Global renewables: Pioneering the energy transition | DW Documentary

More than 50% of the world's population lives in urban areas. By 2050, it could be almost seventy percent. Big cities have big needs for water, food and

energy

. This huge demand on resources poses enormous challenges for researchers in a world fighting climate change. Those cities and towns will need large amounts of

energy

. Revolutionizing the complex systems of our energy supply is one of the biggest challenges for a

global

transition

to green energy. And for people, probably the most tangible. So for us as cities and policymakers in cities, I think it's very important that we take a leadership role.

Because it is possible that cities change. That is why we are very aware that we need to move towards an economy that is renewable, circular and positive for nature, all at the same time. In reality, we have no choice. I think we have little time left to save the planet. So, we have to do everything we can as quickly as possible. To see how a sustainable energy supply can work in practice, we turn to the United States. There, a California city aims to become the first carbon-neutral community in the country. Lancaster is home to about 175,000 residents.

In 2009, officials began a journey to go green, fundamentally transforming the city's economy and infrastructure. It was not only a technological reform and, more importantly, it was a change in mentality. The purpose of government is to help people, not slow them down. It used to take a minimum of six months if this person wanted to put solar panels on their roof. They have to get a permit. Someone would always have a design change, but it would take six months to be allowed to do so. And when I found out about that, I sent a memo. Now it takes 45 minutes, and it better be 45 minutes.

In the city of Lancaster, the hardest part was changing the culture within the city staff that we look for reasons to say yes, we don't look for reasons to say no. You know, when we started down this path, they laughed at us, they looked down on us, we were, you know, Facebook was lighting up every day, but we set out to develop a model for a city that, once the world woke up, they would find more easy to do. As we go down this path, we make more money than you can imagine. Alternative energy is profitable and it is enormously so.

Lancaster Mayor Rex Parris began installing photovoltaic panels on all municipal buildings. The electricity generated was used for public lighting. In the process, Parris discovered that he saved the city a lot of money. The dollars saved went toward installing even more photovoltaic panels on the rooftops of private residences. These systems also became mandatory for new buildings. Little by little, Lancaster created an alternative energy network. Excess electricity began to be used to generate hydrogen to power public transportation. Cheap electricity and cheap hydrogen attracted large new companies. And Lancaster solidified its reputation as a booming green city in the United States.

I traveled a lot. I went to the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, I went to Saudi Arabia, I went to all the energy conferences in the Middle East and I learned a lot. Thanks to the sunny climate and the already existing solar and wind farms in the area, the production of green energy and hydrogen continued to expand. When Lancaster began the process of transforming its own energy system in 2009, the unemployment rate was 17%. In 2023, it fell to around 6%. Lancaster became a self-sufficient green energy powerhouse and also very profitable. Once people start being innovative and creative, it is not limited to the immediate goal in front of you.

It spreads everywhere. I think this really is the most exciting city in the world, for that reason. We have a common purpose and it is a simple purpose. It is for our children to survive. You know, that's not difficult, you know? And when you have that as a common purpose, you can put aside all the differences and you can make things happen. You can build things that have never been built before. You know, this project here is actually quite remarkable. In recent years, both the City of Lancaster and Mayor Parris have been recognized with numerous awards for their achievements.

From the US state of California to Wunsiedel, in the German state of Bavaria, a rural region where the forestry industry is key. When Marco Krasser took the helm of the regional energy supplier, everything changed. What would the energy supply be like if we could only use renewable energy and sustainable raw materials? Well, we harness solar and wind energy and store them. Wunsiedel switched to a circular system that effectively linked its strong regional timber industry to the local energy system. The idea was to reuse as much energy as possible, multiple times. And wherever excess energy accumulates, for example in the form of waste wood or waste heat from machines, it should not be lost, but used.

We have wood, we have biomass, we have sun and wind. We may not have hydroelectric power, but we use everything we need locally. Surplus energy generated from solar and wind energy is used to press forest waste into wood pellets. The pellets can then be burned to generate heat or to power a turbine to generate electricity. It forms a cascading system that always consists of the same things: solar and wind, battery storage, and combined heat and power. It is the perfect system that unites sectors and industries. The construction industry is linked to the logging industry; The timber industry is linked to agriculture or forestry.

