Understanding the energy transition roadmap

Personally, I am very much into green energy solutions. I did few courses from Stanford center for professional education to understand more about the renewable energy sector:

1. Planning for a sustainable future with Wind, Water and the Sun
2. Economics of Competing Energy Technologies

The more I learn, I am realizing that I have great passion for net zero emission mission .

Today, I have attended the awaited virtual event " Launch of Net Zero by 2050: A roadmap for the global energy system" organized by International Energy Agency (IEA). It explained the modelling outcome by energy analysts, experts’ inputs. As the world to going towards the energy transition, understanding the goal, and contributing accordingly is the necessity of time.

Here are some takeaways from this event:

Three main factors to reach the goal of NZE:

·      Utilizing existing clean energy means to the fullest

·      Technical innovation

·      Reduction of fossil fuel use

Technologies to reduce the emission to achieve the target by 2030:

·      Quadrupling of solar and wind capacity addition

·      Electric car sales increase 18 times

·      Reduction of energy intensity of GDP by 4% every year

 Way for CO2 savings by 2050

 ·      50 % technology option already available like electrolytic hydrogen for methanol, CCUS (Carbon capture utilization and storage), direct air capture, optimized heat pumps with storage etc.

·      46% technological innovations under development (Hydrogen based steel, advanced batteries, CO2 capture from cement manufacturing units, next generation biofuels etc.)

·      4% behavioral change

The demand of critical materials will increase. Apart from copper, Nickel, Lithium demand will increase too. Huge investment is required to achieve all the actions mentioned above.

We missed some information in this seminar as inclusion of Hydropower was not discussed, regional/national roadmap was missing(different guidelines for developing versus Developed nations) also the access to capital for clean energy was not explained in detail to achieve the net zero emission by 2050.

Overall, it was informative and good for networking. I hope that every country will take this issue seriously and help reaching the common global goal.

Kudos to the team of International Energy Agency (IEA) for this wonderful job.

About Author: Nasreen Perween is a PMP certified chemical engineer with more than 15 years of experience. She worked in Reliance industries limited, Technip KTI/Benelux (Now Technip Energies), Honeywell UOP. She is now working with Hygenco -The hydrogen company as AVP-Product Development.

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