Cylib, a startup backed by Porsche and Bosch, is building a huge electric vehicle battery recycling facility in Dormagen, a town in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia region.
Cylib
A massive battery recycling plant is being built in Germany by Cylib, a startup looking to reduce waste from EV batteries that have reached the end of their life.
Cylib, which is backed by luxury sports car firm Porsche and appliances maker Bosch, on Monday started work on the new site in the town of Dormagen, in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
More than 180 million euros ($200 million) is being pumped into the facility, which is expected to span 236,000 square feet and will produce recycled batteries for the electric vehicle industry in Europe.
Cylib says its facility will be the largest end-to-end lithium-ion battery recycling facility in Europe.
It plans to recycle roughly 30,000 metric tons of end-of-life batteries at the facility each year, making it larger in scale than the current biggest plant, Hydrovolt, a joint venture between Swedish EV battery maker Northvolt and Norway-based aluminum and renewable energy firm Hydro.
Hydrovolt has capacity to recycle 12,000 metric tons of end-of-life batteries annually, according to Hydro’s website.
Recycled batteries produced by Cylib’s new facility are expected to be used by Porsche, which invested in the startup as part of a 55 million euro funding round, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC.
The source, who preferred to remain anonymous as the information is not yet public, added that the plans are still in the early stages and have not yet been formalized.
Asked about Porsche’s involvement in the project, a Cylib spokesperson said that investments from partners like Porsche are “strategic,” adding that it is working closely with its investors about process industrialization and commercial partnerships.
Battery recycling is a key priority for the European Union, which is looking to ensure the sustainable development of batteries needed to fuel the transition to electric vehicles.
Founded in 2022 by German entrepreneur Lilian Schwich, her husband Gideon Schwich, and Paul Sabarny, Cylib uses water-based lithium and graphite recovery techniques to repurpose materials from batteries that have hit the end of their lifespan.
Earlier this year, the firm raised 55 million euros of financing from investors including climate-focused venture capital firm World Fund, Porsche Ventures, Bosch, and DeepTech & Climate Fonds.
Cylib said the new plant would primarily serve automotive, battery manufacturing and chemicals clients. The startup wants it to be the first of many, with further facilities planned elsewhere in Germany and Europe within the next few years.
The new facility is being built on a brownfield site located at Chempark, an industrial space used primarily by the chemicals industry. Cylib said that the location was strategic, with preexisting supply chains already located on-site.
Operations at the plant are scheduled to commence in 2026. The move is key to Cylib’s ability to reach mass production, said CEO Lilian Schwich.
“Cylib reaching industrial scale production will be a key driver in building a robust European battery infrastructure,” Schwich said in a press statement.
“Battery recycling is pioneering the circular economy, proving that economic success is compatible with reduced environmental impact,” she added.
From left to right: Johan Pihl, Doconomy’s chief creative officer and co-founder, and Mathias Wikstrom, chief executive officer and co-founder.
Doconomy
Swedish climate-focused financial technology startup Doconomy told CNBC on Thursday that it’s raised 34 million euros ($36.9 million) from leading European banks, including UBS and Commerzbank.
Doconomy, which offers tools to help bank customers measure the carbon footprint of their everyday spending, raised the cash in a Series B financing round co-led by UBS Next and CommerzVentures, the venture arms of UBS and Commerzbank, respectively.
Credit ratings agency S&P Global came on board as a new investor, while existing shareholders Motive Ventures, PostFinance and Tenity also participated.
Founded in Sweden in 2018, Doconomy works with the likes of Boston Consulting Group, Mastercard, S&P Global, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to calculate the climate cost associated with financial transactions.
Among the firm’s tools is the AIand Index, a cloud-based service for banks that helps their customers convert every transaction into its corresponding CO2 footprint. The index is used by more than 100 financial institutions in more than 40 countries.
Doconomy plans to use the fresh cash to drive expansion into North America and roll out new products, CEO and co-founder Mathias Wikstrom told CNBC in an interview.
“Going forward, we want to enable every bank in every corner of the world to engage their clients in the ESG [environmental, social, and governance] work of the bank,” Wikstrom said. “We see a connection between the E and S, the environmental and the social. We can’t isolate those two different streams.”
Wikstrom said he was “very happy” to see partnerships emerging with the likes of UBS and Commerzbank, describing it as an “alliance of the winning both money and intellect into getting this issue under control.
News of Doconomy’s latest funding follows the firm’s February 2023 deal to acquire Dreams Technology, a platform that uses behavioral science to boosts customers’ digital engagement and financial wellbeing.
Wikstrom said that Doconomy’s valuation in its Series B round is unchanged from the price at which it raised funds in its Series A, which saw the firm raise cash from the likes of Citi Ventures, Mastercard, and Ikea parent company Ingka.
Doconomy’s growth story hasn’t come without its challenges. More recently, the firm faced attacks from right-wing online commentator Jordan Peterson and his followers.
It’s not really hurricane season anymore, it’s fear season.
Mathias Wikstrom
CEO, Doconomy
Last week, Peterson targeted the company in a post on social media platform X, labelling it the “soft positive planet-saving voice of the worst imaginable corporate/fascist/green tyranny.”
The Canadian psychologist, who gained internet fame critiquing so-called political correctness, is a noted skeptic who described climate change as “the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free card.” He once framed rising greenhouse gas emissions as a positive for making the planet “green in the driest areas.”
Climate scientists say this is misleading, as it doesn’t take into account the negative effects intensified droughts, wildfires and heatwaves caused by global warming have on plants and ecosystems.
Wikstrom told CNBC that the situation concerning Peterson’s attacks on his firm “illustrates that we need to educate a lot of people.”
“Fear will lead to frustration and frustration will potentially lead to protests, and protests will lead to violence and violence will lead to damage done,” he told CNBC.
Wikstrom said that he hopes that the more the likes of Peterson and other climate skeptics keep “banging the drum,” the likelier that their sentiments will eventually sound “hollow.”
“Looking at what’s happening in Hawaii, in Canada, in France, in Spain, in Greece — we have the floods, we have the fires, we have so many concerns now,” he said. “It’s not really hurricane season anymore, it’s fear season.”
Climate fintech is a niche area of financial technology that has attracted heightened interest from investors, as world governments push corporates to hit ESG targets and reduce carbon emissions associated with their operations.
Michael Baldinger, chief sustainability officer of UBS, said the bank’s venture investment into Doconomy “underscores our focus on fostering innovation to provide the data and actionable insights our clients need to make informed choices about their investments and effect the change they want to see.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addresses a speech during a meeting, at the Station F in Paris on May 26, 2023.
Joel Saget | AFP | Getty Images
Tech firms and Silicon Valley billionaires have been pouring money into nuclear energy for years, pitching the sustainable power source as crucial to the green transition. Now they have another incentive to promote it: artificial intelligence.
While generative AI has grown at lightning speed, nuclear power projects are heavily regulated and usually advance at a plodding pace. That’s raising questions about whether advances in nuclear energy can cut emissions as swiftly as energy-guzzling AI and other fast-growing technologies are adding to them.
“If you were to integrate large language models, GPT-style models into search engines, it’s going to cost five times as much environmentally as standard search,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research group focused on the social impacts of AI. At current growth rates, some new AI servers could soon gobble up more than 85 terawatt hours of electricity each year, researchers have estimated — more than some small nations’ annual energy consumption.
“I want to see innovation in this country,” Myers West said. “I just want the scope of innovation to be determined beyond the incentive structures of these giant companies.”
Oklo is one of the nuclear startups backed by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI who has described AI and cheap, green energy as mutually reinforcing essentials to achieving a future marked by “abundance.”
“Fundamentally today in the world, the two limiting commodities you see everywhere are intelligence, which we’re trying to work on with AI, and energy,” he told CNBC in 2021 after investing $375 million in Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup that Altman chairs. Microsoft last year agreed to buy power from Helion starting in 2028. Oklo, which Altman also chairs, is focused on the opposite reaction, fission, which generates energy by splitting an atom; fusion does so by merging atomic nuclei.
Representatives for Altman, through his special acquisition company AltC, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In rural southeastern Idaho, Oklo is working to build a small-scale nuclear powerhouse that could fuel data centers like the ones OpenAI and its competitors need. But the company also wants to supply mixed-use communities and industrial facilities, and is already contracted to build two commercial plants in southern Ohio.
As the United States moves toward wide-scale electric vehicle adoption and decarbonization, “the amount of energy we’re going to need to do that is huge,” said Oklo CEO and co-founder Jacob DeWitte. “Also heating and cooking — if we want to electrify those processes, you’re going to need even more.”
Oklo has found getting regulators on board harder than finding potential customers.
In 2022, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees commercial nuclear power plants and materials, denied the company’s application for the design of its Idaho “Aurora” powerhouse, saying it hadn’t provided enough safety information. In October, the Air Force rescinded its intent to award a contract for a microreactor pilot program to power a base in Alaska.
“You’ve got new physics, you have to use new models. You have to do all sorts of stuff that’s different than what they’re used to,” DeWitte said of the NRC. Oklo is now working to satisfy regulators, he said, acknowledging agency officials must “do their independent job of ensuring this meets adequate safety requirements.”
Oklo’s proposed 13,000 square-foot Aurora powerhouse, featuring a 15-megawatt fission reactor, is smaller than earlier plants and looks more like a sleek ski chalet than the Cold War-era ones with their iconic curved towers. The plant set to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research facility where Oklo has been given an Energy Department grant to test recycling nuclear waste into new fuel. DeWitte says the design is safer, too, citing the use of liquid metal as a coolant rather than water.
The nuclear power industry hasn’t meaningfully expanded its share of the U.S. energy mix for decades. It has chugged along despite popular opposition fueled by infrequent but devastating accidents like those in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 and in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. But as the climate crisis accelerates, most Americans now support expanding nuclear energy — 57%, up from 43% in 2020, a Pew Research survey found last year.
Nuclear power currently makes up only 19% of the nation’s overall energy generation, with 93 commercial reactors operating today, down from a peak of 112 in 1990. By one estimate, up to 800 gigawatts of new nuclear power will be needed by 2050 to meet current green energy targets.
