Decade Of Wind, Solar, &amp; Nuclear In China Shows Clear Scalability Winners</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth">www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/scientificamerican0114-521.pdf">vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/scientificamerican0114-521.pdf</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/eia-renewables-will-overtake-natural-gas-in-us-power-mix">Renewables Set to Overtake Natural Gas in US Power Mix, EIA Says</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/13/covid-19-impacting-oil-gas-more-than-the-markets-as-a-whole/">COVID-19 Impacting Oil &amp; Gas More Than The Markets As A Whole</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-now-lower-than-the-cost-of-natural-gas/">Wind power prices now lower than the cost of natural gas</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/">LLNL Flow Charts</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/06/23/what-oil-bust-japanese-air-conditioning-giant-builds-4-2mm-square-foot-factory-near-houston/?sh=76dde62027b0">What Oil Bust? Japanese Air-Conditioning Giant Builds Megafactory In Texas</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://gwec.net/global-figures/wind-in-numbers/">WIND IN NUMBERS | Global Wind Energy Council</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/04/06/world-now-has-583-5-gw-of-operational-pv/">World now has 583.5 GW of operational PV</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/06/policy-global-supply-chain-innovation-are-making-solar-cheap-not-new-solar-chemistries/">Policy &amp; Global Supply Chain Innovation Are Making Solar Cheap, Not New Solar Chemistries</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/22/gates-thiel-wrong-energy-thiel-wrong/">Gates &amp; Thiel Are Wrong On Energy, But Thiel Is More Wrong</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/13/some-of-vox-9-experts-on-billionaire-climate-spending-are-off-base/">Some Of Vox&rsquo;s 9 Experts On Billionaire Climate Spending Are Off Base</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/22/bill-gates-is-throwing-away-money-on-ill-advised-non-solutions-to-global-warming/">Bill Gates Is Throwing Away Money On Ill-Advised Non-Solutions To Global Warming</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/20/chevrons-fig-leaf-part-5-who-is-behind-carbon-engineering-what-do-experts-say/">Chevron&rsquo;s Fig Leaf Part 5: Who Is Behind Carbon Engineering, &amp; What Do Experts Say?</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/23/heliogen-is-bill-gates-latest-venture-that-is-only-good-for-oil-gas-part-2/">Heliogen Is Bill Gates&rsquo; Latest Venture That Is Only Good For Oil &amp; Gas &ndash; Part 2</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/05/08/why-is-bill-gates-being-attacked-for-fighting-covid-19/">Why Is Bill Gates Being Attacked For Fighting COVID-19?</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/c1f245f8-d201-498e-9e85-8592095ae2ac">Small modular nuclear reactors were tried in the 1950s and won&rsquo;t be better toda</a>y</li>
</ul>
A version of this article is also published in CleanTechnica.

What does Bill Gates’ favorite energy guru, Vaclav Smil, get wrong?

Aviation is a major source of greenhouse gasses, punching above its weight due to additional forcing factors of contrail- and nitrous oxide-related warming in addition to direct carbon dioxide emissions. It’s in the same range of total greenhouse gas emissions as hydrogen manufacturing as a hard-to-decarbonize segment. It’s going to decarbonize, whether the industry likes it or not, because the climate implications are sufficiently significant that it must.

