I have been consuming the latest flagship report, released today, 10th September 2020, by the IEA called “Energy Technology Perspectives 2020

The report’s comprehensive analysis maps out the technologies needed to tackle emissions in all parts of the energy sector, including areas where technological progress is still lacking such as long-distance transport and heavy industries.

It shows the amount of emissions reductions that are required from electrification, hydrogen, bioenergy and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. It also provides an assessment of emissions from existing infrastructure and what can be done to address them.

Within the work going into this report, the IEA has identified over 800 technology options that need to be further examined, explored, validated, and accelerated for the World to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. That is an awful lot of innovation to get us to a clean energy transition from where we are today.

The report is over 400 pages long and is framed as a guide book for all involved in the energy transition. The report not only shows the scale of the challenge but also offers vital guidance for overcoming so many of the issues and challenges identified today. As anyone knows the more you explore innovation and what it is trying to resolve, the more complex it becomes.

To cover the whole energy system what we have been identified today in technology options will multiply, adapt, change, and build out different solutions as we continue to learn and advance.

If nothing else do read the press release for this report HERE “ Reaching energy and climate goals demand a dramatic scaling up of clean energy technologies – starting now”

Accelerating Innovation through rapid innovation adoption cycles

There are so many aspects of innovation need within this report but one part I felt was worth highlighting as it suggests eight innovation approaches of rapid innovation cycles for the Energy transition. These are ways to look to accelerate a more rapid innovation cycle within the energy transition. I wanted to put these into a simple table as they make real sense of how we can tackle innovation within the drive towards a clean energy transformation

You can download this as a PDF Table of rapid innovation cycles for the Energy transition

Different approaches to more rapid innovation adoption cycles

This rapid innovation cycle approach is the work of IEA- all rights reserved.

The examples illustrated are ones chosen by IEA to help relate the attribute to the example of technology, innovation, or process change.

Within this extensive report on the innovation need to deploy clean energy technologies you get a deep dive through this Energy Technology Perspectives 2020. The report focuses on technology needs and opportunities for reaching international climate and sustainable energy goals. This flagship report offers vital analysis and advice on the clean energy technologies the world needs to meet net-zero emissions objectives.

Providing a comprehensive innovation understanding of the impact and relationship

It is a comprehensive report for anyone interested in how and why innovation is central to our lives as it has the major role to play in the energy transition we are all undertaking.

A journey to turn our energy into clean modern and more sustainable ways, as well as to move towards the eradication of harmful emissions caused by our industrial past we need this transition to hopefully give us a promising future of ensuring our (one) planet will be fit to habitat in decades to come.

In my view applying and harnessing all we know on innovation, research and development give us this (one) chance.

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There is complexity in all the energy transitions going on. Still, it is the ones that can see the possibilities and ‘energize’ through new innovative solutions that hold the future in our hands to capitalize upon as fast as we can..

All we can predict is that the pace of innovation and energy transition will speed and then scale up to meet the needs of a world rapidly wanting to decarbonize, and the companies that are the investors in innovation will be the best placed to capitalize on this.

During the next ten to twenty years, we are in a race to transform our energy systems, one that moves from fossil fuel reliant to clean fuels based on renewable energy. Innovation is the catalyst for this.

We need to decarbonize and make energy greener.

The magnitude of realization of achieving deep decarbonization of our energy systems, the upending of fossil fuel reliance into renewables, and this undertaking of a complete energy system redesign is hard to comprehend within the time scales set.

What we do in the next ten years will determine if we can achieve the goals of reducing global warming by 2 percent by 2050. The cost of not achieving this will be significant for its impact on our lives if we do not attempt to undertake this.

The need is to allow time for new technologies to commercialize.

To undertake something like a global energy transition, you need time; time to figure it out, validate the options and pathways and then provide the necessary time to pilot, learn and then commercialize the (multiple) solutions to be scaled and applied. The cost of this transformation will eventually run into trillions of dollars.

The innovation aspect needs to gather momentum. Technologies are emerging based on several solution needs:

• Ones that are grid edge in design, meaning more customer-facing and power-flow controls
• Radically different storage technologies that can handle the variances in renewable of holding the supply of solar and wind generating energy as well as converting energy through electrolysis, hydrogen and synthetic fuels that serves the needs of mobility, heating, agriculture
• The present gas and steam turbines need to be upgraded, optimized, converted and have applied hybrid solutions that combine different energy sources, various technologies that combine to provide mixed energy source power plants
• The advancement of carbon capture techniques and carbon removal
• Exploring next-generation nuclear fission and fusion
• Finding different solutions that allow high-temperature superconductor transmission and solid-state transformers to be introduced increasingly into the energy system
• We need to increase the transparency, reliability, and resilience through the application and use of sensors, monitoring, analytics, and self-learning systems to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
• Finally, putting to use digitalization for machine and device connectivity, managing growing complexity in overall systems

Each of these initiatives “demands” new technology design.

