Oxford net zero climate in the balance. I'm Steve Smith, the executive director of the Oxford Net Zero Initiative.
And each week, I get to talk to leading thinkers here at Oxford about what it will take to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases.
Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Nick Air to discuss zero carbon energy specifically.
Now, many of you will probably know Nick already.
For those of you who don't, he's professor of energy and climate policy in the Environmental Change Institute,
as well as being co-director of the Programme on Integrating Renewable Energy at the Oxford Martin School here.
He's been at the forefront really of research from energy systems for the last couple of decades,
really throughout the course of carbon and climate emerging as issues here in the UK for the energy system.
So he was director of strategy for the Energy Savings Trust, director of the UK Energy Research Centre UK and is now currently director of Credits,
which is a national centre for research into energy demand solutions.
So next, going to give us a big picture view to that the energy system, but it's worth knowing.
He's also a climate change science adviser to Oxford City Council,
so has a real understanding of how these issues look right down at the local level, where the rubber often hits the road as well.
In case you want to ask him about that and we do want your questions today, so you can ask throughout the talk,
and I'll be picking out your questions as we go along and asking Nic throughout the talk, hopefully, and also at the end.
So to ask a question, you must be logged in on crowd cost rather than watching on YouTube if you've logged into crowd customer watching there.
Hopefully, you'll see an ask a question button at the bottom right of the screen, and that will open a window in which you can write.
And also importantly, you can type the questions that you'd like to so you can see which ones are popular.
And we are recording this event, and it will be available to watch on YouTube afterwards via the Oxford Martin School channel,
along with all the other conversation in this Oxford net zero series. So without further ado, I'm going to pass over to Nick Nick over to you.
Thanks, Dave. How people can see that slide on full screen now.
So I want to cover in the next hour of these five questions.
Why do we want to move to zero carbon energy? What does that imply for energy systems and what we get from energy systems and then
address two sub questions within how we get to a zero carbon energy supply system?
And how do we use less energy and use it more efficiently because those turned out to be two very important questions.
And then end by looking at what are the key challenges really much, very much from the perspective of an energy research on climate researcher.
So starting with July zero carbon energy,
and I'm going to be very quick here because I suspect most of the people listening
know very well what we need to get to something close to zero carbon energy.
There are talks in the series which will explain that a lot better than I can do.
But this is my quick and simplistic view of the matter based on work undertaken by Irakli and of us,
but lots of similar diagrams and well respected academic papers.
What are the implications of the Paris Agreement? Well, basically there are two key commitments in the Paris Paris Agreement.
One is to get to to constrain global average temperature rise to two degrees or 1.5 degrees.
That implies rapid decarbonisation starting now.
The green pathways on this diagram show you less than two degrees, the blue 1.5 degrees.
In either case, we need rapid decarbonisation starting now, and the net zero commitment,
which this series is principally about, means that we need to reach net zero emissions.
Now, when we reach net zero emissions is a different question,
but that the combination of rapid decarbonisation and reaching net zero emissions
means that we need to reach net zero emissions by mid-century or not long after.
What does that mean? What's the relationship of this to energy?
Oh, this is a diagram taken from the last full IPCC report looking at where great
global greenhouse gas emissions come from rising in the period 1970 to 2010.
Not every year, but pretty consistent rise over the period.
Then you can see that the the biggest contribution by far is CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning with CO2 from land use,
the red ball another substantial section and then the other greenhouse gases, methane, antero and gases.
I'm not going to say anything about those of the greenhouse gases today, nor am I going to look at CO2 from land use,
which was very well covered in the in the last talk in this series and one focussing on fossil fuel emissions.
And the implication of net zero, I think, is that we need to get pretty close to zero in CO2 emissions.
You can argue that we might be able to do some negative emissions,
either within the land use sector or through the use of geoengineering or other negative emotions technologies.
But realistically, everybody thinks that we also have to get back to see that yellow locked down to close to zero five by 2050 or not long after.
I think the working assumption for those of us who work in energy has to be
that we need something approximating net zero carbon energy by mid-century.
Yeah. And Nick just is probably worth as being clear at the start what we mean by energy and energy systems as well,
because I know there can be some confusion on this point contact, whether it's whether we're talking about electricity or something broader than that.
And maybe on top of that, you could also give us a flavour. We're talking about net zero by 2050.
What does that really mean in terms of time scales? So how does that compare to, you know, a power plant or critical parts of the energy system?