Aviation is a major source of greenhouse gasses, punching above its weight due to additional forcing factors of contrail- and nitrous oxide-related warming in addition to direct carbon dioxide emissions. It&rsquo;s in the same range of total greenhouse gas emissions as <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/8ac4c548-a60d-43b5-a1bb-6ba9264cad51">hydrogen manufacturing</a> as a hard-to-decarbonize segment. It&rsquo;s going to decarbonize, whether the industry likes it or not, because the climate implications are sufficiently significant that it must.
But how it&rsquo;s going to decarbonize is a different matter. There are many contenders to be the aviation fuel of the future, and I&rsquo;ve assessed most of them. Hydrogen would double the cost per passenger or freight mile and introduce very significant safety concerns as -249&deg; Celsius cyrochilled hydrogen will have to be inside the air frame with passengers. The combination makes it infeasible in <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/08/batteries-biofuels-not-aluminum-hydrogen-will-fuel-the-airlines-of-the-near-future-part-1/">my opinion</a>.
There are other equally intractable problems with aluminum air fuel cells, another contender being touted by one of the refueling startups. Being non-rechargeable and requiring the depleted batteries be returned to an aluminum smelter to be remanufactured means heavy weights of aluminum will be traveling further than just the air travel, and aluminum smelters are not evenly spread at all. Once again, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/09/batteries-biofuels-not-aluminum-hydrogen-will-fuel-the-airlines-of-the-near-future-part-2/">infeasible</a>.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/175d47a6294b9f4025ce0b962ddbeed0c7bcff0f.png" alt="Figure 1: Projection of aviation fuel demand through 2100 by author
" />
The contenders for replacement which pass basic tests of viability are <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/10/batteries-biofuels-not-aluminum-hydrogen-will-fuel-the-airlines-of-the-near-future-part-3/">sustainable aviation biofuels</a> and the increasingly energy-dense cell batteries that are already fit for 400 km trips. Some SAF biofuel processes are supplemented with hydrogen, and that&rsquo;s where the demand line for hydrogen fits in.
Late in 2021, I published version 1.0 of my projection of aviation refueling through 2100 based on my analyses, discussions with aerospace startups and engineers, and assessment of the impacts of multiple strongly impactful trends. Subsequently, I engaged in discussions with more experts and analysts to consider how I would refine the next iterations.
The most <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/21/aviation-demand-forecasting-expert-challenges-2100-aviation-refueling-scenario/">substantive discussion</a> was with Wilma Suen, PhD in strategic alliances and most recently the global Vice President of Portfolio Strategy &amp; Forecasting for GE&rsquo;s airplane leasing business, until very recently the largest such organization in the world. She and her timezone-distributed team spent their days analyzing the best data that a multibillion dollar organization could buy to project flights per person per year for every material country in the world for 5, 10, and 20 years, with decreasing reliability with each increase in duration of course. Her insights led me to increase growth slightly.
There are several things to call out in this projection.
First, aviation is unlikely to return to pre-COVID-19 levels quickly. The efficiency and effectiveness of video conferencing and remote work has been proven across the economy, but especially in those sectors that used to be heavy fliers, and I say that as someone who used to fly weekly for business. We&rsquo;ve moved a decade into the future and broken the habit of getting on planes, and corporations will no longer pay for rafts of consultants to show up Monday and fly away Thursday. Client-facing now means over video links for the vast majority of the information, sales, and consulting workforces.
Among many other data points, this was reinforced by my discussion yesterday with a former colleague who now runs the national ESG practice for Canada for one of the major consultancies. While their junior staff are itching to get back to client sites, that&rsquo;s just not going to happen. Only the most important and critical deals will involve flying from now on, and then only a subset of them.
Similarly, in-country travel is going to be much more favored than international travel by many more people for vacations, and that will persist. COVID-19 was the fourth epidemic in the past 20 years, following SARS, H1N1 and Ebola, and now everyone knows the consequences. COVID-19 wasn&rsquo;t the last epidemic, it was just the worst epidemic since the Spanish Flu.
That said, both IATA and Boeing project in the range of 4% growth year over year for the next twenty years. I consider this deeply unlikely after the post-COVID bounce. Population growth is slowing and will end between 2070 and 2100, depending on which demographic projections you prefer, with the UN being on the conservative side. That means fewer new potential passengers. Alternatives to flying are increasing as well, specifically high-speed rail, with China alone having built 38,000 kilometers of electrified passenger service since 2007, California&rsquo;s high-speed rail having started construction, and Morocco planning to expand its current 323 km service to 1,500 km in the coming years. Shorter distance travel will be subsumed somewhat by autonomous electric ground transportation as well, as people sleep their way to their destinations. Finally, aviation refueling will come with increased aviation costs through the second half of the century, putting a strong economic inhibitor on increases in demand. However, global affluence continues to grow, and with that, new customers.
The combination means that I&rsquo;ve added a slow rise per decade to demand through 2090, where it flattens out, instead of being flat after the post-COVID bounce. This is a global perspective, with significant geographic variance.
Second, electric means battery-electric, but is not limited to lithium-ion chemistries. Lithium-ion is fit for purpose for up to 19-passenger turboprops with 400 km ranges today, and the intersection of density, cost, and weight will continue to improve every year. The fast-charging technology for cars and trucks is fit for purpose for rapid recharging of small electric airplanes today. The amount of manufacturing, research, and innovation underway in battery technology means that battery technologies have their own Moore&rsquo;s Law equivalent, <a href="https://www.mining.com/web/visualizing-the-freefall-in-electric-vehicle-battery-prices/#:~:text=According%20to%20Wright's%20Law%2C%20also,in%20line%20with%20modeled%20forecasts.">Wright&rsquo;s Law</a>. Lithium-ion is improving roughly 28% for every doubling of manufacturing capacity. But new chemistries are coming which will see significant improvements beyond that. Lithium-ion will likely prove suitable up to 100-passenger planes for 1000 kilometers, but other chemistries will take over. Only in the second half of the century will a mixture of aviation advances including greater battery density, better power management, novel electric engines currently on the drawing board and improved airframe aerodynamics enable cross-Pacific aviation.
Third, battery-electric and biofuels are only going to start making a noticeable dent in aviation fuel toward the middle of the 2030s. This is a hard sector to decarbonize, and significant transformation and development is required to achieve these targets. For example, in my piece articulating the case for biofuels one of the transformations that will occur is the elimination of wasteful use of biofuels in easier to electrify sectors. The two million barrels a day currently going into cars and trucks today needs to be repurposed as all ground transportation is electrified.
The economic intersection of battery energy density, weight, and cost is sufficient for 400-600 km range planes with 4-19 passengers today, and that will grow substantially with each passing decade, but it&rsquo;s insufficient for the majority of current flights right now. And, of course, battery-electric passenger planes need to be manufactured and certified, something companies like <a href="https://heartaerospace.com/">Heart Aerospace</a> and <a href="https://electronaviation.com/">ELECTRON Aviation</a> are working hard at.
Fourth, I&rsquo;ve put a line in for it, but sharp eyes will note that hydrogen is going to be providing very little energy for aviation. I see no future for it as a directly used fuel based on the assessment of massive increases of cost and the need to use hydrogen for much more useful decarbonization purposes. However, hydrogen is used in some biofuel processes to supplement the hydrogen bound up in the cellulose, and there will be a window for some economically viable use of green hydrogen for that purpose.
Fifth, SAF biofuels will only grow as a source through 2060, when I project that energy densities of batteries will be sufficient for 80% of flights, and a sufficient number of battery electric airplanes will be replacing the current fleets. After 2070, it starts diminishing rapidly as fuel-burning turboprops and turbofans retire. Biofuels for aviation are only a 40-year growth market and after that they will diminish. Of course, agricultural lobbies will work to extend this, and may very well pervert or at least defer rational decision making.