This creates local circular energy economies that can be scaled up at all levels, which in turn meets the demand for energy in the form of electricity and heat. And electricity in terms of mobility. Wunsiedel in Bavaria and Lancaster in California: both have made the best use of locally available resources. And both have created infrastructures in which green energy can be used as efficiently as possible in a continuous cycle. Of course, these systems are ideally integrated from the beginning into construction projects. In Copenhagen, a newly built district called Nordhavn served as a testing ground for the “EnergyLab” project, a living laboratory for research into innovative and more efficient energy cycles.

Well, the gist is that we test the solutions in real life. At EnergyLab Nordhavn we have also been investigating business models because they are also part of the solution. Innovation and business models are part of the solution. In this context of sectoral coupling, it is very important that we use the available energy and this is basically something that we are demonstrating here in the Nordhavn project. We can say that the energy system has to develop, we have to do it in a smarter way, and that means we need to see what other sources are available and how we can use them in the best possible way.

The buildings here are well insulated and retain heat. This saves money and is especially important during early morning rush hours. Additionally, commercial businesses in the neighborhood can compress the waste heat and supply it to the district heating system, which provides heat to surrounding buildings. The compressors to cool the products run on electricity and by using a little more electricity in the compressors, we get much more available heat. So in situations where we have surplus electricity coming from wind turbines or photovoltaics, we can optimize the operation of the compressors and convert that into a lot of additional energy that can be used in buildings.

And in that sense, is this system really a smart component in the sector's coupled energy system? Here again, an ingenious cycle. The energy introduced into the system does not have a single purpose, but is used several times. And the entire neighborhood benefits. The goal of a modern circular economy is to save energy and increase efficiency. These cycles are optimized to make energy price competitive while serving as an extension or even an alternative to large centralized grids. Norway and its capital Oslo are among the pioneers in the

transition

to green energy. Oslo aims to reduce CO2 emissions to zero by 2030.

Mayor Marianne Borgen helped draft and approve a series of concrete measures. We have tried at all times to tell our inhabitants that these are not restrictions. So it's not about restrictions. It's about opportunities. When we build new daycares and schools, we build them with solar cell panels. And they also produce more energy than they need to use on their own. So we can move it to other nearby buildings. Oslo is considered the world capital of electric mobility. It has also made significant progress in making its construction sector carbon neutral with advances in heating and building materials.

We said in Oslo that we want to be the first city in the world with zero emissions by 2030, which is a very ambitious goal, but it is possible. I think it is very important to try to reduce consumption, of course, but also reduce waste and also reuse and recycle. I think these are all important elements of the total policy. To achieve this ambitious goal, both residents and businesses must play an active role. Hege Schøyen Dillner spent several years of her career working at a large Scandinavian construction company based in Oslo. The company has more than 8,000 employees and carries out projects around the world.

As a board member, he pushed the company to publicly commit to implementing the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. He also supported Mayor Borgen's measures. I think the most important moment of my career was when the entire management team decided that we would work towards the Paris Agreement. We didn't know exactly how we should do it, but we set a clear direction. And I think that was crucial: setting the direction. And then some people said: But what if we can't do it? And I said, Well, I'm not so afraid of that. I'm afraid we don't dare to set the course.

With all his experience, Hege Schøyen Dillner served for years on the board of directors of the Norwegian Green Building Council, which is part of the World Green Building Council. I think it will be very important how we build our cities in the next 30 years. In 2022, we will reach eight billion people on Earth, and in 2050 there will be 10 billion. That means a city the size of Vienna will be built every week until 2050. That's a lot of aluminum, steel, glass, wood, concrete, plastic and bricks. So we have to go in a circle. We have to build with less for longer.

Sonja Horn runs a real estate company in Norway. In the construction of new buildings, the company aims to reuse as many elements as possible from old office buildings that are being demolished. By building a modern office complex in Oslo, the company merged the old with the new. It was a pilot project, so success was not guaranteed. But almost immediately, new businesses and tenants began moving in precisely because they were attracted to the concept. Hege Schøyen Dillner also had an office there for some time. It is a reused reflector panel. The fence here was also on the floor of the pool in the technical room and is now used as a railing in the atrium.