That's the first question is, yeah, it's an important one state. It's people commonly interchange energy and electricity, which is very unhelpful.
So by energy, I mean, anything that uses an external energy source that could be fossil fuels,
it can be nuclear, it can be renewables, but it has to provide energy service.
So the sorts of things that we get from energy are warmer buildings, the ability to move around, the ability to to make things.
So the energy system is the whole system that provides for those.
And so it's a pretty broad concept and certainly broader than electricity because we need to arrange it.
And thus in this context, it's the energy system. That's important because we can eliminate carbon emissions from electricity and we need to do that.
But that's not sufficient.
We need to eliminate it from all the other things that we use energy for, such as heating buildings and transport timescales of time scales.
So the critical challenge and the reason that most people think there's anything quicker than 2050
is really very challenging is because part of the infrastructure are around for four decades.
So typical car would last for 10 years to go power station 20 or 30 years to go,
building perhaps a hundred years so longer than the timescales that we're talking about.
So we are talking about really very radical changes to the infrastructure on something like the lifetime of those infrastructure systems.
Let me move on, then, to what zero-carbon implies for energy systems and the first but critically
important point is that global energy systems are dominated by fossil fuels.
You can see there from the International Energy Agency.
The global energy supply looks like dominated by oil.
The big orange section at the bottom. Natural gas and coal.
The blue sections at the top. Smaller contributions from biofuels and waste that that stuff.
The size of that often surprises people. But please don't run away with the idea that that's modern, clean biofuel plants.
Most of that is biofuels being collected by very cool people, usually very poor women in the global south and used for cooking and heating.
So probably not something that most people would say is sustainable for desirable.
There are smaller contributions from nuclear there and grain and hydropower and blue, which have been around for a long time.
And those of you with good eyesight can see a small yellow section in the middle.
That's new renewable energy sources, largely wind and solar.
So I'm going to be talking quite a lot about those today,
but I think it's really important to understand at the outset that those are contribute a very small share of global energy supplies.
At the moment. We're to rely on them a lot more. It is a big change.
The second point I want to make is that the energy system is hugely important,
affordable and reliable, and modern energy services are basic human needs.
That doesn't mean everybody has them. We still have three quarters of a billion people on Earth with no access to electricity.
And over two and a half billion without access to clean fuels for cooking and sustainable go.
Sustainable Development Goal seven is aiming to get those numbers down to zero by 2030,
which is a really important but challenging ambition in in high income societies.
All our basic infrastructure or public services are critically dependent on reliable energy supplies without energy.
We would oh, we couldn't run off grid system or water system, our health system or education system.
So energy is critically important. I think what that means is that some simplistic slogans like stop digging up fossil fuels.
Well, yeah, that's why we need to end up, but it's not a credible strategy on its own.
Indeed, I would say, as the outcome of a systemic change in the way that the energy system works,
the way that we provide energy services, rather than the starting point for, for, for, for analysis.
So what does the energy transition need to look like?
Well, clearly there's there's huge amounts of research going on into that.
I'm going to try and summarise it in one diagram of the the numbers in these charts come from an influential paper by a group.
I know this from from 2018, but there are some similar analyses by other people.
And the key messages are we need to do two things we need to reduce energy demand and we need
to shift demand from fossil fuels to renewable energy so you can see the left hand job.
They're projecting that global energy demand needs to fall by something like 40 percent more than that in the global north,
more like 50 percent in the global north to allow for growth and service demands in the poorer countries in the world and on the right hand side,
the share of primary energy supply. This is a useful chart.
It goes right. The way back to nineteen hundred allows you to see the growth of this burning
coal and then oil and then gas during periods during the industrial revolution.
And you can see the change in supply mix that's needed with growth in wind and solar hugely rapidly over the next few decades.
So those transitions happening happening much faster than the transition to oil and the growth in oil and post-Second World War and energy systems.
That's why this is a challenging process and those are the global numbers.
If you look at UK numbers from the Committee on Climate Change, they look pretty similar.
They look like a 50 percent reduction in UK energy demand by 2050 and at least
six fold growth in supply of renewable energy from the numbers that we have now.
And one key point that actually links the reduction in demand in the shift to renewable energy is its electrification.
Both of these points in the direction of increased electrification, a bigger role for electricity in the overall energy system.
That's because the key renewables, wind and solar largely produce electricity, so we expect to see the supply side shift in that direction.
But also the energy efficiency improvements implied on the left hand side require fuels that can be used more efficiently in electricity in general,
can be used much more efficiently than fossil fuels can directly.