Sixth, battery electric barrels of oil equivalent is arrived at by using a blended efficiency factor for current aviation between the remarkable 55% of high-altitude turbofans at cruise, and the much lower efficiency of internal combustion turboprops operating at lower levels. I use that to determine the gigajoules required, then use the very high efficiency factory for electric motors to gross it up to the MWh required for similar distances. In other words, it&rsquo;s the normalized energy used per distance flown that becomes the electricity figure. This seems defensible to me, and conservative.
Of course, many deep analysts have issues with this perspective. People seemingly close to current SAF results have disagreed with my earlier analysis. Others deeper into batteries have disagreed with my perspectives on aluminum air fuel cells, albeit on what appear to be technicalities and some lack of a systems engineering perspective. People invested in hydrogen for their various reasons disagree with this analysis of course. Professor Mark Z. Jacobson disagrees with the earlier biofuels portion of the analysis, although the time perspective and CO2e perspective still might shift his opinion. So do consider this to be one of many potential scenarios. It is necessarily imperfect.
What is important with this analysis are the implications for greenhouse gas emissions.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/58dcd8a671b9e92b93aa656b78f8bf8a7156a7be.png" alt="Figure 2: Projected aviation CO2e emissions by author
" />
Similarly to the projection of fuel usage, I&rsquo;ll call out a set of obvious observations and some not so obvious ones.
First, aviation-related global warming emissions plummeted during COVID-19. Regardless of the measure, whether direct CO2, NOx or contrails, enormous numbers of flights didn&rsquo;t occur for the past two years. It&rsquo;s relatively insignificant compared to the history of CO2e emissions that will drive warming for the next century regardless of what else we do, but it&rsquo;s still there.
Second, while aviation energy requirements will not return to 2019 levels until mid-century, it will still rebound a fair amount over the next eight years, and emissions will rise as a result.
Third, it will likely take three decades before net emissions for aviation are back below 2020 levels. That&rsquo;s a problem, but they&rsquo;ll still be well below 2019 levels. That said, this projection suggests that while aviation is a hard target, more attention needs to be paid to it. Aviation emissions rising substantially this decade is not a climate solution.
Fourth, contrails and NOx CO2e ratios make it clear that biofuels are not a long-term solution. Both are significant warming side effects of burning fuels. The model assumes operational changes that substantially reduce contrail formation and impacts, something that can be substantially done by just 500-meter changes in operating altitude. But burning any fuel in our atmosphere produces NOx with 265 times the global warming potential of CO2. Biofuels substantially reduce CO2 from the fuel and operational changes reduce CO2e from contrails, but NOx persists. They are much better than fossil fuels however. That said, electric drive trains would emit no NOx and create no contrails, and so is obviously the best case scenario. I project, without a specific chemistry or technology set, that fully electric long-haul aviation will be viable after 2050.
Fifth, the initial CO2e of electricity is relatively high, but diminishes substantially through 2040 with grid decarbonization. As a result, CO2e savings from electrification grow per billion barrels of fuel equivalent with time.
Sixth, biofuels are also high in CO2e initially, but diminish through time. Agrigenetics related to nitrogen fixing at the roots of plants as per <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/21/cleantech-talk-1-2-ceo-karsten-temme-of-pivotbio-on-microbes-slashing-agriculture-ghg-emissions/">Pivot Bio</a>, resultant reductions in fossil-fuel sourced ammonia fertilizers, precision agriculture lowering fertilizer use further, and low-tillage agriculture are going to radically reduce agriculture warming emissions in the coming decades. Every ton of fertilizer used today is equivalent to 9 or more tons of CO2e between direct fossil fuel use and nitrous oxide formation after application. Diminishing fertilizer applied very precisely by electrified farming equipment brings agriculture close to zero emissions. I have conservatively not assumed soil carbon sequestration from farming in this analysis, but many studies project the potential for agriculture of all types to become carbon negative. This wouldn&rsquo;t change the need to eliminate biofuels due to contrails and NOx by the way, so those who think biofuels have a future past 2100 should think again.
Seventh, emissions take until 2100 to approach zero. There will be a long tail of both fossil-fuel sourced kerosene and SAF biofuels into 2090 and 2100. Direct and indirect emissions are still substantial. Electricity is similarly going to have a long tail of lowering emissions. This is to be expected, and if not embraced, at least acknowledged. It&rsquo;s going to take a long time to get rid of the long-tail CO2e emissions.
Eighth, hydrogen doesn&rsquo;t show up on this chart because the small amount of it that will be used to increase the yield of biofuel processes is assumed to be manufactured from green hydrogen with very low CO2e per ton.
Finally, I&rsquo;ll remind readers who have made it this far that while my opinion is professional, informed, broad, and fairly deep, it is still merely an opinion, and hence at the bottom of the ladder of evidence. And further, while I have a history with aviation and the transportation sector, and have been reviewing transportation related emissions and alternatives for a decade, my professional life is not solely devoted to this subject. The error bars on these projections are broad.
That said, the general outlines I think are correct. As I said in my assessment of hydrogen as an aviation fuel and the assessments of those who like it, they require an assumption of truly extraordinary advances that do not appear to be viable per the laws of physics. The economics of alternatives and operational requirements appear to make them so non-viable as to be easily dismissed.
To summarize, battery-electric aviation will be over 50% of flights by 2070, and approaching 100% by 2100. Biofuels will rise through 2060 and then start to fall again. This is an imperfect solution, but perfection is the enemy of good enough. This projection sees total aviation-related warming at under a third of 2019 levels by 2060, and continuing to drop to approach zero by 2100. In 80 years, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_shame">flygskam</a> will be a thing of the past.
As a note, one of the things I looked at while preparing this scenario was a set of market analyses projecting aviation fuel growth. To say I found them remarkably lacking in reality, context and usefulness would be to deeply understate how unlikely I thought they were. There was no recognition of the state change that COVID-19 had brought, the projections were clearly based on projecting history in a straight line into the radically altered future, they ignored the requirement for aviation to deal with climate change, and they ignored the battery-electric and biofuel revolutions sweeping up to replace petroleum-sourced kerosene fuels.
For commodities traders, businesses, strategists, and policy makers, I would recommend being very leery of most of the market analyses currently in the space. Anyone invested in hydrogen aviation startups such as ZeroAvia and Wright Electric should be considering their exit very carefully, as there is still hype to ride, but no upside due to the laws of thermodynamics and economics. Obviously anyone considering investing in aviation fuel alternatives should avoid hydrogen pathways as well, beyond hype-oriented speculative investments lasting at most 5-6 years.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
<h3>Additional references:</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.baaqmd.gov/~/media/files/planning-and-research/research-and-modeling/saf-report-final-for-distribution-to-baaqmd-pdf.pdf?la=en">https://www.baaqmd.gov/~/media/files/planning-and-research/research-and-modeling/saf-report-final-for-distribution-to-baaqmd-pdf.pdf?la=en</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bbb.2225">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bbb.2225</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/articles/sustainable-aviation-fuels-low-carbon-ethanol-production">https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/articles/sustainable-aviation-fuels-low-carbon-ethanol-production</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.flyradius.com/bombardier-q400/fuel-burn-consumption">https://www.flyradius.com/bombardier-q400/fuel-burn-consumption</a>​</li>
<li><a href="https://www.convertunits.com/from/gigajoule/to/gallon+[U.S.]+of+kerosene+type+jet+fuelhttps://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/CO2-commercial-aviation-oct2020.pdf">https://www.convertunits.com/from/gigajoule/to/gallon+[U.S.]+of+kerosene+type+jet+fuelhttps://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/CO2-commercial-aviation-oct2020.pdf</a>​</li>
</ul>

