California policymakers made headlines in 2021 when they announced new emissions regulations that will ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. As the state inches closer to that date, researchers in UC Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) are studying how an all-electric fleet will interact with California’s power grid.
Late last month, the research team received a new tool to help their work: an electric car donated by Vietnamese automaker VinFast, a subsidiary of the Vingroup conglomerate. Energy and Resources Group professor Dan Kammen, who leads the research team, said he connected with the automaker’s representatives last year while he was in Hanoi, Vietnam, judging the $3 million VinFuture Prize.
“This was complete serendipity,” he said. “At the end of my trip, the company asked if they could donate one of their first 999 U.S. vehicles to our lab.”
Kammen said the vehicle will be used by RAEL—a multidisciplinary research group that focuses on designing, testing, and disseminating clean and sustainable energy systems—to study energy storage constraints, how changes in temperature affect battery performance, and other issues relating to electric cars, as well as the social and equity dimensions of EV infrastructure developed to support marginalized communities. The lab also hopes to work alongside the manufacturer to explore the costs associated with modifying vehicles to send power from their batteries back to the electric grid.
“Service, delivery, and rideshare vehicles that might be driven for work during the day could be used at night to shore up our grid and provide distributed energy storage for profit,” Kammen said.
The vehicle also offers RAEL researchers an opportunity to conduct community outreach, particularly within low-income neighborhoods where access to electric vehicles is low. “Electric vehicles are now sufficiently inexpensive that, if the upfront costs could be amortized, they would be cheaper than gas-powered vehicles,” Kammen said. “Low-income communities, however, might not be given the chance to drive a shared electric vehicle because that’s not a standard thing to loan out.”
In the future, the car might be stationed at public charging locations near BART stations or integrated into the ongoing EcoBlock research project as a shared-mobility vehicle.
Learn more about RAEL and the EcoBlock projects at their websites.
Click here for the new publication in Frontiers of Environmental Science.
Citation:
Opperman JJ, Carvallo JP, Kelman R, Schmitt RJP, Almeida R, Chapin E, Flecker A, Goichot M, Grill G, Harou JJ, Hartmann J, Higgins J, Kammen DM, Martin E, Martins T, Newsock A, Rogéliz C, Raepple J, Sada R, Thieme ML and Harrison D (2023) Balancing renewable energy and river resources by moving from individual assessments of hydropower projects to energy system planning. Front. Environ. Sci.10:1036653.
To read the original in the November 5, 2022 Jordan Times, click here.
COP27: Green hope growing in the desert
by
Frederic Hauge and Dan Kammen
World leaders gather anew in Egypt for COP27 to address the existential threat of the climate crisis; while solutions exist, the world needs to see action and implementation. To achieve this, the global community needs both grit and optimism.
COP27 should be about collaboration, green acceleration, and, most importantly, bringing to life existing concepts and solutions to scale and create much-needed green jobs. A metaphorical crossing of the Red Sea is needed to halt the current trajectory to 2.8°C or more of global warming. It is time for finance to step up.
In 2012, at COP18 in Doha, a pilot facility for production of food, energy, water, and revegetation of desert areas was launched. Today, a few kilometers from where COP is taking place, the Sahara Forest Project produces tons of vegetables far into the Jordanian desert, in saltwater-cooled greenhouses, with their own renewable energy, planting trees in the desert.
Not everyone believed, back in 2012. But seeing was believing, and it still is.
At the dawn of the 2000s the electrification of transport seemed a vision more than a possible reality. In 2009, when Bellona brought the first four Tesla Roadsters in Europe to COP15 in Copenhagen, it all became a bit more real. Today, we can acknowledge massive strides taken over the last 13 years.
Not everyone believed, even in 2009. But the needle was moved. Seeing is believing.
The adage may be old and slightly worn out but has never been truer. Can a few electric cars solve the problem? No. But can it click the right gears into place? Absolutely.
Renewable energy has been doing this for years, with rapidly declining costs for solar, wind, and storage technologies all transforming the energy sector. Replacing fossil fuels in use has also become a no-brainer in many more applications, with heavy construction machinery the latest addition. Manufacturers are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that not only is electrification good for the environment, it is also good for worker health, noise levels, and the pocketbook. In industry, carbon capture and storage is becoming viable as a large-scale solution for process emissions that are difficult to get rid of.