So these two changes reducing energy demand and shifting renewable energy are all linked in that way.
So I want to go on now to talk a bit more about about each of those, and we'll start with the shift to renewable energy.
So how do we get a zero carbon energy supply? There are three broad options.
Renewable energy, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage and nuclear power.
And if I've been giving this talk even 10 years ago, I think would have been a more even emphasis on those.
I think now what has become clear is that renewable energy sources are likely to be the dominant contributor to that.
I mentioned the importance of electricity. If we look at electricity systems this, this looks a bit similar to the chart I showed earlier,
but this is about just electricity globally as opposed to the total energy system.
Again, you see coal in blue and natural gas in green, playing a very large role.
At the moment, oil dark blue plays a much smaller role in electricity production.
It's used primarily in transport.
And you see bigger relative roles for four four four four nuclear and hydro as the state of fuel used largely for electricity production.
And on this chart, the good news is that you can see wind and solar.
They're actually a big enough share to get a label.
So wind and blue, solar and purple, the bottom starting from the very, very low shares again again, but now rising quite quickly.
So a lot more cause for optimism when you look at this diagram.
So that can renewables.
These four hydro historically has been a very important part of electricity systems almost since their inception in the late 19th century,
biomass is potentially important and can be stored more easily than many renewables,
but raises questions about the impact of production with the terrestrial biosphere on the food versus fuel debate.
I think anybody who heard the talk last week bye bye,
Natalie and Cecile will will will have realised if they didn't know before that that the idea that we can grow
very large amounts of biomass just to produce carbon that's good for the environment is overly simplistic.
But nature based solutions that point towards monoculture of biomass plantations, which are generally used for producing bioenergy.
So we're left with wind and solar. The good news about both of those is they have the resource base is huge for wind.
It's very large lake that remains untapped. It's variable across the world.
In the U.K., we have particularly good wind resource that could easily supply all of our energy up to this time of year.
We have not such a good solar resource, but it's still not bad.
What we've seen in recent years is dramatic cost reduction in the price of solar, which making it making it a much cheaper resource.
This This slide shows the scale of what's happened to solar costs in the last 35 years, starting in 1976.
It's and if you look carefully, it's worth noting that the y axis is a logarithmic scale, because that's the only way you can sensibly show this.
There's been a 200 fold reduction in the costs of solar modules in that period.
So in 1976, the modules for a typical two kilowatt household system would have cost you something like £100000 thousand hundred thousand dollars.
Now they cost you something like five hundred dollars. So they've gone from being a technology that essentially would be used in spacecraft
to one that is accessible and affordable to many people for electricity generation.
But and indeed, if you look at the range of renewable technologies,
this is a somewhat more complex charge taken from the International Renewable Energy Agency,
showing all the major electricity generating renewable options and the change that that's been over the decade from 2010 to 2019.
And you can see that biomass, geothermal and hydro absorbing cost effective for quite a long time, but the resources are limited.
But solar and wind have become economic, not only becoming amongst the cheapest of the low carbon options,
but increasingly the cheapest of all electricity generating options and certainly in many countries close to the equator.
Solar is now the most economical way to generate electricity,
which means we can do carbon emissions reduction at a negative cost, of course, which is a hugely important change.
So a couple of questions, actually. That's right, because we've got plenty coming in.
Maybe I'll just pick out a couple that are sort of unlinked points to what you've just covered.
And Rosalind asks, have we had enough energy without fossil fuels and nuclear?
So I think you touched on the fact that when wind and solar have a lot of potential,
so are you confident that issues of potential are not a problem here to meet demand?
And also, we've got a question from Dr. Mark Robinson saying, Do you have any views on small scale or mini nuclear options?
I think you focus quite a lot on solar and wind and and the cost reductions there.
But do you see a role for innovative new nuclear? Yeah, OK.
So if I take each of those, the short answer is there is the solar resource in the world is huge, even in this country.
We could supply all our energy from solar. In principle what we would want to supply or energy from solar,
but we could do it using a very small fraction of the land area of the UK now have been claims in the past that isn't the case,
but they simply are not correct. Is it that the solar resource that hits the Earth's surface is thousands of times
more than the energy that we need when it's different in different countries?
But if you're in the central plains of the US or western China, as well as, say,
the Atlantic Seaboard or the Pacific Seaboard in other countries, then the wind resource is also very large.
It's not a size of resource problem the nuclear.
