Making power grids fit for a net zero world: a call for open collaboration.

Enel’s commitment to Net Zero?

As recently published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the world’s CO2 levels are now comparable to the ones of more than 4 million years ago, when they were close to 400 ppm. This is more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels and, above all, these are concentrations that humankind has never experienced before. And, even worst, much of these emissions will continue to rise and warm the atmosphere for thousands of years, towards what scientists define a global environmental catastrophe.

With the energy sector playing a key role in cutting CO2 emissions, Enel decided to take action against climate change by putting the Net Zero goal at the heart of its strategy, as announced during the last Enel Capital Markets Day . As the challenges of the energy transition and the 2050 climate targets call for more renewables and electrification of consumption, our company is in fact bringing forward by ten years, to 2040, the deadline for completely decarbonizing its operations.

The role of power grids?

In this scenario, Grids will be the fundamental platforms to enable electrification and the whole transition towards the world decarbonization: consequently, they need to speed up their transformation to address this challenge and deliver infrastructures that are fit for Net Zero. To this extent, in 2021 Enel launched Grid Futurability? ?as the global and customer-oriented industrial approach driving the Group’s 70 bln € investments on power distribution grids from 2021-2030.

Grid Futurability? traces the roadmap to identify and prioritize renewal, reinforcement and expansion interventions for our grids in the coming years, transforming them into resilient, participatory and sustainable platforms.

All our investments will target this vision, ensuring our power grids are ready to accelerate the energy transition by hosting increasing shares of renewable distributed generation across the territories, and at the same time enabling a deep, clean electrification of our economies at scale. This is the first contribution of grids for the net zero goal. ?

But a second contribution is related to decarbonization of the power grids themselves: to effectively support the net-zero ambition, not only must grids facilitate renewable electrification and customer engagement, but they also need to reduce the carbon emissions associated with the infrastructure itself, phasing out direct and indirect emissions.

Making our infrastructure more sustainable

In order to eliminate CO2 emissions from all Enel’s activities by 2040 and extend the Net Zero strategy to include distribution grids, #sustainability must be at the core of our business. And to face this challenge first we have to analyze and break down grid’s emissions by scope 1, 2 and 3.

Enel Grids’ total direct and indirect annual emissions related to its operations are around 9 MtCO2eq (million tons of CO2 equivalent). Roughly 37% of these emissions come from scope 1 (grid operations) and 2 (network technical losses) and 63% from scope 3 (supply chain materials, components, work and services). As an analogy, eliminating 9 MtCO2eq would be equivalent to removing from circulation 4.6 million internal combustion cars. We are in the process to carry out the SBTi (Science Based Target Initiative) certification and further disclosure will be shared by Enel Group later in the year.?

During Enel’s Net Zero Grid Day we introduced how we are integrating new principles in all our processes, starting from the engineering and network design activities where we are including sustainable parameters for the solutions’ evaluation, together with the traditional technical and economical parameters.

We are lowering the CO2 footprint from our operations by adopting more sustainable solutions through digitalization, remote operations, fleet electrification, biodiversity protection measures, and by reducing the technical losses of the grids, representing today almost the 31% of total GHG emissions of our business.?

Also, we are putting in place actions to embrace circular economy principles across our processes, such as using recycled materials for new assets, following a “Circular by design” approach, such as circular meters, green cables, poles or street cabinets, managing the end-of-life of dismissed grid components, to reintroduce second-hand raw materials into the manufacturing process.

The importance of open collaboration

Finally, we are tackling our indirect emissions by engaging with other stakeholders of our value chain: if we consider that the emissions related to the procurement of our components and devices account for more than 60% of the total GHG emissions of our grids worldwide, it becomes clear that the net zero challenge is something we can win only by involving other industries and supply chains. This is why we are working with them to adopt innovative and circular solutions and to deploy more sustainable grid processes and components, such as SF6-free switchgears, vegetal oils for transformers and green cables, or defining new standards and guidelines for sustainable construction sites, focusing on the adoption of low impact materials and construction techniques to reduce environmental footprint, fostering engagement with the communities in which we operate.

Another example of the important steps made by Enel towards net zero grids is represented by the first low-loss High Voltage / Medium Voltage Eco-design transformer isolated in natural ester developed in partnership with Hitachi Energy. This innovative ester not only is completely interchangeable with the mineral oil technology traditionally used for isolation and refrigeration purposes, but drastically reduces the carbon footprint generated during the transformer’s entire life cycle, bringing important environmental and safety advantages, presenting greater resistance to fire.

Finally, Enel has recently partnered with Prysmian Group for a 3-year agreement for the supply of Low Voltage and Medium Voltage cables mainly based on the innovative P-Laser technology, a 100% recyclable, eco-sustainable, high-performance cable technology allowing a significant reduction of CO2 emissions thanks to a special sheath of vegetable instead of chemical origin. Based on a production process that reduces CO2 emissions by 40% and is fully compatible with traditional cable technologies already installed, this technology offers better electrical characteristics, and in particular higher performance at high temperatures, greater intrinsic reliability and greater productivity.??

Furthermore, to overcome all these incoming challenges and take advantage of the future opportunities, as we noted, the Grid of the Future will embed sustainability into the business, ensuring greater level of resilience, reliability in terms of quality and continuity, centrality of customers and participation by different stakeholders, on innovation, circular economy, and inclusive solutions.

Open Power Grids to speed up decarbonization and electrification of the world?

Over the last decade, Enel has pursued the convergence of technical solutions towards global, sustainable standards, but to reach our net zero future we cannot walk alone: we need to join forces as all the other network operators in the world are facing similar challenges and all other grids at a global level will be equally important to win the battle against climate change.

?The Open Power Grids association is a step in that direction: following its #openinnovability approach, Enel is opening up its upgraded industrial and engineering approach to share the effort of identifying the best technical solutions with other players, in an open and collaborative environment.

The goal is to accelerate even further the development of sustainable standards and the capacity to implement them all over the world, bringing stakeholders, universities and research institutes together in the development of grids that are more resilient, sustainable and safer, in order to foster clean electrification, promote industrial innovation and empower grid customers to support the decarbonization along our entire value-chain.

We can go faster towards a brighter and sustainable future only if we move together!