2.

3 Clean Energy and Industry

Chapter theme: Clean Energy and Industry

Lecturer: Jeffrey Sachs

This chapter addresses clean energy and industry as a key transformation for the SDGs.
Professor Sachs opens with a brief discussion of rising CO2 emissions, followed by the energy
components needed for a transformation including zero-carbon electricity, electrification of
energy users, greater energy efficiency, and reducing industrial pollutants.

In this chapter, I'll talk about the third of the six transformations that is the transformation to clean energy
and ecologically sound industry, industry that picks up after its own mess and keeps the environment safe,
sometimes called the circular economy. This of course, constitutes one of the great purposes and great challenges
of the Sustainable Development Goals: how to make a rapid decisive shift from a world economy dependent on
fossil fuels to a world economy operating on clean, safe energy.

What does clean, safe energy mean, specifically?

It means energy that does not release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that then contributes to global warming
and climate change, more generally. And we have an urgent challenge here because the world economy has grown
up as a fossil fuel-based economy over the roughly 200 years of the spread of fossil fuel use from the steam engine
to the internal combustion engine and the gas turbines and all of the power plants running on a coal around the
world.

We have a world economy where around 85% of primary energy comes from fossil fuels. And that means a
massive amount of CO2 emissions, in fact running roughly at 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the
atmosphere each year, mainly from energy and industrial processes.

So this transformation is central to achieving SDG 13, central to achieving the Paris Climate Agreement, and part
and parcel of SDG 7, which calls for access to modern energy services for all, but in a safe manner, not by simply
replicating the fossil fuel economy, but building a renewable energy infrastructure for the world economy.

So how can this transformation be done?

First we need a transformation to zero-carbon electricity. Electricity will be the great energy carrier for the 21st
century. It’s, of course, how we power the digital world, but it will be the way we power our vehicles. It will be the
way we power our heating in cold climates. Rather than using fossil fuels in the gas tank and an internal
combustion engine, we're going to be driving electric vehicles. Rather than heating our homes through a furnace
that's burning a heating oil, we will use a electricity based heating methods such as heat pumps in order to keep our
buildings warm in winter.

So how do you get to zero-carbon power generation, zero-carbon electricity?

Of course, the key way is to have a zero-carbon primary energy sources, wind, solar power, hydroelectric power,
geothermal energy, biofuels, ocean power, or nuclear energy. So these are all primary energy sources that do not
release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Of course, there are pluses and minuses for each of these. And some
places say no to nuclear energy, though other places use nuclear energy and will continue to deploy nuclear energy.
But among that set of options countries will choose in significant part based on the resources that they have. Are
they in a sunny climate, in say a dry lender desert region which has a massive amounts of sunshine?

Are they in a windy environment where they can harness wind power, they in a mountain environment or near
enough to one where hydroelectric power becomes an energy source of choice? Most of these low-carbon energy
sources—not nuclear, but the other ones —are characterized by some degree of intermittency wind when the wind
blows, solar energy when the sun is shining, hydroelectric power often on a seasonal basis when the rivers are
running, and so the questions of storage or balancing intermittency by connecting larger geographic areas through
long-distance transmission grid so that when it's not windy in one place, it is windy and another is part of the story
of harnessing zero-carbon electricity. Storage itself is a big issue through or through pumping water into mountain
reservoirs that can then be used as a kind of battery by letting the water come back down through turbines, so
producing hydroelectric power, so-called pumped hydro storage.

But the first pillar is zero-carbon electricity. The second pillar that I mentioned already is electrification of energy
users, that to move from fossil fuel use in the gas tank of a light duty vehicle to a battery or to a fuel cell, that uses
hydrogen produced by renewable energy, for example. This can be done with technologies that we have by and
large, almost across the board. There are still some areas like aviation and a heavy shipping, large ships that can't
run on batteries the same way that a light duty vehicle can, but they can run on a hydrogen powered fuel cells or
direct hydrogen combustion in the case of ocean vessels or perhaps through synthetic, liquid hydrocarbons that is
not dug up from the ground but is captured from the air and from the use of renewable energies a synthetic
hydrocarbon, so this kind of electrification is the second major pillar would mean that most of the energy users can
rely on electricity that itself is produced by zero-carbon.
Of course, a third dimension to reaching zero CO2 emissions is much greater energy efficiency. The less energy
that we need, the easier it is to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewables because we'll need to less of the
renewable energy, and there are huge gains that can be made in energy efficiency—smart appliances, certainly
smarter building construction with better insulation shells for building so that you don't need as much energy for
the heating and cooling of the buildings. So this is the three pillar approach to decarbonizing the energy system:
zero-carbon electricity, electrification or synthetic fuels, and energy efficiency to achieve the sustainable
development goals.

That energy transformation needs to be combined with a process of reducing the pollutants from industrial
processes as well. That's SDG 12, which calls for cleaning up after ourselves. It calls for sustainable production
systems and especially what's called the circular economy, when waste is coming out of an industrial process, try to
use the waste as an input or at least reengineer the process, different kinds of chemistries so that the waste that's
coming out is not toxic, but it's easily absorbed in the environment.

Here, green chemistry will be absolutely crucial changing the way that plastics are produced so that they can be
recycled, changing the materials that we use so that the materials themselves automatically become biodegradable
or using recycling processes more generally so that our waste isn’t simply collected and dumped in a landfill which
becomes toxic or which itself emits the greenhouse gas, methane into the atmosphere, but the waist is used for
energy or directly for recycling or as an input to industrial production processes. This kind of closing the loop or
the so-called circular economy.

Together with the transformation from fossil fuel-based energy to zero-emission energy systems is key for
achieving sustainable development, protecting the climate, and protecting us from pollution.