Despite being a nuclear physicist on a less nuclear bomb, some other issues.
It's very clear that existing nuclear technologies are not going to be cost effective with wind,
and so if you look at the costs of nuclear, they've not been coming down.
If anything, that's been going up as the safety precautions have increased and they are on the to or eight times as expensive as renewables.
There are claims that smaller new designs of nuclear could change that,
but I think it's almost inconceivable that they will do so on the time scales needed to address climate change by 2050,
because things essentially are designed that have not yet been built.
So to go from not built to making a major contribution to supply, that's challenging even for wind and solar.
But I don't see many nuclear contributing very much to that.
And I think so, some of the interesting questions moved beyond the questions of our potential
towards how you integrate these together in a system which I think you'll come to,
won't you? But I may just slip in one more question while we're on it.
Good question from Holly Devitt asking about other countries, particularly large countries in sub-Saharan Africa,
because you touched on the fact that energy access is really a human right.
And clearly, they're going to be increases in demand there.
And you talked about the falling costs of some of these technologies, but Holly asks, do you think countries like Nigeria and Kenya,
for instance, can avoid carbon lock in, given they're not developing as quickly as China or India, she says.
And do you see these relatively big economies as a threat in the sense that they will be big emitters in the future?
I think if those economies grow to be big emitters, then we absolutely will not achieve.
The targets that have been set out in Paris is perhaps it's imperative.
To to us all, not only that, we escaped our own carbon lock him,
but that would prevent carbon locking and setting in those countries where us as the question size demand is, is going to grow and ought to grow.
Is it Paul? It is, I mean that the costs of solar generation in those countries are now lower importing coal or gas,
which normally would be imported in in in East Africa, or at least not not not in West Africa.
There is no reason other than vested interests for countries that don't have strong
electricity systems at the moment to to invest in anything other than renewable technology,
given that those are the cheapest options. It's a much more stark answer than it used to be,
and I think it probably people probably haven't fully digested the sort of scale and changes and costs that we've seen in the last decade.
And, of course, Nick, my vested interest point was thrown in there, but I mean,
I think it is it is an important point that a lot of the inertia is due to the fact that for certain interest groups next to the fossil fuel industry,
but also the things that make their power generating flood levels blockchains.
This is this is a big sell. Of course it is that we can't deny the.
As you say, the situation has changed really quite recently,
and perhaps then some companies and policymakers still have to catch up with the new reality and say To keep bringing in your questions,
I'll let you get on with the next section of your talking and I'll fire a few more at you.
Yeah. So I mean, I think.
It's it's important not to run away with the idea that this becomes easy because all these technology,
even if they are relatively cheap, are capital intensive.
And so the the capital investment required, which I'm not going to go into in any detail, is still large.
So it is important that we use less energy and use it more efficiently.
And the good news is that we've been doing that for quite a long time.
This is another challenge from last IPCC report,
and it simply looks at the full contribution to the overall carbon emission, the so-called clear identity.
For those of you know what the population GDP per capita energy intensity of GDP and carbon intensity of energy.
And in principle, most but all of those two get together gives you carbon emissions.
So this chart shows the change in each decade due to each of those factors of the globe.
And as you would expect, population increase and GDP per capita growing and they tend level to increase emissions.
Carbon intensity of energy changed change depress us.
That which is the red ball has been changing, was depressingly slow today,
actually in these four decades and even in the wrong direction and in the decade from 2001 to 2010.
But that change being because of the rapid industrialisation based around coal and some countries in that decade.
And what that means is to the extent that we've addressed climate mitigation and done anything to reduce carbon emissions.
It's been through improved energy intensity of GDP, partly due to changes in structure of the economy,
but largely due to technological improvements in energy efficiency.
So we have done something in this area and we are we are doing something.
This is just to illustrate that in a bit more detail based on UK experience.
So this is a preview of some data from a forthcoming plan for Bobby and Liz and myself.
And it's looking at how the UK has reduced its emissions over the last 30 years.
We did it because the two of us were involved in a paper that went to the UK cabinet in 1999,
so we thought it would be good to look 30 years back and let's see what happened.
And you can say that both been substantial contributions from fuel switching and electricity,
both coal to gas and renewable electricity, but by far the most substantial contribution has been through increasing use efficiency.
That's slightly changing. To put it all in one.
And it's actually industrial energy efficiency, building energy efficiency and transport energy efficiency.
And all of those have contributed. But you can say that I I intend to use this chart to annoy people who work in both the nuclear
industry and the sex industry that their contributions have been negligible over the same period.
