Global warming to turbo charge low-carbon energy technologies

Today (22 November), the European Union sets out its research strategy for energy. The aim is to find the low-carbon technology fix for climate change and build a continent-wide independent and sustainable energy system.

Innovation has a “crucial role” in helping to lower the cost of low-carbon technologies, according to the Strategic Energy Technology Plan, unveiled in Brussels today.

The strategy, which has the overall aim of making Europe’s energy system more sustainable, is being released against the backdrop of the fourth, most outspoken – and most frightening – assessment to date of the threat of global warming, published last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It needs to be viewed also through the lens of the upcoming meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where a successor to the Kyoto Treaty on limiting emissions of greenhouse gases will be under discussion.

The technology cost of cheap oil

In common with the rest of the world, Europe is now having to face up to the fact that a cheap and plentiful supply of oil and other fossil fuels has led to a long term under investment in energy technologies. Public funding for energy R&D in the EU member states declined between 1991 and 2005 in real terms, when it stood at around €2.2 billion a year. Of this, almost three-quarters is concentrated in only three countries. Private sector investment in energy R&D shows a similar pattern.

As a result the process of energy technology innovation is riddled with structural weaknesses, such as long lead times to market, incompatible infrastructures and limited market incentives. In the era of cheap oil, the take up of new energy technologies was hampered because they were inevitably more expensive.

Now, as oil nudges $100 per barrel and the IPCC’s warnings on global warming become yet more dire, the European Commission wants to accelerate low carbon energy development and deployment. The strategy highlights 14 technologies it plans to promote, ranging from wind and solar power, to decarbonised fossil fuel and nuclear fission and fusion.

The choice is based on factors including CO2 emissions that will be avoided, carbon mitigation cost, fossil fuels saved and changes in the overall production costs.

Wind, solar and hydropower, biofuels and clean coal power plants are seen as the means to filling the low carbon energy gap in the short term, while ocean power, hydrogen and fuel cells and nuclear fusion and new generation fission reactors are identified as the technologies that need to be pursued now if they are to contribute to creating a sustainable energy system in the longer term.

How to jump start research?

The problem is how to jump start energy research from its current low base. Although member states share some priorities, pan European cooperation is low, and until now there has been no setting of priorities at a European level. Yet the capital intensive nature of energy technologies – witness the ITER nuclear fusion project – makes it essential to find synergies and build economies of scale.