Aviation is a major climate problem, but electrification and biofuels are solutions

The hype related to a hydrogen economy continues, relatively unabated. The fossil fuel industry, the natural gas utilities, Hyundai, and Toyota continue to push the illusion that hydrogen will be a source of heating, transportation fuel, and energy in general, despite the basics of physics and economics. Europe is especially susceptible to lobbying efforts at present it seems. They are, of course, going to be proven wrong unless their heavy thumbs on the scales of policy force us down that expensive dead end.

The hype related to a hydrogen economy continues, relatively unabated. The fossil fuel industry, the natural gas utilities, Hyundai, and Toyota continue to push the illusion that hydrogen will be a source of heating, transportation fuel, and energy in general, despite the basics of physics and economics. Europe is especially susceptible to lobbying efforts at present it seems. They are, of course, going to be proven wrong unless their heavy thumbs on the scales of policy force us down that expensive dead end.
<h3>The basics of physics and economics have a way of winning arguments against lobbyists eventually, so the hydrogen problem will be eliminated.</h3>
In mid-2021 I published my first version of a heterodox scenario of hydrogen demand through 2100 (<a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/16/hydrogen-demand-1-3-hydrogen-is-not-a-growth-market-its-a-diminishing-one/">part 1</a>, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/17/hydrogen-demand-there-is-only-one-growth-hotspot-through-2100-part-2-of-3/">part 2</a>, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/19/hydrogen-demand-and-now-the-contentious-disappointments/">part 3</a>). It showed hydrogen demand falling before rising somewhat again. Pure hydrogen&rsquo;s highest demand sectors are 55% in oil refineries for manufacturing engine fuels, and in 37% for fertilizer manufacturing, both of which have to diminish substantially through the middle of the century and beyond to meet climate goals. This is the third iteration of it.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/d87561f697c86d25a0ba3382a18eead05bd86e70.png" alt="Figure 1: Hydrogen demand by demand area through 2100 projection by author
" />
The argument for fossil fuels being eliminated is obvious. I project perhaps 5% of refineries will be operating by 2100 to manufacture the valuable industrial chemicals which we currently get from the parts of a barrel of oil which don&rsquo;t turn into fuel or asphalt, and which we have not found lower-negative externality biological replacements for. Hydrogen&rsquo;s primary role in refineries is desulphurization and I project that only the lowest-sulphur crude that&rsquo;s closest to water will still see demand in 2100, so hydrogen consumption will diminish in two different ways in this sector.
In the case of fertilizer, the hydrogen component of ammonia and fertilizers made from it currently comes from fossil fuels using steam reformation of natural gas with 10-11 times the mass of CO2e as hydrogen, or coal gasification with 20-35 times the mass of CO2e. When it is spread on fields much of it turns into nitrous oxides with global warming potentials 265 times that of CO2. The combination leads to nine or more times the mass of CO2e as fertilizer. Clearly this is a climate problem, and the solutions of low-tillage and precision agriculture, and nitrogen fixing plant and soil microbe enhancement through agrigenetics will cause a major fall in demand in this sector as agriculture decarbonizes and becomes a carbon sink again.
Only steel manufacturing is a significant growth area for hydrogen in this projection although a smaller one than most suppose. My projection has a significant increase in demand met through steel recycling in electric steel minimills, including a very large percentage of existing fossil fuel infrastructure and transport vehicles. After all, 40% of oceanic shipping alone is for coal, oil and gas, and that will go away. Similarly, natural gas pipelines, most refineries, oil trucks and the like will all become obsolete and available as scrap over the coming decades. Finally, cheap steel from overseas will become more expensive as marine shipping refuels with low-carbon alternatives, so more local scrap steel will be more economically advantageous.
There is no value proposition for heating with hydrogen outside of some very specific and likely niche industrial processes. In all cases, heating with electrically powered heat pumps and heat sources like electric arc furnaces powered by renewables will be less expensive, more convenient and safer than first making expensive hydrogen from renewable electricity. Hence the line for heating being flat at approaching zero tons through 2100.
Since the initial publication, I&rsquo;ve fielded a wide variety of critiques of my assessment and had substantive discussions with experts such as <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-martin-195763b/">Paul Martin</a> of the newly formed <a href="https://h2sciencecoalition.com/">Hydrogen Science Coalition</a>, refineries experts and people engaged in biofuels. This is now the third version of the projection, and it&rsquo;s fairly stable so far. Refinery use has hunted up and down a bit. Transportation has gone from no hydrogen demand to four million tons by 2100, but that&rsquo;s specifically as a process enhancer for biofuels, not as a fuel in its own right, and definitely not as a synthetic fuel component.
However, as with my projection of aviation refueling through 2100, the important question is What are the impacts on CO2e emissions? For the purposes of this assessment, I stayed solely with the scope 1 emissions associated with the manufacturing of hydrogen. Scope 2 and 3 emissions are critical, and in the case of both fossil fuels and fertilizers dwarf emissions from the hydrogen itself, but those are problems with different solutions.
At present, black and gray hydrogen from coal and natural gas account for over 99% of hydrogen manufacturing, with 20-35x and 8-10x as much CO2 as the mass of hydrogen resulting. It&rsquo;s skewed to natural gas, so I chose an initial baseline of 15x, and trended that down to 4x through 2100, as whatever hydrogen comes from fossil fuels will be forced to deal with emissions for the most part. At the same time, fossil-fuel sourced hydrogen will drop in demand decade by decade until only minor hold-out regions still use it. Note that these numbers for scope 1 emissions from hydrogen manufacturing are by the author, and as such should be considered to include significant error bars, as with the projections of hydrogen demand through 2100.
Replacing it will be green hydrogen, currently under 1% of total supply, but growing to 99% of supply by 2100. Per work I did related to the <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/28/cleantechnica-exclusive-a-case-study-into-a-technology-that-should-be-set-aside-until-2050-carbon-engineerings-air-to-fuel-fig-leaf/">Carbon Engineering direct air capture</a> air-to-fuel boondoggle in 2018 and 2019, PEM electrolysis manufacturing of hydrogen would have a carbon debt of roughly 10x the mass of hydrogen created on grid electricity with 200 grams CO2e / kWh, a not unreasonable number for modern grids. That number will fall through 2100 as more and more renewables come on line, reaching 0.2x the mass of CO2e as hydrogen created. Hydrogen will become low-carbon, but it is only low-carbon from fully carbon-neutral electricity, and that&rsquo;s not the global standard yet.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/8174cf98deea01ff5a10a75bb308b830d843f20b.png" alt="Figure 2: CO2e emissions from hydrogen through 2100 by author
" />
The combination of shrinking demand through 2060 as we electrify transportation and shift away from fertilizer, and decarbonization of hydrogen manufacturing as we shift to renewably powered electrolysis (and some faint hope &lsquo;blue&rsquo; hydrogen production) will cause the massive emissions from hydrogen we currently experience to plummet.
To put this in context, just manufacturing hydrogen today creates around as much CO2e as all global aviation in 2019. That sector will <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/15/how-aviation-will-decarbonize-decade-by-decade-until-2100-part-2/">decline substantially in emissions through 2100 as well</a>, but it won&rsquo;t be doing it with hydrogen-powered airplanes.
Hydrogen is a very significant contributor to global warming when only scope 1 emissions are considered. When the emissions from fossil fuels stripped of sulfur are considered, emissions skyrocket. When emissions from nitrous oxides baked off of fertilizer spread on fields globally are considered, emissions skyrocket.
<h3>This is why hydrogen is a climate problem, not a climate solution.</h3>
We can only decarbonize hydrogen manufacturing slowly. Manufacturing green hydrogen somewhat economically &mdash; but still more expensively than when we are allowed to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer &mdash; requires running cheap electrolyzers at very high capacity factors with very cheap electricity.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/529ab6d5bfdbba4a28ed61671c02d32a358e9512.png" alt="Figure 3: Lazard LCOE for hydrogen current best case scenario (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/)" />
Electricity available 90% of the time from renewables isn&rsquo;t going to drop below $20 / MWh. Electrolyzers aren&rsquo;t going to become so cheap that we give them away in Cracker Jack boxes. Further, a hydrogen manufacturing plant has a significant number of additional components, most of which are standard and no longer subject to Wright&rsquo;s Law efficiency improvements, so most of the plant components will be subject to normal inflation, not innovation-related deflation.
We aren&rsquo;t going to be producing dirt cheap hydrogen from massive amounts of free renewable electricity 20% of the time. Green hydrogen will be significantly more expensive than gray hydrogen is today. Among other things, the transmission costs still have to be paid for. While McKinsey in one odd report projects that 2040 costs of hydrogen will be <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/08/batteries-biofuels-not-aluminum-hydrogen-will-fuel-the-airlines-of-the-near-future-part-1/">15-20% of 2021 prices</a> for fossil fuel-sourced black and gray hydrogen with no CCS, delivered and supercooled, that&rsquo;s just a ludicrous assumption that ignores economics and physics. As a result, we&rsquo;ll have an increasing ratio of green hydrogen displacing the problem area of black and gray hydrogen through 2100, and little new demand in areas with cheaper alternatives.
So there&rsquo;s the bad news / good news story. Hydrogen is a problem today. It will be a problem for much of the century. However, by the end of the century, CO2e emissions related to hydrogen will be approaching zero. That projection rests on markets, industry, and policy makers eventually being rational about hydrogen of course, something which is in short supply today if you believe the press. But the basics of physics and economics have a way of winning arguments against lobbyists eventually, so the hydrogen problem will be eliminated, not expanded.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Green hydrogen’s rise will coincide with falling demand