Unit 3’s reactor and cooling tower stand at Georgia Power Co.’s Plant Vogtle nuclear power plant on Jan. 20, 2023, in Waynesboro, Ga.
John Bazemore | AP
But as tech firms sprint toward AI, many data centers are already struggling to add capacity fast enough to remain affordable, with data center rents jumping nearly 16% between 2022 and last year alone. The demand crunch is one reason major industry players have been ramping up their nuclear investments.
Microsoft signed a deal last summer with Constellation, a top nuclear power plant operator, to add nuclear-generated electricity to its Virginia data centers. The year before, Google took part in a $250 million fundraising round for the fusion startup TAE Technologies. And in late 2021, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other investors raised over $130 million for Canadian nuclear company General Fusion.
For tech firms, it makes sense to tap directly into nuclear plants “instead of sourcing electricity from the grid,” said Ross Matzkin-Bridger, a senior director at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group focused on reducing nuclear and biological risks. In addition to being clean, he noted, many recent nuclear projects are also compact. “You can fit a lot more energy per acre in nuclear energy than you can with any other technology,” he said.
Beyond Silicon Valley, “big investment firms are actually starting to believe that this is going to take off,” said Ayan Paul, a research scientist at Northeastern University who studies AI. “People have started to believe that these kinds of energies are going to fuel our population.”
But some experts warn that efforts to expand nuclear power shouldn’t be rushed, no matter how fast demand is growing.
“We need nuclear power to get to a low-carbon future,” said Ahmed Abdulla, assistant mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at Carleton University. But for engineering projects that have historically taken decades, the regulatory process needs to be a methodical one, he said: “There is a chance to make serious mistakes if we sprint to the goal.”
In this aerial view water vapour and exhaust rise from the steel mill of Salzgitter AG, one Europe’s largest steel producers, on November 22, 2023 in Salzgitter, Germany.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Policymakers and business leaders from across the globe are set to arrive in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for the world’s biggest and most important annual climate conference.
The COP28 summit, which starts on Thursday and is scheduled to run through to Dec. 12, will provide a critical forum for government officials, business leaders and campaign groups to accelerate action to tackle the climate crisis.
The pressure to deliver is immense. Global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions continue to break records, with no continent left untouched by more frequent and intense extreme weather events.
Climate finance is always a hotly debated talking point at the U.N. summit and COP28 promises to be no different. It refers to the financing needed to support efforts to both significantly reduce emissions and adjust to the effects of climate change.
Talks in Bonn, Germany earlier in the year became gridlocked over this issue of finance and support, with some low-income countries refusing to talk about slashing emissions unless there was an equal focus on how wealthy nations would provide cash to them.
It laid the groundwork for what one environmental group expects to be a “huge fight” between high-income and low-income nations at COP28.
Climate activists hold a banner outside the InterContinental London Park Lane during the “Oily Money Out” demonstration organised by Fossil Free London on the sidelines of the opening day of the Energy Intelligence Forum 2023 in London on October 17, 2023. (Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP) (Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP via Getty Images)
Henry Nicholls | Afp | Getty Images
Data published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in mid-November, however, showed that rich countries had finally fulfilled their promise to provide $100 billion a year to low-income countries — albeit two years after the deadline. It is hoped that this could go some way to fostering goodwill at the summit.
“COP28 has a massive role to play in setting the political direction for a transformational shift in climate ambition. But without finance and economic confidence, countries won’t be able to act at the pace and scale needed,” said Alex Scott, program lead at E3G, an independent climate think tank.
Another major financial issue will be to operationalize the so-called “loss and damage” fund, arguably the main legacy of last year’s COP27 summit in Egypt.
Rich countries, despite accounting for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions, have long opposed the creation of a fund to compensate low-income countries for the loss and damage they’ve caused.
Advocates argue, however, that it is required to account for climate impacts — including hurricanes, floods and wildfires or slow-onset impacts such as rising sea levels — that countries cannot defend against because the risks are unavoidable, or the countries cannot afford it.
The establishment of the loss and damage fund at COP27 was seen as a historic breakthrough and potential turning point in the climate crisis, although many key details were left unresolved — such as who should pay into the fund, how large should it be and who should administer the money.
Countries reached a consensus on how to approach loss and damage payments during tense discissions that ran into overtime earlier this month. Yet it remains to be seen whether this fragile agreement can hold for countries to successfully operationalize the fund in the UAE.
“Billions of people, lives and livelihoods who are vulnerable to the effects of climate change depend upon the adoption of this recommended approach at COP28,” Sultan al-Jaber, president-designate of COP28, said in a statement on Nov. 5.
People carry their belongings while crossing the section of a road collapsing due to flash floods at the Mwingi-Garissa Road near Garissa on November 22, 2023. The Horn of Africa is experiencing torrential rainfall and floods linked to El Nino climate pattern. Several communities are isolated as thousands of homes have been destroyed or damaged by floods that struck at least 33 of Kenya’s 47 counties, killing more than 70 people and displacing many across the East African nation. (Photo by LUIS TATO / AFP) (Photo by LUIS TATO/AFP via Getty Images)
Luis Tato | Afp | Getty Images
Al-Jaber was seen as a controversial choice to lead COP28 discussions in Dubai given that he also works as the head of the state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
Climate activists criticized his appointment saying his position as an oil executive reflects a clear conflict of interest — akin to “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.” His office has said he will play a pivotal role in the intergovernmental discussions to build consensus at the event.
Melanie Robinson, global climate program director at the World Resources Institute, said COP28 will be the biggest accountability moment for climate action in history — and fossil fuels will be at the heart of the talks.
She anticipated three main debates around the use of oil, gas and coal — the burning of which is the chief driver of the climate crisis.
“So, one is this ‘phase out’ or ‘phase down’ [of fossil fuels]. Actually, for us at WRI, since neither of those has got a timeline, the most important thing for us is that whatever language they agree to, it needs to send a really strong signal that the world is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels and it will do so equitably,” Robinson told CNBC via telephone.
“The second, but perhaps slightly linked, issue is whether it is ‘abated’ or ‘unabated.’ There’s a whole debate about the role of carbon capture technology abating emissions and there are certainly some oil companies and producer countries who would try to have us believe that with CCS [carbon capture and storage] we can continue to burn fossil fuels and still achieve our climate goals,” she continued.
“We think the science suggests that is simply not true. There is no credible scenario where CCS will allow continued use of fossil fuels, let alone expanding oil and gas. So, for us, it is important that COP28 acknowledges the limited role CCS will play.”
Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of the UAE’s Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and president of this year’s COP28 climate summit gestures during an interview as part of the 7th Ministerial on Climate Action (MoCA) in Brussels on July 13, 2023.
Francois Walschaerts | Afp | Getty Images
Abated fossil fuels refer to the process in which emissions are captured and stored with carbon capture and storage technologies. The definition of unabated fossil fuels lacks clarity, despite the term cropping up in several climate commitments, but it is said to refer to fossil fuels produced and used without interventions to substantially reduce the amount of emitted greenhouse gases.
Robinson said the third talking point on fossil fuels was that there is a risk Dubai “could become a platform celebrating pledges from the oil and gas industry that fail to curb the emissions of their products.”
She warned that any net zero pledge from the oil and gas industry that doesn’t involve so-called Scope 3 emissions would not be significant. Scope 3 emissions refer to the emissions produced from across a company’s entire value chain, and often account for the lion’s share of a firm’s carbon footprint.
“For us, it’s a bit like a cigarette company saying that whatever happens to cigarettes after they leave the factory gate has got nothing to do with them. So, that I think we have to watch,” Robinson said.
One unique component of the Dubai climate talks is the conclusion of the first global stocktake since the landmark Paris Agreement — the 2015 accord that aims to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The world has already warmed by around 1.1 degrees Celsius, scientists say, after over a century of burning fossil fuels as well as unequal and unsustainable energy and land use. Indeed, it is this temperature increase that is fueling a series of extreme weather events around the world.
The stocktake is the main tool through which progress under the Paris Agreement is assessed. According to the U.N. global stocktake synthesis report released in early September, only transformational change will be enough to get the world back on track to meeting its climate goals.
Cooling towers at a nuclear power plant in Slovakia. Nuclear power is likely to be discussed in great detail at the COP28 climate change summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Janos Kummer | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The role that nuclear power should play in creating a more sustainable future has long provoked strong feelings — among advocates and critics alike.
It’s set to be a hot topic at the COP28 summit in Dubai, which begins this week. There are reports that there will be a concerted effort to get behind a big increase in nuclear capacity from now to 2050.
Of particular interest to observers will be a ministerial event called “Atoms4NetZero” on Dec. 5. Co-hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the COP28 presidency, the event will “announce the IAEA Statement on Nuclear Power,” according to the COP28 website.
That, it adds, reflects the “critical role of nuclear in the net zero transition.”
Atoms4NetZero was namechecked by the World Nuclear Association in September when it announced the launch of an initiative called "Net Zero Nuclear," which aims to triple the planet's nuclear capacity by the middle of the century.
In a statement issued alongside that announcement, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the IAEA's director general, stressed the importance of the coming climate summit.
"Building on the efforts made during COP 26 and COP 27, nuclear energy will feature even more prominently at COP28," he said.
"As more nations understand the role nuclear can play in achieving energy security and decarbonisation targets, global support for nuclear energy is growing," he added.
The IAEA, for its part, will also have its own "Atoms4Climate" pavilion at COP28, where it says it will "showcase how nuclear technology and science are addressing the twin challenge of climate change mitigation and adaptation."
In a sign of how polarizing the debate around the subject can be, this month, the leader of Germany's center-right Christian Democratic Union lamented his country's move away from nuclear power after the closure of its last three plants in April 2023.
"The German government took a decision which was in our view absolutely wrong, a strategic mistake to get out of nuclear," Friedrich Merz told CNBC's Annette Weisbach.
Merz — whose party is not in the coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz — said rather than focusing only on wind and solar, "all energy sources" need to be utilized.
