VICE
- Nafeez Ahmed
A Swiss government-backed study suggests that we could see major warming
in the near future if we do not have a "fast and complete" renewable
energy transition.
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Image: Xu Congjun/VCG via Getty Images
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Scientists backed by the Swiss government warn that widely accepted global
scenarios for reducing carbon emissions to avoid dangerous climate change in
reality pose a 60-80 percent probability of breaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius
(C) ‘safe limit’ agreed by world nations under the 2015 Paris
Agreement.
Their
new preprint paper
published in March, which is currently under review with the journal
Environmental Research Letters, finds that only a “fast and complete”
global renewable energy transition led by solar power to be accomplished
before 2030 can reduce this probability to a more acceptable level of around
20 percent.
Existential threat
The vast majority of decarbonization scenarios put forward by the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Environment
Program, especially those which are consistent with actual current levels of
carbon emissions, point toward the 60—80 percent probability of breaching the
1.5°C safe limit.
The IPCC has called for emissions to be halved by 2030, with a net zero target
for 2050.
Even when the more ambitious IPCC decarbonization scenarios are taken into
account, the scientists find that: “All the IPCC scenarios violate the 1.5°C
peak heating target” with a probability between 40 percent and higher than 80
percent.
“Such high probabilities of violation would be considered unacceptable in
other areas, like engineering or public health,” write the co-authors Harald
Desing and Rolf Widmer of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science
and Technology in Switzerland.
“Growing understanding of the Earth system suggests that peak heating beyond
1.5°C may be an existential threat to the biosphere and therefore also
humanity,” they explain in their paper.
“Transitions that exceed
this vital threshold with a high probability expose future generations to
substantial risks without their prior consent.”
Although some residual probability might still be acceptable for society, they
say, by tolerating high probabilities between 40 and 80 percent the current
climate discourse “exposes future generations to unprecedented risks without
their prior consent.”
To illustrate the urgency of climate action, the paper shows that even if
carbon emissions were to remain constant at 2018 levels, there would be a 66
percent probability of depleting the remaining carbon budget before 2028.
Of course, carbon emissions continue to rise every year and are
forecast
to increase this year by as much as 5 percent.
Fast transition
However, while this sober warning suggests that the “existential threat” of
dangerous climate change beyond the 1.5°C limit is baked into prevailing
decarbonisation plans, the paper also shows that a rapid transition to a
solar-based renewable energy system can dramatically reduce this risk. But we
need to act fast.
The paper uses the concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI)—a measure of
the amount of energy used to extract a certain quantity of energy from any
given resource—to assess the prospects of such a transition.
The speed of
action would require a temporary increase in fossil fuel emissions above
current levels “for the sole purpose of accelerating the growth of renewable
energy capacity” and switching off the “fossil engine” before 2030.
“The solar engine grows fastest, when the fossil engine’s output is not
replaced by solar energy during the transition… but is increased to utilize
all available idle capacity,” says the paper.
“Consequently,
fossil CO2 emissions will temporarily increase during the transition but will
be reduced to zero as soon as the solar engine can replace the fossil engine.”
Lead author Harald Desing told Motherboard that: “The fast transition would
need to commence beginning of next year or end of 2021 and… would be complete
anywhere in between 2024 and 2028.”
Although this is far faster than all conventional decarbonization scenarios,
it is the only feasible way to reduce the probability of breaching the 1.5C
limit to a genuinely safer level.
Overbuilding solar to ‘switch off’ the fossil engine
Desing explained that such a rapid global solar transition would create
further new possibilities for decarbonization due to the potential for clean
electrification of key sectors:
“The fastest possible transition is achieved by investing all overcapacity we
have in today’s fossil energy system in building the solar system.
"And given the fast exponential growth, the size of overcapacity
built into the solar system doesn’t matter that much… This indicates that
solar overcapacity is fast to obtain… having a negligible effect on the
climate but opening unprecedented possibilities.”
Recent peer-reviewed
research
by Columbia University engineer Marc Perez has shown that overbuilding solar
capacity—aiming for 100 percent if not more—creates a level of surplus solar
energy which can be used to top off the grid, producing electricity some 75
percent cheaper.
Perez
found
that if the US, for instance, operated an overcapacity solar-dominated grid
with limited wind power and energy storage, it could generate a constant
source of electricity even cheaper than today’s conventional production
without intermittency problems.
The Swiss paper thus confirms that while building out the global renewable
energy system will entail exploitation of carbon intensive resources, if
deployed correctly this can pave the way for shifting all further societal
activities including the manufacturing of renewable energy systems onto the
new solar-based power system.
“Fossil fuel use should be increased
temporarily with the sole purpose to build the solar engine as fast as
possible to subsequently switch off the fossil engine forever,” the paper
concludes.
“As solar overcapacity is fast to build, we see two main advantages,” said
Desing.
“First, it reduced the need for storage capacity. Storage is energetically
expensive as it either has high embodied energy, for example, battery, and has
a low turnaround efficiency, for instance for synthetic fuels.”
Second, he said, solar overcapacity can then provide the clean power to
sustain direct air capture and storage (DACS) technologies to drawdown further
carbon from the atmosphere.
“Stabilizing the climate in the long run, it is necessary to reduce the
atmospheric CO2 concentration down to below 350ppm. Solar overcapacity is
ideal for this task, operating DACS during peak sun hours and summer, when
idle capacity is available.”
The new research has been funded under the Sustainable Economy National
Research Program (NRP) run by the Swiss National Science Foundation. NRPs are
administered by the Swiss Federal Council, the seven-member executive council
that constitutes the federal government of Switzerland.
Clean energy abundance?
Two years ago, Desing’s team at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material
Science and Technology released a
paper
published in the peer-reviewed
Energies journal which attempted to
calculate the “global appropriate technical potential”—the actual quantity of
energy that could be produced for societal use given realistic environmental,
land-use and other constraints—of a solar-dominated renewable energy system.
They found that such a system, if deployed properly with sufficient
overcapacity, could generate vastly more energy than the existing fossil
fuel-based industrial energy system.
Their study took into account the need to remain within earth system
boundaries while also accounting for demand for chemicals and materials.
It found that the technical potential incorporating solar installed across the
built environment as well as the world’s deserts would be as high as 71
terawatts (TW) of clean electricity annually, “which is significantly larger
than the current global energy demand”.
Currently global energy consumption is
around 17.7 TW, which according to Desing is equivalent to 6.7 TW of electricity.
This is orders of magnitude higher—more than ten times as much—as current
levels of energy consumption, and leaves large quantities of electricity
“which can then be transformed into e-fuels and heat where necessary.”
Even without deserts, Desing told
Motherboard, solar concentrated on
the built environment alone would still contribute 22 TW of electricity, which
is a huge three times higher than current equivalent energy consumption.
Desing and his team conclude that this means there is “sufficient renewable
energy potentially available to increase energy access for a growing world
population as well as for a development towards increasingly closed material
cycles within the technosphere” — that is, to devote more energy toward the
‘circular economy’ through increased recycling of raw materials and
electrification of industry.
If the Swiss team’s data is correct — and they have expressed 99 percent
confidence in their calculations — a solar transition by 2030 could not only
avert the worst risks of dangerous climate change by switching off the age of
fossil fuels forever, it would usher a new age of clean energy abundance
unleashing “unprecedented possibilities” for human civilization.
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