“And while damages and losses of climate change continue to increase with each passing year of inaction, the global community is still stuck trying to deliver on the 2009 pledge to mobilize the mere $100 billion annually from developed to developing countries.”
But tempo is lacking. Implementation is lacking. Scale is lacking. And not least, finance is lacking.
Getting money to the right projects is without doubt one of the greatest challenges in the fight against climate change. Our current measures for accelerating funding, both for adaptation and mitigation, are failing. And while damages and losses of climate change continue to increase with each passing year of inaction, the global community is still stuck trying to deliver on the 2009 pledge to mobilize the mere $100 billion annually from developed to developing countries.
We need to have a hard look at challenges facing the current climate financing. At the same time, we need to take a view beyond this one pledge, toward new mechanisms for financing a just and green transition.
A paradigm shift is needed in climate finance, a Climate Finance 2.0. This new paradigm can focus on certain key issues.
One such issue is infrastructure. Large-scale infrastructure projects are hugely important to roll out much-needed renewables, as well as decarbonizing harder-to-electrify industrial processes across the world. But project deployment is slow, and projects suffer from lack of public funding, long lead times, challenges facing permitting processes, administrative hurdles, and issues related to public acceptance.
Another issue is defining projects “of common interest” eligible for climate financing. An international mechanism channelling capital to projects of common interest could create a global stamp of approval, sending positive market signals and mobilizing additional private capital either into projects directly or to associated projects relying on shared infrastructure.
These are not just examples, but a vision, and a possible reality. Now more than ever we need action and leadership. This is why it is so important to showcase all the solutions that actually exist today, highlighting their many benefits, and building better stories for climate action as a positive for the climate but also for countries, cities, communities. This is also why we are at COP27.
We are on a trajectory for 2.8 degrees instead of 1.5. The slogan for COP26 in Glasgow was “keeping 1.5 alive” — it is currently on life support. Still, every day we see new and innovative solutions to the climate and environmental crises that the global community is trying to solve.
Seeing is believing. Now let us get them some funding.
Dan Kammen is a professor of sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served at the World Bank as chief technical specialist for renewable energy, and as science envoy in the Obama administration. He has been a coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999.
Frederic Hauge founded Bellona in 1986, at the age of 20. Through academic work, legal action, and non-violent activism, Bellona has changed the opinion and set the agenda on environmental issues in Norway for almost three decades. Hauge was elected in 2007 as vice chairman of the European Commission’s Technology Platform for CO2 sequestration (ZEP). The same year TIME Magazine named him “Hero of The Environment”. In 2009 he became a board member of the EU Biofuel Platform (EBTP), and one of the founding partners of the Sahara Forest Project.
Elon Musk says ‘population collapse’ is a bigger threat than climate change. Is he right?
Kyle Bagenstose, USA TODAY
At the Cannes Film Festival this summer, many attendees reveled at the “Top Gun” reboot, a throwback to the past. But on the sidelines a smaller crowd witnessed something more solemn: the possibility of a dark and tragic future.
“Plan 75,” a film by Japanese director Hayakawa Chie, explores the potential dangers of her country’s aging society, where nearly one-in-three people are currently 65 or older. Set in a near-future dystopia, the film depicts a nation whose healthcare and pensions systems have become so overburdened by the elderly that the government aggressively markets a policy to pay for final bucket list items and then euthanize anyone over 75.
While technically the stuff of science fiction, demographers say the film arrives at a time when humanity really is aging.
The global fertility rate has decreased by half since 1960. In countries responsible for 85% of the world’s gross domestic product – the United States, Germany, Japan, even China and India – births have fallen below the “replacement rate,” meaning that unless offset by immigration, population will begin to decline as older generations depart.
The United Nations calculates the world population will now peak in 2084, before starting to fall by the century’s end.
An elderly man walks by an electronic stock board of a securities firm in Tokyo, Friday, Aug. 19, 2016. Japan is the world’s oldest country, with 3-in-10 people over the age of 65.
In a world where economies are designed around growth and social systems depend on the young supporting the old, forward thinkers are beginning to wonder what comes next.
Consider Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and business magnate, now most prominent among their ranks.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk wrote on Twitter this summer. “Mark these words.”
But is he right?
Population concerns are nothing new
For centuries, humans have pondered the ideal size of humanity.