These are some of the most internal aspects of reuse, we also refer to it as upcycling. Then it goes from one thing to be recycled to another. We have been working systematically to figure out how we can make buildings part of the solution. I mean, buildings account for about 40% of carbon emissions

global

ly, 40% of energy use, so a big part of the problem. Which means we also have the opportunity to be a big part of the solution. In 2019, an office building commissioned by Sonja Horn's company was inaugurated in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. It was called: "Powerhouse." The roof is covered with solar panels, angled optimally to capture the northern European sun's rays.

As a result, Powerhouse, with its 3,000 square meters of panels, produces an annual average of 500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. That's more than double the amount you consume. Surplus electricity is used in a local microgrid to supply neighboring buildings, as well as buses and electric cars. And this is a

pioneering

project, it is one of its kind, the first of its kind. That is why it is attractive for young people to sit and work here. And it feels good. Whenever we build something new, we have mainly focused on three aspects: one is to use fewer resources and materials, so anything you can reuse will be great.

If you can't reuse,Maybe you can use recycled materials before you start looking for new materials. More and more of the construction sites we have in Oslo are now zero-emission construction sites because the technology already exists. We need to challenge the establishments, the industry and also show the way. Employers and employees in companies are now largely in general agreement that reducing emissions is not only the right thing to do for the global climate and the future of our children, but it is also economically smart. Like Oslo, the rest of Norway aims to be carbon neutral by 2030.

The country has a large oil and gas sector, but is also rich in hydropower. Norwegian Minister Espen Barth Eide is confident that the necessary transition towards a carbon-neutral economy brings more opportunities than risks for national industries. We are also seeing that the service industry that developed thanks to 50 years of oil is now very eager to enter these new areas. Because if oil or gas platforms can be operated in the North Sea with waves 10 meters high and in extreme conditions, it can also be done with floating wind. If you are good at building fossil ships with advanced technology, you are also good at building hydrogen or ammonia powered ships with advanced technology.

This circular energy economy depends on both technological innovation from major industries and a stable grid that can provide consistent and reliable green energy. In northern Europe, the best way to achieve this is with wind energy from offshore farms and hydroelectric energy. If countries bordering the North Sea can help balance mutual demand for green energy, it could give rise to an international network, which could become a global model. The longest of these undersea links to date was built in 2021 to connect Norway with the east coast of England. At some hydroelectric plants in Norway, water falls hundreds of meters to drive turbines that generate gigawatts of electricity.

At Kvilldal, hydropower is converted for transmission and transmitted to Blyth in England, where gigawatts of electricity are generated from offshore wind power. What we are installing here right now is a converter station that physically converts the current, so it converts direct current to alternating current or vice versa. Ultimately, we have interconnectors that allow us to absorb, you know, green energy from the lakes of Norway, hydropower, in the country itself, so it is enabling that green energy transition not only for the United Kingdom but also for our neighboring countries, whether that's Norway, whether that's France, whether that's Denmark or anywhere else.

Britain has become a European leader in the development of offshore wind energy in the North Sea. It has now become an exporter of green energy. It is a super-fast green highway that allows the transfer of energy from any of the countries to which we connect. It also provides security of supply. Blyth, once a prosperous mining town, suffered a heavy economic hit from the decline of coal mining. Blyth Port Manager Martin Lawlor hopes the electric link will help the town return to its former glory. So the Port of Blyth is already a major marine energy center for the UK and that is actually helping to attract more investment, so companies want to be part of this group, they want to feed into some of the hydraulic specialties and power companies, some of the boat operators and those building cable factories, and that will help drive more investment across the estuary.

Are the first signs of economic recovery on the horizon thanks to the energy transition? We are seeing this growth accelerate around the Blyth Estuary. So Blyth Harbor is very much part of the town of Blyth. And the community is very much in agreement with the port on what we are doing here. They see the jobs that are coming, they see the benefits to the economy and, looking to the future, we hope that the majority of those jobs will go to local people, so they are very much with us. The world's largest network for reliably generating energy has been under construction in the North Sea since 2020.

For a new energy economy to succeed, it is crucial to build large green electricity grids that are stable. By becoming partners in a new North Sea network through direct coast-to-coast lines, bordering countries are getting closer to the goal of achieving energy security. Europe must be able to collaborate even better. I think all European state leaders and European Union leaders have realized that we need to collaborate much stronger than we ever thought possible. This North Sea network will deploy the latest technology to exchange generated power back and forth on demand. Large industrial centers will be built in the centres, such as this planned “energy island” off the coast of Jutland.

