l'Actualité du Solaire

There's a lot of talk about the energy transition, reducing the use of fossil fuels, protecting the climate... Mr Liebreich brings it all together in a brilliant presentation that, above all, explains current developments.

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In a nutshell

The exponential growth of renewable energies and storageWhether over ten or twenty years, the expansion of renewable energies is meteoric.

System solution : to take advantage of this energy, we need to develop the best ways of using it

Energy competitionCompetition for energy: we also need to determine how to make better use of the products available

Disappearing demandWe are no longer in a phase of increasing use, but of making better use by reducing energy demand.

The primary energy fallacyThe energy transition involves reducing energy requirements and using clean energy.

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The text

While many commentators stress the difficulties of achieving the energy transition, citing its cost or the transformations it will require, Michael Liebreich (of BloombergNEF) offers an optimistic vision of this development, pointing to the five forces that will facilitate this transformation

The exponential growth of renewable energies and storage;

Twenty years ago, in 2004, it took a whole year to install a single gigawatt of photovoltaic solar energy. In 2010, it took the world a month to install a gigawatt. By 2016, a week. Last year, one gigawatt of solar photovoltaic energy was installed in a single day.

Cumulative solar photovoltaic installations have doubled over this period, and it is this doubling that is driving down costs. Photovoltaic solar energy has generated a learning rate of around 25% per doubling over the past five decades, reducing the cost of modules byducing the cost of modules from $106 per watt of capacity in 1975 to $0.13/W in November 2023 (according to BloombergNEF's solar price index), a factor of 820. The phenomenon is similar for wind power.

Together, wind and solar are the fastest-growing sources of electricity in history. Twenty years ago, they accounted for less than 1% of the world's power; 10 years ago, that figure had risen to 3%. By the end of last year, that figure had risen to 15%.

Solar power capacity, which stood at around 1.5 GW in 2004 and 48 GW at the end of 2014, is set to exceed TW by 2025. At COP28 in Dubai, the world agreed to triple the amount of renewable energy installed by 2030; in its latest report on renewable energy, the IEA estimates that two and a half times as much will be needed. There would not even be any need for new policies.

The same thing has happened with batteries: they have grown even faster than solar energy. They have increased fivefold in the last eight years. In 2015, some 36 GWh of lithium-ion batteries were produced; last year, the total was around 1 TWh. Over the last decade, the cost of cells has fallen from 1.000 to 72 dollars per kWh, while at the same time energy density has doubled and degradation per cycle has been halved. We are also seeing new battery chemistries such as iron-air and sodium-ion, which promise to be even cheaper than lithium-ion.

This growth defies all predictions: In 1993, a German utility group took out full-page advertisements in German newspapers stating that "renewable energies such as solar, water and wind will not be able to cover more than 4% of our electricity demand, even in the long term."

The level of saturation that dominates all human action does not yet seem to have reached renewable energies. Their growth limit is far from being reached.

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System solution

Many people do not believe in the extension of renewable energies, because intermittency is currently an obstacle to the 24/7 use of renewable energies. In reality, the battery system is a temporary solution that is currently being developed. It should give way either to a system that will provide additional power during intermittent periods, or to another long-term storage system using hydrogen, biogas or grid interconnection. Each of these technologies is experiencing remarkable growth and investment, and are gradually being interconnected.

Some suggest that the electricity grid needs to be strengthened by 21,400 billion dollars (BloombergNEF figure) in order to develop the electrification of the world. There are five points to be made about this estimate

- Over the last 50 years, the world's electricity transmission capacity has increased fivefold; we can certainly increase the network fivefold over the next few decades.

- Superconductors will one day replace electricity cables in the same way that fibre optics replaced copper telephone cables.

- Power lines should only be built in economic regions where they are needed. The number of lines will be reduced if industries locate at production sites, which also makes it possible to lower selling prices.

- Needs are evolving towards the electrification of electric vehicles and heat pumps. These devices can shift their consumption by a few hours or a few days, to take account of intermittence.

- The development of these machines is closely linked to the price of energy. The lower the price per kWh, the more people will buy electric vehicles and heat pumps.

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The energy competition

In 2018, Mr Liebreich already estimated that the purchase of electric vehicles and heat pumps should be sufficient to cap emissions.