But experts warn such efforts usually end in folly, and that our species has within its grasp solutions to prosper whether populations rise or fall.
“It’s up to us and how the world responds,” said Lauren Johnston, a professor at the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre and economic demographer.
For much of the last few centuries, those fretting about overpopulation have had the spotlight. In 1798, English scholar Thomas Malthus published an influential essay that laid out an idea known as the “Malthusian trap,” which holds that population growth inevitably exceeds food and other resources, leading to famine and poverty. The work inspired anxiety in England and helped lead to the first national census of England, Scotland and Wales.
Such concerns echoed loudly in 1968, when Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich and wife Anne Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” a book that predicted global famine leading to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people within decades.
But most experts say such predictions have not come to pass. Particularly in the past 50 years, a “Green Revolution” in agriculture has used new farming methods to reap more calories per acre of land, leading world hunger to decrease even as the population doubled.
Although studies show such practices have created additional problems – driving water pollution, contributing to climate change, and perhaps even decreasing the nutritional value of food – Johnston points out that many nations are now facing the opposite of starvation.
“In most countries there has been a sufficiently productive response to population growth that there hasn’t been a famine,” Johnston said. “Now there’s obesity.”
Underpopulation on the horizon?
As concern over having too many mouths to feed has waned, an opposing one has risen: too few people to work.
That’s an especially obvious worry in China, which infamously implemented a one-child policy in 1980 to address exponential population growth projections. Its current population of 1.4 billion remains the world’s largest.
But realizing the aging trajectory of its society, in 2016 China eliminated the policy and has also limited pensions and social programs for the elderly, Johnston said.
Chinese children hold flags during a rehearsal prior to the opening of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) 2018 Beijing Summit on Sept. 3, 2018 in Beijing, China.
Many other nations are or soon will be facing similar challenges.
To maintain a steady population without immigration, a nation has to achieve a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, experts say. But the fertility rate is just 1.7 in China and Brazil, 1.5 across the European Union, and 0.8 in South Korea, the lowest of any country, according to the World Bank. The rate is 1.6 in the United States, where the population is still rising only due to longer lifespans and immigration, which is projected to outpace natural births by 2030.
Globally, it’s primarily African nations like Nigeria, where the fertility rate is 5.2, that are contributing to population growth. But as those nations develop, some experts expect fertility rates to fall as well, contributing to the possibility of unprecedented global population decline.
“There’s never been anything close to a parallel,” Johnston said.
Some experts are ringing alarm bells on what that could mean for societies.
Nations could wind up burning the candle at both ends: as a higher percentage of people become retirees they require more public resources, while at the same time the taxable working population shrinks. Problems could be exacerbated as rates of Alzheimer’s and other costly elder illnesses increase, while labor shortages create inflationary pressures. As countries face these challenges, their societies and politics could destabilize.
“Our view of the future is not encouraging, but it is coherent and plausible,” Goodhart and Pradhan write.
So Musk is right?
Not so fast, says Daniel Kammen, a professor of sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley and former Science Envoy to the U.S. State Department.
While aging societies do pose possible challenges in the future, Kammen says the world is facing a current full-blown crisis right now: climate change.
And adding more people to the Earth’s population will only further complicate humanity’s lagging efforts to fight global warming, experts say.
“There’s no ideal number, but certainly I would say there are too many people on our planet for our current lifestyle,” Kammen said.
Kammen believes the entire conversation about population is a red herring, a view commonly held among population experts.
Instead, he says the focus should be on whether or not countries are wisely using resources. That’s when the wealth of nations like the U.S., and not their population, come into focus.
A study in the journal Nature Sustainability this year found that the world’s wealthiest 10% of people produce 47% of its carbon emissions, compared to just 10% of emissions for the entire bottom half of the economic ladder.
To put it another way, World Bank data shows the average Nigerian’s carbon footprint is 0.6 metric tons each year. With the globe currently emitting about 34 billion metric tons of CO2 annually, that means it could currently support 58 billion people if they had a Nigerian carbon footprint.
On the other hand, the average American uses 14.7 metric tons of CO2 each year, meaning the world could support just 2.3 billion people if everyone had an American footprint.
