The energy transition: evolution or ruptures?
Faced with the magnitude of the challenge of the fight against climate change, humanity has decided to set a common objective, commensurate with the problem: drastically reduce and from the middle of the 21 th century its greenhouse gas emissions, mainly CO2.
Thus, many countries and regions of the world including Europe, China and the United States, responsible between them for more than 50% of CO2 emissions from the energy sector, have decided to achieve carbon neutrality between 2040 and 2060. Achieving carbon neutrality means that residual CO2 emissions from certain industrial sectors that are very difficult to decarbonise must from that date, year after year, be completely stored in one form or another, in the ground or in artificial storage.
Europe, for example, has set this target for 2050. While today it still emits 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 (2019), its future emissions will have to be fully compensated by natural or artificial storage.
It is no longer a question of dividing our emissions by 4 but of dividing them by a factor of 6 to 8.
This shows the magnitude of the task. It is no longer a question of dividing our emissions by 4 but of dividing them by a factor of 6 to 8. It is a question of reinforcing the downward trends for the OECD countries and reversing the trend for most other countries including China.
CO2 Emissions from the Energy Sector of China and the OECD: Historical and Projected (Estimated Final Threshold)
The reduction in CO2 emissions necessary to comply with the Paris agreements(1) must, in this context, be part of a disruptive development. For this, should it only integrate changes, evolutions, or go as far as ruptures and transformations of the energy system?
Ruptures mentioned, but more or less marked
“The energy transition can no longer be limited to mitigation efforts or incremental steps. It must be a transformation effort, an overhaul of the system, based on the rapid upscaling of available technologies while innovating for the future. This is the message of the Director General of Irena in the latest report published last March(2). The transition at the global level would mainly boil down to three notions related to technology: transformation, acceleration and innovation, all supported by appropriate policies.
This message, with a global reach, is found in other scenarios. Thus the négaWatt scenario for France refuses “to rely on hypothetical ruptures, often pretexts for postponing action”. But négaWatt stresses that “the energy transition obviously involves an economic and social transformation of society”(3).
The IEA, in its latest WEO(4) report, for its part, indicates that the most difficult tasks for the transformation of the energy sector are in particular in the industrial sectors such as steel and cement, in long-distance transportation, in balancing multiple changes occurring in parallel through a complex energy system, and in public acceptance. To achieve a “net zero” scenario globally, the IEA points out that this goal “would require profound changes in consumer behavior and would push technological innovation and deployment to their limits”.
The energy transition, which induces a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions, clearly involves a systemic change that goes beyond the energy system alone.
To come back to France, EpE (Association française des Entreprises pour l'Environnement), in its "ZEN 2050" scenario(5), indicates that "the massive deployment of existing technologies would make it possible to 'achieve the required reduction levels without waiting for technological breakthroughs'. But EpE also evokes an “unprecedented change” or a “societal and economic revolution” and underlines that this transition involves the implementation of “binding, incentive and socially just policies”.
These different references show that the energy transition, which leads to a drastic drop in CO2 emissions, clearly involves a systemic disruption that goes beyond the energy system alone.
A systemic break
It is illusory to imagine being able to drastically reduce CO2 emissions by relying only on technological advances and innovations that are otherwise essential. Of course, this objective questions our ability to improve the performance of energy technologies, but also questions our energy mix, which today depends globally at 80% on fossil fuels, our relationship with energy and our methods of using energy.
Our societies have understood that bending a planetary trajectory cannot be successful by continuity by improving our current energy system but must necessarily include ruptures. These ruptures are of different natures and must each contribute to reshaping our changing world, as plate tectonics, with doses of faults, fractures affecting the earth's crust, has gradually shaped our world today.
These breakthroughs are both energetic - the intrusion of hydrogen into the energy debate is a good illustration of this -, technological - with the deployment of "new" energies, CO capture and storage technologies< sub>2 -, social and societal in relation to voluntary sobriety to be promoted, to a new organization of work, to the creation of new jobs to replace those which will disappear.
And these different ruptures will create new ones that will affect other fields such as geopolitics, giving new players a weight comparable to that acquired by a certain number of countries, such as the countries of the Persian Gulf, continued with the advent of oil. The latest CIA report(6) underscores this fact: “The shift to renewable energy will increase competition in certain minerals, particularly cobalt and lithium for batteries and rare earths for magnets. electric motors and generators.
They will involve industrial disruptions with the prospect or the hope of relocating part of our means of energy and industrial production. Finally, an appropriate framework will have to be put in place to redirect investments towards a low-carbon economy, such as the European taxonomy(7), carbon taxation or the mechanism envisaged to carbon adjustment at the border(8) to avoid carbon leakage linked to the export of industrial means of production. Solutions that are often difficult to implement.
A necessarily incremental break due to historical assets
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Beyond the simple stylistic formula, the notion of incremental rupture must be integrated by all the actors likely to carry the energy transition: citizens but also industrialists, financiers and institutions. It results from the cost of replacing existing infrastructure and assets such as energy transport and distribution networks, the renovation of existing housing, the car fleet or the thermal power plant fleet.
Globally, the car fleet includes around a billion vehicles that will only be able to be completely renewed in decades. The essential increase in sales of less polluting vehicles for manufacture and use will only have a significant impact in 10 years at best.