Bringing them down to zero will require special provisions for heating, industry, chemicals, aviation, shipping, steel, cement and agriculture. In various sectors, ammonia (toxic and dangerous) and methanol (easy to handle but requires a carbon molecule) have been pitted against each other. In other sectors, we are turning to hydrogen. Viable competing experiments have already been launched with carbon prices of between 75 and 250 dollars per tonne of_CO2 equivalent. There are only a few sectors where no solution has yet been found.

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Disappearing demand

The energy transition will require far fewer minerals than previously thought. They will be cheaper than currently envisaged. Estimates of demand for minerals from clean energy technologies have been greatly overestimated. No account has been taken of technological improvements, replacement of materials and, above all, recycling.

The recovery rate for end-of-life batteries has risen from 59% in 2019 to 90% today, and will eventually reach 99%. Electric vehicle batteries are full of valuable materials (battery waste currently costs between $1,000 and $5,000 per tonne).

As well as the collection rate, what matters is the recovery rate, i.e. the proportion of materials recovered for reuse, and in particular the proportion of critical minerals. And here the news is very good.

Let's assume that your battery has a lifespan of 15 years and that the collection and recovery rates exceed 90%. As long as the energy density of the battery improves by 10% every 15 years - and remember that it has doubled in the last decade - the initial minerals in your battery will continue to provide the same storage services forever. That's what circularity looks like, and it's not taken into account in any of the major energy demand and mineral models - in fact, most of them are not even considered.In fact, most current life-cycle carbon assessments for electric vehicles do not include recycling at all.

The transition will naturally lead to a reduction in demand for resources from the fossil fuel industry: the 15% of global energy consumption that goes into extracting and refining oil and gas will disappear. Around 40% of the shipping that currently transports oil, gas and coal around the world will no longer exist. The maritime transport of iron ore, which accounts for 15% of transport, will be largely rendered superfluous by the local manufacture of green steel. Demand for hydrogen from hydrocracking to make petrol and diesel will have disappeared. Oil and gas pipelines will be dismantled. Even demand for cement and steel will start to fall.

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The primary energy fallacy

The challenge of decarbonisation as a whole is much smaller than its critics claim. The reason lies in the nature of primary energy demand, the measure that dominates the public debate on transition.

The history of primary energy goes back to the 1970s, when Western countries feared they would be deprived of the raw energy their economies needed and began to focus on the need for energy.conomies needed and began to search the world over for energy resources to ensure that they controlled a sufficiently large proportion. The agency set up to do this was the International Energy Agency, and its key indicator was primary energy demand. Today, you'll still find it like this in the IEA's energy reports.

Despite its name, primary energy demand is not really a measure of demand. Let's take an example. Suppose you light your hallway with a 75-watt incandescent bulb, lit for 2,000 hours and consuming 150 kWh per year. Feed it with electricity from a coal-fired power station with an efficiency of 35%, add 10% grid loss and you create a primary energy demand of 476 kWh.

However, you could provide the same amount of light with a single 10 W LED bulb. Include the same 10% grid loss and it uses just 22 kWh. Run this LED on wind, solar or hydroelectric power and you will reduce your primary energy demand by 95% and eliminate its_CO2 emissions without any reduction in lighting consumption.

Let's take a second example: switching from an internal combustion car to an electric car. Let's assume that your VW Golf manages 40 miles per gallon, a fairly normal figure for real-world use. This translates into 1 kWh/mile or, after taking into account the losses associated with extracting, refining and distributing your fuel, 1.2 kWh/mile. The equivalent electric VW ID3, after adjusting for network losses and load, consumes just 0.3 kWh/mile. By changing, you've achieved a 75% reduction in primary energy demand and paved the way for the elimination of 100% of driving-related emissions without any reduction in mobility.

A third example. Heating an average American home requires 57 million British thermal units (btu) per year. If you heat with gas or oil, after adjusting for upstream losses of 15% and furnace efficiency of 90%, that works out at 21 MWh per year. Switch to a heat pump with a coefficient of performance of 4 all year round, allow for 10% network losses and your energy consumption is reduced to 4.6 MWh. Powering a heat pump with clean electricity can reduce your primary energy demand by 78% and eliminate the_CO2 emissions (and methane leaks) associated with space heating - without any reduction in comfort.

See the model? The transition isn't about replacing all primary energy demand with something cleaner, it's simply about providing energy services, in considerably smaller quantities, in a clean way.

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