How do we take all the knowledge that we've learned so far in this course and apply it to create a pathway to a future driven by more diverse and environmentally friendly energy sources? Let's start off by talking in general terms and then we'll look at one country, Ireland, to understand its specific challenges in creating new pathways. Any significant goal in transforming the world's energy systems is as significant as goals get; must be guided by effective planning. Effective planning must lay out a hierarchy of specific goals, such as building X gigawatts of wind generation capacity, which in turn requires setting smaller goals, such as situating wind generation offshore and onshore, and building electrical transmission capacity to bring the new wind power to market. There may be several levels of sub-goals before we get to the point where we can identify specific actions to take and to design specific pathways to achieve those actions. In this context, the pathways to achieve our goal of X gigawatts of wind power are going to be the detailed plans to build each individual wind generation and transmission project. Remember several lessons back that car off Aniak from Trans Delta took us through the immense amount of work that goes into building a wind project. Of course, it's only that simple if we were building something that is an established technology, no one to work reliably in the environment we're building at. If we're going to use a new or modified technology, such as a redesigned wind turbine, we may need to build, test or pilot facilities first and run them for a period of time to evaluate their performance before beginning the actual commercial building process. Can we get our project on stream, on time? Remember our discussion about supply chains. We can build all those new wind turbines, nuclear reactors or solar panels only if all the materials are available when we need them for a price we can afford to pay. Finally, will our project perform as planned or will it fall short? Sometimes even the best planning fails to achieve our goals. To sum up, stating goals is not the same thing as creating a pathway to achieve those goals. Or as Phil Everly and others have said in song, 'Wishing won't make it so.' We actually have to do things. For example, we can say that we have a goal to sell only electric vehicles by 2030 or to have a zero emissions electrical grid by 2035. But those goals cannot be achieved without action plans and pathways to accomplish them. Even with that in mind, we should remember the words of the brilliant writer, Isaac Asimov. 'To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.' Let's look at a real life example of the challenges around making energy transition work. Dr. Simon Todd is going to join us today to talk about Ireland's energy transition. Dr. Todd earned his B.Sc. and PhD degrees from the University of Bristol. His energy background is incredibly diverse with experience in petroleum exploration and development, geothermal, and solar energy. He has studied and written extensively on pathways to energy transition with a focus on Ireland. Simon, the floor is yours. Thanks Brad and hello everyone. This lesson uses the Island of Ireland as a small but representative example of the challenges faced by us all. Let start with the historical and more importantly, current picture of Ireland's energy supply. Ireland's total consumption is a tiny percentage of the world's. It is, however, quite representative of many parts of the world. Oil is the biggest source of energy and it powers Ireland's transport. Ireland has no local oil production and relies on foreign imports of oil and oil products. Oil and the transport sector account for 56 percent of Ireland's energy-related emissions. Natural gas is next up, but half of Ireland's supplies used in electricity generation, and the other half in heating buildings and industry. About a quarter of the Ireland's energy emissions comes from natural gas. Coal and peat are still used in power stations and in homes and factories in Ireland, and together account for 16 percent of the emissions. These sources have been shrinking with peat almost eliminated on coal fire power generation dive into one plant in the Republic of Ireland and one in Northern Ireland. Note that wind and other renewables, while growing in size are a small fraction of the overall energy supply. Most jurisdictions in Ireland, Northern Ireland part of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, and EU member have ambitious targets for emissions reduction as a contribution to tackling climate change. Ireland has made good progress in decarbonizing its electricity with wind power. However, like every other country around the world, the energy transition is much more complex than simply greening electricity. For the rest of the lesson, we will focus on how these complex problems might be solved. To do that, we will use the concept of the energy trilemma. This is essentially a ternary three-sided diagram that suggests that when solving energy challenges, we have to consider security and reliability, affordability, and especially to those already energy per, as well as of course, environmental impact locally and globally. In some cases, and members of the trilemma will combine in a positive way to increase the case for change. For example, Ireland is entirely dependent on foreign oil products, bringing security risks and a lack of control. Therefore, if transport can be shifted from oil to renewable energy sources through electrification in a cost-effective way, we will address all three parts of the trilemma. A good example of the trilemma and members working against one another is there ironically the replacement of thermal fossil fuel generation with wind and solar. Because of the intermittency of these renewable sources, without viable long-term energy storage yet, Ireland