So energy efficiency has been doing something, this is to pre-empt the question of how much more can it do?
Taken from the work of Julian A. Jonathan Karl and Julian Allwood,
the short answer is that thermodynamically way out, what a way away from the optimum energy efficiency.
We can do something like a six fold improvement to deliver the energy services that we want from the energy that we currently use.
Some of that is the conversion of improved devices, improved engines, etc. improved light bulbs.
But a lot of it is also improving the broader system.
So things like insulating buildings, using public transport instead of of of private cars.
When you combine all those, you get to a very big potential.
And one other charge from the I think say this is what the IPCC calls a simple chart.
You don't want to see the complicated ones, and what it's trying to do is show how different approaches to carbon mitigation in energy supply,
energy demand reduction on land use change relates to the Sustainable Development Goals.
And the broad picture is that energy demand seems to have more synergies with the other
sustainable development goals and fewer trade offs than other ways of reducing emissions.
And particularly the energy supply side changes so that there are often very good reasons other than climate change to look hard,
improving the efficiency with which we use energy.
So I think, Nick, you've you've made a good case in answer to actually one of the questions asked by Onyour about,
in your opinion, does reduced energy demand equal growth?
I think you you said fairly clearly that you think it is possible to reduce energy demand in the UK,
for instance, and not have a material impact on the quality of life. Maybe you want to say a bit more directly to that.
And also one thing that I hear talked about in different fora is the idea of a rebound effect to energy efficiency.
So if you if people save energy and save money by having a more efficient car, for instance, they might want to buy more.
And so you get a rebound in terms of more demand,
or it might be indirect demand and they save money in other ways and they spend that to fly somewhere else on holiday.
So I've personally seen quite mixed messages about that.
I've seen some people who say that's all pervasive and makes efficiency a pointless exercise.
I've heard others say that it's tiny and immaterial. Do you sit on that debate?
So let's start with with de-growth. I mean, I showed the effect of growth on emissions growth.
Those tend to increase emissions because there's no doubt about that.
But the things being equal growth increases, energy efficiency increases emissions.
But as you said, Steve, we can reduce energy demand without economic growth.
That's not to say we should. I think that's a perfectly respectable debate to be had about the growth,
but it's not necessary for us to reduce energy demand in those numbers that I've shown from both
internationally and from the Committee on Climate Change or assuming continued economic growth.
So I think those two debates are all slightly different.
The degree of debate is not not one for me, particularly, it's not one I would fancy taking to national governments at the moment.
The the point about energy demand is that not just by improving efficiency, but also doing what you might call a progressive lifestyle changes.
So changes that allow us to access each other without troubling something, we've all got a lot better in the last 10 months.
Know we've do what we can do. We can change the nature of the energy services that we consume without being worse off.
A rebound effect. Yeah, it's a big question the you can think of it in two broad types of rebound, the first the ones that you described,
Steve, which are if if I save money, what do I spend it on those that increase energy use again?
To some extent, yes, it does. The most energy intensive thing we know about, though, is energy.
Not surprisingly, energy is one hundred percent energy.
So if you save energy and spend it on, something else is to be less than 100 hundred percent energy, and therefore you don't spend the odds of that.
Saving energy means you spend your money on a whole mix of things.
It's possible. Possible, of course, that all the money you spend save in sight getting more efficient,
lighting you would spend on travelling by air, and in which case you probably would increase your energy use.
But if you look at the mix of things people buy, you tend to find that direct rebound effect is of the order of 10 percent to 30 percent.
So the higher end of that range often for poorer people, if they are, say, insulating a house that's cold and light perfectly,
reasonably, take some of that benefit as a warmer house or on the lower fuel bill.
That's a I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.
That seems to me that lies in the notion of sustainable development somewhat.
There's a broader and more complex area to do with the macroeconomic effects of energy saving, and this actually feeds back into growth.
What is the effect of improving our energy efficiency on our own growth?
That's a more complex question. And it could be at times in history.
Improving energy efficiency has so much increased economic growth it has offset savings.
That was Chevron's original idea. This was originally called Jevons Paradox on Japanese.
I observed that increasing efficiency of coal use in steam engines thus far goes back was was increasing the use of coal in Great Britain.
And so I think the conclusion is that for technologies that are rapid stages of development,
where efficiency is very important to them but can increase energy use, at least in my local area on that technology.
And I think the evidence is that's where we are always with information technology of the moment.