The world is going through a transformation as fundamental as the industrial or computer revolutions, a low-carbon transformation. As the latest UN IPCC reports make clear, we have to make enormous changes quickly. Investment and policy decisions have to be made about how much to spend on what and when, and too often the frame for those decisions is too narrow. Often, as in the case of hydrogen and electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) air taxis, hype and glitz overwhelm rationality.

The world is going through a transformation as fundamental as the industrial or computer revolutions, a low-carbon transformation. As the latest UN IPCC reports make clear, we have to make enormous changes quickly. Investment and policy decisions have to be made about how much to spend on what and when, and too often the frame for those decisions is too narrow. Often, as in the case of hydrogen and electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) air taxis, hype and glitz overwhelm rationality.
And yet, there are tremendous reasons emerging from technical innovation for optimism to leaven the challenges we will have with a world which will not stay within 2 degrees of warming. Electric cars, trucks and buses are taking off. Wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of new energy and deployable in every country in the world. <a href="https://medium.com/predict/future-of-electricity-transmission-is-hvdc-9800a545cd18">HVDC is now practical</a> at much higher capacities and lower losses than traditional generation. 5G everywhere is a proven technology and starting to scale, bringing knowledge to every corner of the globe. New smart grid technologies are making our legacy physical infrastructure perform much more efficiently and effectively. <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2016/09/13/economic-growth-decoupled-carbon-good/">GDP rise has decoupled</a> from carbon growth for good. Our <a href="https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/electricity-is-the-future-for-all-energy-2af6f038b74c">electric future</a> is bright and amazingly efficient.
But that doesn&rsquo;t mean we should be so optimistic about a utopian technical future that our brains fall out of our heads today. And so, this is the set of tenets I apply as a filter when I assess climate problem areas such as <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/15/how-aviation-will-decarbonize-decade-by-decade-until-2100-part-1/">aviation</a> and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/">shipping</a>, and proposed solutions such <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/e8421d25-254d-47b0-b7c0-48e525942aef">as grid storage</a>, <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/c1f245f8-d201-498e-9e85-8592095ae2ac">small modular nuclear reactors</a> and <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/shrinking-hydrogen-demand-hydrogen-decarbonization-will-have-major-climate-benefits/">hydrogen</a>:
<ul>
<li>Accept reality</li>
<li>Respect scientific research</li>
<li>Respect engineering</li>
<li>Respect human nature</li>
<li>Respect scale</li>
<li>Embrace change</li>
<li>Be pragmatic</li>
</ul>
<h2>Accept reality</h2>
With change comes both opportunity and setback, and the benefits and pain are distributed unevenly. We are in the midst of a tumultuous period. Global warming is real, the attendant impacts of climate change are being felt in hurricanes and droughts, wildfires and rising waters. The promise of artificial intelligence is starting to be realized, with large numbers of jobs now requiring at minimum substantial change as computers take more and more direct control from humans. Social media has been weaponized, and traditional media has in many cases been corrupted by <a href="https://medium.com/s/story/musk-and-tesla-are-doing-much-better-than-headlines-suggest-9091d8ea59d0">PR efforts</a> for both good and ill, more so than in the past.
The physical world changes much more slowly than the virtual world, but both are transforming at an unprecedented and uneven pace. Keeping up is hard, never mind looking ahead with any certainty. It&rsquo;s possible we are in a Kurzweil singularity of exponential and unpredictable change, but the limitations of our human senses prevent us from seeing it. Be humble about knowledge and perspectives on the future.
<h2>Respect scientific research</h2>
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/681e3249ccc8b2c31ecb9de89c0db3a8f5f253db.png" alt="Figure 1: Evidence-based medicine hierarchy courtesy https://commons.wikimedia.org
" />
We understand the reality of the physical world through science. The people who toil in labs &mdash; usually for long hours, little money, and little reward compared to other careers they might have had &mdash; deserve our respect. The papers they strive to publish should be reviewed carefully and thoughtfully. They should be considered in context of other scientific papers and in context of the hierarchy of evidence, with opinion at the bottom and systematic reviews such as the IPCC process at the top.
Respect does not mean blind reverence, but properly skeptical attention. When headlines about research papers appear, they should be treated with care and not immediately shared, even if they fit our biases of optimism or pessimism about a certain area. The underlying source should be assessed. Find it and at least read the abstract or executive summary. Is the paper in a peer-reviewed journal with a respectable impact factor or from a trusted institution? Does the paper support the often hyperbolic headlines, or is it much more cautious? Have the researchers or analysts asserted support for the press coverage of their research or are they cautioning that it is inaccurate? What quality of study from a data and methodology perspective was performed as best as can be assessed?
And understand that advances demonstrated in labs are a long and tortuous road from commercial and wide-scale deployment. What has been shown to work at a small scale may never be commercially viable.
<h2>Respect engineering</h2>
While scientists demonstrate possibility and enhance our understanding of nature, engineers build things which have impact. Engineers automatically start thinking about logistics, materials and capacity, not the art of what might be possible, but what is actually possible today.
While a scientist might find an interesting isotope of silicon to enhance solar panel efficiency, an engineer will look at material sources, cost and manufacturing difficulty. Things which look good in labs may work as prototypes, but may never be manufacturable in sufficient scale to actually deliver value. An engineer will look at prior art and attempts in the same space to see if something has been tried multiple times to no avail. 99% of engineers will look at hydrogen, see that it&rsquo;s destined to be a fossil fuel with no distribution network and move on to something which makes sense.
When confronted with a possibility, for example <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/03/airborne-wind-energy-platypuses-instead-cheetahs/">air-borne wind energy,</a> <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/solar-roadways-engineering-failure">solar roads</a>, or <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/15/hydrogen-isnt-cars-still-might-transportation-role/">hydrogen fuel-cell cars</a>, think like an engineer or find an engineering assessment on the domain.
And recognize that engineers are human too. The reality of hydrogen, air-borne wind energy and now electric rotorcraft air taxis, among many other things, is that engineers often are being paid considerable sums of money to do something intellectually interesting to them, and that doesn&rsquo;t mean that there is any useful outcome from those efforts except that enjoyment. I&rsquo;ve had that conversation with engineers in multiple technical domains, usually more mature ones who no longer are seduced by easy money and fun technologies, but who want to deliver actual solutions that are needed.
<h2>Respect human nature</h2>
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/3dc6503d057a0b757cf858ec5d94fb6a85ddbf80.png" alt="Figure 2: Image by author with material from vendors" />
Which one aligns with human nature, the sexy, very quick sedan or the electric rickshaw with the worst attributes of cars and motorcycles?
We humans are wonderful things, capable of amazing art, thought, and sentiment as individuals. And en masse we behave in moderately predictable ways. When people are given a free market to buy anything that they want, they will buy things which are more convenient, more comfortable, sexier and cheaper, all else being equal.
They will use climate control year round, they will eat tasty meat, and they will drive to the corner store five minutes away to get milk. They will drive around a parking lot for five minutes looking for a closer spot to the door rather than walk for three minutes. They will delude themselves into believing commute times that are only true at 3 AM on Wednesday mornings when buying homes that align with their internal vision of &lsquo;home&rsquo;.
If you want human beings to adopt something which is good for them in large numbers, it has to be more convenient, more comfortable, sexier or cheaper, and probably at least three of the above.
Hair shirts, short-range crappy electric cars &mdash; three-wheels or four &mdash; and giving up on creature comforts aren&rsquo;t winning strategies. Any &lsquo;solution&rsquo; which requires humans to behave against their nature in large numbers isn&rsquo;t viable.
<h2>Respect scale</h2>
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/c4497ae1821fe387e5fc976782c01d9e2d155290.png" alt="Figure 3: 0.58% of annual carbon emissions are currently used by CCUS facilities. Image by author
" />
Global problems are big. Stupidly big. Enormously big. Any solutions to global warming worth talking about at length &mdash; as opposed to quietly just doing something about our own carbon footprint &mdash; should at least have the potential to be a 1% to 5% wedge.
Carbon capture and sequestration has proven to be what was obvious from some simple math years ago: too small, too slow, too expensive and almost entirely used for <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/21/carbon-captures-global-investment-would-have-been-better-spent-on-wind-solar/">enhanced oil recovery</a>. Whether it&rsquo;s <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/24/no-magnesite-isnt-the-magic-co2-sequestration-solution-either/">magnesite</a>, <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/27/capturing-co2-from-exhaust-pipes-is-a-bad-idea-that-wont-die/">capturing CO2 from vehicle exhausts</a>, or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/02/clean-coal-america-kemper-power-plant">at-source coal-generation carbon capture</a>, it can&rsquo;t achieve scale. Tiny wind turbines won&rsquo;t cut it either.
And part of scale is time. Internal combustion cars won&rsquo;t go away in years, but decades. Fossil-fuel electrical generation will continue to decline, but we will still be burning fossil fuel somewhere for electricity in 2100.
Even achieving mass market production of a consumer product takes significant effort, as shown by the production hell Tesla endured in 2018 with the Tesla Model 3.
<h2>Embrace change</h2>
When data changes and our biases and preferences are no longer supported by evidence, it&rsquo;s time for us to change, not the data. As our lives are going to be disrupted by technology, look for the opportunity zones for our next career or gig. Our politics are proving to be whipsawed already in part by climate change, as the round of European elections showed after the Syrian refugees flooded into Europe. The world&rsquo;s predictable boundaries are being redrawn and the lessons we thought were learned for life are now cast into doubt.
In some cases, this means accepting that battles we thought were long won such as abortion rights and near-universal vaccination have to be refought and arming for them. In other cases, it means accepting that many who aren&rsquo;t techno-optimists are actively fearful of change and bringing them along the journey slowly with us.
In other cases, it means abandoning favored technologies which have not stood the test of time for mass deployment in sufficient scale to be a major factor, whether this is hydrogen or nuclear or carbon capture.
<h2>Be pragmatic</h2>
While wind turbines, solar panels, and HVDC transmission lines are no longer sexy new technology, just highly dependable modern technology, they are the backbone of the grid&rsquo;s transformation. And while cars, trucks and buses are just that, they are by far the dominant forms of moving people around, and making them clean and green is much more pragmatic and useful than trying to get everyone moving through depressurized tubes above or underground, or trying to get them to buy electric tricycles. Accept that if <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/09/breaking-news-fusion-recedes-into-far-future-for-the-57th-time/">nuclear fusion</a> ever generates electricity in sufficient quantities to be useful, it will have nowhere to do it except in space.
If we ever arrive at a techno-utopia while still having bodies, it will have been done piece-by-piece, unevenly and incrementally. It will be continuous evolution and experimentation that leads to it, not revolution. The physical has actual rules, unlike the virtual, and while in some far distant future we might be able to sidestep some of them, we have these limitations for the foreseeable future.
It&rsquo;s the foreseeable future our children will live in. It&rsquo;s this world that all but the tiniest fraction will be born, live and die upon. When thinking and writing about technical solutions, pragmatism is a useful constraint.
We have the solutions to solve the problems facing us. It doesn&rsquo;t take new tech, it takes deploying the tech we have and innovating around it, much more than inventing new gizmos. That&rsquo;s the techno-optimist utopia that makes sense for the coming decades, not a laboratory experiment or insolation geoengineering pipedream. We don&rsquo;t have to fix every problem, just the pressing ones without creating too many new ones.
As Voltaire said, &ldquo;the best is the enemy of the good.&rdquo;
A version of this article is also published in <a href="https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/a-manifesto-for-pragmatic-techno-optimism-50dd3f6372bc">The Future is Electric</a>. Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Seven tenets of cleantech pragmatic techno-optimism

what works? What should we be doing? A couple of years ago that came in the form of a question that was well enough formed to trigger Michael Barnard to write down the solution set: “What exactly is the current scientific consensus on steps to combat climate change?“

