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Technical and Other Considerations

During the discussion period, the panelists and audience members explored questions and perspectives on a variety of factors beyond those reviewed in the presentations. Storage capacity and reliable transmission were areas of interest. But it is clear that the energy transition will entail more than strictly engineering and technical challenges. Other important considerations include prioritization, consumer behaviors, the need to communicate—and act with—urgency, cooperation to enhance efficiency, and careful attention to equity in decisions and actions.

STORAGE AND TRANSMISSION AT DIFFERENT SCALES

In response to a question about whether everyone will eventually have solar generators on their roofs and batteries in their garages, Towler observed that high-density living is much more sustainable than low-density living. If the world is to accommodate 9.5 billion people, the majority of them will need to live in cities. With that sort of population density, everyone cannot get enough energy from solar panels on their roof—“there’s just not enough space for it. So you can’t completely solve the problem locally.”

Towler also pointed out that electrification is the answer in decarbonizing most energy applications, such as light duty vehicles and home heating. But “we have to be careful, because if you electrify while you’re making your electricity from natural gas and coal, you’re just prolonging the use of natural gas and coal.” Other forms of power generation are essential, whether small modular nuclear reactors or solar farms in the desert coupled with investments in the grid. “We need all of the above.”

Kurtz explained that the question involves the relative cost and ability to install transmission versus the relative cost and ability to install storage.

In places like San Diego, where the summer and winter loads are similar, low-cost storage could do the job. “If you can cut the wire that comes into your house and have your own local system, think of how much we would save to not need to maintain the distribution grid.” But in places where the sun might not shine and the wind might not blow for extended periods, the cost of putting in enough storage is prohibitive. “It becomes a question of which technology comes down in cost the most.”

Towler observed that energy transportation today covers massive distances, such as the movement of petroleum from the Middle East around the world. This is likely to continue, even with renewable forms of energy. Australia is already installing solar power with the intent of electrolyzing water to make hydrogen for shipment to Japan. Other places similarly have an excess of solar power that could be moved through the transport of hydrogen rather than through the electric grid.

Halloran and Bell both reiterated a point made by Towler: Whether rooftop solar, small modular reactors, distributed wind power, or more complex grids, “we need all of the above,” said Halloran. Bell observed

that “there are a lot of different solutions, and everyone across industry, the public sector, and the private sector is working on all these different solutions.”

ESTABLISHING PRIORITIES

Moderator Deanne Bell led off the discussion period by asking whether innovation, infrastructure, or investment should be prioritized, given the magnitude and nature of the challenge. Towler responded that technologies are ready to be deployed but costs need to be further reduced. Some countries are seeking to incentivize the energy transition by providing tax subsidies or incentives for making clean fuels, but “the transition will go faster if you have better technology, [so] it is critically important to keep innovating and bringing the cost down.”

Kurtz noted that the challenge with renewable energy technologies is that their costs are largely incurred up front. Therefore, business innovations are important for deployment. For example, partners are needed that can provide investments and then be paid back over time. Such innovations “can expand the market very quickly,” she said.

Reyes observed that being the first of a kind is a challenge, whether as a supplier or a user of energy. The first customer should not have to bear all the risk. The Department of Energy, for example, has programs designed to reduce uncertainties for the first consumers of a technology. The Inflation Reduction Act also provides funds “to get things moving, so that the first customers don’t take all the risks.” Leveraging an existing supply chain also reduces risk.

McCarthy pointed out that fusion is not going to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions anytime soon. As a result, continued investments are needed from both the public and the private sectors. Today, fusion research is being supported by the Department of Energy and by the Inflation Reduction Act, and, “again, the private investment leveraging is extremely important,” she said.

Halloran also pointed to the importance of investments in clean energy. For example, grid-scale storage is available through the deployment of lithium ion batteries, but research and development are also needed on new battery chemistries. “We don’t want to be reliant on lithium that we can’t

Moderator Deanne Bell engages the panel.

mine enough of in the United States,” she said. Investments in solid state transformers and other technologies also will be critical in making the grid more efficient and reliable.

CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR

Bell asked whether behaviors and habits will need to change as countries decarbonize or whether life will remain largely the same as technologies improve. Towler observed that the problem should be viewed in an international context. The people of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are as entitled to a good quality of life just as Americans are, he said. “We, the human race, have to look out for all of each other. We haven’t all made this problem, but we’re all going to have to live with it.” People in the United States “do consume too much in my personal view,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean that we have to make a whole lot of sacrifices, because we’ve accumulated a lot of capital goods.” These capital goods can continue to support a high quality of life while people elsewhere achieve a similar quality of life.

Some of the necessary changes also happen naturally, Towler pointed out. The ratio of per capita energy consumption to GDP has gone down in

the rich countries, although there is still room for improvement. Countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia have different needs than do smaller countries like the United Kingdom, Japan, or Italy, but all can improve energy efficiency.