The efficiency of I.T. has grown by orders of magnitude, the energy efficiency of processing, but so is the amount of processing with society.
So there are some exceptions, but the general rule is it's a 10 to 30 percent effect, probably.
So not to be ignored and indeed good policy analysis now, just take this into account, for instance,
home energy efficiency programmes in the UK take into account when I calculate the carbon savings that we will get warm homes by doing.
Shall I move on stage to the key challenges? Please do.
OK, so you want to talk about a couple of key challenges that arise from this really substantial
change that's being envisaged to a highly renewable and much more efficient energy system.
The first is the challenge of the variability because solar and wind are all variable.
This is, of course, because we are moving solar and wind implies using the flows of natural energy that come to us,
rather than digging up energy that's been captured from those flows over millions of years, which is what we're doing with coal, oil and gas.
So it's a good thing that way in terms of sustainability of electricity systems do
need to be balanced and they need to be balanced on really quite short timescales.
Talking about second, the supply on the demand needs to be balanced on that sort of timescale.
So the transition to renewable increases the need for flexibility in electric systems is a significant challenge.
The second challenge really, really relies outside the electricity system.
Clearly, some of our uses of energy or at electricity, things like lighting,
and some can be relatively easily switched to electricity and decarbonised them that way.
The obvious example, which we're beginning to see, is electric vehicles, but other uses of energy can't be electrified as easily.
It's hard, not impossible, but it's hard to electrify aircraft or or cement films.
And therefore, we may need to think about the cold or the zero carbon vectors or other ways that energy can be moved around in the zero carbon form.
So briefly address each of those challenges like they sort of illustrates.
The balancing problem is some data taken from Germany.
It's about five years old now, so it's got even more profound sense than the chart shows.
Generation and from solar and wind blew is offshore and green is onshore wind yellow solar in the month of August 2015,
and you can see that very characteristic daily variant variation and solar the
size of the uncloudy is and then much more apparently random variation in wind,
but with windy and windy periods typically being of the order of days.
Rather, it was.
The net effect was that the summer of wind and solar output varied from about two percent to 70 percent of total demand in Germany in that moment.
And the rest of the system had to balance that.
Now, when you think that Germany wants to treble its renewables from that level to to meet its climate targets,
you can rapidly say that you get periods of of the of the day most days in summer,
when solar in particular, has the capacity to supply more than 100 percent of demand.
And indeed, it's one of the oddities of this problem of variability that whereas people have
often thought about the main problem being what happens if it isn't sunny and windy,
how do we where do we get our energy from? Which is a real issue.
I'm not attempting to deny that the first problems that are being met are actually
while we've got too much energy when it's sunny and windy that prices fall to zero.
And in some cases, grid systems have difficulty coping with too much energy.
But we certainly do need to look at how we cope with that.
The guy with colleagues have been involved in the Oxford Martin programme on interior integrating renewable energy.
Integrate has been doing that for the last few years.
I'm not going to try and describe our work in detail. This is almost a summary slide.
There are potential solutions. You can have a flexible older generation on the system.
You can store energy, you can interconnect to other electricity systems and you can use demand response,
i.e. very demand in time, depending on what supply looks like.
And clearly, information technology is giving us more potential to do that.
But in each of those cases, it's not just a technical problem. That's the thinking that underpins integrate.
It's it's an economics and markets problem.
There are clear social issues, particularly with distribution, storage and demand response, and the whole policy framework may need to change as well.
So please do take a look at our website.
If you're interested in a map, there's a huge amount of work that's been going on.
It have to solve these problems and we do think they are in general soluble.
But it will be possible to have electricity systems with very, very high levels of intermittent and variable generation on them.
So that we think is largely soluble is just one exception to that, which were, I think more work is probably needed.
So this looks at that particular area of energy storage in the chart, you can see for the price of lithium ion batteries,
very reminiscent of what we seen with with with solar costs in the earlier slide.
The price of batteries is May. Set to fall below $100 a kilowatt hour now being made in huge the greater amount than they used to be, of course,
particularly for the growing electric vehicle sector, and that potentially makes batteries a game changing technology for dial storage,
for storing for a few hours, and therefore really does change the economics of stand alone solar systems for developing countries
because it means that you can use solar energy to provide night-time night-time energy services.
But batteries will not be suitable for longer term storage that remain too expensive and in particular
for international energy storage in coal countries or even relatively cold countries like the UK,
we use far, far more energy in winter than in summer.