I spend a lot of time critiquing solutions for low-carbon transformation, most recently the current hydrogen gold rush Europe is trying to start in northern Africa, and that leads, inevitably, to people asking me: what works? What should we be doing? A couple of years ago that came in the form of a question that was well enough formed to trigger me to write down the solution set: &ldquo;What exactly is the current scientific consensus on steps to combat climate change?&ldquo;
Consensus is an interesting word. I tend to prefer consilience, where multiple lines of investigation lead to the same conclusions. That said, the following are the solutions or approaches that I see from my investigations and discussions as gaining consensus and consilience. It&rsquo;s not the how, but the what. There are many paths that lead to these realities. One way to read the following is to consider that it describes the world in 2050.
This list doesn&rsquo;t necessarily map easily to Project Drawdown because its approach is a cost-benefit analysis of CO2e reductions for dollars, while this is a more aggressive transformational vision.
<h2>The short list</h2>
<h3>Electrify everything</h3>
Convert all energy services to work directly from electricity instead of fossil fuels. Transportation, industry, and agriculture. All of it. All gas appliances must go. All road transport must be electric. Most trains and a lot of planes must shift to electric. Electricity creating biofuels or hydrogen for the small subset of transportation that can&rsquo;t be electrified. All heat from electricity. The US throws away two-thirds of all primary energy, mostly in the form of waste heat from fossil fuels used in inherently inefficient combustion processes. We only have to replace a third of the actual primary energy we use today to maintain our lifestyle and economy.
<h3>Overbuild renewable generation</h3>
All other forms of generation with the exception of nuclear were overbuilt, so we&rsquo;ll do the same with wind and solar, and they are really cheap, so that is not that expensive. Also a bit of geothermal and some biomass. After all, only $3 trillion of renewables would provide all primary energy for everything the US does today.
<h3>Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets</h3>
And improve existing ones. High-voltage direct current (HVDC) became much more viable with high-speed hybrid circuit breakers in 2011, and is an essential technology for long-distance, low-loss electrical transmission. It can replace some AC transmission during upgrades and be buried along existing right-of-ways.
<h3>Build a fair amount of pumped hydro and other storage</h3>
While storage of electricity is an overstated concern given overbuilt renewables and continent-scale grids, some is still required. Closed-loop, off-river, pumped hydro resource potential is far greater than the need, is efficient, and uses stable, known technologies. Shifting existing hydro-electric dams to be passive, on-demand storage as opposed to baseload is also key. Fast response grid storage can be provided by existing lithium-ion technologies, as Tesla has proven in California and Australia. Redox flow batteries will bridge lithium ion and pumped hydro. By 2050, we&rsquo;ll have roughy 20 TWh of batteries on wheels in US cars alone, available both for demand management to reduce peak demand, soak up excess generation, and to provide some vehicle-to-grid electricity.
<h3>Plant a lot of trees</h3>
We have cut down about 50% of the six trillion trees that used to grow on earth. Planting a trillion trees would buy us a lot of time as they sucked about a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere per tree over 40 years.
<h3>Change agricultural practices</h3>
High-tillage agriculture is a process that keeps releasing carbon captured by the soil back into the atmosphere. Switching to low-tillage farming would buy us a lot of time as the CO2 captured by farmland would stay in the soil a lot longer, and some of it would be permanently sequestered. Making precision agriculture universal and leveraging agrigenetics to tweak nitrogen fixing microbes and plants to mostly eliminate CO2e-heavy nitrogen fertilizers clears up the rest. Eliminate subsistence farming.
<h3>Fix concrete, steel and industrial processes</h3>
8% of global CO2 emissions come from making Portland cement. It&rsquo;s absolutely critical to urban densification and industry, so we won&rsquo;t stop making it. But it&rsquo;s a huge source of CO2, about half from the energy and half from CO2 that bakes off limestone as it is turned into quicklime. Electrifying that energy flow helps a lot, but capturing that CO2 is one of the few places where mechanical carbon capture will make sense. Steel will mostly be fixed by aggressively turning internal combustion cars, refineries, pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure into new steel using electric minimills. 70% of North American steel is already made this way. And transform high-emitting industrial processes like bicarbonate manufacturing.
<h3>Price carbon aggressively</h3>
The simplest way to get a lot of people and industries to shift away from emitting lots of CO2 is to make it expensive. That&rsquo;s what carbon taxes do.
<h3>Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively</h3>
Getting rid of coal is already happening, but it&rsquo;s still by far the biggest single source of CO2 emissions. Aggressive actions to eliminate burning coal are needed. For gas, the question is how few gas plants can we build, how many of them can we run on biologically sourced methane and how fast can we shut them down.
<h3>Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel</h3>
Exploration, extraction and use, just cut it out. The US alone spends tens of billions of dollars annually on subsidies of various kinds for the fossil fuel industry, and hasn&rsquo;t done a thing about it since committing to eliminate them in 2009. The G7 and G20 have committed to eliminating subsidies, but progress has been very slow. The World Bank continues to finance coal, oil, and gas projects, despite commitments to end them.
<h3>Eliminate HFCs in refrigeration</h3>
The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer targets the unforeseen side effects of displacing ozone-depleting CFCs with high global warming potential HFCs. Project Drawdown puts this at #1 on its ranked list of solutions by cost vs benefit. The US has still not ratified this Amendment, although 131 other countries including China and India have.
<h2>There are some mildly controversial things left out of this list</h2>
<h3>Nuclear power is too slow to build and too expensive</h3>
That&rsquo;s empirical reality, not an advocacy statement. The conditions for rapid build that existed in a couple of places and times in the past don&rsquo;t exist today. And we need a lot of clean electricity very quickly. Nuclear need not apply. Keep existing nuclear running until it needs major upgrades, don&rsquo;t stop new nuclear buildout in China &mdash; pretty much the only place building new generation capacity &mdash; but don&rsquo;t expect it to be more than a rounding error in a few decades. New nuclear technologies including SMRs are decades from commercial deployment at any scale, and we have technologies that are reliable, predictable, cheap, and fast to build, so there will be nothing for new nuclear to do once it actually makes it out of R&amp;D.
<h3>Mechanical carbon capture and sequestration is a mostly dead end</h3>