still needs a fallback position, such as backup fossil fuel, electrical generation to maintain energy reliability. Now let's look in some detail how the transition might be affected in Ireland, what are the challenges and opportunities along the pathway. First, we'll use a Sankey diagram to illustrate the flow of energy from primary energy requirement by fuel on the left, to where this energy is used and/or converted in the middle, to how much of that energy ends up as useful work on the right. The first striking point to note is high ineffective and wasteful Ireland's energy system is,2/3 of the energy is rejected into the environment. Rob talked about this a few lessons ago when addressing energy efficiency. In transport, for example, because of the inefficiency of the internal combustion and engine, Ireland's gasoline, petrol, and diesel vehicles like the world over, only use about 1/3 of the energy driving the motor shaft. The rest is rejected as heat through the radiator, out the exhaust tailpipe, or is admitted as noise. Electric vehicles or EVs, are the obvious solution for this energy waste problem. In principle, replacing ICE vehicles with EVs at a minimum, pushes the message back problem back to the power generation, and hence replaces millions of point sources of emissions with just a few. Emissions problem is then further sold by having renewable energy sources to create electricity to charge the vehicles. Ireland has harbored ambitions for transport of electrician. The upper chart on this slide is from the sustainable energy of authority of Ireland in about 2011. It depicts a growth of EVs to 10 percent of cars on the road by 2020. That projection has proven to be way too optimistic. For example, in 2019, EVs were about 0.4 percent of the passenger car fleet. Despite that flaw in 2019, the Irish government, as part of the Climate Action Plan up the ante on these projections by declaring a ban on petrol and diesel engines from 2030 almost. With the hope of encouraging the ownership of nearly one million electric vehicles on Irish roads by 2030. First point to note about this projection is that it's not likely to happen. Taking private cars alone, which comprise very nearly 3/4 of the total current vehicle fleet of 2.7 million, there isn't enough annual turnover to realistically achieve this target. Roughly 100,000 Irish cars are retired each year. To put 100,000 EVs on the road instead, newly purchased replacement cars would need to be 100 percent EV by 2030, which is a 17-fold increase in sales over four years from last year. That doesn't seem likely. Even to reach 100 percent EV new cars by 2030 requires an exponential growth of about 30 percent or more of the market share prior to the prior year. Several things need to happen. Firstly, a better range of affordable EVs is needed. Even the last six months, that picture has been changing for the good, with many car manufacturers announcing new EV models. Safe from choice and supply of models, another reason consumers are not yet buying EVs in the required numbers is the perceived re-inject anxiety, even for a geographically small country like Ireland. I know from experience from driving in the USA that that problem is largely unfounded and will become less of an issue as charging station networks are standard. Nevertheless, charging is an issue now and will continue to be so, particularly for people with on-street parking and it's not clear that the traditional petrol station model will work. Despite these problems, the EV proposition looks tractable in the long term, with clear potential for electric vehicles to grow, to be cheaper as well as cleaner than their fossil fuel counterparts. I believe EVs could exceed 20 percent of the low stock in Ireland by 2030. See my projection in the lower chart below compared to the ICE's original chart. Although progress will still need to be made on the issues outlined above if EVs are to take up an even greater share. But as with other trilemmas, EVs are not a silver bullet. Unlike a game of whack-a-mole, there are consequences to EV take up, which we'll discuss later. We've looked at transport. Let's now look at industry, residential, and services. These sectors are a little bit more complicated in terms of energy sources. Using electricity to provide light and to power systems and machines, and using natural gas, oil, and some coal and peat to provide heat. We'll deal with electricity and its chances a little later. For now, let's focus on heat. As illustrated in the cartoon, heat is the global elephant in the room when it comes to decarbonization. Not only is it a huge component of the challenge, 34 percent of energy emissions in Ireland, for example, it is more difficult to convince stakeholders to replace fossil fuels, particularly when they are relatively cheap. As with transport, the first part of the solution has to be eliminating waste in the final consumption of heat. In domestic heating applications, a lot of energy is lost by leakage, particularly in older housing stock in many countries around the world, including Ireland. This is especially so when spaces are warmed and water is heated by combusting fuels to generate temperatures much higher than are actually required. In older leaky houses, most of the generated heat literally goes up the chimney or out the windows and doors. Opportunities to insulate older homes and to build new homes to higher energy efficiency standards can be easily made into good for all season's investments with payback of the capital investment measured in years, not decades. The graph on the right shows the measured energy efficiency of 1.5 million Irish homes against an A to F/G rating on an average cost to heat. The data illustrate that there is as much as €2.3 billion wasted each year in the sample. If each home, except those homes that are already A-rated, were improved by one level, €900 