ChatGPT and DALL-E generated image depicting a professional and modern boardroom scene with a diverse group of investors examining various decarbonization options., one of the United States largest investment banks, asked me to speak to a global group of their clients, institutional investors representing billions and possibly trillions in funds.
An example I called out was the country of France. It’s stuck on nuclear energy, but it’s best thought of not as supplying 75% of France’s demand, but as supplying 13% of Europe’s demand. Nuclear energy is inflexible due to a combination of technology and economics. It has to run at 90% or so capacity factors in order to make money, and most designs and technologies don’t like changing up or down in any event.
At present, it’s a climate change problem of the same scale as all of aviation, and job number one is to fix that. Currently, the single biggest use, about a third of the 120 million tons or so we manufacture from fossil fuels annually, is to remove sulfur, water, and other impurities from crude oil, and to crack the crude into lighter and heavier fractions. That’s going away.
We’ll be building lots of wind, solar, and storage in more remote areas and bringing firmed electricity to big demand centers. An example of that is the Xlink project, which will bring 3.6 GW of firmed electricity to the UK 20 hours every day over HVDC cables. There are two levels to this. The first is the big interconnectors between grids. The first type of that is just plugging different side-by-side electricity grids together. Each grid is a running its own rhythm and the grid next door is either just off the beat or is running a different tempo entirely. North America has several grids. Japan has multiple grids and some run at different tempos for historical reasons.
At the bottom end of the scale, it’s on the distribution grid. Commercial, industrial, and residential sites are plugged into the grid and used to get electricity solely from it. Now they have solar on their rooftops, car parks, and side fields, and push electrons back into the grid. That’s still pretty small scale, as we have to get up to light industrial and above to potentially reach MW-scale bi-directional flows.
The EU’s budgetary guidance for its carbon price in 2030 is US$203 per ton of carbon dioxide or equivalent, and close to $300 in 2040. Any geography which electrifies its economy and decarbonizes its electricity is going to have a baked-in competitive advantage over countries which don’t. The CBAM will give credit for local carbon pricing in the exporting countries, so Canada, a dozen US states including California, and China will all get discounts on CBAM pricing at various levels.
Canada Canada Latest News, Canada Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: cleantechnica - 🏆 565. / 51 Read more »