Being pragmatic about energy sources

The clean energy journey is going to be a messy one, with plenty of missteps, side turns and dead ends before the destination is reached

If 2022 taught global policymakers anything, it was that they needed to be pragmatic about their clean energy journey. The Russia-Ukraine war was a rude reality check for developed as well as developing nations that were confident they could get rid of coal soon and reduce their dependence on hydrocarbons sharply. Instead, the year brought coal back into demand — with global prices shooting up and developed countries like the US and Germany turning to the fuel once again and reopening mothballed coal-powered power plants. Western Europe, in particular, found that solar and wind capacities would not help if it did not get reliable supplies of natural gas at affordable rates. It also learnt that prices of minerals like lithium and nickel would shoot up if conventional energy supplies were disrupted.

As we enter 2023, it is important to look at the lessons learnt on the energy front. The most important lesson is the one that energy experts have pointed out from time to time but policymakers have paid little attention to — that is, until storage technology matures, solar and wind capacities will need gas-powered plants to pick up the slack during lean times for renewables. Despite periodic announcements by billionaires about giga-storage factories that can power the world, we are still several years — and perhaps more than a decade — away from energy storage technologies catching up with renewable power generation capacities.

There are two reasons for this. One is that despite announcements of breakthroughs in battery chemistries coming almost daily, turning these laboratory demonstrations into practical, large-scale storage facilities that can power an entire city when solar and wind capacities are not generating enough power is still far away. Scaling up a laboratory breakthrough demonstration into a real world application capable of powering hundreds of thousands of homes, offices and factories requires time, capital and engineering expertise. And many of the laboratory breakthroughs may not even be capable of being scaled up properly because of inherent limitations of the process itself.

The second issue is mining activities and mineral supply need to go up sharply to ramp up battery capacities even with current battery and renewable chemistries. Lithium-ion batteries that are the standard today require lithium, cobalt, nickel and other minerals. Solar panels and wind turbines too need minerals. Some are garden variety and easily available, but there are many minerals that are relatively rare. Some experts estimate that billions of tonnes of minerals will need to be mined over the next few decades to ensure that ambitious clean energy goals of developed countries are met.

But here lies another problem. Mining is not a clean business. Apart from causing ecological damage to geographies where large scale mining is undertaken, the operations themselves require enormous amounts of power. And invariably, mining operations depend on dirty, thermal-fuelled power plants and not renewable energy sources for their energy requirements.

The other big realisation of 2022 was that the great clean energy hope — green hydrogen — has plenty of issues that need to be addressed before it becomes a practical replacement for natural gas.

Hydrogen is a versatile gas that can be used as a fuel in many industries such as cement, steel, aluminium and others instead of natural gas or coal — assuming hydrogen costs drop sharply. Green hydrogen — or hydrogen that is produced by the process of electrolysing water using renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power — is considered among the cleanest of fuels. Green hydrogen unfortunately also costs far too much to be a practical replacement for natural gas at the moment. There is hope though that as global capacities rise and the process is refined, green hydrogen prices will come down over the next decade or so to levels where they are true alternatives to natural gas. The big attraction of green hydrogen is that burning it will primarily produce water — and, therefore, solve the problem of emissions.

But apart from high costs, researchers are flagging off one issue that needs to be solved before the adoption of hydrogen as a fuel on a mass scale. This is the “leakage” problem. Hydrogen, being highly inflammable, requires special containers and pipes to transport safely. Inevitably, some of the gas still leaks into the atmosphere despite best efforts. These leakages and their effects on the environment, experts say, can negate a lot of the advantages that green hydrogen theoretically possesses over natural gas. At the moment, there isn’t enough hydrogen being used for the amounts leaked routinely to be an issue. But as usage of the gas goes up, the effect of its leakages into the atmosphere and its environmental impact will need to be mapped properly.

What has become apparent as we enter 2023 is that there is no magic bullet when it comes to clean energy. All fuel sources come with some negatives attached — and more negatives could come to light as their mass scale adoption takes place. Similarly, the current dirty fuel sources cannot be simply wished away — they are likely to be required for several decades more because of costs and other reasons.

Most important though, policymakers and energy strategists advising governments need to realise that the transition to clean energy will not be “clean”. It is likely to be a messy journey with plenty of missteps, side turns and dead ends before the destination is reached.

The writer is former editor of Business Today and Businessworld, and founder of Prosaic View, an editorial consultancy