The same effect can be seen within countries. While many Americans believe that population-dense cities hold the most blame for carbon emissions, work from Kammen and his colleagues show the carbon footprints of urban Americans are actually substantially less than rural residents, with suburban residents surpassing both. That’s true both on a per capita basis and in total: about half of U.S. carbon emissions come from suburban settings, while less than a third come from urban.
Ultimately, Kammen said, the question is how to reduce resource footprints, especially in wealthy nations. The smaller they get, the more people the planet can support.
“While it sure seems like there are a lot of people on our planet, our individual impact is much more measured by the ways in which we amplify or minimize our footprint,” Kammen said. “If you make it about population, you avoid how critical our patterns of consumption are.”
Experts also say the challenges of population decline are not insurmountable.
Johnston says it will come down to smart planning and cooperation. If populations do peak and fall, governments can mitigate the repercussions by sharing resources more equitably. That will likely include sacrifices among the older generations. Not with their lives as “Plan 75″ depicts, but through higher retirement ages and adjustments to pensions and benefits.
Other experts note that it may be possible to maintain productivity levels with fewer people, through increased education or even possibly with the assistance of technologies like Artificial Intelligence and automation. In the end, people of working ages may also need to sacrifice in the form of higher taxes.
But such a future will inevitably look different than the world we live in now, and Goodhart and Pradhan warn a lot will be riding on whether or not societies accept such changes.
“We doubt that politicians, facing rising health and pension costs, will be prepared or able to raise taxes enough to equilibrate the economy via fiscal policy,” they wrote.
Population ‘cures’ can be worse than population collapse
While population decline comes with challenges, experts warn that attempts to reverse course are often at best ineffectual, and at worst hateful and destructive.
After all, they note, the basis of population decline is personal freedom.
Reiner Klingholz, a population researcher and author based in Germany, notes that smaller families and a more developed lifestyle often go hand-in-hand. As a society becomes wealthier and more educated, its fertility rate invariably falls.
That’s particularly tied to women’s education and empowerment. When women become more educated, both professionally and on sexual reproduction, they are presented with life choices beyond homemaker and often choose to have less children, experts say. Development also brings increased wealth, which creates societies that are overall healthier and happier, even if the fertility rate is lower.
“Look at Sweden and Denmark,” where fertility rates stand at 1.7, Klingholz said. “People are very happy in these countries.”
Also troubling: Concerns about population decline often boost xenophobia.
In the United States, “Great Replacement Theory” – an unfounded conspiracy that political leaders are intentionally replacing white Americans with non-white immigrants – has moved from extreme right-wing circles into mainstream discourse.
Perhaps nowhere is this tension more apparent globally than in Hungary, where the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban is now offering about $30,000 and a raft of subsidies on homes and cars for Hungarian families with at least four children, while opposing new immigration.
“Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender,” Orban said in 2020.
Such rhetoric stands in stark contrast to most economists, who according to Goodhart and Pradhan, value immigration as a tool to offset population decline and boost a country’s workforce and productivity.
Attempts to instead fix population decline through economic policies like tax incentives often fail due to the ties between women’s empowerment and lower fertility rates, said Per Espen Stoknes, director of the BI Centre for Sustainability and Energy at the Norwegian Business School.
“Men can’t tell women how many children they should have,” Stoknes said. “It’s not really about the issue of (resources). It’s really about what kind of life do women want for themselves?”
A happier future?
Johnston says that in the end, population decline doesn’t have to be a crisis. Ultimately, as with climate change, it comes down to wise resource allocation.
If humanity can cooperate and efficiently distribute resources through immigration and economic policies, it could build a world with where people are fewer but more educated, and in which productivity and ingenuity still flourish.
But that’s a big “if.”
“It might be so much healthier if there’s a smaller population overall, but much more cooperation,” Johnston said. “If China goes from 1.4 billion people to 800 million, but people go from peasants to middle class, how on Earth is that going to be a bad shift?”
Kyle Bagenstose covers climate change, chemicals, water and other environmental topics for USA TODAY. He can be reached at kbagenstose@gannett.com or on Twitter @kylebagenstose.
CA Sets New Record For Power Use As Brutal Heat Wave Continues. How Are You Dealing?