On how to move energy from summer into winter remains an essentially unresolved problem and the problem in fossil fuel energy systems.
We relied on piles of coal and other types of oil.
It was easy within in renewable dominated systems.
We will need to look for new ways of doing that, and that remains a significant research and development challenge.
The second area of the challenge, I think, is what I call the hard to decarbonise sectors,
although we talk a lot about electricity and I've been doing that here, we need to remember 80 percent of foreign lands.
Demand at the moment is some fuels of electricity.
And although things like light vehicles and a lot of space ageing can relatively easily be converted to electricity,
though, I mean, not that easily these are big economic shifts.
There are sectors which look actually technically quite hard to decarbonise aviation shipping
heavy road vehicles where batteries might just be too heavy for folks to put out lorries.
So industrial processes like promise do taking on cement and even peak demand for first place heating, which electricity might not do.
Alright, so. And so we need to think about how we're going to decarbonise those.
As I indicated, that point towards using some of the vectors,
there's a range of things being looked at for other ways of moving energy around that don't impose a carbon.
This benefit hate or it used extensively, of course, and can be stored for four days but hard to store hot temperatures not suitable for so many uses.
Hydrogen, I guess, is the front runner in at the moment and thinking about these hard to decarbonise sectors,
it can be made either from natural gas with carbon capture and storage.
I think this is probably the principal area of interest for carbon capture and storage a technology now, or it can be made by electrolysis.
And if you think about that chart from Germany talking [INAUDIBLE] on the air with huge spikes of of of excess electricity at times
that points to using that spare electricity that would otherwise just be essentially thrown away for electrolysis for hydrogen.
There are other factors that are perhaps somewhat easier to move around and use that hydrogen needs to
be brought to very low temperatures or rise to very high pressures to make it easily transportable.
And I think ammonia, a lot of work going on in Oxford on ammonia, I think particularly looking at shipping as one of ammonia might be a good field.
And then in aviation in particular, other synthetic carbon based fuels, they would be the easiest to plug in,
essentially to make some some artificial kerosene to replace aviation fuel.
But if that's to be net zero energy to come from a sustainable biological carbon source,
so back to the questions about the sustainability of bioenergy,
and you will see that these questions about what vectors we might use for difficult
to decarbonise sectors are linked to the questions about longer term energy storage,
and that fuels a lot of hydrogen.
Ammonia might be used for boats, and I think that's the link between those those those two areas is important to approval at the moment.
Understudied. So I mean, those are my conclusions, I'll just whip through them very quickly.
And its services are critical to any modern society, but our main source of greenhouse gas emissions,
that's why energy is such an important topic we're probably going to get to.
They need to be close to zero, and that implies a major change quickly.
We sort of know the broad picture of that improve efficiency and switch to renewables.
And it seems feasible without huge cost to the economy, but still very high investment.
But there are these huge major challenges around changing to a system based on variable natural flows of energy away from the store.
Non-sustainable, sustainable sources. We use the moment. And what?
What are you going to use for to replace fossil fuels in some of the more difficult
applications where electricity doesn't seem like it will be appropriate?
Thank you very much, Nick. That's a great overview, and we've had lots of questions,
which unfortunately we won't have time to get all the way through, but I'll do my best to group a few.
We've had several questions about specific the role of specific technologies.
Probably too many to go through in detail because they're all interesting in their own right.
But for instance, people have asked about the role in electricity, specifically about carbon capture and storage, about tidal power.
Others have asked that we've discussed briefly about nuclear power,
and some others have have asked about potential ideas, such as converting CO2 directly into aviation jet fuel.
So I don't know if you want to pick up on any of those specifically, maybe.
But also, I might just roll this in with with Miles's question.
Just in case you want to attack this in the same way that Myles Allen asks,
how can we design policies to ensure that low carbon energy options compete for investment with fossil fuels rather than with each other?
Because for me, at least I may be involved wrongly here, miles.
But for me, there's this interesting question between these specific individual technologies,
and it's quite easy to get fixated on one answer versus a sort of technology neutral approach on the role.
The difference in emphasis between going for new innovative things versus sticking with rolling out what we know.
So yes, maybe you can sort of pick out any and very specific technologies you want to address,
but comment more generally on what you think of the policy framework should be
to give as level playing field as is needed to deliver the overall target.
Yeah. OK. I mean, just a quick word on some of those individual technologies.
Tidal yeah, I mean titles interesting, but it's never going to be available on a scale,
but that's anything but the scale of of total total energy demand facing us.