By way of illustration, Bloomberg(9) anticipates that the share of electric vehicle sales will reach nearly 30% worldwide in 2030 and nearly 60% in 2040. However, the share of electric vehicles in the existing car fleet would represent only 8% in 2030 and 30% in 2040. The renewal of the existing fleet takes time, as does the deployment of new distribution infrastructures (electric terminals, hydrogen network, etc.).
The same observation could be made for global electricity production, which is still 37% based on coal-fired power stations, the power stations that emit the most CO2. But, good news, the reduction has begun and this percentage could fall thanks to the rise in power of renewable energies and, to a lesser extent, nuclear, according to the IEA(10). In the European Union, while the share of coal was still 18% in 2019, it is expected to decline sharply over the next few years.
Systemic disruption is therefore well underway at the global level, but it takes time and its impacts are only gradual. A forced march, of the "whatever the cost" type, is probably not bearable for society, which would risk rejecting any idea of transformation in the long term. Hence the need to adopt a step-by-step approach, initially favoring an incremental break to better amortize the infrastructure investments already underway.
Change gears… and overcome obstacles
Climate change is likely to lead to a radical upheaval in the state of equilibrium of our system. The measures adopted are intended to calm things down and limit the amplitude of the disturbances which are beginning to appear: gigantic fires, disappearance of species, melting of glaciers, permafrost and disorders of all kinds, including sanitary... The objective of carbon neutrality proposed by a growing number of States is the result of this heightened awareness under the pressure of facts.
Some believe that economic and demographic decline is the only possible way to solve this immense challenge. To avoid what looks like a societal impasse, others are proposing scenarios to reconcile economic and demographic growth and carbon neutrality. It is a question of decoupling not economic growth and energy consumption, but economic growth and the carbon intensity of the economy.
The outlines are well known: sobriety, energy efficiency and the rise of renewable energies. This now widely shared triptych, with various methods of application, can be found, for example, in the IEA's "Net Zero Emissions by 2050" scenario. The objective of this scenario is therefore to limit, with a probability of 50%, the rise in temperature to 1.5°C, while nevertheless limiting massive recourse to net negative emissions on a global scale.
One could say to oneself that it is enough, through appropriate political measures(11), to increase and guide investments but also behaviors. But the "we just have to" comes up against realities that are added to the sole inertia of energy systems. Before arriving at a new system, it is also necessary to overcome the obstacles. And they are many.
First, alternative solutions are usually more expensive. This constraint can be partially lifted by combining basic and applied research and state support for industrialization. This is what has already been observed for the electricity sector, with the result of a drastic drop in production costs, for solar or wind power, even if a complete economic assessment remains to be done for a system with high penetration of intermittent RE(12).
Our society must accept that time for urgency is not synonymous with haste.
In other sectors, encouraging signs of lower costs are also already visible for electric vehicles and are hoped for in the long term for hydrogen or biosourced solutions. As with the transformation of the energy system, it takes time to reduce costs and make these new solutions socially acceptable.
It will also take time to succeed in professional changes and retraining between job destruction and new opportunities. It will also take time to rebuild an industrial tool adapted to the image of the time it took to build the Airbus group resulting in part from the innovations made for Concorde. It will also take time to gain “strategic independence in sectors of activity of vital importance(13)” in connection with the energy sector.
Humanity finds itself in a time of urgency in the face of climate change. Thanks to the “UN” awareness, thanks to the impatience of part of the population, the ecological transition is underway. If we have obviously lost time(14), this movement accelerates. But a complete implementation must nevertheless be thought over the long term. Our society must accept that time for urgency is not synonymous with haste.
Thinking about complexity and moving forward
Future energy systems will have little to do with those that exist today. They will integrate more electricity, hydrogen, two vectors that will be produced by non-carbon or decarbonized solutions. Energy sources and biobased products will occupy an increasing share. Electric vehicles, possibly autonomous for some, will occupy a prominent place alongside perhaps "hydrogen" vehicles and thermal vehicles based on biofuels. Generation, transmission and demand management systems will reduce losses. Sobriety, energy efficiency and recycling will be integrated into our lifestyles.
The measures adopted and planned lead us for the moment to a temperature increase of 2.7°C by 2100 according to the IEA.
These choices impose real breakthroughs of a regulatory, fiscal, technological, systemic, industrial and also societal nature. The consequences of the choices made must be analyzed with finesse in terms of environmental footprint (water, raw materials, local pollution...(15)), societal (various nuisances), and geopolitics (technological sovereignty, dependence raw materials...(16)). It is at this price that sustainable trajectories can be established.
The measures adopted and planned lead us for the moment to a temperature increase of 2.7°C by 2100 according to the IEA. This is a first step that confirms that actions are underway. But this is of course still insufficient to respect the limit of 2°C, or even 1.5°C, as defined in the Paris agreement. We need to go further and faster. This will require resolute and long-term support for research actors, creators of innovation to accelerate the marketing of technologies that are both the most efficient and the most acceptable.
“Don't worry about going slow; only worry if you are arrested,” says a Chinese proverb. This is not enough for some who rightly push to go faster. But we are on the right track.