Despite calls to conserve power, California’s energy demands were at an all-time high Tuesday. The extreme heat wave is creating a big need for power, so much that we blew past a record set during a heat wave 16 years ago. Cal-ISO, which operates the state’s power grid, first reported that energy use in the state surpassed more than 50,300 megawatts as of 3:09 p.m. Tuesday. That was 68 megawatts above the 2006 record. Ultimately it hit 52,061 megawatts. Cal-ISO typically calls an alert when temperatures are hot. Energy consumption runs higher during these times, so people need to cut down. But heat isn’t the only factor. All of these issues can put a strain on our state’s power grid. Meanwhile, the Fairview Fire in Hemet exploded over Labor Day weekend killing two residents as they were trying to flee. Today on AirTalk, we’re joined by Eric Boldt, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, Daniel Kammen, professor of energy at UC Berkeley, andJon Heggie, battalion chief with Cal Fire, to discuss the latest on SoCal’s heat wave, the fire raging in Hemet, and the new power use record set last night by Californians.
Both bills would do quite a bit to help the US fight climate change—much to the relief of many Democrats in Congress worried about getting climate legislation passed before the midterms. But with so much legislation floating around, keeping track of each bill’s actions can be tricky.
Here’s what you need to know about climate change policies in the IRA and CHIPS act.
Direct climate action from the Inflation Reduction Act
The Inflation Reduction Act includes roughly $369 billion for climate programs, meaning, if passed, it could be the most significant climate bill Congress has ever passed. The bill offers tax incentives to companies to increase the production of wind, solar, and battery technologies. Additionally, the bill limits the amount of methane a US company can emit, which is crucial because methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
As for ordinary folks, the bill offers a $7,500 tax credit toward purchasing a new electric vehicle and a $4,000 tax credit toward purchasing a used one and more. This is important because electric cars are better for the climate than gasoline-powered vehicles. But, it may have the bonus of convincing car manufacturers to keep building more electric vehicles and could increase the building of charging stations.
“Whether you’re on the EV side, whether you’re on the stationary green power side, seeing them all in the same bill is critically important,” Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley. “It messages that $369 billion is being spent in a holistic way.”
A report from the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, found the IRA would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 31 to 44 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Greenhouse gas emissions peaked countrywide in 2005, but since then, carbon emissions have shrunk by 20 percent. The Biden administration has set a goal of reducing emissions by 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030—so the IRA would provide a significant boost.
Current projections show the IRA wouldn’t get us to the Biden administration’s climate goals by itself, but Kammen feels that the effects of it passing could “snowball.” He says that the initial investment could spur further investments and breakthroughs to help us reach or exceed planned emission reductions.
The CHIPS bill ups funding in science and technology
The CHIPS and Science Act mainly focuses on increasing the domestic production of semiconductors used in computers, phones, vehicles and more. That being said, the bill contains other important provisions. It includes roughly $200 billion of funding for scientific research, which is a significant increase in funding. That money could be critical in developing new technologies—from artificial intelligence to nuclear fusion—and could help the US reach its climate goals. Kammen says the bill’s funding could be beneficial as the US tries to build more renewable energy.
“The more we think about what has driven the remarkable cost declines in solar, in batteries and wind, it’s certainly manufacturing, but it’s also systems integration,” Kammen says. “That’s a place where the US is better poised than it may think it is to be a real leader. Clean energy systems require as much smart interconnection as they do great pieces of individual hardware.”
The funding in the CHIPS bill could help the US further integrate its energy systems, making for more effective and efficient energy use in towns and cities. “Assuming we get a version of the Schumer-Manchin IRA bill and [CHIPS], it actually sets the US up pretty well,” Kammen says, “because you get both upstream, smart integration developments and $369 billion of deployment money from tax credits, so I think they do work together.”
Together, these two bills work to fund urgently needed change in climate policy, considering there’s only so much time to do something. The CHIPS bill’s investments could also bring us the next generation of climate-fighting technologies and better integrate our existing and developing energy systems. The US looked poised to fail in its attempts to fight climate change, but these bills are creating some hope.
An unpacked “Box” in the field, providing power for water filtration and clinic electrification. Photo by Sam Miles
Access to reliable, affordable and clean energy is increasingly recognized as the “golden thread” tying together and enabling many other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite progress over the last decade in making solutions to energy poverty more accessible to the more than 800 million people currently without electricity (and the many more with intermittent or unaffordable energy) many gaps remain. In particular, the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted supply and demand for energy, both of which are necessary to meet SDG 7.