More should follow and be interconnected. In the future, they could form a kind of inland offshore network. Basically, it is an artificial island that can expand over time. But the really nice thing about an energy island is that it can power different countries around the North Sea at the same time. The first of these energy islands will be built about 80 kilometers off the coast of Jutland and, according to the latest estimates, will cost more than 30 billion euros. It is the first of several centers for the new energy sector. The island alone should one day supply electricity to up to 10 million homes.

This will require large substations where alternating current can be converted to direct current and vice versa. This is vital for transmitting electricity over long distances. It largely began as a technology that would help integrate large amounts of energy and transmit long distances with much higher efficiency due to much lower losses. The more systems we integrate, the more complex the entire energy system becomes. If I need to integrate the next 20 or 30% of electric vehicles into the electricity system, if I need to integrate 40, 50 or 60 gigawatts of offshore wind, planning and investments need to be anticipated to deploy the grid technology in time.

Sixty gigawatts is approximately equivalent to the capacity of forty nuclear power plants. On the east coast of Britain, construction of a new power cable was recently completed. It connects the grids of Great Britain and Denmark and will supply them with electricity from offshore wind farms in both countries. The new interconnector between the two countries is called Viking Link. With a length of 765 kilometers, it is the longest underwater electrical cable in the world. To meet the growing need for energy in the future, in addition to transmission infrastructure, large storage facilities will be needed. Hydrogen has immense potential as a means of storing green electricity.

At a Siemens Energy plant in Berlin, a simulator shows the total energy demand in a complex industrial society. Hydrogen could become the new optimal energy carrier. This means that the technology to produce hydrogen already has great strategic importance, even if the industrial infrastructure is just being built. One way to produce hydrogen is through electrolysis, a process that uses an electrical current to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity to carry out this process must come from renewable sources so that its production is sustainable. The advantage of electrolyzers is that they can be relatively easily integrated into existing business cycles.

Anne-Laure de Chammard is a member of the Executive Board of Siemens Energy. The idea is to have a modular system where you can actually add them together, so that it's the same building block, but you can add them together so you can reach the right scale, the gigawatt scale that is needed and really hold our ground and be very capable of adapting to the demand of our customers, depending on whether it is a small industrial site or large-scale hydrogen production. In the future, an industrial facility could use electrolysis to secure its electricity supply through hydrogen storage.

How much is needed during daily peak hours? How much hydrogen would be needed to replace, for example, a conventional power plant? These estimates can be used to determine the best energy alternatives. Hydrogen is available in virtually unlimited quantities and could become the key to future supply. I would say there are maybe three levers for the energy transition: the energy efficiency part, which is reducing energy consumption by actually going there and finding places where we can recycle the energy that is produced. Then electrification, wherever possible, because it will be the cheapest way to decarbonize. And then hydrogen and green molecules where this electrification would not be enough and where we need to capture it so we can store it and reuse it in other places or in processes.

But hydrogen can do more than that. It can be further refined with CO2 to convert it into new fuels. Until now, these fuels have mainly been supplied by fossil fuels in heavy industry. The hope is that hydrogen could be the basis for a whole range of fuels in the future. Hydrogen per se will be used as hydrogen, but much of it will also be transformed into what we call electronic fuels, where we capture carbon, which we mix with this hydrogen, so that we can then do it synthetically with any of the fuels. that today you know.

Professor Bernd Rech is the scientific director of the Helmholtz Center in Berlin. He oversees projects using BESSY, a particle accelerator. BESSY is used to conduct specific research on energy storage and conversion media. That includes making solar cells more efficient and refining hydrogen into new fuels. Since when have I been convinced that something needs to change in our energy supply and system? It was simply the idea that the physical potential of renewable energy is great enough to power our planet and humanity and that it is relatively easy to achieve. That's what convinced me and has captivated me ever since.

So to translate that into modern materials and technologies, we can convert the energy of sunlight into electrical energy. And we can convert that energy into green electricity. And then we can, for example, use electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. And through this process, we have chemical energy carriers that we can use. And if we think in general terms, we could be in a position to, for example, join hydrogen to CO2 in the atmosphere and then generate synthetic fuels. Sonya Calnan leads a research project at the Helmholtz Center. The goal is to use solar energy and hydrogen to produce cleaner cooking fuels.