"The energy supply — for this country, for our industry — is decisive for our competitiveness," he went on to state.
High-profile figures in the German government do not share Merz's viewpoint.
"The phase-out of nuclear power makes our country safer; ultimately, the risks of nuclear power are uncontrollable," Steffi Lemke, Germany's federal minister for the environment and nuclear safety, said in April.
"We now face decades full of challenges before we can safely and responsibly dispose of our nuclear legacy," she later added.
"But switching off the final three nuclear power plants will usher in a new era in energy production."
This kind of analysis — that nuclear is not the answer — is shared by environmental organizations like Greenpeace.
"Nuclear power is touted as a solution to our energy problems, but in reality it's complex and hugely expensive to build," its website says. "It also creates huge amounts of hazardous waste."
"Renewable energy is cheaper and can be installed quickly," it added. "Together with battery storage, it can generate the power we need and slash our emissions."
While Germany — Europe's largest economy — has moved away from nuclear, other countries are looking to expand their capacity.
France, a major player in nuclear power, is also planning to increase its number of reactors.
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Energy markets are still affected by the shocks from Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and discussions about nuclear power are not going away anytime soon.
"Amid today's global energy crisis, reducing reliance on imported fossil fuels has become the top energy security priority," noted the International Energy Agency, viewed by many as a leading authority on the energy transition.
"No less important is the climate crisis: reaching net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by mid-century requires a rapid and complete decarbonisation of electricity generation and heat production," it added.
"Nuclear energy, with around 413 gigawatts (GW) of capacity operating in 32 countries, contributes to both goals by avoiding 1.5 gigatonnes (Gt) of global emissions and 180 billion cubic metres (bcm) of global gas demand a year."
The country’s leaders have been optimistic about its path to net zero, making bold claims that 50% of its power generation will come from renewables by 2030, and 100% by 2070.
However, coal production continues to soar and reliance on the fossil fuel won’t end any time soon as India struggles to find other ways to cool homes down and keep the lights on.
“India will not be able to survive completely without coal and there is no alternative for India in the coming 10 to 20 years,” said Anil Kumar Jha, former chairman and managing director of Coal India — the world’s largest coal producer.
“If you are hungry and don’t have cake to eat, will you eat bread or die hungry? That is presently what India is doing,” Jha told CNBC. “We don’t have an alternative to generate that amount of electricity, and will have to depend on coal.”
Fossil fuels, mainly coal, continue to make up 75% of India’s power supply, making it “the only fuel that India has in relative abundance,” said Neshwin Rodrigues, electricity policy analyst at Ember, a global energy think tank.
A man rides a motorcycle along a road past the National Thermal Power Corporation plant in Dadri on April 6, 2022.
Prakash Singh | Afp | Getty Images
Effects from climate change have triggered more than 700 heat waves in India over the past five decades,driving up electricity demand as more households purchase air conditioners.
“India is presently witnessing a rapid surge in electricity demand, driven by the electrification of numerous households, the burgeoning economy, and the increasing adoption of electric vehicles, infrastructure development, and cooling systems,” said Sooraj Narayan, Wood Mackenzie’s senior research analyst of power and renewables in Asia Pacific.
“This heightened power demand necessitates a reliable, cost-effective, and consistent power generation source, which coal currently fulfills,” he highlighted.
Whether we like it or not, coal will continue to have a role to play in India.
Sooraj Narayan
Wood Mackenzie
Data from the International Energy Agency showed that electricity consumption in India from air conditioners increased by 21% between 2019 and 2022.
Nearly 10% of the country’s electricity demand comes from space cooling and this will increase ninefold by 2050, the IEA said.
Simultaneously, India’s coal consumption has rapidly increased.
The country’s coal production rose to 893 million tons in 2022 to 2023, a 14% growth from 778 million tons in 2021 to 2022, according to data from the Ministry of Coal.
Jha estimated coal production could reach 1,335 million tons in 2031 to 2032.
This raises the question about whether India will be able to reach its 2030 target of achieving 50% of its energy requirements from non-fossil fuel sources. As of now, energy analysts don’t think it’s achievable.
“Coal remains a reliable fallback option for India to ensure consistent and dependable power generation, especially as it strives to meet the demands of a rapidly growing population and economy,” Narayan pointed out.
This could be the norm for India until after 2030 — when coal demand is expected to peak, according to Sumant Sinha, founder of Indian renewable energy firm ReNew Power.
“What we cannot afford as a country is essentially to shortchange our growth on account of a lack of power capabilities. Whether we like it or not, coal will continue to have a role to play in India,” Sinha told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on last week.
All the analysts who spoke to CNBC agreed the country’s solar, wind and hydro energy capabilities are still unreliable as they are dependent on weather conditions and the climate.
“Renewable sources like solar and wind are inherently variable, relying on natural factors such as sunlight, wind and water availability. This variability makes them less dependable for meeting the nation’s burgeoning power demand,” Wood Mackenzie’s Narayan said.
A worker walks through the Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower plant project construction site in Uttarakhand, India, on Feb. 9, 2022.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The South Asian nation currently has around 180 gigawatts of installed renewable energy, and hydropower makes up half of that mix. However, more advanced infrastructure is needed to ensure it serves as a reliable alternative to coal in the future.
“While India seeks to leverage hydropower to balance its grid, this source of renewable energy is not without its complexities,” Narayan said, explaining that projects are often delayed.
“The construction of dams and run-of-river projects for hydropower often encounters prolonged delays, extensive gestation periods, and is contingent on variable rainfall patterns.”
Solar and wind energy face the same hurdles as underdeveloped power grids curtail progress in the sector.
“India’s existing grid infrastructure is not fully equipped to handle the integration of variable renewable energy sources like solar and wind,” according to Narayan.
Ramping up investments — particularly in battery storage — may bethe most significant way for India to meet its net-zero transition goals.
India currently has around 180 gigawatts of installed renewable energy and aims to reach 500 gigawatts by 2030, according to government agency Invest India.
“Grid-scale battery storage is costly, with supply chain disruptions further driving up prices due to events like the Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts. These complexities render it challenging to rely solely on renewables for consistent and dependable power generation,” Narayan said.
Water being released from the Madupetty dam and hydro power station in Kerala, India.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Another issue is that renewables are a frontloaded investment where “all your investments happen on the day of installation. You pay for everything upfront,” said Rodrigues from Ember.
“The problem with that is that you require a lot of financing capacity, and there is limited financing capacity in India,” he added, warning that India’s net-zero goals cannot be met without foreign investments.
“Going forward, we need to find ways to first phase down coal, then we can talk about completely phasing it out.”
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Wind turbines and a lignite-fired power plant photographed in in Germany.
Jan Woitas | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Demand for oil, coal and natural gas is set to peak before the end of this decade, with fossil fuels’ share in the world’s energy supply dropping to 73% by the year 2030 after being “stuck for decades at around 80%,” the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.
A transformative shift in how the planet is powered is also underway, with the “phenomenal rise of clean energy technologies” like wind, solar, heat pumps and electric cars playing a crucial role, according to a statement accompanying the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2023 report.
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions are also on course to peak by the year 2025.
Despite these seismic shifts, the IEA says more effort is required to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The IEA’s analysis of governments’ “current policy settings” shows the world’s energy system is on course to look very different in the next few years.
In its statement, the Paris-based organization said it sees “almost 10 times as many electric cars on the road worldwide” in 2030, with “renewables’ share of the global electricity mix nearing 50%,” higher than the roughly 30% today.
Among other things, heat pumps — as well as other electric heating systems — are on course to outsell boilers that use fossil fuels.
“If countries deliver on their national energy and climate pledges on time and in full, clean energy progress would move even faster,” the IEA’s statement said.
“However, even stronger measures would still be needed to keep alive the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C,” it added.
“As things stand, demand for fossil fuels is set to remain far too high to keep within reach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 °C,” the statement went on to say.
In a sign of how high the stakes are, the IEA’s report said its Stated Policies Scenario was now “associated with a temperature rise of 2.4 °C in 2100 (with a 50% probability).”
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Tuesday’s report reaffirms the content of an op-ed published in September 2023 that was authored by the IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol, and published in the Financial Times.
In remarks published Tuesday, Birol sought to emphasize the huge potential for change while also highlighting the massive amount of work that still needs to be done.
“The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable,” he said. “It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ — and the sooner the better for all of us,” he added.
“Governments, companies and investors need to get behind clean energy transitions rather than hindering them,” Birol said.
“There are immense benefits on offer, including new industrial opportunities and jobs, greater energy security, cleaner air, universal energy access and a safer climate for everyone.”
“Taking into account the ongoing strains and volatility in traditional energy markets today, claims that oil and gas represent safe or secure choices for the world’s energy and climate future look weaker than ever,” Birol said.
The IEA’s report comes just weeks ahead of the U.N.’s COP28 climate change summit in the United Arab Emirates.
The shadow of the Paris Agreement, reached at COP21 in late 2015, looms large over the IEA’s report.
The landmark accord aims to “limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.”
The challenge is huge, and the United Nations has previously noted that 1.5 degrees Celsius is viewed as being “the upper limit” when it comes to avoiding the worst consequences of climate change.
The Jan De Nul Group’s Voltaire in waters off China in Dec. 2022. As wind turbines get bigger, the vessels that install them are having to change, too.
Located in the North Sea, over 130 kilometers off England’s northeast coast, the Dogger Bank Wind Farm still has some way to go before it’s fully operational, but the installation and powering up of its first turbine is a major feat in itself.
That’s because GE Vernova’s Haliade-X turbines stand 260 meters tall — that’s higher than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge — and have blades measuring 107 meters.
Turbine installation at Dogger Bank has required a huge amount of planning and preparation, with the Voltaire — a specialist vessel designed and built by the family-owned Jan De Nul Group — playing a key role.
With a lifting capacity of 3,200 metric tons, the Voltaire — named after the 18th-century French philosopher — will have installed a total of 277 Haliade-X turbines when its work is complete.