At the same time, transitioning to more renewable energy-based electricity systems requiring battery storage, whether in emerging markets or developed ones, will require massive amounts of mineral resources with significant human and environmental footprints. A paper published by USAID in late 2021underscores the urgency of addressing mining in the context of the green energy transition:
Recent global studies predict demand increases of up to ten times current production levels for minerals like cobalt, graphite, and lithium. No matter the mix of alternate energy sources the world turns to, the mining sector will be a key player in the years ahead.
To meet the ambitious goal of universal modern energy by 2030 — while grappling with the consequences of critical minerals demand growth — harmonized policies, coordinated investment and innovative research are urgently needed. Equally or even more important, however, are the understudied and undersupported partnerships that can catalyze and scale these efforts to make SDG7 both a lifeline and a means of economic empowerment and equity.
The Congo Power alliance represents one such innovative coalition approach. Initially launched by Google’s Supplier Responsibility team in 2017 to reinforce responsible minerals trade and expand economic opportunity through clean energy, the initiative supports communities committed to the responsible sourcing of minerals that are ubiquitous in electronics and historically tied to conflict and human rights abuses. This mineral trade focuses on tungsten, tin, tantalum, gold and cobalt, making this issue particularly critical in the African Great Lakes Region, where much of the world’s supply of these minerals’ stock lies underground.
The African Great Lakes region includes Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Republic of South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia. Image courtesy of Google, USAID
As part of its overarching sustainability strategy, Google committed to maximizing our use of finite resources, which includes supporting in-region programs that reinforce responsible supply chains, and increasing the use of recycled materials. These program commitments are also part of meeting the expectations of Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which mandate that all publicly traded companies complete due diligence on their supply chains, and report on those measures.
In line with these commitments, the Congo Power team has invested in 14 community projects since 2017 and has brought a broad group of stakeholders along. On a Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA) delegation with the U.S. State Department in late 2019, for example, Google, Nokia, Intel, Apple, Global Advanced Metals, USAID, U.S. Department of State, GiZ, the Responsible Business Alliance and RESOLVE visited the Idjwi Island minigrid and spent time with the Panzi Foundation’s Denis Mukwege discussing the intersection of human rights and responsible sourcing in the region.
As a result of that trip, the Congo Power team focused on building a deeper relationship with the Panzi Foundation and put community health clinics at the center of addressing power, gender, energy equity along with reinforcing responsible supply chains. The team also continues to expand collaborations with conservation areas such as Garamba National Park, which is deploying clean power systems to support local economic activities (both mining and non-mining) in ways that reduce threats to the park’s conservation and biodiversity goals.
Four artisanal gold miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at a site visited by the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade delegation in 2019. Photo Credit: Alyssa Newman
The program’s launch highlighted the importance of deep relationships between development partners, consumer brands and NGOs with deep in-country operating expertise, such as GivePower and Resolve. This multi-sector approach is critical for drawing in further “downstream” conglomerates whose customers increasingly demand end products made with responsibly sourced materials.
This strategy has successfully brought on some of the world’s largest manufacturers to the alliance’s commitment to responsible sourcing. Intel has funded two additional phases, and other partners are in the process of making funding commitments. The alliance collaborates with platforms such as Cobalt for Development (BMW, Samsung, BASF, GIZ, Volkswagen, Good Shepherd International Foundation and others) and the Fair Cobalt Alliance(Tesla, Fairfone, The Impact Facility and others) to reinforce mutual objectives in responsible sourcing, and support organizations that are working on the ground.
This is just the beginning, however. Many questions remain for the RAEL/Congo Power collaboration to uncover in improving the delivery of sustainable and appropriate energy solutions across the various supply chains that constitute the lifeblood of vulnerable communities around the world.
Chief among the initiative’s research ambitions is developing a deeper sense of how to make $1 of investment in renewable energy “go further.” Benchmark impact metrics for innovative energy projects are lacking in the empirical literature, particularly for mini-grid technologies, increasingly recognized as the least-cost way to electrify hundreds of millions of those without power. Developing and documenting enabling partnerships also offers a key resource for nations, businesses, multinational aid / development organizations and civil society to interrogate potential solutions and scale up winning concepts that can help meet goals set in the Paris Climate Agreements and other SDGs.