They need to be economically viable and scalable and need to drive a clean energy transition and provide increasing systems flexibility

These new technologies need to break into the existing lifecycle of energy design to substitute incumbent solutions. The speed of development and deployment will be unprecedented for use to meet the climate goals, decarbonize the system, and change the fuel source.

Innovation is at the heart of the energy transition.

Innovation will be at the forefront of the energy transition; it will be both radical and full of breakthroughs to achieve the goals set to decarbonize our world.

Innovation is enabling technologies, offering new business models, market design, and system integration options in focusing on flexible solutions to overcome solar and wind variability, provide increased system flexibility, and allowing for reduced total system cost.

Innovation is playing a significant role in facilitating the integration of the emerging new renewable energy system providing new opportunities to explore and evolve:

1).  For new business models, where new services, enhancing the system’s flexibility, and providing the incentivizing of further integration models can play there part.

2). Then we have the consequence of any innovation change, in energy source and delivery, and that is in market design innovation. Regulations, policies, new incentives for value-adding services are building new business opportunities that give a new breed of energy players, including a new set of infrastructure investors, the opportunities to support and gain from the new introduction of solutions.

3). Lastly, the innovating models for operating in the electricity system can give a different way to share the value out of managing this VRE generation. It opens up the market to a whole new range of energy providers, including, you as a net contributor back to the energy grid with the right approach to usage, storage, and generation from your renewable technology stack of solutions.

Innovation solutions are both supply-sided and demand-sided

Innovation is working on both the supply-side in finding the new flexible solution but on the demand-side as well. Just providing two significant examples where innovation can transform parts of the energy system:

The Grid is offering real potential to different innovative solutions. The need for a growing range of flexible solutions to reduce the dependencies on large centralized grids offers a transformational set of opportunities. Network Grids that are more downstream or even operate at the edge, closer to final demand, enable energy to achieve a closer match for the generation and response to consumer demand. Also, the more variable generation having a more distributed grid provides increased flexibility in storage and new grid operations. From these new grid designs, Energy Utilities can deliver solutions that interconnect the systems to be more flexible and deploy digital solutions that support increasing effectiveness and coverage, closer to users to offer improved services.

Storage through advancing battery-scale solutions and the power-to-x solutions is also offering a completely different range of options for demand-side management. As designs become more optimized, the distribution of energy gets closer to the markets and the ability to aggregate distributed energy resources to match and design the grid services for giving the need consumer that flexibility by taking out the variability of renewables.

Within these two examples, Innovation through new technology application becomes the catalyst to the changes we need within the Energy Transition. Are you unlocking its power to transform?

The post Innovation has the power to unlock the Energy Transition first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

1. Firstly by exchanging fossil fuel hydrogen with renewable hydrogen for fertilizers and feedstocks
2. Secondly, exchanging coal and gas with renewable hydrogen for steel making and chemical production.
3. The Electrolysis method can bridge the gap between power and the industry sectors, increasing the value of electrons and provide the essential molecules.
4. The Electrolyzer can complement the intermittent renewable energy sources of wind and solar to form a complete energy source. Hydrogen can be stored, and the electrolyzer ramped up when you suffer variable weather conditions to offer continued energy, all based on renewable sources, solving the seasonal variations that wind and solar can have.