million per year could be saved. Similar opportunities for energy efficiency exist in large commercial and public buildings, although the opportunity is not as big as large commercial buildings often need to be cooled more than they are heated because of waste heat from machinery and computer systems. Installation of building envelopes and the recycling of generated heat can help enormously in reducing energy demand. Having improve the energy efficiency of the building, the next large opportunity for energy is to harness energy from the building's local environment. The thermal and solar photovoltaic utilizing the energy in sunlight are well-known ways of deriving energy locally and behind the grid. Geothermal is far much less utilized, but uses the shallow subsurface as a source and the store of heat. Even the air, whatever the temperature has heat that can be focused and use by heat pumps, which we discussed as part of our lesson on geothermal energy. Heat pumps are so efficient that typically for one unit of electricity used in the pump, three units of heat are delivered to the target. This is known as the coefficient of performance or COP. For example, where 60 kilowatts of heat are delivered using 20 kilowatts of electrical power, the COP is three. Heat pumps have huge potential to replace fossil fuel boilers in homes, businesses, and industry. The program for government and the Climate Action Plan in Ireland set ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, including homes with targets to retrofit 500,000 homes to building energy rating of B2 and to install 400,000 heat pumps in existing buildings over the next 10 years. Building efficiency to radically reduce waste, the heat pumps to substitute for natural gas, oil, and coal heating, sounds easy. Why is it taking so long? There are a number of reasons, including public perception of alternatives to conventional energy solutions. One big blocker is the ability of the homeowner to afford the costs of retrofitting installation and replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump. There are, of course, government grants and other incentives, but often these don't quite make the difference. Another interesting challenges that Ireland, like a number of countries in Europe, have a environmental tax on electricity making natural gas an artificially cheaper alternative. The recent gas crisis in late 2021 in Europe hasn't held the situation, but it is clear that the government will have to rethink the distribution of tax burdens to incentivize change. There is also another issue which takes us back further to the left on the Sankey chart, electricity generation and distribution. Let's take a closer look at that. This Sankey diagram zooms in on electricity generation and transmission in Ireland. On the left, the various fuel sources with fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, dominating. On the right, is the split of energy that is transmitted on the grid to consumers and what is lost in the conversion process. Although natural gas combustion is far more inefficient as a conversion process, it still dominates the transmit of electricity picture. Nevertheless, wind, which is largely on shore in Ireland now, increases in proportion from source to transmit it because there's little loss in the wind turbine process. A simple view of this picture suggests that all was needed is more wind power and hence have investment in offshore wind. After all, Ireland's coastlines are amongst the windiest in Europe. If the cost of wind continues to plomer, it solves the security problem of foreign gas as well. Unfortunately, as with most energy transition challenges, it's not that simple with a reliability corner of the trilemma playing a role. The chart illustrates the whole Ireland growth in electricity generation from 2012 onwards as the Ireland's economy recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Throughout the period, the proportion of renewable energy and the generation mix has been steadily increasing the vast majority from onshore wind firms. This is encouraging from a sustainability point of view and is making electricity cleaner with time. Both governments in the Ireland are considering goals of a 70% proportion of electricity generated by renewables in 2013. However, the challenge is not simply replacing fossil fuel generation capacity with more wind. These challenges made all the more difficult by increasing demand for electricity. This range of forecasts combined for the whole Ireland show the expected growth and demand towards the end of the decade. Most of this growth is attributed to new industrial demand and particularly to data centers. A 30 percent increase in demand on today's demand is very significant. This is one scenario presented by the Ireland two grid companies to show higher 70 percent renewable energy sources target might be accomplished. It depends on further growth of onshore wind. Then offshore development is kicking in from 2024 onwards. The same time the amount of dispatchable at capacity is forecasted to decrease. With Ireland's last coal fire power plant, expect it to be shutters in 2025. This presents a significant problem to the reliability of the Ireland's grid because the new capacity illustrated in the previous slide is intermittent and non-dispatchable. For the grid to be reliable, there needs to be backup for longer periods when weather patterns become the majority of wind farms. Building wind capacity doesn't mean that the spots for fossil fuel capacity is obsolete. Its problem isn't even highlighted in the demand forecasts illustrated here. The reduction in coal par, coupled with overall increasing demand pushes the island and the deficit in the middle of the decade. The report says that this projection is being carefully monitored. There has already been some interesting ramifications. For example, Eric