He added that younger generations are more interested in virtual things than material things, which could help reduce consumption. “All of these things will come together. But it all needs to accelerate if we’re going to get to the target of keeping global warming below 2 degrees…. We all personally need to be part of the solution.”

Reyes called attention to the comparison between human development and energy consumption per capita in different countries. Many developing nations are on a steep curve where a small difference in per capita energy consumption makes “a big difference to their lives.” So the greatest gains in human development for the least amount of change in energy consumption per capita are available in the developing world. At the same time, the developed nations that have high carbon emissions are on a plateau, relative to the human development index, that may make them “more accepting of some of the restrictions, but not to the extreme.”

Kurtz called attention to opportunities that open up when cheap solar power is readily available. Perhaps companies could run factories just when the sun is shining to tap into extremely inexpensive power. Individuals and companies could chemically store energy available during the day to replace the use of natural gas in homes, since “the challenge of electrifying everything between now and 2050 is really big.” Programs could be established to create demand when electricity is available and cheap, such as using appliances at particular times of the day, creating hydrogen for later use, or pulling carbon dioxide out of the air to sequester it underground. “We don’t necessarily have to use batteries to balance all of the demand and supply.”

McCarthy said that she does not see the world getting to net-zero carbon in 2050 without substantial increases in nuclear energy generation. That means relying on fission reactors, since fusion is unlikely to be able to make a large contribution to energy supplies in that time period. The transition to nuclear, solar, and wind power “is a very complex systems engineering problem,” she said, and it will also involve changes in behaviors. “This is

a really interesting and important problem that we have to look at, because there are always unintended consequences to changed behaviors.”

GENERATING A SENSE OF URGENCY

Given the need for rapid and massive changes, how can the necessary sense of urgency be generated? Kurtz responded that “the key thing is to be most effective.” If a huge investment in the energy transition were to lead to a recession, the results could be counterproductive. Consumers are already worried about higher energy prices, inflation, and the possibility of a recession, and “if we go into recession, our ability to mobilize a lot of private capital goes down. So we need to be smart and do it in the way that will enable us to move fastest.” Good technologies are available, Kurtz said, and “if we’re really smart about how we implement them, we can move faster.”

Reyes acknowledged that generating the necessary momentum is a big challenge. Today, “we’re not aligned, we’re not working together to resolve” the problem. Each part of the industry has its own concept that it wants to be adopted. “We need to be integrating these great ideas and working together to resolve this challenge.” Some 16,000 gigawatts of carbon-free energy sources need to be deployed by 2040, he said. “This is a huge, huge issue, so we need to work together.”

McCarthy made the point that “the US really needs an energy policy. It’s something we’ve been saying for a very long time.”

Towler remarked that overcoming societal resistance to change requires doing “two things that are extremely difficult for engineers.” He acknowledged that engineers like talking to other engineers because they can talk about the details of complicated things, but “we have to get much better at getting the difficulty of the challenge, the magnitude of the problem, what happens if we don’t do it, understood broadly in society.” That means being interdisciplinary and getting well outside most engineers’ comfort zone.

Also, engineers need to state the problem simply to help achieve societal buy-in. “Again, as engineers…many of us have spent our careers understanding the details and the minutiae of [complicated things] in order to make them better, which is a very, very good thing. But it makes it almost impossible to explain to people who don’t have that technical background.” As a result, people are left “with almost magical thinking” about how society and technologies work and how technologies can provide people with the

Audience members queue to ask questions.

benefits to which they have become accustomed. “They don’t realize that that’s not sustainable. It needs to change. It’s going to be difficult to do, but it can be done.”

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Bell invited each of the speakers to provide a brief summary of their thinking about the engineering challenges and opportunities in transitioning to net-zero carbon.

“These are big, existential challenges, but they’re fantastic opportunities,” said Towler. “A lot needs to be done. A lot of great science needs to be discovered. There’s a lot of opportunity to invent things, and a lot of opportunities to make money. It’s a great engineering challenge to navigate the energy transition.”

“We need to stop being against the things we aren’t 100 percent for,” Kurtz said. “There’s no perfect solution out there. But we have a lot of really promising solutions and a lot of brilliant people in the room who have ideas and directions to go. And if we can use each of those, and then be smart about how we do them together, then we’ll be able to solve the problems.”

“We need to align ourselves so that we’re all working toward the same effort in an efficient manner,” said Reyes. “We need to design for impact and be thinking about commercial scale. We need to make an impact with our designs. And, lastly, we need to fund for success—we need to have the funding available to be successful in our approaches.”

“We have to look at these from a systems perspective and at unintended consequences, even outside of energy distribution,” said McCarthy. “And the other thing that we haven’t talked at all about today: we have underserved communities in the United States. How are we going to bring them into all of this? We always talk about developing countries, but we’ve got some serious problems in the United States.”

“Energy justice is a big piece of this,” Halloran agreed. “We have the opportunity to design a grid that can serve everyone in the United States, an energy system that can serve everybody economically. And that’s what needs to happen.”