After its first year, reFUEL powers past coal

On the 5th of November, the reFUEL project had its first public event in the framework of BOKU’s energy cluster. Advisory board member Jessica Jewell presented her work on the global coal phase out while Johannes Schmidt gave an overview over the reFUEL project and showed results from the first project year.

Jessica discussed the global Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) and its contribution to the 1.5 degree target (see her presentation here and her paper here). A closer look at PPCA membership reveals that members are characterized by a low degree of coal dependence, i.e. coal makes up a small fraction of total power generation, comparatively high GDP and a high score on a functioning of government-index. Accordingly, PPCA’s contribution to the necessary global coal phase-out is very low. As a comparison, the German coal phase-out alone (not part of PPCA) is of about the same magnitude as all phase-out pledges in the PPCA. Jessica’s results also show that increasing the impact of PPCA means to bring countries on board which have a lower GDP, a higher share of coal, and a lower score on a functioning of government index. But it also means to prevent new, rapidly developing countries becoming member of the club of major coal users. This is a huge challenge, but one fact that Jessica pointed at may help: the rapidly decreasing cost of renewable energy, in particular solar PV and wind power. Jessica’s figures impressively showed the necessary magnitude and speed of the required transition.

Johannes presented perspectives on the future of trade in renewable energy carriers in low-carbon energy systems. A decrease in the trade of energy carriers is widely expected by the modelling community. Moreover, such a decline is also a political goal, for example in Austria, which aims to cover its entire power demand from “national renewables” by 2030. Strongly decreasing costs of renewables over the past decade may help achieving this goal. Yet, the uptake of renewables is sluggish in some markets, recently. In Germany, once a global frontrunner of the renewables expansion, onshore wind energy installations have virtually grinded to a halt as the government struggles to attract sufficient bids in its auctions for wind energy. While there is a multitude of reasons for that slow down, increasing conflicts over the expansion of new infrastructure in a country that has very high energy-use density per area of available land are an important contributing factor. But even if we manage to overcome such obstacles on the way towards fully renewable energy systems, integration costs of intermittent power generators are increasing strongly for penetration levels above 60%. The use of dispatchable, renewable fuels could be one way forward as such power generation could be an important source of flexibility. This, however, would likely give rise to the need to import renewable energy carriers. Consequently, Johannes discussed how synthetic fuels made from renewable electricity might become a globally traded energy commodity.

However, building up an export industry in resource-rich regions can give rise to substantial negative impacts, as was shown for the case of Brazil, where environmental and social conflicts revolve around the wind power expansion. The presentation can be found here.

After their presentations, Jessica and Johannes discussed with the audience about the role of coal and nuclear power in future energy systems, about trade in renewable energy carriers as a double-edged option that might speed-up decarbonization, but also export European land-use conflicts to other world regions. Moreover, it was pointed out that trade is not necessarily long-distance. Rather, trade within continents and even within communities can also increase flexibility of energy systems.