This image, from Dec. 2022, shows Jan De Nul Group’s Voltaire in China. A specialist installation vessel, the Voltaire has a lifting capacity of over 3,000 metric tons.
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Described by Dogger Bank as the “largest offshore jack-up installation vessel ever built,” in many ways, it’s the pinnacle of an extensive supply chain involving numerous businesses and stakeholders.
The logistics are complex and multi-layered, with water depth a particular issue.
The sea in the Dogger Bank Offshore Development Zone is up to 63 meters deep, meaning the Voltaire’s ability to work in deeper waters is crucial.
This is where its four legs come into play.
According to Jan De Nul, the legs of the Voltaire — which was built at the COSCO Shipping Shipyard in China — enable it to lift itself above the water’s surface.
With each leg measuring roughly 130 meters in length, they highlight the scale of equipment required to install huge offshore wind turbines like GE’s Haliade-X.
In an online Q&A before installations at Dogger Bank began, Jan De Nul’s Rutger Standaert spoke of their importance. “Thanks to those legs, the Voltaire can effectively operate at a water depth of 80 meters,” Standaert, who is manager of vessel construction at the business, said.
He noted that the Voltaire’s capabilities would enable installations further out to sea, allowing it to play a key role in the emerging floating offshore wind sector.
“Off the Scottish coast, for example, expensive floating windfarms are often the only way to tap into offshore wind,” he said. “The water is too deep for fixed windfarms, but the Voltaire can offer new opportunities.”
Thinking big
Once completed, the Dogger Bank Wind Farm will have a total capacity of 3.6 gigawatts (GW) and be able to power as many as six million homes per year, according to its developers.
Work on the project is taking place over three phases: Dogger Bank A, B, and C. A fourth phase of the wind farm known as Dogger Bank D has also been proposed, and would increase its capacity even further.
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Søren Lassen is head of offshore wind research at Wood Mackenzie, a research and consultancy group. He described Dogger Bank as “a huge project, especially if you combine the three phases.”
“It is a project that requires a lot of preparation,” he told CNBC. “There’s the logistics in terms of having the vessels to do the installation … and then of course, you also have the logistics in terms of getting the components to the marshaling port.”
Both of these aspects were being made “a lot more complicated” by the use of next-generation turbines and a next-generation installation vessel, Lassen said.
“You have … a lot of innovation that goes into this. And not only do you need a new vessel or new components, you also need new factories to build those components.”
As such, a slew of upgrades and adjustments were needed to “reverberate throughout the entire value chain” for operations to run smoothly, he added.
Bigger turbines, bigger challenges?
This image, from June 2023, shows tower sections of GE’s Haliade-X wind turbine at a site in the U.S.
David L. Ryan | The Boston Globe | Getty Images
Thanks to their sheer size, larger turbine designs have created a specific set of needs for the offshore wind sector and sites like the Dogger Bank Wind Farm.
“From cranes to vessels, we use a number of specially designed pieces of equipment to transport the Haliade-X turbines that will be used in this project,” a spokesperson for GE Offshore Wind said in a statement sent to CNBC.
Wood Mackenzie’s Lassen stressed the importance of having dedicated transportation vessels, noting that the towers of turbines need to be broken into three or four sections in order to fit on board.
Massive blades represent the biggest challenge, he said, as they have to be laid flat. “And that just means that you need a very, very long transportation vessel, [and] that you need to stack them up accordingly.”
Blades of the Haliade-X turbine stacked on top of each other at a site in the U.S. The past few years have seen companies develop increasingly large wind turbines.
David L. Ryan | The Boston Globe | Getty Images
Meanwhile, delays or bottlenecks can have far-reaching — and expensive — consequences.
Lassen cited the example of blades not being delivered on time, which leads to vessels having to “go away and then come back half a year later to do the installation. This is very costly, of course.”
And delays also lead to lost revenue.
“These projects are going out [and] generating a lot of power from the day that they’re being installed, pretty much,” Lassen added.
“So any delays [and] you’re also losing a lot of revenue, especially right now when the power prices are really, really high.”
The bigger picture
Offshore wind farms are set to play a significant role in reducing emissions and hitting net zero goals in the years ahead — but a supply chain that’s well-run and reliable will be key to the industry’s success.
This is set to cost serious money. According to Wood Mackenzie, a base case of 30 GW of installations per year by 2030 — excluding China — will require investment of around $27 billion by 2026 to build out supply chains.
“The supply chain needs to invest,” Lassen said, adding that it also needed capital, certainty and concrete, firm orders. However, cost pressures mean there is currently uncertainty over projects planned for 2025, 2026 and 2027.
“Any delays to these projects takes away volume from the supply chain, and the supply chain needs that volume to convert it into revenue to build new factories,” Lassen explained.
It is crucial that projects planned for the next few years go ahead, he added. “That helps the underlying supply chain ramp up so they can build the capacity [for] ’27, ’28, ’29 and well into the 2030s as well.”
A customer inspects a Tesla Motors Inc. Powerwall unit inside a home.
Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist | Bloomberg | Getty Images
After a summer of extreme weather and wildfires and now during the peak of hurricane season, the power going out again is becoming familiar to more Americans. That means it may be a good time to consider a home backup power storage system.
The pervasiveness of extreme weather and climate change, local utility reliability and cost may all factor into this financial decision.
“Backup power may be warranted depending on regional factors and geography as well as the state of the infrastructure there,” said Benjamin R. Dierker, executive director of the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure, a research and educational organization, in an email.
In coastal areas, for instance, considerations include the resilience of storm or sea walls, the quality and capacity of drainage infrastructure and the electrical grid’s hardiness, he said. In other areas, extreme weather conditions like high winds, tornados and ice may cause falling trees or downed lines — a risk that’s significantly mitigated if there are buried utility lines rather than overhead lines, Dierker said. Pre-emptive shutdowns, due to extreme weather or other factors, can also be a consideration.
As of Sept. 11, there have been 23 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect United States, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, which has a graphic that shows the locations of these disasters. These events included two flooding events, 18 severe storm events, one tropical cyclone event, one wildfire event, and one winter storm event.
Here’s what consumers need to consider about home back-up power options:
Appliance needs during power outages
A good first step is to think about the most important appliances you are running on electricity and how long you might realistically need them to run in the event of an outage, said Vikram Aggarwal, chief executive and founder of EnergySage, which helps consumers compare clean home energy solutions.
If you have minimal backup needs, a small portable fossil-fuel generator or battery could suffice, which can cost a few hundred dollars. But if you want your home to operate as normal, you’ll want to consider whole home options.
Location can be a factor since in some areas, the power goes out infrequently or for only short periods of time. In some states like California, Texas and Louisiana, however, it can be a whole different ball game. California consumers, for example, can get an up-to-date sense of outages in their area to get a sense of what their risk may be.
Fossil fuel vs. battery power
If you’re not opposed to fossil fuel-powered options, there are several categories to consider based on your power needs. For lower power needs, a portable generator, which often runs on gasoline or diesel can cost a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. There are also higher-priced portable versions that are usually quieter and more fuel-efficient and may be able to power multiple large appliances—and for longer. How long depends in part on the appliances you’re powering.
A whole home standby generator, meanwhile, is permanently installed and automatically kicks on when the power goes out. This generator type is often fueled by propane or natural gas and costs vary based on size, brand and fuel type. There are options in the $3,000 to $5,000 range, but with installation the total can be considerably higher. This could be a good option if you’re expecting outages for multiple days; theoretically, the generator can run for as long as fuel is supplied, but it can be advisable to shut it down for engine-cooling purposes.
For the environmentally-inclined, battery-powered backups can be a good option for their more environmentally friendly and quieter nature. For a few hundred dollars, give or take, there are lower-priced smaller to mid-size battery options that people can purchase and that will last for several hours.
There are also battery-powered options to back up the whole home that offer many of the same functions as conventional generators, but without the need for refueling, according to EnergySage. Consumers might expect to pay $10,000 to $20,000 to install a home battery backup system, EnergySage said. This can often last for eight to 12 hours, or even longer if you aren’t using it to power items such as air conditioning or electric heat.
Incentives that lower the cost of purchase and installation
When thinking about what type of backup to choose, incentives can factor into the equation. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, households can receive a 30% tax credit for a battery storage installation, even if it’s not paired with a solar system, Aggarwal said.
Other state and local incentives may also be available. For instance, in some markets like California, Vermont, Massachusetts and New York, utilities pay consumers to tap into their batteries during peak periods like the summer, Aggarwal said. Consumers with larger batteries—10kWh or more—may be able to earn hundreds of dollars a year, he said.
EVs as a backup power option for the home
Some electrical vehicles can be used to back up essential items, or, in some cases, a whole home.
Ford’s F-150 Lightning, for example, can power a home for three days, or up to 10 days under certain circumstances, according to the company. With the required system installed, and the truck plugged in, stored power is transferred seamlessly to the home in the case of a power outage. For its part, GM recently said it would expand its vehicle-to-home bidirectional charging technology to its entire lineup of Ultium-based electric vehicles by model year 2026.
“If you’re contemplating spending $10,000 on a whole home gas generator system, why not think about an EV with this capability instead?” said Stephen Pantano, head of market transformation at Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on electrifying homes, businesses and communities.
Consumers in the market for a new stove might also consider an induction model with an integrated battery to power it or other items such a fridge on an as-needed basis, Pantano said. “This opens up new possibilities for power backups that weren’t there before.”
Solar-plus-storage can lead to long-term savings
Home solar panels are becoming more popular, but most are connected to the grid, and you need some kind of battery storage in order to have backup power, said Sarah Delisle, vice president of government affairs and communications for Swell Energy, a home energy solutions provider.
That’s where a solar-plus-storage system can come in handy. It allows people to use electricity generated from their solar panels during the day at a later point, which can be particularly useful for people who live in areas where there are frequent power outages, said Ted Tiffany, senior technical lead at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a group that promotes moving buildings off fossil fuels.
