10-Day Countdown to #Unshackle #EU #Cleantech: #OperationWarpSpeed for the #EnergyTransition

10-Day Countdown to #Unshackle #EU #Cleantech: Everything everywhere all at once

?

Day 10:?The countdown concludes! For those catching up, each day in the runup to the European Council meeting that began earlier today (9 February), I’ve been sharing one actionable?#idea?that can help accelerate the?#energytransition?and make Europe a global leader in #cleantech?#innovation?and?#deployment.

?

Towards System Change: We need an Operation Warp Speed for Energy

Nearly three years ago, the world desperately needed to invent a Covid-19 vaccine. But since medical advances and generational achievements in science - like sending a man to the moon - tend to be the result of marathons that take decades to come to fruition, the US federal government launched an initiative intentionally designed as a sprint. We needed that vaccine – and fast. And it arrived 11 months later, the fastest vaccine development in history.

?

Operation Warp Speed, as the effort was dubbed, was an intensely focused program. Built into the public-private partnership was an ability to adapt to changing requirements, assume strategic risks, align the interests of different players, and pursue multiple vaccine technologies simultaneously. Fortunately, the effort was successful. And can now be a guiding post to both sides of the Atlantic as they engage in a ‘race to the top’ to build a new generation of clean technologies on a time scale never seen before.

?

Looking back, it took wind and solar more than four decades to become cost-competitive. We don’t have that luxury – the climate crisis is accelerating too fast, the energy and security crisis is too serious, and our industrial competitive edge too fragile. Bottom line: we’re now on a full-on sprint. That’s why over the past nine days, I’ve been sharing one actionable idea a day that can help Europe accelerate in its quest to be a global cleantech leader. Here’s a quick recap:

?

• Day 1 (Simplicity): The EU has powerful tools at its disposal – but they need to be simplified. For example, under the €38 billion Innovation Fund, the European Commission could?launch competitive, Europe-wide bidding mechanisms?(auctions) to support green hydrogen production, rather than further fragment the EU Single Market by a subsidy free-for-all doled out at Member State level.
• Day 2 (Speed): Excessive complexity is the antithesis of speed. The European Commission should take stock of existing instruments and consolidate. Less can often be more.
• Day 3 (Anticipation and Predictability): To help entrepreneurs scale across Europe, we need to better anticipate how fast-developing technologies make certain policies not just obsolete but an obstacle to progress. The Commission should hold focus groups with #technology?#frontier?companies to better understand their challenges.
• Day 4 (Talking Business): Business is not a monolith, and too often something gets lost in translation between “Brussels” and tech pioneers.?The EU should adopt a more receptive, open attitude toward cleantech entrepreneurs. For instance, rather than put out complex calls with low chance of success for even the best of companies and hope firms at the tech frontier apply, why not do more active scouting for the best solutions?
• Day 5 (Scaleups): The last sizable multinational created in Europe was SAP in 1971. Geographies that can only sustain the old without being able to grow the new are unlikely to be dynamic marketplaces. The more we help scaleups break new ground in emerging technologies, the more all of Europe benefits from first-mover advantages.
• Day 6 (Power grid and LDES): Advanced economies around the world have to fill a?$140 billion investment gap?in the grid every year through 2030. Here, the?European Investment Bank can play a leading role in bringing around a step change in European power grid investment. LDES technologies also need urgent policy prioritization and support – including tying LDES targets to renewable targets.
• Day 7 (Market Signals): A hotchpotch of priorities is often the result of (necessary) compromise in the European Commission and remaining “tech neutral”, but lack of clarity in the Green Deal Industrial Plan muddies the market signals of the EU’s response to the crystal-clear IRA. The EU should have at least a rudimentary technology “wish list” that sends clear market signals.
• Day 8 (The Hydrogen Reality Check): The Delegated Act on Additionality was supposed to come out more than a year ago … yet it is still pending. Renewable hydrogen will be a first critical test case whether EU plans for cleantech are rooted in reality.
• Day 9 (Critical Minerals): Critical minerals are the life blood of the clean energy economy. Some experts claim that extraction of the materials needed in the next 30 years is equivalent to the total amount of materials extracted since the dawn of humanity. The result is an enormous global competition that will create new dependencies and vulnerabilities. That’s why substitution, recycling and teaming up with allies to secure necessary supplies must be top priorities.

?

Which brings us to … Day 10

And back to Operation Warp Speed. The fact is that energy is exceedingly complex, as these posts have shown. Like the effort to rapidly develop a vaccine by pursuing multiple medical technologies simultaneously, we also need to work on energy breakthroughs on multiple fronts – everything, everywhere all at once, and with all hands on deck. There simply is no 'clean tech' silver bullet. This will be hard work. And while I firmly believe the energy transition will create millions of jobs, clean our air and lead to sustainable growth across Europe, I think it is – and has been – downright irresponsible to often paint the transition in these rosy colors. In my time in #publicpolicy, I encouraged to think of – and describe – the #energytransition as a #structuralreform, to signal to citizens and policymakers alike that this is hard but necessary work. Alessandro Blasi of the International Energy Agency (IEA) described this aptly a?few months ago: “[E]nergy is a tremendous serious thing. It is not a ‘piece of cake’ to put together a system able to deliver reliable, affordable and – ideally – sustainable energy all the time. There is…a super complex world that needs to work in harmonious and timely way.”

?

The reality is that to be successful in cleantech, nothing short of systemic change in the energy system is needed. And for that, the first step – at least in democracies – is for people and organizations to come together to build the necessary societal consensus. As the European Council convenes today, in the presence of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy whose country is bearing the ultimate cost for a fossil power gone rogue, we must remind ourselves once more that #energy is at the very heart of this conflict and the current crisis. If there is a silver lining in this war, it is that it will finally give us the resolve to build a new energy system.

?

Or in the words of a coalition of 40 organizations that have send the following letter to the EU heads of government and the President of the European Commission, European Council and European Parliament at the occasion of today’s summit: “The Covid pandemic, the fossil fuel crisis and the illegal Russian war of aggression against Ukraine have tested our mettle, and yet clean, secure, resilient and local solutions have emerged from European innovators and leading businesses which are building a sustainable and competitive future.”

?

Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. We saw that during Operation Warp Speed, and we see it today with the need to put the energy transition on steroids. Climate was already enough of a reason to act. A war only adds to the extreme urgency of this moment, as does a global competition for (clean) technology supremacy. Honestly: if not now, then when?

That’s a wrap for Day 10, the final day of?#unshackle?#eu?#cleantech

#greendealindustrialplan?#netzeroindustryact