Grid, one of the grid operators, has asked data center companies only to present plans for new developments that include their own cogeneration power plants, which currently can't be anything else other than gas or oil. The fallout of this for Ireland's emissions targets continues to be a focus for political debate. Given the economic importance of the data center industry. Thought of breakthrough and battery, or there are other kinds of storage. This problem is likely to come to a head in the next couple of years. On flick of thermal fossil generation capacity. With wind power leads us nicely back to the final topic of this lesson on Ireland's energy, trilemmas natural gas. This chart shows my forecast for natural gas consumption up to 2030. Assuming that 70 percent renewables in electricity are pursued and accomplished, my projections shows that Ireland will still be consuming 150 billion cubic feet of gas each year in the next decades. Furthermore, because Ireland's only domestic gas field will have depleted by then, the vast majority of this gas will have to be imported from abroad with local biogas and hydrogen from renewable electricity, very unlikely to ascertain the energy scale. Ireland's important gas comes from across the sea in three pipelines, all of which emanate from a single terminal in Southwest Scotland. This exposes Ireland to unforeseen circumstances, so-called black swan events. For example, if the terminal was incapacitated for a period of time. The problem is further exacerbated by Ireland being on the end of a very long supply chain, which increasingly originates in Russia. Ireland is exposed to European demand and supply fluctuations. As experienced in the latter part of 2021, price hikes, increases in natural gas prices also put that cost of electricity up. Well, this has led to some frustration with policymakers. To be fair, a lot of it is justified. A ban on further licenses for offshore exploration for oil and gas has driven big companies away from Ireland, and so prevented investment in already licensed prospects off the West coast. A sizable oil and gas discovery remains undeveloped off the side coast. The government decision has only been made more complicated through the perception that frack gas from the US is dirtier than conventional gas. Let's conclude with some final comments on Ireland's energy transition. I hope I've illustrated that the energy transition, it's not just about climate change, but for countries like Ireland is also driven unconstrained by the security and price of energy. I've illustrated that some transformational changes to the energy system are required, starting with eliminating huge amounts of energy waste in our current energy flows. There are some really positive opportunities armed, particularly in wind, but also in solar and geothermal. The crossover to renewables, however, presents several huge conundrums and supply price risks that could lead to catastrophic, the systematic management of the transition and these risks needs a mindful planned approach in which problems are solved with social equity, economic prosperity, security of supply, and the environment, all priorities to be addressed. Those salts and energy plan, the luck of the Irish is unlikely to be sufficient. Thanks Simon, for that look at Ireland energy trilemma, providing real-world insight into the challenges around designing pathways to address our energy needs and goals. To close out this lesson, let's expand our view to look around the world that energy transition goals and pathways in different places. In fact, we see that most of these plants focus on emissions and address energy transition only from the point of view of minimizing emissions, not addressing energy security and reliability. Few are designed to guide a secure and effective energy transition. A great example is the International Energy Agency is 2021 report net-zero by 2050 of roadmap for the global energy sector. Obviously, the focus is in reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. The IEA modeled what they felt is the most technically feasible, cost-effective, and socially acceptable pathway to net-zero emissions. They'd laid out more than 400 milestones for what needs to happen to, in their words, transform the global economy from one dominated by fossil fuels into one powered predominantly by renewable energy. The IEA milestones are goals and sub-goals. They are not pathways to achieve those goals, but they are very useful in drawing attention to the many different areas where change is required. Some people view the IEA net-zero report as a true roadmap to the future lay out steps we must follow. Others have dismissed it as being unrealistic, saying we can't possibly do all the things that recommends whatever view we take, we have to remember that this is one scenario judged by the IEA to be the best way to achieve net-zero emissions. Here are some of the very broad actions the IEA proposes to support achieving their milestones. One can ask many questions, Is it realistic to assume that all governments agree in the very near future to implement complementary energy and climate policies will be anticipated? Leaps in innovation occur on schedule, will people agree to major lifestyle changes to reduce energy consumption? How can we stop investment in fossil fuel supply when global demand is still growing? But the biggest question must be with a focus on emissions reduction can be IEA net-zero scenario, ensure delivery of dispatchable, affordable, reliable energy to meet global demand and support all the UN sustainable development goals. Is it an energy plan as well as an emissions plan? Let's gain some further insights in the next lesson, examining the economics of diversifying our energy sources. This is a good place for course participants to join the online discussion group to express their thoughts on these questions.