A solar-plus-storage system costs about $25,000 to $35,000, depending on the size of the battery and other factors, according to the U.S. Dept of Energy. It’s easier and more cost-effective to install panels and the battery at the same time, but it’s not required. Homeowners who have already installed solar panels and want to add storage, might expect to pay between $12,000 to $22,000 for a battery, according to the Energy Department. Consumers who purchase a battery on its own or with backup are eligible for federal tax credits. Some states provide additional solar battery incentives.
Also consider the long-term savings potential, Tiffany said. He has a family member who, with electrical upgrades, spent around $8,000 on a fossil fuel-powered whole home generator. Putting that money into solar instead might have been more economical because of the energy savings over time and tax incentives, he said.
Consumers can visit EnergySage to find contractors and get information about solar and incentives. They can also visit, Switch is On, which helps consumers find information on electrification and efficiency measures for home appliances that supports the renewable energy integration.
German automaker BMW on Saturday launched a hotly anticipated electric concept car, saying the so-called “Vision Neue Klasse” represents the dawn of a new era for the company.
BMW’s latest design showcases a platform that will underpin the brand’s next generation of electric vehicles. The first electric vehicles based on the Neue Klasse — or new class — architecture are set to enter production in 2025.
The new line-up of electric vehicles includes BMW’s sixth generation of battery cells, which the company says will improve both the charging speed and range of the Neue Klasse platform by up to 30%. As a result of these measures, BMW said the overall vehicle efficiency would increase by up to 25%.
“With the BMW Vision Neue Klasse, we put every innovative force that BMW has on the electric side, on the digital side and, of course, that car will also be prepared for the industry of circularity,” BMW CEO Oliver Zipse told CNBC’s Arabile Gumede.
“In only two years’ time, these cars will hit the road, and with that, overall, we lead BMW to a new era of innovation and sustainability. That’s the purpose of our show at the IAA,” Zipse said.
The Vision Neue Klasse is set to make its public debut in the coming days at the IAA motor show in Munich, which also serves as the headquarters of BMW. The IAA show is one of the world’s largest mobility trade fairs.
“We believe that electromobility will be the largest growth segment in the world for the automotive industry and we want to be a leading force here,” Zipse said.
An employee checks the logo of a car during its final inspection on a production line at Germany’s carmaker BMW plant in Leipzig, eastern Germany, on October 20, 2022.
Ronny Hartmann | Afp | Getty Images
The BMW chief executive projected that battery electric vehicles will represent 15% of the carmaker’s worldwide sales by the end of 2023 and that “we will increase that further next year and the year after next.”
Frank Weber, member of the Board of Management of BMW responsible for development, said the Neue Klasse range represents a “major technological leap” for the carmaker.
In early August, BMW said that it expected ongoing challenges from supply chain issues and stubbornly high inflation to persist over the coming months. It nevertheless lifted the annual outlook for its margin on earnings before interest and taxes in the automotive segment.
Shares of BMW are up around 13% year-to-date.
Asked about the presence of Chinese electric vehicle giants at the Munich motor show and whether he was worried about Chinese exports into Europe impacting BMW’s business, Zipse replied, “No, we are not afraid at all.”
“That is a sign of attractiveness when global players like the Chinese, which is the largest car market in the world, come here to Munich and showcase what they want. It is far more than auto, this is a tech show, this is an innovation show,” Zipse said.
“And I think to have everyone here, the Americans, the Europeans and now also the Chinese, is super exciting. You hear it in my words already, I’m more excited, and I’m not afraid at all, and it is good that we have a show which attracts a lot of competition. That’s super.”
The Hywind Tampen project is located in waters off the Norwegian coast.
Ole Berg-rusten | AFP | Getty Images
A facility described as “the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm” was officially opened by Crown Prince Haakon of Norway on Wednesday, marking the culmination of a major renewable energy project years in the making.
Located around 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) off the coast of Norway in depths ranging from 260 to 300 meters, Hywind Tampen uses 11 turbines. The wind farm produced its first power in Nov. 2022 and became fully operational this month.
While wind is a renewable energy source, Hywind Tampen helps power operations at oil and gas fields, the idea being that it will cut these sites’ carbon dioxide emissions in the process.
“Hywind Tampen has a system capacity of 88 MW and is expected to cover about 35 per cent of the annual need for electricity on the five platforms Snorre A and B and Gullfaks A, B and C,” Norwegian energy firm Equinor said.
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Floating offshore wind turbines are different from fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines, which are rooted to the seabed. One advantage of floating turbines is that they can be installed in far deeper waters than fixed-bottom ones.
In recent years a range of companies and major economies like the U.S. have laid out goals to ramp up floating wind installations.
Equinor, a major player in the fossil fuel industry, describes the turbines at Hywind Tampen as being “mounted on floating concrete structures with a common anchoring system.”
Alongside Equinor, partners in the Hywind Tampen project include Vår Energi, INPEX Idemitsu, Petoro, Wintershall Dea and OMV.
The project off Norway’s coast marks Equinor’s latest move in the floating wind sector. Back in 2017, it started operations at Hywind Scotland, a five-turbine, 30 MW facility it calls the planet’s first floating wind farm.
“With Hywind Tampen, we have shown that we can plan, build and commission a large, floating offshore wind farm in the North Sea,” Equinor’s Siri Kindem, who heads up the firm’s renewables business in Norway, said in a statement.
“We will use the experience and learning from this project to become even better,” she added. “We will build bigger, reduce costs and build a new industry on the shoulders of the oil and gas industry.”
Powering the oil and gas industry
The use of a floating wind farm to help power the fossil fuel industry is likely to spark significant debate at a time when discussions about climate change and the environment are at the front and center of many people’s minds.
This is because fossil fuels’ effect on the environment is considerable. The United Nations says that, since the 19th century, “human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.”
“Burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gas emissions that act like a blanket wrapped around the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures,” it adds.
The stakes are high. Speaking at the COP27 climate change summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, last year, the U.N. Secretary General issued a stark warning to attendees.
“We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,” Antonio Guterres said.
“Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.”
Nuclear power has been touted as a proven, safe way of producing clean energy, but why isn’t it more widely adopted?
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
As the world pushes toward its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, nuclear power has been touted as the way to bridge the energy gap — but some, like Greenpeace, have expressed skepticism, warning that it has “no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future.”
Nuclear energy is not only clean. It is reliable and overcomes the intermittent nature of renewables like wind, hydro and solar power.
“How do you provide cheap, reliable and pollution-free energy for a world of 8 billion people? Nuclear energy is really the only scalable version of that, renewables are not reliable,” Michael Shellenberger, founder of environmental organization Environmental Progress, told CNBC.
According to the report, there are 486 nuclear reactors either planned, proposed or under construction as of July, amounting to 65.9 billion watts of electric capacity – the highest amount of electric capacity under construction the industry has seen since 2015.
Only a few years ago, the International Energy Agency had warned that nuclear power was “at risk of future decline.” The report in 2019 said then that “nuclear power has begun to fade, with plants closing and little new investment made, just when the world requires more low-carbon electricity.”
Schroders noted that nuclear power is not only scalable, but much cleaner — emitting just 10-15 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour. That’s competitive with both wind and solar energy and substantially better than coal and natural gas.
Nuclear power is also the second largest source of low carbon energy after hydro power, more than wind and solar combined, Schroders said.
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Shellenberger’s view is that renewable energy is reaching the limits of what it can achieve in many countries. For example, hydroelectric power is not viable in all countries, and those that have them are “tapped out,” which means they cannot exploit any more land or water resources for that purpose.
Nuclear power is a great alternative, with “very small amounts of waste, easy to manage, never hurt anybody, very low cost when you build the same kind of plants over and over again,” he added.
That’s the reason why nations are having a second look at nuclear power, Shellenberger said. “It’s because renewables aren’t able to take us where we need to go. And countries want to be free of fossil fuels.”
Twelve years after Fukushima, we’re just getting better at operating these plants. They’re more efficient, they’re safer, we have better training.
Michael Shellenberger
Environmental Progress
In an interview with CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” last week, Adam Fleck, director of research, ratings and ESG at Morningstar, said the social concern around nuclear power is “somewhat misunderstood.”
While the tragedies in Chernobyl and Fukushima cannot be forgotten, using nuclear is one of the safest ways to produce energy, even taking into consideration the need to store the nuclear waste.
“Many of those [storage facilities] are highly protected. They’re protected against earthquakes, tornadoes, you name it. But there’s a reason why there hasn’t been a significant tragedy or concern related to storage of nuclear waste.”
Shellenberger said: “Twelve years after Fukushima, we’re just getting better at operating these plants. They’re more efficient, they’re safer, we have better training.”
There have been new designs for nuclear power plants that have also enhanced safety, “but really what’s made nuclear safe has been the kind of the boring stuff, the stuff of the trainings and the routines and the best practices,” he told CNBC.
So, if nuclear has been a tested, proven and safe way of generating power, why isn’t it more widely adopted?
Fleck said it boils down to one main factor: cost.
The extra time that nuclear plants take to build has major implications for climate goals, as existing fossil-fueled plants continue to emit carbon dioxide while awaiting substitution.
“I think the biggest issue of nuclear has actually been cost economics. It’s very costly to build a nuclear plant up front. There’s a lot of overruns, a lot of delays. And I think, for investors looking to put money to work in this space, they need to find players that have a strong track record of being able to build out that capacity.”
But not everyone is convinced.
A report by global campaigning network Greenpeace in March 2022 was of the position that besides the commonly held concern of nuclear safety, nuclear energy is too expensive and too slow to deploy compared to other renewables.
Greenpeace noted that a nuclear power plant takes about 10 years to build, adding “the extra time that nuclear plants take to build has major implications for climate goals, as existing fossil-fueled plants continue to emit carbon dioxide while awaiting substitution.”
Furthermore, it points out that uranium extraction, transport and processing are not free of greenhouse gas emissions either.
Greenpeace acknowledged that “all in all, nuclear power stations score comparable with wind and solar energy.” However, wind and solar can be implemented much faster and on a much bigger scale, making a faster impact on carbon emissions and the clean energy transition.
