TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS to CLIMATE CHANGE

Solar panels and wind turbines

What may be the biggest innovation to combat climate change
has been around for decades.
Solar panels and wind turbines turn sun and wind into
electricity without releasing greenhouse gases. As the
technologies have scaled up and converted energy more
efficiently, they have come down in price to become cheaper
than fossil fuels globally.
"Solar and wind being cheap and reliable and performing well
opens up a lot of possibilities," said Gregory Nemet, a professor
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written a book
on how solar energy became cheap. "Even as we've had 30
years of politicians dithering and not as much progress as most
people would have hoped, in the background, technology has
been progressing."
But generating clean energy is one thing — storing and
distributing it is another. This is particularly important for
renewables that cannot generate electricity without the sun
shining or wind blowing.
Three things suggest innovation is overcoming these hurdles,
said Nemet. "That's renewables getting better, batteries
allowing you to store electricity and then information in the
system allowing you to manage it better."
A floating solar plant near Santiago, Chile

Wind turbines south of Nairobi, Kenya

Batteries for electric vehicles
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded three scientists a
Nobel prize in October for their work in developing lithium-ion
batteries, which they say have "revolutionized our lives since they first
entered the market in 1991" — and continue to advance.

Lighter and smaller than earlier rechargeable batteries, lithium

batteries can also be charged faster and more often. As their weight
and price continue to fall, they are playing an increasingly pivotal role in
decarbonizing the transport sector by making electric vehicles cheaper.

"Battery storage will be critical," said Joao Gouveia, a senior fellow at

Project Drawdown, a research organization that analyzes climate
solutions. "It will allow the integration of more and more renewable
tech. We cannot have 70% [of renewable energy by 2050] coming from
wind and solar if we don't apply battery storage systems."
Holding batteries back are aging electricity grids and costs that, despite
falling each year, remain high.

But electric vehicles could act as a storage system, said Gouveia, with
owners buying electricity at night to charge their cars and selling it to
the grid when demand is high and cars are parked, idle, during the day.
"We are finding new lithium reserves because this is a tech for both
markets, so we're innovating more and more."

While the global electric vehicle fleet has grown rapidly — passing 5
million cars in 2018, data from the International Energy Agency shows
— this progress has been dwarfed by a rise in larger and less efficient
SUVs that run on fossil fuels. Four in 10 new cars sold globally in 2018
were SUVs.
A fully electric Mercedes car on display in Stockholm,
Sweden
Power-to-X
Another way to store renewable energy is using electrolyzers to extract
hydrogen from water. The process, also known as power-to-X, is a way
of storing energy in different forms. Engineers run an electric current
through water and collect the hydrogen molecules that break off. These
can be burned for heat, stored in fuel cells or turned into chemicals
such as methane for processes that require fossil fuels.
"It's a great way to decarbonize the heating, mobility and chemical
sector," said David Wortmann, a board member of Energy Watch
Group, a German NGO. "It's scaleable — the tech is all there. The
industry is young, you have manufacturers out there to produce an
electrolyzer. But the demand is not there yet, the regulations are not in
place."
Hydrogen could also help decarbonize a high-polluting sector that has
mostly been overlooked: heavy industry.
The high heat needed to process industrial materials — such as
concrete, iron, steel, and petrochemicals — is responsible for about
10% of global CO2 emissions, according to a report from the Center on
Global Energy Policy in October. The cement industry alone is
responsible for about 8% of CO2 emissions, mostly in production. This is
more than three times the CO2 emissions of the aviation industry.
Burning hydrogen from renewable energy sources could meet industrial
heating needs cleanly, said Jeff Rissmann, head of modeling at Energy
Innovation, a research firm. "Moving to hydrogen can have a huge
impact across many sectors, and would be one of the biggest ways to
decarbonize the global economy."
Lithium iron batteries could help decarbonize transport
Carbon capture and storage
Even under optimistic scenarios for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
scientists say we will not meet targets to limit global warming to 1.5
degrees Celsius without removing some of the CO2 we have already
emitted. The IPCC projects between 100 billion and 1 trillion tons of
CO2 would need to be removed this century.
Trees and plants that extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into
oxygen through photosynthesis are one way of doing this. But they take
up large tracts of land — which is needed for other purposes such as
growing food — and are not a secure way of storing carbon, because
they may be felled for firewood or burned in forest fires.
Some companies are experimenting with capturing CO2 from power
plants and storing it deep underground. By doing this with biomass
plants — where recently-grown plant matter is burned and not ancient
fossils — then power can be produced while reducing the amount of
CO2 in the atmosphere.
But with just 19 facilities running such systems, its deployment is not
happening quickly enough to meet emissions reductions targets,
according to a report from the Global Carbon Capture and Storage
Institute.
Capturing CO2 from power plants is seen as increasingly
necessary to reach emissions targets

REFERENCE : Technologies to slow climate change Deutsche Welle

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