Fundamentally, such a private-public-academic partnership boils down to exploring what kinds of impact — described both quantitatively and qualitatively — different energy delivery models can achieve across institutional and geographical scales. And beyond the evaluation of impact: Which narratives can most effectively communicate these insights into actionable support for promising solutions and their developers?
Guided by such academic research questions, these partnerships are able to fund implementation partners as well. Nuru, Equatorial Power and OffGridBox are three such partners in East and Central Africa, whose operations are providing critical insights into key techno-economic and operational challenges to scaling energy access.
These organizations have a wide and diverse footprint. Nuru builds and operates mini-grids across remote, rural, and urban areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Their principal installation is one of the largest mini-grids in Africa, supplying more than 1,800 customers through a 1.3 megawatt solar-hybrid installation in peri-urban neighborhoods in Goma, DRC. Congo Power supported Equatorial Power’s very first installation mini-grid, a 20 kilowatt-peak (kWp) installation on Idjwi Island on Lake Kivu (separating the DRC and Rwanda) supplying over 300 connections, including several small-to-medium enterprises. OffGridBox has deployed one of its 3.4 kWp containerized power and water installations in Walikale (a mining center in eastern DRC), with more than 80 identical such deployments around the world.
OffGridBoxes (“Boxes”) ready for deployment at the Rwandan headquarters. Photo by Sam Miles
To gain deep yet broad insights into the challenge of strengthening the “golden thread,” RAEL researchers within the Congo Power alliance aim to be both methodical yet practical in developing research themes from these initial project foci — particularly important given the challenges of doing in-person research through a pandemic.
One theme that consistently emerges through and across such projects is the importance of “productive” uses of electricity — most simply defined as the ability of electricity users to generate additional income on the basis of improved energy access. When, where and how are informal artisans, entrepreneurs and laborers able to convert renewable electricity into improved economic outcomes for themselves, their homesteads and their communities? These questions have proven particularly challenging to answer, despite over two decades of scholarship describing productive uses of electricity as a cornerstone underpinning the financial sustainability, and thus scalability, of energy access solutions with high upfront investment costs and low margins.
RAEL researchers have brought novel evaluation approaches to tackle this problem, including live-monitoring of electricity consumption of productive use pilots across the region, geospatial and remote sensing techniques leveraging satellite imagery and machine learning, as well as piloting new power quality and reliability measurement methodologies for evaluating the state of electricity for health services, including cold storage, through collaborations with infrastructure-monitoring startup nLine.
Many important questions beyond how to catalyze income generating uses of electricity remain, however. Does street lighting reduce crime in remote villages or rapidly urbanizing environments? Can decentralized energy solutions bridge the gaps in Africa’s vaccine cold chains? How can project funders best collaborate with private sector implementers, NGOs, and policymakers to optimize the impacts of a given energy project, targeting outcomes as disparate as supply chain traceability, productive end uses, conservation or women’s empowerment?
Public street lighting provided by Nuru in a community near Garamba National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo by Esther Nsapu
These and many other research questions will guide RAEL researchers as the Congo Power initiative continues to gain momentum and partners. A much wider consortium of partners, however, is still needed to confront the magnitude of the challenges ahead, and data-driven research is critical to harness the disparate perspectives, resources and objectives such a big tent approach entails.
For corporate sustainability professionals, joining coalitions such as Congo Power is one way to connect many distinct pieces of the challenges that lie ahead: confronting climate change by supporting cleaner energy production in communities at the very start of their supply chains, tackling the human rights implications of exponential demand growth for minerals required for electronics infrastructure including renewable energy equipment and battery storage technologies, and ensuring the equitable distribution of potential benefits from the global energy transition are distributed equitably. No one company or organization can move the needle on their own, but it is increasingly clear that shareholders, consumers, employees and regulators are placing greater responsibility on global brands to step up to the challenge.
Partnerships such as Congo Power provide a clear pathway for private-public partnerships to explore and support cutting-edge projects, technologies and infrastructures, guided by the most recent empirical evidence of impact. With rigorous, intersectional and actionable research guiding such a powerful coalition of committed partners, a truly just energy transition is possible.
Editor’s note: Serena Patel (MIT), Hilary Yu, Joyceline Marealle (both UC Berkeley) and Alyssa Newman (Google and UC Berkeley) also contributed to this article.