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Nuclear power is a “distraction” from the “answer we need” — such as renewables and energy storage solutions to mitigate the unreliability from renewables, said Dave Sweeney, a nuclear analyst and nuclear-free campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation.
“That’s the way that we need to go, to keep the lights on and the Geiger counters down,” he told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Friday.
An XPeng Inc. G9 electric vehicle at the Shanghai Auto Show in Shanghai, China, on Monday, April 24, 2023.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Global electric vehicle makers are tapping advanced technology to vie with each other and domestic brands in the intensively competitive Chinese market.
“China’s domestic brands are leading the market in the development and implementation of advanced assisted driving systems, capitalizing on their early-entry advantages in the electric and intelligent vehicle sector,” research firm Canalys said in a recent report.
“These brands have an edge over other joint ventures in the planning and execution of smart assisted driving systems.”
BofA Securities in a May report said it expects China to still be the world’s largest EV market in 2025, standing at 40%-45% market share.
“China auto makers are accelerating vehicle platform, technology upgrade or innovation, leading to outstanding user experience. China EV products are much more competitive than before, and China will continue to see EV penetration expanding, in our view,” said the BofA Securities analysts.
But these global players are now stepping up their efforts.
On Friday, BMW China announced that it is accelerating the development of hands-free autonomous driving features, also known as Level 3 or L3 functions. BMW China said it plans to roll those out by end of 2023 or early 2024 and will ensure compliance with local regulations.
L3 autonomous driving has not been widely approved in China, though some companies including domestic EV maker Xpeng has been authorized to test the technology.
The Chinese market is growing at an unprecedented pace. Toyota will also work together as a group to reform how we work & think to survive in China.
“We are now accelerating the expansion of our local electric portfolio and at the same time preparing for the next innovation step,” Ralf Brandstätter, Volkswagen AG board member for China, said in a company statement.
Volkswagen and Xpeng will co-develop two new EVs that will incorporate its advanced driver-assist software for the Chinese market and aims to roll them out in 2026.
“The Chinese market is growing at an unprecedented pace. Toyota will also work together as a group to reform how we work & think to survive in China,” Tatsuro Ueda, CEO of China for Toyota, said in a company statement.
“By promoting local development … we will attempt to develop and provide competitive products that can satisfy Chinese customers at a fast pace.”
“Now more than ever, it’s vital that we bolster our energy security,” U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Monday.
Christopher Ames | E+ | Getty Images
The U.K. government on Monday provoked outrage from environmental groups after it confirmed plans to grant hundreds of new oil and gas licenses for the North Sea.
According to authorities, the move will protect over 200,000 jobs and boost the country’s energy independence at a time of geopolitical instability following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It’s expected that the first of the new licenses will be issued this fall.
Alongside new drilling for fossil fuels, the government also confirmed the locations of two new “clusters” for carbon capture usage and storage.
These will be located in northeast Scotland and the Humber, in England, and complement two previously-announced CCUS clusters. CCUS has its advocates, but the technology is divisive and has been questioned by environmental organizations.
“Now more than ever, it’s vital that we bolster our energy security and capitalise on that independence to deliver more affordable, clean energy to British homes and businesses,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a statement.
“Even when we’ve reached net zero in 2050, a quarter of our energy needs will come from oil and gas,” he added. “But there are those who would rather that it come from hostile states than from the supplies we have here at home.”
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While the government was keen to stress what it viewed as the upsides to its announcements, environmental groups were highly critical of the plans.
“Rishi Sunak’s energy security drive should focus on energy efficiency and the UK’s vast home-grown renewable resources, rather than championing more costly and dirty fossil fuels,” said Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of policy.
“Climate change is already battering the planet with unprecedented wildfires and heatwaves across the globe,” Childs added. “Granting hundreds of new oil and gas licences will simply pour more fuel on the flames, while doing nothing for energy security as these fossil fuels will be sold on international markets and not reserved for UK use.”
Elsewhere, Greenpeace U.K.’s Philip Evans described relying on fossil fuels as being “terrible for our energy security, the cost of living, and the climate.”
Globally, the U.K.’s plans for new oil and gas licenses would also appear to run counter to comments from the U.N. Secretary General, who has previously slammed new funding for fossil fuel exploration, calling it “delusional.”
Green debate
The U.K.’s announcement about its plans for North Sea oil and gas comes at a time of renewed discussion about the implementation of green policies, such as London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone.
A key policy of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, a high-profile Labour politician, the scheme covers a large chunk of the U.K. capital, charging drivers whose vehicles do not comply with a specific set of emissions standards.
The planned expansion of the ULEZ was seen as being a major reason for Sunak’s Conservatives narrowly holding the seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in a recent byelection.
In a sign of how Sunak may be looking to tap into the often polarizing debate surrounding the environment and net-zero, on Sunday he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “reviewing anti-car schemes across the country.”
Some Conservative MPs have also questioned the government’s plans to stop the sale of new diesel and gasoline cars and vans by 2030, part of a wider goal to require all new cars and vans to have zero tailpipe emissions by 2035.
A number of lawmakers within Sunak’s party have suggested pushing back the 2030 deadline, but the prime minister does not appear to be in favor of this.
During an interview with the Sunday Telegraph this weekend, Sunak is reported to have said, “The 2030 target has been our policy for a long time and continues to be. We are not considering a delay to that date.”
Volvo Cars CEO Jim Rowan photographed in Nov. 2022. The company wants every car it sells to be fully electric by the year 2030.
Anders Wiklund | AFP | Getty Images
Volvo Cars does not plan to use autonomous driving technology from Tesla and will instead focus on developing its own systems, according to the company’s CEO.
Back in June, the Gothenburg-headquartered carmaker said it had inked an agreement with Elon Musk’s firm that would give its electric vehicles access to 12,000 Tesla Superchargers in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday morning, Volvo Cars chief Jim Rowan was asked whether this meant the business would consider using Tesla’s autonomous driving tech in the future.
“We’ve already made that decision in terms of what we want to control internally, in terms of our technology stack,” Rowan said.
“And we’ve chosen that we want to be in full control of our ADAS [advanced driver assistance systems], all the way up to full AD [autonomous driving] software,” he added.
“So we will continue to write that, we will continue to invest in that, and we’ll continue to develop that.”
In a sign of how the company’s strategy is taking shape, Volvo Cars announced late last year that it had taken full ownership of Zenseact, a business specializing in AD software.
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Rowan was speaking to CNBC after Volvo Cars reported second-quarter results. The company said earnings before interest and taxes were 5 billion Swedish krona (around $487.5 million) compared to 10.8 billion Swedish krona in the second quarter of 2022.
“During the quarter, the company reported a continued strong sales performance in electric cars,” it said in a statement accompanying its earnings report. “Sales of fully electric Volvo car models increased by 178 per cent year-on-year during the quarter and accounted for 16 per cent of its total share.”
Volvo Cars’ longer-term electrification strategy is centered around every car it sells being fully electric by the year 2030. This would mean a phase-out of vehicles using internal combustion engines, a category that includes hybrids.
The past few years have seen the automotive industry suffer issues related to supply chains and the cost of materials crucial to the production of electric vehicles.
During his interview with CNBC, Rowan gave an overview of the current state of play. “Last year we saw lithium spike quite dramatically, that’s now come down substantially from its peak,” he said.
“It went from about 10 to about $110 per kilo and now it’s down … below, somewhere between 30 and 40 [dollars],” he added. “So we’re starting to see that normalize, and I think that will keep reducing through the course of this year.”
Rowan also described semiconductors as being “patchy” in 2022 but “much, much better this year.”
This had been shown in Volvo Cars own output, he said. “We manufactured over 50% more cars this quarter than we did in the same quarter last year.”
He added that 2022 had also been affected by Covid lockdowns. “If you remember, Shanghai was locked down for almost 60 days — we had a lot of the suppliers in Shanghai, and that was an effect there,” Rowan said.
“So we’re seeing that bounce back really quickly for us.”
A plane flying over Northamptonshire, England. For many, turbulence is an uncomfortable part of air travel.
Joe Giddens – Pa Images | Pa Images | Getty Images
Turbulence during a flight can be an uncomfortable experience for many, ranging from mild bumpiness to more serious instances of damaged airplanes and injured passengers.
With millions of people jetting off on their summer vacations, a recent study from researchers in England provides some challenging, but important, reading.
Related to wind shear, clear-air turbulence presents a specific challenge to pilots because it’s tricky to identify ahead of time and can appear without warning.
The World Meteorological Organization, for example, says CAT “often — though not necessarily always — occurs in the absence of cloud, making it difficult to detect visually.”
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In an announcement accompanying the report’s release, the University of Reading laid out some of the researchers’ key findings.
“At a typical point over the North Atlantic — one of the world’s busiest flight routes — the total annual duration of severe turbulence increased by 55% from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020,” it said.
In addition, moderate turbulence jumped from 70.0 to 96.1 hours, while light turbulence hit 546.8 hours, up from 466.5.
The university went on to state that warmer air from carbon dioxide emissions “is increasing windshear in the jet streams, strengthening clear-air turbulence in the North Atlantic and globally.”
The paper’s authors say their research “represents the best evidence yet that CAT has increased over the past four decades, consistent with the expected effects of climate change.”
Aircraft passengers are required to fasten their seatbelt when the sign is illuminated, and advised to keep it secured for the duration of a flight.
Pedrojperez | Istock | Getty Images
Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading and co-author of the study, spoke to CNBC and provided some context to the findings.
“[This] doesn’t necessarily mean planes are encountering turbulence, clear air turbulence, 55% more often because, of course, planes try and avoid it and they’ve been getting very good at avoiding it,” he said.
There is, however, “more turbulence in the atmosphere, full stop.”
“I think … it’s hard to believe that there could be 55% more turbulence in the atmosphere and for planes not to be encountering it more,” Williams said. He also made it clear that the report analyzed atmospheric observations rather than directly looking at aircraft measurements of turbulence.
Williams said they could include “internal damage to the aircraft from objects and people … colliding with the insides, usually the ceiling, and more mundanely just routine wear and tear or what engineers call ‘fatigue’ on the aeroplane.”