This is an overhyped fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. Virtually every CCS site is actually an enhanced oil recovery site which recovers oil that couldn&rsquo;t be pumped out before, typically enough that 2&ndash;3 times more CO2 is generated from the oil than was put underground. Exceptions are natural gas wells with too high a concentration of CO2, leading to 25 times the emissions once the natural gas is burned. Expensive, unscalable, and wasteful. As stated, flue carbon capture might be useful for concrete.
<h3>Air-to-fuel technologies are dead ends</h3>
Solutions such as Carbon Engineering&rsquo;s direct-air-capture with hydrogen electrolysis to create synthetic fuels is a broken model. It&rsquo;s vastly more expensive and higher CO2 emitting than electrification or biological pathway fuel synthesis. Any money spent on this would have vastly better results if spent on renewables instead. It&rsquo;s not an either-or, but in this case policy makers should ignore this and governments shouldn&rsquo;t fund it.
<h3>Hydrogen as a store of energy</h3>
Hydrogen hype is high in the 2020s, but the molecule is better understood as a climate change problem, not a climate change solution. We use about 120 million tons of black hydrogen annually, with CO2e emissions about a billion tons per year. The biggest user is in oil refineries to reduce sulphur in gas, diesel, kerosene and other petroleum products, and that&rsquo;s going away. The second biggest use is in nitrogen fertilizers, and that has to diminish radically as well. The remainder must be served by green hydrogen, and there is little room for wasting energy by turning renewable electricity into an inefficient and ineffective fuel. Long-duration grid storage is best served by much more efficient and effective closed-loop, off-river pumped hydro and redox flow batteries.
<h3>The military is a hard problem</h3>
The military requires vast amounts of high energy fuel in places with no electrical supply chain, often for months at a time. The US military is considered by many to be the single largest CO2 emitting organization in the world. However, eliminating global fossil fuel strategic military actions &mdash; which describes virtually everything done in the Middle East for the last 100 years &mdash; will diminish the need for the US military substantially. A great deal of its emissions, which hopefully will start coming to light as the US has re-entered the Paris Accord, were related to the Middle Eastern deployments. There&rsquo;s only so much we can do for biofuels, but to be clear, the world has been in a period of diminishing military conflict since the end of WWII. Globalization may have downsides, but the ties of trade and treaties which bind countries together have been highly effective in allowing diplomacy pathways to work, and making the military option increasingly difficult to consider.
Where approaches or recommendations from people or groups diverge from the above, question what lobbying groups are involved, where revenue will be lost or gained and in general what the motivations of the people or organizations involved are. This is all empirically grounded analysis. It&rsquo;s not rocket science.
We have the solutions. We just need the will to execute, which is being sapped by the losers in this necessary transformation, predominantly the fossil fuel industry.
<h2>Readings:</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2017/11/12/7-reasons-future-electric/">7 Reasons The Future Is Electric</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/predict/future-of-electricity-transmission-is-hvdc-9800a545cd18">Future of electricity transmission is HVDC</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/the-seven-reasons-renewables-are-dominant-today-630181e24e5b">The seven reasons renewables are dominant today</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/21/wind-solar-in-china-generating-2x-nuclear-today-will-be-4x-by-2030/">Wind &amp; Solar In China Generating 2&times; Nuclear Today, Will Be 4&times; By 2030</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/21/some-good-news-for-the-us-nuclear-fleet-renewables/">Some Good News For The US Nuclear Fleet &amp; Renewables</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/20/us-could-achieve-3x-as-much-co2-savings-with-renewables-instead-of-nuclear-for-less-money/">US Could Achieve 3X As Much CO2 Savings With Renewables Instead Of Nuclear For Less Money</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/12/chevrons-fig-leaf-part-1-carbon-engineering-burns-natural-gas-to-capture-carbon-from-the-air/">Chevron&rsquo;s Fig Leaf Part 1: Carbon Engineering Burns Natural Gas To Capture Carbon From The Air</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/21/carbon-captures-global-investment-would-have-been-better-spent-on-wind-solar/">Carbon Capture&rsquo;s Global Investment Would Have Been Better Spent On Wind &amp; Solar</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/12/best-carbon-capture-facility-in-world-emits-25-times-more-co2-than-sequestered/">Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/17/soil-carbon-capture-great-loamy-hope-bandaid/">Soil Carbon Capture: Great Loamy Hope Or Bandaid?</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/22/farming-carbon-capture-has-potential-but-is-not-a-magic-bullet/">Farming Carbon Capture Has Potential, But Is Not A Magic Bullet</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/the-best-trees-to-plant-for-global-warming-have-three-blades-generate-electricity/">The Best Trees To Plant For Global Warming Have Three Blades &amp; Generate Electricity</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/16/what-would-planting-100-million-trees-per-week-do-in-5-50-500-years/">What Would Planting 100 Million Trees Per Week Do In 5, 50, &amp; 500 Years?</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-to-meet-all-our-renewable-energy-needs">Massive Global Study Just Smashed One of The Last Major Arguments Against Renewables</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://sdg.iisd.org/news/kigali-amendment-enters-into-force-bringing-promise-of-reduced-global-warming/">Kigali Amendment Enters into Force, Bringing Promise of Reduced Global Warming | News | SDG Knowledge Hub | IISD</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/shrinking-hydrogen-demand-hydrogen-decarbonization-will-have-major-climate-benefits/">Shrinking Hydrogen Demand &amp; Hydrogen Decarbonization Will Have Major Climate Benefits</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/15/how-aviation-will-decarbonize-decade-by-decade-until-2100-part-1/">How Aviation Will Decarbonize Decade By Decade Until 2100</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/01/global-shipping-less-of-co2e-problem-today-than-aviation-more-by-end-of-century/">Global Shipping Less Of CO2e Problem Today Than Aviation, More By End Of Century</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/e8421d25-254d-47b0-b7c0-48e525942aef">Longer term grid storage is a massive growth market through 2060</a>​</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/e8421d25-254d-47b0-b7c0-48e525942aef">Pumped hydropower storage &amp; redox flow batteries are the untold future of energy</a>​</li>
<li><a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/c1f245f8-d201-498e-9e85-8592095ae2ac">Small modular nuclear reactors were tried in the 1950s and won&rsquo;t be better today</a>​</li>
</ul>
A version of this article is also published in <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/09/29/the-short-list-of-climate-actions-that-will-work/">CleanTechnica</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/the-short-list-of-climate-actions-that-will-work-d08c8069d2a8">The Future is Electric</a>. Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.​