California can do better than carbon neutrality by 2045
BYDANIEL KAMMEN
Ten years ago, many Californians could not have imagined the climate nightmare we are living today — dark orange skies during wildfire season, heat waves in the dead of winter, mandatory water restrictions amid crippling drought.
Without urgent action, we may well look back on this moment as the calm before the storm. Over the course of the next decade, California’s biggest climate challenges — hotter summers, a shorter rainy season and more destructive wildfires — could double in intensity.
It’s against this backdrop that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) last week released a draft of our state’s scoping plan, a blueprint for combating climate change that will guide California’s policy for years. Despite the stakes for Californians, and although my research indicates the state could actually become carbon negative by 2030, the draft proposal would delay reaching carbon neutral until 2045. The barriers to a target of 2030 are political, not technical.
The draft plan calls for investment in new fossil fuel electricity resources, and it relies on unproven and costly carbon capture technologies that would lock in fossil fuel pollution. Adopting this approach would be lazy, nonsensical and racially unjust. During the current 45-day period for public review of the plan, California has the chance to choose a smarter path.
The Huntington Beach Generating Station includes a natural gas generator that began operation in 2020.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Renewable energy, even when coupled with energy storage, is cheaper than fossil fuels. California’s own state laws say that renewable energy must be prioritized before building out expensive and polluting gas power plants. Instead, California must set ambitious targets that immediately cut pollution through no-regrets strategies.
If we fall short of the climate action that science demands, Californians, and especially lower-income Californians and communities of color, will pay the price. What’s more, we could see this failed model replicated across other states and nations. It’s not hyperbole to say billions of people could be worse off if California fails to lead.
By the same token, if our state sets an ambitious but achievable goal — like carbon neutrality by 2030 or 2035 — the benefits ripple widely. Other states and nations are looking to California. If we set an ambitious target and focus future policy toward meeting it, others are more likely to adapt as well. Even when climate goals are not reached, they keep policies and investments moving in the right direction.
Last summer, when he directed CARB to examine accelerating California’s climate targets to 2035 or sooner, Gov. Gavin Newsom said “science demands we do more.” Having just announced a historic $32-billion investment in climate programs over the next five years, he must now step in and ensure that regulators live up to his call to increase climate ambition across the board.
To get this planning process back on track, regulators must start by correcting the flawed methodology that is the underpinning of their current proposal. CARB’s economic and jobs modeling fails to incorporate both the true cost of delaying emissions reductions and the full health and societal benefits from more ambitious emissions reductions. Put simply, California can create more jobs and more prosperity with renewables than we can with fossil fuels.
In developing the scoping plan, CARB staff used a measure called the social cost of carbon, which puts a dollar value on the damages created by additional greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is, these estimates vastly underestimated the costs of delaying climate action.
If we don’t begin to rapidly reduce fossil fuel pollution, the impacts on California’s healthcare system, our economy, our food supply and our communities will be orders of magnitude greater than what CARB has accounted for. Regulators can correct this by aligning with experts’ latest analysis, which calculates the true social cost of carbon at $50 per ton of pollution emitted.
As a next step, regulators need to acknowledge it is far too late in the game to gamble our state’s future on unproven carbon capture technologies that may never materialize. CARB’s draft scoping plan projects that California will use 100 million metric tons (MMT) of direct air capture in 2045. Globally, only 0.01 MMT of annual direct air capture is happening today. It is unrealistic to assume we can scale up this technology so much overnight, and foolish to direct investment to unproven experiments when affordable natural carbon removal solutions like composting and tree-planting are readily available now.
We have affordable renewable energy technologies available today that not only cut carbon emissions but also tackle our state’s air pollution crisis. California’s scoping plan should mobilize a vast expansion of renewable energy technologies. Instead, the current proposal calls for 10 gigawatts of new natural gas generating capacity — the equivalent of 33 large new gas plants.
There is still time for CARB and Newsom to deliver a bold climate blueprint that centers equity and public health and focuses on a no-regrets approach of renewable energy investment. It’s California’s legacy and lives around the world that are at stake. We cannot afford to fall short.
Daniel Kammen is a professor of sustainability at UC Berkeley. He is a former coordinating author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kammen in currently serving in the Biden-Harris Administration as Senior Advisor for Energy & Innovation at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