Hydrogen does the potential to tick all the boxes of the decarbonizing industry as well as be the alternative heat source fo building and through hydrogen fuel cells offer low-carbon mobility. Using renewable hydrogen can accelerate the shift to green energy and decarbonization as a replacement for fossil fuels. Finally, it has the potential to be substituted in many of the harder-to-abate industrial sectors reliant on hydrogen through steam methane reforming as well as compliment electricity and decarbonize the gas grids we presently rely upon.
Hydrogen is not an energy source but an energy carrier. It is versatile; it offers no greenhouse gases, particulates, Sulphur oxides, or ground-level ozone but does have a high Co2 intensity upstream if produced from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, or natural gas. To make it green hydrogen, it has to be green, and that requires production through water electrolysis.
So We Are At The Time for Ramping up the Electrolyzer
I want to return to the discussion that Armin Schnettler EVP of Siemens Energy had with Kevin O’Donovan here. He was asked, “what are the technical challenges with the (PEM) Electrolyzers?
The reply by Mr. Schnettler was mostly about working on the fundamental technologies of Electrolyzers as the critical needs to make Electrolyzers Industrial ready. He pointed out the PEM technology is presently not mature enough, and this needs more robust solutions.
 The list of issues to tackle was in Mr. Schnettler’s opinion:
1) Certainly, get the capital cost down of the Electrolyzer
2) Make the Electrolyzers more compact, in their size,
3) Make sure they have high levels of reliability to operate in industrial application environments for 10 to 20 years and
4) Scaling up the Electrolyzers from the existing 4 MW to the next “ten-factor step” that seems achievable every 4 to 5 years and deliver the 100 MW plant solution next.
5) Finally, to get to these 100 MW solutions as soon as possible and then to 1 GW.
It was here he put it: “it is moving from MW to GW as the challenge (and opportunity)”
Why is this scaling up so important?
Just imagine Siemens have only delivered their latest Gas Turbine, the Siemens 9000HL model recently in the UK to work in a combined-cycle plant. Weighing in at just under 1.1 million pounds (497,000 kilograms), it’ll rotate 3,000 times a minute and generate 593 megawatts of power at peak, likely for decades. That turbine could be argued is “the pinnacle of today’s combustion technologies.”( Bloomberg / Siemens).
All these power generation technologies are competing; all are focusing on not just efficiencies but finding fuel systems that support that technology solution. Electrolyzers need to get into the big league of energy generation, pure and simple, to compete effectively. The pricing of the finished product of Hydrogen has got to get far closer to what the fossil fuel alternatives can deliver today in efficiencies and effectiveness and are matured through well-established solutions and integrated designs.
The significant upcoming advantage for the Electrolyzer is the marginal unit of power generation is coming from a smaller and smaller source. In 2020, the median kilowatt-hour generated in the UK will come from a plant of 596 MW of capacity. In 2040, the median kilowatt-hour will come from a plant of only 40 MW of capacity. (Source: Bloomberg). The other is by using the Water Electrolyzer (PEM) it is better to combine with other variable renewable sources for a faster ramp-up and giving a totally carbon-free fuel or product solution that offers a clean, sustainable alternative.
The commercial competitiveness of the electrolyzer will depend on the ability to advance the underlying technologies. These I will be exploring in my next post.
The need is for technology improvements of higher efficiencies, less degradation, higher availability, larger cell sizes, higher operating pressures, less reduced critical materials together with this need for reduced material size (Armin’s compactness). 
 Getting to this, the plants will require a significant plant production capacity ramping up and becoming more automated. That plant ramping up will need more automation production of the Electrolyzer cell components, the cells, and stacks to build GW scale electrolyzer plants. Then you will have a set of different challenges at the installing site, where the cost of electricity becomes critical. Coupling low-cost renewable energy with Electrolyzers makes them viable.
So the push by Governments brings up closer to the tipping point of building a significant renewable Hydrogen business in the next decades. Already according to Wood MacKenzie, the green hydrogen pipeline more than doubled in five months from 3.2 GW to 8.2 GW of electrolyzer investments by 2030
The plan in Europe is to take the share of Hydrogen from less than 2% to 13-14% of the European energy Mix.
So as we all look to Electrolyzers as the solution towards offering a power source of Hydrogen it is 1) the technology developments needed to be well-mastered, 2) to build out capacity volumes to bring down unit prices, 3) we need to see GW scale to make them industrially attractive,4) renewable integrated electricity- hydrogen partnerships and 5) integrated project development, construction, and installation approaches, so these solutions can ensure electrolyzers competitive. And that is a long hard road to travel between now and 2030 to get the Electrolyzer the Real alternative to other power generation options.
Exploring this further
So we need to look a little more at the Electrolyzer and see if it is scalable in asset readiness, system design, and value chain developed to offer an Industrial shift to Hydrogen in these next 5 to 10 years.
To understand this readiness and the issues to be addressed, I decided to take a further, more in-depth dive into Electrolyzers. You will find my outcomes from my research and piecing different parts of the Electrolyzer puzzle together over on my dedicated energy transition posting site: https://innovating4energy.com.
I plan to explore and explain some of the significant obstacles to be overcome in ramping up today’s “pilot” electrolyzers into full-scale industrial-grade solutions. Electrolyzer solutions than can compete with other power generation technologies, ones that are very mature and will certainly not yield their established market space without a fight and some compelling arguments of the reasons to change.
A more in-depth review of Electrolyzers can be found on my dedicated posting site for all thongs of Energy Transition by clicking this link “Show me an Electrolyzer.“

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