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By Eric
RostonIn 2018, the most authoritative group of climate scientists
defined our climate mission simply and directly.
How playing whack-a-mole with dirty power can help the
world reach net zero
In 2018, the
most authoritative group of climate scientists defined our climate
mission
simply and directly. The world needs to eliminate carbon dioxide
pollution by midcentury and halve it, below the 2010 level, by 2030.
Countries, cities, businesses and investors heard this and acted.
Sort of.
They largely
heard this to mean that companies and governments need net-zero plans.
But that’s not what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
said. The scientists said that
Earth
needs a net-zero plan.
Zero
is a new podcast from
Bloomberg
Green
that explores the tactics and technologies taking us to a future
of zero emissions. In our first episode, climate reporter Akshat
Rathi sits down with UK politician Bryony Worthington to talk
about the importance of climate laws and how to make them
crisis-proof.
Listen to the episode — and subscribe now on
Apple,
Spotify or
Google to get new episodes every Thursday.
As I wrote back in June, there’s a difference between a company
meeting its own net-zero plan and contributing to efforts to meet the
planet’s. For instance, oil and gas companies may sell their polluting
assets to meet climate commitments. But it makes
no difference to the atmosphere if private equity firms then buy
and operate them.
“We’re seeing
an increasing trend toward pass-the-buck environmentalism,” says Gavin
McCormick, co-founder and executive director of WattTime, a
nonprofit offering technology that, among other things, tracks the
real-time intensity of electricity emissions by US zip code. The
perspective is almost, “‘I can optimize my carbon footprint. That’s
going to increase everybody else’s, but I get to claim I’m green,’” he
says.
In the
electricity sector, the problem is thorny. The climate-friendliness of
any power grid changes every hour of the day as a shifting array of
sources — solar, wind, gas, nuclear, hydro — meets ever-fluctuating
demand. That makes carbon accounting, especially for an individual
company, difficult.
For years,
companies trying to estimate their use of clean power relied on a
simple calculation. They essentially looked at the generation mix in a
power grid and its annual emissions, and divided it by their share of
the electricity. They bought
renewable energy credits to match their CO₂ emissions.
But an
average, annual calculation of something as dynamic as power
generation dramatically simplifies a complicated picture.
For a few
years now, several large companies, including
Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp., have explored “24/7
carbon-free energy” as a way to ensure that every hour, all year long,
is tracked and covered by renewable energy generation. Google expects
to achieve 24/7 CFE by 2030. The company last year launched the
24/7 Carbon Free Energy Compact, a project managed by the UN group
Sustainable Energy for All, to bring together everyone involved in
changing power generation and delivery, including energy purchasers
and suppliers, governments at every level, grid operators, investors
and researchers.
Google also
publishes updates to its 24/7 strategy, which includes identifying all
the hours in a year each of its facilities still relies on dirty
power, and layering in more resources to
clean them up. Down the line, growing demand — plus investment,
technology development and policy — should gradually replace dirty
power generation with new technologies.
Think of it
as dirty power whack-a-mole. Corporations, nonprofits, foundations and
government agencies are trying to develop and standardize practices
that will provide actionable, real-time information on sources and end
users of electricity.
As they do
that, new questions are arising:
-
How
granular in time and location should the data be?
-
What is
being measured — megawatts of renewable power, avoided power
emissions or something else?
-
And
finally, what is the desired goal? To meet a company’s carbon goals
or the world’s?
Even with
growing consensus around 24/7 monitoring, different parties can
nonetheless still have different — sometimes competing, sometimes
complementary — answers to the second and third questions. For some,
like WattTime, preventing emissions that would contribute to planetary
warming is the most
productive direction. That’s why it’s been working with
Salesforce Inc. and steelmaker Nucor Corp. to align their renewable
energy investment with maximum avoided emissions.
Consulting with WattTime, Salesforce chose to buy power from a
solar farm in Australia because it reduced significantly more
emissions than a similar purchase on a cleaner grid, such as
California’s.
Until now,
power investments have been made largely with a focus
on maximizing revenue and reliability. Now they need to help the world
reach net zero, too.
Meta
Platforms Inc., the power data and analytics company Resurety Inc.,
and Broad Reach Power, which owns and operates clean energy projects
in the US, last week launched an
Energy Storage Solutions Consortium. The group wants to set up a
freely available and independently approved method to measure the
planetary greenhouse gas savings associated with grid-scale energy
storage. The goal is to make sure battery-stored renewable power is
displacing fossil-generated electricity.
Jesse
Jenkins, a Princeton University professor whose
Zero Lab conducts sophisticated modeling experiments on 24/7
carbon-free power, last week released a study showing how a market for
energy certificates could help clean up a grid. Companies could buy
and sell certificates that verify hourly clean-energy purchases. Those
with lots of their own renewable energy could generate certificates
and sell them to others who want to get in the game but can’t afford
to buy their own generators.
Building a
market to channel demand for clean power ultimately should drive
deployment of more and more resources, much as
power-purchase agreements have done in recent years.
Ensuring
solar-fed batteries discharge when the grid is dirtiest and hourly
renewable certificates, could help move the Earth closer to net zero.
But that’s usually not what companies pursuing “net zero” write their
press releases about.
Calling all
filmmakers. Bloomberg Green Docs is
still accepting submissions. We want to see your short documentaries
on climate change. Submit your film by September 16 and compete to win
a $25,000 grand prize, plus the opportunity to showcase your work at a
special screening in Los Angeles on October 26.
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