In a statement issued last month, Mark Prosser, a PhD researcher at the University of Reading and co-author of the study, highlighted the financial implications of turbulence.
“Airlines will need to start thinking about how they will manage the increased turbulence, as it costs the industry $150–500m annually in the USA alone,” he said, referencing a figure on a website related to the NCAR Research Applications Laboratory.
“Every additional minute spent travelling through turbulence increases wear-and-tear on the aircraft, as well as the risk of injuries to passengers and flight attendants,” Prosser added.
What then, can be done to mitigate or manage clear-air turbulence? Among other things, Williams stressed the importance of improving forecasting.
“We need more research into understanding exactly what generates turbulence and how to calculate it,” he said. “I think we should be investing in better turbulence forecasting research.”
When it comes to technology, there’s room for significant developments in the years ahead, even if challenges remain.
“Although the radar on the flight deck can’t see … clear air turbulence, there’s a related technology called LIDAR that stands for light detection and ranging,” Williams said.
LIDAR, Williams explained, operates on the same principles as radar but uses ultraviolet light and lasers instead.
“By using that different wavelength of light, we can see invisible clear air turbulence ahead,” he said.
“They’ve done test flights and it works about … up to 20 miles ahead of the aircraft … [so] you can see it on the screen in the cockpit and put the seatbelt sign on and try and fly around it.”
There’s one big catch, however. “Unfortunately it’s very expensive and also comes in a big heavy box, which you don’t want really to go on a plane to add weight onto the aircraft,” Williams said.
While it’s not being used at the moment, things could change.
“In future, as it presumably becomes miniaturized and the cost comes down and there’s more turbulence in the atmosphere as well, we might see aircraft retrofitted with LIDAR. And that would be a game changer if it happens,” Williams said.
“It’s certainly dependent on our emissions,” Williams said. “Each additional one degree Celsius of warming implies an extra amount of turbulence,” he added.
“To that extent it’s in our control … [because] we can control the warming from our emissions. But, you know, I think … unless we do something drastic, there’s more turbulence on the cards in the coming decades.”
Williams also had some measured words of comfort for flyers who may feel concerned about such an outlook.
“I’m not suggesting that it’s going get so bad that planes will start falling out of the sky or we’ll have to stop flying in certain parts of the world,” he said.
Severe turbulence, he added, is “quite rare — only 0.1% of the atmosphere at 40,000 feet has severe turbulence in it, so if you’re on a plane it’s very unlikely that your plane will hit that 0.1%.”
“However, given the number of planes in the skies, one of them will. But even if turbulence were to treble, it would still just be 0.3% of the atmosphere.”
His advice to passengers is straightforward. “I don’t think there’s a major worry here for passengers.”
“It’s sensible, of course, to keep your seatbelt fastened, just in case you’re unlucky and you do hit that tiny part of the atmosphere that has the turbulence in it.”
Heavy electrical transmission lines at the powerful Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, located in California’s Mojave Desert at the base of Clark Mountain and just south of this stateline community on Interstate 15, are viewed on July 15, 2022 near Primm, Nevada. The Ivanpah system consists of three solar thermal power plants and 173,500 heliostats (mirrors) on 3,500 acres and features a gross capacity of 392 megawatts (MW).
George Rose | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management this week said it has advanced two transmission projects proposed by public utility NV Energy that would facilitate more renewable energy development and delivery in Nevada.
The agency will start an environmental review for the Greenlink North project, which will span over 450 miles to connect Las Vegas to Reno, and release a draft environmental impact statement for the Greenlink West transmission project, which will cover 232 miles from Ely to Yerington.
Once completed, the projects will connect eight gigawatts of clean energy to the Western power grid. The plans would bolster the Biden administration’s goal to deploy 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands and waters by 2025 and achieve a carbon-free power sector by 2035.
The announcement comes as Congress debates federal energy permitting overhauls, with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introducing a measure earlier this month to speed permitting of both fossil fuel and renewable energy projects.
Transmission projects involve expanding high-voltage lines that transport renewable energy to populated areas and will play a critical role in accelerating the clean energy transition while meeting growing power demand.
The BLM aims to finalize proposed documents and develop a record of decision for the Greenlink West project by late 2024. It will also release draft environmental planning documents for the Greenlink North project for public comment later this year.
“Our public lands have a critical role to play in the clean energy transition,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement.
The agency said it has approved 35 clean energy projects over the past couple of years, including solar, geothermal, and gen-tie installations, which are anticipated to generate 8,160 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power more than 2.6 million homes.
Some projects include the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project in New Mexico and construction approval for California’s Sunlight Storage II Battery Storage System. The agency is also reviewing projects like Utah’s Star Range Solar Project and Nevada’s Bonanza Solar Project.
Kocho, a food produced using enset, served with honey and red pepper sauce.
Mwayout | Istock | Getty Images
Earlier this year, shoppers in the U.K. faced a shortage of fresh fruit and vegetables, with some of the country’s grocery stores rationing produce like tomatoes, lettuce and peppers.
The reasons behind the scarcity of ingredients crucial to a tasty salad were complicated and varied, ranging from high energy prices to adverse weather conditions in supplier countries.
While the shortage has more or less abated, it did highlight the fragile nature of our food system and the huge importance of food security.
In 2022, a major report from the United Nations showed the scale of the problem.
“Between 702 and 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021,” The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report said.
The U.N.’s report flagged the “major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition: conflict, climate extremes and economic shocks, combined with growing inequalities.”
With concerns about the effects of climate change on the agriculture sector mounting, what we grow and eat could be on the cusp of a significant shift.
Crops unfamiliar to many of us could have a crucial role to play in the years ahead. In June 2022, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, listed several sources of food that could play a big role in future diets.
They include seaweed; cacti like the prickly pear; a type of wild coffee able to cope with far warmer temperatures than Arabica coffee; and enset, also known as the false banana.
“Enset is a relative of the banana,” James Borrell, research leader in Trait Diversity and Function at RBG Kew, told CNBC.
“But whereas a banana is from Southeast Asia and you eat the fruit, enset is from Africa and has been domesticated — and is only cultivated — in Ethiopia,” he added.
“You actually eat the whole trunk, or pseudo stem, and the underground corm.”
“Something like 15 plants could feed a person for a year, so it’s … very large, and it’s very productive.”
The enset plant in Ethiopia. Enset is also known as “the tree against hunger.”
Glen_pearson | Istock | Getty Images
When it comes to food security, the potential of enset — which is also referred to as “the tree against hunger” — appears to be considerable.
Borrell told CNBC that it possesses a combination of traits and characteristics “very unusual in crops.”
“Firstly, it’s perennial, and so it keeps growing each year if you don’t harvest it,” he said.
A fruit tree may also be perennial, he noted, “but it only produces its fruit at a certain time of year — so you either need to consume it then or you need to store it.”
With enset, however, “you eat the whole thing … so the fact that it gets larger each year, you can simply harvest it when you need it.”
That, Borrell said, makes it particularly useful for subsistence farmers working on several crops.
“If some year your other crops fail, or they don’t have a sufficient yield, you can eat a little bit more of your enset,” he said.
“If you have a good year for your other crops, you can eat a bit less of your enset.” That means enset could “buffer seasonal food insecurity.”
“For a subsistence farmer, that’s an amazing product,” he added.
“It’s like a bank account of food, it’s like a green asset that you can maintain and nurture and if you don’t use it, it keeps accumulating.”
At the moment, RGB Kew saysenset supplies food to 20 million people in Ethiopia, but the organization adds it “could be a climate-smart crop for the future” thanks to its “high yield and resilience to long periods of drought.”
In late 2021, researchers based in the U.K. and Ethiopia, including Borrell, published a paper in Environmental Research which provided a tantalizing glimpse of the role it might play in the future.
“We find that despite a highly restricted current distribution, there is significant potential for climate-resilient enset expansion both within Ethiopia and across eastern and southern Africa,” the authors said.
Kocho, produced using the enset plant, photographed in Ethiopia.
Glen_pearson | Istock | Getty Images
Could, then, the cultivation of enset extend from Ethiopia to other parts of the world, buffering other crops in the process?
“The very important caveat is that it is an Ethiopian crop,” Borrell said.
“And so those kinds of decisions are entirely up to Ethiopia … it’s Ethiopia’s indigenous knowledge, and it’s Ethiopia’s farmers that have spent thousands of years domesticating it.”
“So although we can talk about what is the potential and would it work, it’s very specifically not up to us to say whether it should happen and if it can happen.”
It’s unlikely, then, that people outside of Ethiopia will be seeing enset on their plate anytime soon.
Nevertheless, its resilience and importance in shoring up supply for farmers there illustrate how practices rooted in tradition may have a big role to play in the way we think about and consume food.
“It’s an amazing crop, with amazing indigenous knowledge underlying it,” Borrell said.
“I think the message is that this is just one of hundreds or even thousands of underutilized crops that are not particularly extensively researched, and they’re not widely known.”
“So for every plant we talk about, like enset, there’s many others that could have … particular combinations of traits that could help us address a challenge that we face.”
Solarcycle CTO Pablo Dias and COO Rob Vinje show a solar panel laminate after it’s been cleanly separated from the glass to investors and partners. The laminate is where most of the value is contained in a panel, like silver, silicon, and copper.
Solarcycle
The growing importance of wind and solar energy to the U.S. power grid, and the rise of electric vehicles, are all key to the nation’s growing need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, lower carbon emissions and mitigate climate change.
But at the same time, these burgeoning renewable energy industries will soon generate tons of waste as millions of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion EV batteries reach the end of their respective lifecycles.
As the saying goes, though, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Anticipating the pileup of exhausted clean-energy components — and wanting to proactively avoid past sins committed by not responsibly cleaning up after decommissioned coal mines, oil wells and power plants — a number of innovative startups are striving to create a sustainable, and lucrative, circular economy to recover, recycle and reuse the core components of climate tech innovation.
Wind and solar energy combined to generate 13.6% of utility-scale electricity last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and those numbers will undoubtedly rise as renewable energy continues to scale up. Some leading utilities across the nation are far ahead of that pace already.