I think I've said I don't think six has got much of a future in electricity generation.
I think they're far more interesting questions about six on some of these difficult to decarbonise processes like blast furnaces,
iron cement kilns, though it's far from trivial on those questions about CCS for hydrogen production.
If we think I do think we will need something like hydrogen for for quite a few purposes on the overall policy framework.
Well, I guess I would just push back on why the technology neutrality is quite the right way to think about it,
because this is a systemic problem on, for example, a combination of wind and solar.
We know much better balances the the the the demand for electricity in the UK than either wind or solar is not true in many countries.
And you may find that you want a balance of relatively what's called in the jargon, dispatchable energy sources.
So things like bioenergy, geothermal, things that you get the way you could switch the power station off and on wind and solar, which aren't.
So you may actually deliberately want to trade some different resources differently.
And certainly when you get into these difficult to decarbonise sectors, you will have to look at other resources.
So not not not all units of energy are of equal value,
partly because of time considerations when they're available, but partly because what you want to use them for.
So I think it's a bit more complex than we need to be technology neutral, which is I enjoyed the standard economic sense, too.
Everything is like Steven Law and standard economics on most things is it's a bit simplistic.
Well, as a physicist, I can possibly respond.
Well, I don't argue that either, but I tend to try to shoehorn in three more questions actually before we go because there's lots of very good ones.
One. Ask a bit more about the demand side of the picture that you talked about demand reduction specifically from Eric Neal.
He says that you do that necessity for reduction in demand reduction in the coming decades.
Is that really a realistic assumption there access to markets increased in the past decades?
How do you practically reduce demand in First Nations? My understanding actually is that in several First World Nations now, demand is reducing.
But perhaps you can talk to that and explain how you can achieve as much standard quiz question with a large
audience is to ask the impersonator to ask them how much energy demand has gone up in the UK in the last 15 years.
The answer, of course, is gone down 15 percent. So this is part of energy efficiency working.
So is it realistic to reduce demand? Yeah, hugely.
I mean, the Committee on Climate Change Projections are based on what is feasible on economic and realistic.
And I think what is of people often miss is that if you're electrified vehicles,
that's not just switching the fuel, it's improving the efficiency of that vehicle by a factor of three.
If you shift from a gas boiler to a heat pump, you're improving the efficiency by a factor of three or four.
So some of these changes that are now thought to be inevitable and necessary produce huge improvements in energy efficiency.
And indeed, it's almost impossible to contemplate just going on using the amount of energy
that we are if we move away from fossil fuels towards largely electric systems.
Very interesting. Thanks, Nick Panopto, my question from Max Boycott's,
a bit more of a geopolitical question here about energy systems and what are your thoughts on early signs from the US Biden
administration and how they might influence the feasibility for moving to zero carbon energy in the UK and around the world?
Hello, Max, nice to hear from you. I think you'd be better placed to answer that than I am, but I think I mean, we're all delighted that day.
It's. I think the signs are good. The signs are that Biden wants to engage with international negotiations,
but also that he seems to be serious about the nuts and bolts of sort of boring
things in energy efficiency like compliance standards and vehicle laws,
and the East realise that the oil pipelines are on need and that renewables are cheaper.
So I think both internationally and nationally, it looks pretty good.
Fingers crossed. But yeah, the devil will, of course, be in the detail when he stops to meet the vested interests.
Great final question, as we come to the top of the hour,
it's actually the most devoted question and it's a great one from Ali bringing it all directly to us in our individual contacts.
What's the most effective way for individuals to reduce their footprint? Yeah, that's a great question, a lot, most great questions.
It doesn't have a very simple answer.
There's a if we got a way of of pointing people at particular papers, there's a great paper by a colleague of mine.
And if an over of those which actually reviewed the whole of the literature to try to
identify the top 10 areas which are inevitable that can't remember off the top of my head,
but I'm very happy to point people. There is no one thing because we use energy in our food systems and in our buildings, in transportation.
We need action in all of those areas basically to. I'm speaking at a party where it's best or we can reach the time.
I'm not sure how it got out, but great question.
Yes, thank you and thank you very much to all of you, as as well as to Professor Nick Carter for joining us today.
Join us again next Monday, at which in the next one of the series, we'll be discussing the concepts of sensitive intervention points for net zero.
We'll be with Professor Cameron Hepburn, Cigar Industry Master and myself.
If you're on track customer moment, you can register by clicking the green button under the video screen, but in the meantime, have a very good week.