Gigaton Throwdown: Redefining what's possible for clean energy until 2020

The Gigaton Throwdown Initiative was launched to educate and inspire investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policy makers to “think big” and understand what it would take to scale up clean energy massively over the next 10 years. A unique group from the business community — investors, entrepreneurs, and executives — teamed up with leading academics for the throwdown. Th e team investigated what it would take to reach gigaton scale for 9 technologies currently attractive to investors.

To attain gigaton scale, a single technology must reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO2e) by at least 1 billion metric tons — a gigaton — by 2020. For an electricity generation technology, this is equivalent to an installed capacity of 205 gigawatts (GW) of carbon-free energy (at 100% capacity) in 2020.