The short list Of climate actions that will work

Like hydrogen, small modular nuclear reactors have been seeing a resurgence of interest lately. Much of that is driven by governmental policies and investments focusing on the technology. Much of it comes from the nuclear industry. And inevitably, some comes from entrepreneurs attempting to build a technology that they hope will take off in a major way, making them and their investors a lot of money.

Small modular nuclear reactors were tried in the 1950s and won’t be better today

There are multiple races under way in grid storage. The big one right now is securing seed funding for potential battery technologies. Billions are being invested in often faint hopes. Within technology groupings such as redox flow, a variety of chemistries are in competition to see which ones are most viable.

There are multiple races under way in grid storage. The big one right now is securing seed funding for potential battery technologies. Billions are being invested in often faint hopes. Within technology groupings such as redox flow, a variety of chemistries are in competition to see which ones are most viable.
But in the coming decades, the race will be purely one of deployment. This article is a projection -- with large error bars -- of my expectation of how this race will play out through 2060.
In a <a href="https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/e8421d25-254d-47b0-b7c0-48e525942aef">previous article</a> I laid out the attributes used to coarsely and qualitatively assess major grid storage contenders. The need for storage is rich and complex, and no single technology will dominate. As a result, three primary technology groups were selected for different aspects of the storage requirement: closed-loop, off-river, pumped-hydro storage, lithium-ion batteries, and the dark horse, redox flow batteries.
The next obvious question is how much of which storage is likely to be deployed, and hence, where will all the money for storage go? This is going to be a big business over the coming 40 years or so until we have achieved 99% grid decarbonization.
<h2>How big is it going to be?</h2>
That&rsquo;s a million dollar question. Actually that&rsquo;s a multi-trillion dollar question. I chose to answer this by returning to Stanford&rsquo;s Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and team&rsquo;s most recent report on achieving 100% renewables by 2050.&nbsp; Jacobson and co&rsquo;s modeling covers 143 countries, broken into 24 grid regions, addressed transmission increases necessary to move renewably generated electricity around, and also <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/20/100-wws-part-2-jacobsons-latest-study-covers-storage-transmission-more/">dealt with storage</a>. While the study has its detractors, I&rsquo;ve duplicated enough aspects of the math, reviewed the criticisms, and discussed my minor concerns with Jacobson a sufficient number of times that I&rsquo;m comfortable that it&rsquo;s a robust analysis and a reasonable projection of a potential grid decarbonization scenario.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/8cd9a605db483555ca4d771da5579b175cb9b620.png" alt="Source: Mark Z. Jacobson and Stanford University" />
When I spoke with Jacobson about his technology choices, he made it clear that they had made very conservative selections based on what was currently available, what was already being deployed, and using current prices. My projections are rather different, but do come with clear provisos as well.
Table 3 of the study provides the team&rsquo;s breakdown of required storage.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/bbbefba2a91844e3aaed83147877d402c811ad7c.png" alt="Source: Mark Z. Jacobson and Stanford University
" />
As I&rsquo;ve consistently asserted, the amount of storage required is much lower than most people expect. And as is clear, my expectations about what will provide that storage are substantively different than the Stanford team. Solar thermal heat, as one example, falls into the also-ran bucket of my assessment, but is a mainstay of the Jacobson et al. projection. This is not to say that we disagree, but that they made a specific set of conservative choices, not a prediction of what will dominate storage. I&rsquo;m more in the prediction business in this piece, but will also say clearly that this is a projection of a scenario I think to be likely, not a cast-in-stone Tony Seba-esque statement of magical certainty.
As a side note, I&rsquo;ve found another place where my choices would be different than Jacobson and team, which is that I think concentrating solar power and thermal storage is mostly a dead end. It&rsquo;s been outcompeted by the direct creation of electricity using photovoltaics, which are much cheaper, simpler to deploy, trivial to calibrate, and cheap to operate. The other place is in rooftop solar, something Jacobson and team rely on for roughly 15% of future electricity generation, but which I consider more likely to be in the 5% range. Jacobson and I discussed this on a <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/16/transitioning-the-world-to-100-renewable-energy/">CleanTech Talk</a> just before COVID-19 changed the world.
The way I read this table is that 3.7 TW of storage will be required on the grid. Note, this isn&rsquo;t TWh, but deliverable capacity, the power. The actual storage of energy is a multiplier of that, not counted in Jacobson&rsquo;s study. This is a significant point. At present, per one source, we have 9,000 GWh (energy) of pumped hydro grid storage today, but only 160 GW of capacity (power). That ratio is skewed as much of pumped hydro today is on existing low-head hydroelectric dams, not the model appropriate for the future of closed-loop, off-river, pumped-hydro storage.
It&rsquo;s also worth noting that grid storage is an end game for decarbonization of the grid requirement, not a prerequisite for starting. Every GWh of delivered electricity from renewables is already cutting into the capacity factors of coal and natural gas. Natural gas was a peaker and backup generation source of electricity before the fracking revolution; it will return to that role, and eventually be entirely supplanted by storage. But most of the grid storage capacity will be built after 2040. Job one is building as much wind and solar as possible as quickly as possible, as this displaces the most coal and gas the most rapidly.
Grid storage is measured in multiple ways, as people were quick to point out. I chose to use one measure, cost per MWh, in my selection criteria. For this, however, I&rsquo;ll project based on GW of capacity/power.
As a reminder, lithium-ion power and energy are fairly tightly coupled. That&rsquo;s what makes it suitable for cars and shifting afternoon sunlight four hours into the future, as well as specific types of grid ancillary services, but it does mean that it&rsquo;s not going to be a large part of the grid storage world.
And it&rsquo;s probably worth returning briefly to vehicle-to-grid (V2G) expectations. V2G advocates were another group who objected to the winners I selected. However, I&rsquo;d projected the various <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/04/15/vw-vehicle-to-grid-is-15-years-too-early-except-maybe-in-texas/">value propositions of vehicle batteries for grid management</a> in an earlier piece.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/5d0ad4de4688d4e54fa249100975d923928ecf28.png" alt="Chart 1: Growth of electric vehicle battery explotation strategies. Chart by the author" />
The net is that due to a variety of barriers to the use of V2G, including relatively slow growth of electric vehicles, the long lifetime of non-electric vehicles, lack of current standards, lack of automotive vendor commitment, significant global variability, grid regulatory structures, grid management legacy technology challenges, a requirement for intermediary aggregation, a pronounced challenge with taking electricity and range out of people&rsquo;s vehicles to make it work, the 90% of Asian people living in multi-unit residential buildings, and finally the power to energy limitations, I consider V2G to be a relatively minor player in supplying backup, but a major player in providing demand management coverage to reduce peak demand. Nonetheless, it will be part of the mix, but simply reduces the requirement somewhat.
<h2>How much of which type of generation by when?</h2>
As I pointed out in the assessment piece, pumped-hydro storage (PSH) is well out of the gate, while other grid storage technologies have barely arrived at the gate. There are 160 GW of PSH on the grid already, and another 60 GW under construction that I was able to identify, with 50 GW of that in China alone. Lithium-ion battery storage, especially from Tesla, gets the majority of the headlines, but it barely ranks. My third choice, redox flow batteries, is far behind lithium-ion at present, but as stated in my first assessment, I expect it to more than catch up due to the decoupling of power and energy, and to be second only to PSH on the grid.
<img src="https://illuminem.b-cdn.net/articlebody/1c6a8c978bf6fdf6b3335b2a9948fb847283883e.png" alt="Chart 2: Evolution of storage capacity by technology (in GW). Chart by the author" />
I&rsquo;ll restate a proviso. This is a projection of 40 years of the future. It&rsquo;s an expert opinion, not a meta-analysis of all of the studies done by a major university. It is at the bottom of the pyramid of evidence, and should be treated as informative, not predictive. There are big error bars on this. I think it&rsquo;s more correct than not, but I&rsquo;m with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555">Kahneman</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B015LYZGW6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1">Tetlock</a> in my opinion of un-nuanced headline hunters who make bold and distant predictions without bothering to be specific or check accuracy.
Keen-eyed readers will note two things immediately. My projection is to 2060, not 2050, and the total amount of capacity isn&rsquo;t 3,700 GW. The reason for that is that while I know that Jacobson&rsquo;s 2050 target is eminently achievable, I think it&rsquo;s unlikely to be achieved, so my timeframes for complete decarbonization are longer. I think we&rsquo;ll still be burning some gas and building storage and generation capacity through 2080 or 2090. This is an obvious and arguable timeline and capacity challenge, but I&rsquo;m comfortable that it&rsquo;s sufficiently realistic, while uncomfortable as always with the implications for global warming. While SSP8.5 has become highly unlikely, we aren&rsquo;t yet close to being out of SSP3&ndash;7.0 with its 2.8&deg; to 4.6&deg; Celsius of warming by 2100 and it is deeply unlikely that we&rsquo;ll stay below 2.0&deg; Celsius. My projections are based in that pragmatic, if unfortunate, zone of reality.
I think pumped-hydro storage will almost double by 2030 with all of the projects in construction and development today. I think lithium-ion will still have the edge on redox flow through 2030 due to the relative maturities of the technologies, but that redox flow deployments will still be in the 15 GW capacity range by then. After that redox flow will catch up and significantly surpass lithium-ion as the scaled storage requirement increases.
It&rsquo;s also worth pointing out that the also-ran category is still close to 100 GW of power, and likely a TWh or more of energy storage. This is a non-trivial niche, and while I think the three technologies I&rsquo;ve chosen will be the winners, there&rsquo;s an awful lot of money that will be spent usefully in the also-ran category. If you are a big fan of Germany&rsquo;s hydrogen salt cavern plans or liquid air or compressed air storage, be comforted to know that those edge cases are in a fat edge.
One more thing worth stating. There&rsquo;s vastly more than enough fresh water for pumped hydro. I hear this as an argument against it regularly, so let&rsquo;s put it to rest. The suggested roughly 2 TW of capacity is like 20-40 TWh of capacity. With closed-loop pumped hydro storage, a 500-meter head height requires a gigaliter of water to provide a GWh of storage. That equates to 20-40 thousand gigaliters required for pumped hydro.
A gigaliter sounds like a lot, but it&rsquo;s 1/1200th of the water consumed in the US every single day. 40,000 gigaliters sounds like a lot, but there&rsquo;s 31.5 million times more freshwater on Earth. Pumped hydro doesn&rsquo;t consume the water daily, it just sits there and gets pumped up into the upper reservoir and then runs down into the lower reservoir. Losses due to evaporation go into the water cycle and almost entirely fall upon and as fresh water. There is no concern about the use of pumped hydro. The second concern is about flat lands, which is addressed both by transmission and by redox flow storage, one of the areas where it has an advantage. In other words, like most of the concerns people have about pumped hydro, it&rsquo;s without merit.
Finally, there&rsquo;s the land use argument which people make, claiming that there&rsquo;s no room. As the Australian National University found, there are 100 times the global requirement in sites with greater than 400 meter head heights, near transmission, off of waterways and off of protected lands. A GWh of storage at 500 meters head height requires 2 square kilometers of reservoir between upper and lower, while a single 800 MW dam, Site C in BC, requires 93 square kilometers of reservoir. The scale of land use is vastly off, and the environmental and deployment concerns remain low. The 120 TWh would require roughly 0.24 million square kilometers of reservoir dispersed around the world, and the land mass of the world is 149 million square kilometers.
A version of this article is also published on <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2021/04/30/grid-storage-winners-part-2-how-much-of-which-storage-by-when/">CleanTechnica</a>. Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Michael Barnard

Michael Barnard

Artificially inflated EV emissions amplified by usual anti-EV types

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