Energy Storage Outlook, Corporate Clean Power, Power Grid, NetZero Industry & Sustainable Agriculture

Hi, welcome to the 12th edition of?The Race to NetZero?Newsletter, a monthly round-up of the best research and news from? BloombergNEF .

Find below the best content published by our analyst team in Q1.

1H 2023 Energy Storage Market Outlook

Energy storage hit another record year in 2022, adding 16 gigawatts/35 gigawatt-hours of capacity, up 68% from 2021. Beyond record additions, several markets announced ambitious energy storage targets totaling more than 130GW by 2030, although BloombergNEF remains cautious on its impact on forecast demand given the lack of policy clarity and reforms that address fundamental deployment barriers. Government entities have shelled out millions in subsidies which boost deployment but highlight the underlying problem that batteries are not yet economically attractive in most parts of the world.

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Connect with our head of Energy Storage Yayoi Sekine

Tech Firms Seal US Dominance in Corporate Clean Power Purchasing

US firms are the most prolific buyers of clean energy. They maintained their lead last year, purchasing over half the record 37 gigawatts of power sold to corporations globally.

“The US has the companies that are most willing to buy renewable power and a market structure that best enables purchases,” said? Kyle Harrison , BloombergNEF’s head of sustainability research. “That’s why it’s the number one country for corporate purchases of solar and wind.”

Technology giants?Amazon, Facebook-owner?Meta,?Microsoft?and?Google?are the world’s top buyers of clean power. Amazon is the runaway leader and the 25 gigawatts it has purchased to date almost equals the clean energy portfolio of a leading utility like?NextEra Energy, which has about?30 gigawatts?in active operation.

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A Power Grid Long Enough to Reach the Sun Is Key to the Climate Fight

Imagine it’s 2050 and the world has managed to reach net-zero emissions. If you deconstruct the electricity grid and lay it out in a single line, those cables will stretch all the way to the Sun.

A 152-million-kilometer supersized grid is what’s needed to power a greener future and avert climate disaster, according to BloombergNEF. That’s more than double the length of the grid today.

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Connect with our head of Grids & Utilities Sanjeet Sanghera

Net-Zero Industry Requires Exponential Growth From Carbon Capture, Hydrogen and Clean Power

Without decarbonization intervention, industrial emissions will grow from 6.7 billion tons of CO2 this year to 7.6 billion tons of CO2 per year by 2050, according to the?New Energy Outlook: Industry?report, published today by research company BloombergNEF (BNEF) as part of its?New Energy Outlook?(NEO) series. The report finds that there is no ‘silver bullet’ technology to decarbonize industrial emissions; instead significant investments in carbon capture, hydrogen and clean electrification will all be needed.

The production of steel, aluminum, petrochemicals and cement (the four sectors covered in the report) is due to increase in developing economies and stay flat or only slightly decline in most developed countries. While low-carbon options for industrial sectors remain expensive, to reach net zero by 2050 it is crucial that all future capacity is built with clean technologies, or the option to easily make the transition in the future. If current production routes are maintained, billions of dollars’ worth of polluting assets could be stranded by net-zero deadlines in 2050 and 2060.

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US Energy Is Changing, and Transforming

The US is the world’s second-biggest electricity system, its second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter, its biggest oil consumer, its largest producer of natural gas and tied for first largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. The US energy system is very big; it is also increasingly dynamic.

Capturing that dynamism is the goal of the annual?Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, published this week by BloombergNEF and the?Business Council for Sustainable Energy. The report is a wealth of statistics and trends that captures something important: decarbonization is now hard-wired at the system level. Decarbonization comes from continued incremental change in some sectors; it also comes from fast-moving transformation in others.

The entire report is worth a close read. There are a few trends – some worth re-emphasizing, some perhaps hidden in the data – that BNEF thinks worth highlighting.

Read Full Article by Nat Bullard

Sustainable Agriculture Is the New Green Revolution

By Kobad Bhavnagri , Global Head of Strategy

The global agriculture system is on the verge of a new revolution. Sixty years after the ‘Green Revolution’ brought abundant food supplies to the world, the way food and fiber is produced on the farm is about to undergo another era of sweeping change.

The transformation ahead will shape the future of billions of jobs, trillions of dollars of output and the world’s oldest industry. What’s at stake is whether we have a livable planet, or not.

The planet-sized impact of food

The global agriculture system employs nearly a quarter of the world’s population, generates more than $8 trillion in annual revenue, and occupies and alters over 50% of habitable land on Earth.

That last point reveals the enormous impact that agriculture has on the planet. In fact, of all human industries and activities, agriculture is the single largest driver of threats to the stability of the Earth system due to the number of ‘planetary boundaries’ it breaks. It even trumps our fossil-fuel-dependent energy system as the greatest risk to our children inheriting a livable planet.

The nine planetary boundaries are essentially the physical, chemical and biological processes that have kept Earth in a Goldilocks state for the last 12,000 years. According to scientists’ best estimate, we are currently breaching six of these nine boundaries and agriculture is a major reason for at least four of these transgressions. It is propelling 80% of biodiversity loss, 80% of land-system change and 70% of freshwater withdrawals – among other things.

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Best Regards, Saludos, Cordialement

Guillaume