Meanwhile, sales of all-electric vehicles rose to 5.8% of the total 13.8 million vehicles Americans purchased in 2022, up from 3.2% in 2021. And with the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly proposed tailpipe emissions limits and power plant rules, EV sales could capture a 67% market share by 2032 and more utilities be forced to accelerate their power generation transition.
Solarcycle is a prime example of the companies looking to solve this climate tech waste problem of the future. Launched last year in Oakland, California, it has since constructed a recycling facility in Odessa, Texas, where it extracts 95% of the materials from end-of-life solar panels and reintroduces them into the supply chain. It sells recovered silver and copper on commodity markets and glass, silicon and aluminum to panel manufacturers and solar farm operators.
“Solar is becoming the dominant form of power generation,” Solarcycle CEO Suvi Sharma said, citing an EIA report stating that 54% of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity in the U.S. this year will come from solar. “But with that comes a new set of challenges and opportunities. We have done a phenomenal job making solar efficient and cost-effective, but really have not done anything yet on making it circular and dealing with the end-of-life [panels].”
The average lifespan of a solar panel is about 25 to 30 years, and there are more than 500 million already installed across the country, Sharma said, ranging from a dozen on a residential home’s rooftop to thousands in a commercial solar farm. With solar capacity now rising an average of 21% annually, tens of millions more panels will be going up — and coming down. Between 2030 and 2060, roughly 9.8 million metric tons of solar panel waste are expected to accumulate, according to a 2019 study published in Renewable Energy.
Currently, about 90% of end-of-life or defective solar panels end up in landfills, largely because it costs far less to dump them than to recycle them. “We see that gap closing over the next five to 10 years significantly,” Sharma said, “through a combination of recycling becoming more cost-effective and landfilling costs only increasing.”
Indeed, the market for recycled solar panel materials is expected to grow exponentially over the next several years. A report by research firm Rystad Energy stated they’ll be worth more than $2.7 billion in 2030, up from only $170 million last year, and accelerate to around $80 billion by 2050. The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Laboratory (NREL) found that with modest government support, recycled materials can meet 30%-50% of solar manufacturing needs in the U.S. by 2040.
Both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provide tax credits and funding for domestic manufacturing of solar panels and components, as well as research into new solar technologies. Those provisions are intended to cut into China’s dominant position in the global solar panel supply chain, which exceeds 80% today, according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency.
One recipient of this federal funding is First Solar, the largest solar panel manufacturer in the U.S. Founded in 1999 in Tempe, Arizona, the company has production facilities in Ohio and another under construction in Alabama. It has been awarded $7.3 million in research funds to develop a new residential rooftop panel that is more efficient than current silicon or thin-film modules.
First Solar has maintained an in-house recycling program since 2005, according to an email from chief product officer Pat Buehler. “We recognized that integrating circularity into our operations was necessary to scale the business in a sustainable way,” he wrote. But rather than extracting metals and glass from retired panels and manufacturing scrap, “our recycling process provides closed-loop semiconductor recovery for use in new modules,” he added.
Retired wind turbines present another recycling challenge, as well as business opportunities. The U.S. wind energy industry started erecting turbines in the early 1980s and has been steadily growing since. The American Clean Power Association estimates that today there are nearly 72,000 utility-scale turbines installed nationwide — all but seven of them land-based — generating 10.2% of the country’s electricity.
Although the industry stalled over the past two years, due to supply chain snags, inflation and rising costs, turbine manufacturers and wind farm developers are optimistic that the tide has turned, especially given the subsidies and tax credits for green energy projects in the IRA and the Biden administration’s pledge to jumpstart the nascent offshore wind sector.
The lifespan of a wind turbine is around 20 years, and most decommissioned ones have joined retired solar panels in landfills. However, practically everything comprising a turbine is recyclable, from the steel tower to the composite blades, typically 170 feet long, though the latest models exceed 350 feet.
Between 3,000 and 9,000 blades will be retired each year for the next five years in the U.S., and then the number will increase to between 10,000 and 20,000 until 2040, according to a 2021 study by NREL. By 2050, 235,000 blades will be decommissioned, translating to a cumulative mass of 2.2 million metric tons — or more than 60,627 fully loaded tractor trailers.
Players in the circular economy are determined not to let all that waste go to waste.
Knoxville-based Carbon Rivers, founded in 2019, has developed technology to shred not only turbine blades but also discarded composite materials from the automotive, construction and marine industries and convert them through a pyrolysis process into reclaimed glass fiber. “It can be used for next-generation manufacturing of turbine blades, marine vessels, composite concrete and auto parts,” said chief strategy officer David Morgan, adding that the process also harvests renewable oil and synthetic gas for reuse.
While processing the shredded materials is fairly straightforward, transporting massive turbine blades and other composites over long distances by rail and truck is more complicated. “Logistics is far and away the most expensive part of this entire process,” Morgan said.
In addition to existing facilities in Tennessee and Texas, Carbon Rivers plans to build sites in Florida, Pennsylvania and Idaho over the next three years, strategically located near wind farms and other feedstock sources. “We want to build another five facilities in the U.K. and Europe, then get to the South American and Asian markets next,” he said.
In the spirit of corporate sustainability — specifically not wanting their blades piling up in landfills — wind turbine manufacturers themselves are contracting with recycling partners. In December 2020, General Electric’s Renewable Energy unit signed a multi-year agreement with Boston-based Veolia North America to recycle decommissioned blades from land-based GE turbines in the U.S.
Veolia North America opened up a recycling plant in Missouri in 2020, where it has processed about 2,600 blades to date, according to Julie Angulo, senior vice president, technical and performance. “We are seeing the first wave of blades that are 10 to 12 years old, but we know that number is going to go up year-on-year,” she said.
Using a process known as kiln co-processing, Veolia reconstitutes shredded blades and other composite materials into a fuel it then sells to cement manufacturers as a replacement for coal, sand and clay. The process reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 27% and consumption of water by 13% in cement production.
“Cement manufacturers want to walk away from coal for carbon emissions reasons,” Angulo said. “This is a good substitute, so they’re good partners for us.”
GE’s wind turbine competitors are devising ways to make the next generation of blades inherently more recyclable. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has begun producing fully recyclable blades for both its land-based and offshore wind turbines and has said it plans to make all of its turbines fully recyclable by 2040. Vestas Wind Systems has committed to producing zero-waste wind turbines by 2040, though it has not yet introduced such a version. In February, Vestas introduced a new solution that renders epoxy-based turbine blades to be broken down and recycled.
Lithium-ion batteries have been in use since the early 1990s, at first powering laptops, cell phones and other consumer electronics, and for the past couple of decades EVs and energy storage systems. Recycling of their valuable innards — lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper — is focused on EVs, especially as automakers ramp up production, including building battery gigafactories. But today’s EV batteries have a lifespan of 10-20 years, or 100,000-200,000 miles, so for the time being, recyclers are primarily processing battery manufacturers’ scrap.
Toronto-based Li-Cycle, launched in 2016, has developed a two-step technology that breaks down batteries and scrap to inert materials and then shreds them, using a hydrometallurgy process, to produce minerals that are sold back into the general manufacturing supply chain. To avoid high transportation costs for shipping feedstock from various sites, Li-Cycle has geographically interspersed four facilities — in Alabama, Arizona, New York and Ontario — where it’s deconstructed. It is building a massive facility in Rochester, New York, where the materials will be processed.
“We’re on track to start commissioning the Rochester [facility] at the end of this year,” said Li-Cycle’s co-founder and CEO Ajay Kochhlar. Construction has been funded by a $375 loan from the Department of Energy (DOE), he said, adding that since the company went public, it’s also raised about $1 billion in private deals.
A different approach to battery recycling is underway at Redwood Materials, founded outside of Reno, Nevada, in 2017 by JB Straubel, the former chief technology officer and co-founder of Tesla. Redwood also uses hydrometallurgy to break down batteries and scrap, but produces anode copper foil and cathode-active materials for making new EV batteries. Because the feedstock is not yet plentiful enough, the nickel and lithium in its cathode products will only be about 30% from recycled sources, with the remainder coming from newly mined metals.
“We’re aiming to produce 100 GWh/year of cathode-active materials and anode foil for one million EVs by 2025,” Redwood said in an email statement. “By 2030, our goal is to scale to 500 GWh/year of materials, which would enable enough batteries to power five million EVs.”
Besides its Nevada facility, Redwood has broken ground on a second one in Charleston, South Carolina. The privately held company said it has raised more than $1 billion, and in February it received a conditional commitment from the DOE for a $2-billion loan from the DOE as part of the IRA. Last year Redwood struck a multi-billion dollar deal with Tesla’s battery supplier Panasonic, and it’s also inked partnerships with Volkswagen Group of America, Toyota, Ford and Volvo.
Ascend Elements, headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts, utilizes hydrometallurgy technology to extract cathode-active material mostly from battery manufacturing scrap, but also spent lithium-ion batteries. Its processing facility is strategically located in Covington, Georgia, a state that has attracted EV battery makers, including SK Group in nearby Commerce, as well as EV maker Rivian, near Rutledge, and Hyundai, which is building an EV factory outside of Savannah.
Last October, Ascend began construction on a second recycling facility, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, using federal dollars earmarked for green energy projects. “We have received two grant awards from the [DOE] under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that totaled around $480 million,” said CEO Mike O’Kronley. Such federal investments, he said, “incentivizes infrastructure that needs to be built in the U.S., because around 96% of all cathode materials are made in East Asia, in particular China.”
As the nation continues to build out a multi-billion-dollar renewable energy supply chain around solar, wind and EVs, simultaneously establishing a circular economy to recover, recycle and reuse end-of-life components from those industries is essential in the overarching goal of battling climate change.
“It’s important to make sure we keep in mind the context of these emerging technologies and understand their full lifecycle,” said Garvin Heath, a senior energy sustainability analyst at NREL. “The circular economy provides a lot of opportunities to these industries to be as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible at a relatively early phase of their growth.”