These could be sold in places where electricity is not available for cooking, as is the case in many areas of the world. The project is a collaboration between the Berlin team and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. I always start with photovoltaic cells because right now, since I started, they have become commonplace, so I tell them: Do you see those solar cells on your roof? You can use them not only to produce electricity but also to produce hydrogen and other things, even to clean water, if you hook them up to the right type of chemical reactor and they provide the power, then you can do almost anything without needing a diesel. generator for example.

In many poorer parts of the world, wood and fossil fuel products, such as propane, are used for both cooking and heating. Converting hydrogen and CO2 into a clean fuel would be a sustainable alternative. When you go to buy cooking gas, you go once, maybe once a month, instead of collecting firewood, it's quite bulky, so if you collect firewood for one day, it's not enough, so you have to go the next day and So. The time we spend collecting firewood is saved and this time can be used for other more development activities. Projects like these are still in the experimental stage.

But the hope is that they will become pillars of an ever-expanding circular energy economy. More and more research is being carried out on green technologies around the world. Singapore especially is considered a laboratory of the future. Professor Madhavi Srinivasan is tackling one of the major problems of the new energy economy. Along with hydrogen, batteries are the most important storage medium. But they are made from expensive materials that are becoming increasingly scarce as global demand grows. Madhavi is researching how to recycle batterieslithium ions and other electronic waste so that they can be reintegrated into the production cycle.

There has to be a change in mentality towards a circular idea of ​​economy. Otherwise, we will fall into a trap where, you know, we may no longer have resources. Nanyang Technological University, along with other prestigious institutions such as Berkeley and Stanford, is among the most highly regarded research centers in the world. It focuses on the development of technology that could be quickly implemented in the future industry. This building on the NTU campus is called the Learning Hub and was specially designed for Singapore's tropical climate. Its atrium has natural ventilation, which saves energy. I decided early on that batteries would be my field of research.

That was the topic of my PhD. I've been doing batteries my whole career, energy storage, circular economy my whole career. From the beginning, I always wanted to do something that would change people's lives. These are all mashed up into something like this. You get the crushed batteries and the black stuff you see sticking here is where all the elements are present: lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese. How do we extract them? First we physically separate the black powders that exist and obtain what is called black mass. This black mass is the one that has all the elements inside.

The way we recover today is by using orange peels, we simply add orange peels to the black powder or instead we add bacterial cultures to this black powder. So with the bacterial culture plus this black mass, we can extract all the elements, approximately 99%. Madhavi's research aims to create a closed loop in which the use of completely new materials can be reduced to an absolute minimum. Her innovations have led to thirty patents to date and, in 2019, she was recognized as one of "Asia's Most Sustainable Superwomen." There is a lot of synergistic effort between materials research and the circular materials economy.

Today, both are done in silos, but I think there are a lot of links and my research is really trying to link them. Back in Copenhagen, many of these practical experiments are being organized into a database to examine the most promising results. Tejs Vegge directs this center at the Technical University of Denmark. Improbable approaches are often followed by fresh and innovative ideas. Identifying them and sharing recommendations with laboratories around the world is a central mission of the institute. I mean, the models that we develop here are what we call physics-aware, but they are also uncertainty-aware. That's why they need to know when they don't know.

And sometimes the best way to gather additional information is not actually through the robot. It's from the expert. It could be that the people who work daily to produce new battery materials have their specific knowledge to guide development. So it's a multinational, it's a multi-facility company and it's also asynchronous. Therefore, one could say that it operates continuously around the world, 24/7, collecting the necessary data and controlling experiments and equipment elsewhere. It is truly a global challenge and a global solution. It often takes two decades for basic research to reach industrial maturity. But in the midst of the climate crisis, time is of the essence.

Solutions must be used more quickly. It is an incredibly complex challenge, so complex that applied research will also need to adapt. In fact, I would argue that the main challenge and the main potential solution lies in reinventing the way we invent new materials for the green transition. It's really about rethinking the way we discover materials, develop systems, and we need to reinvent the process itself and integrate all parts of the discovery production and end-use cycle to do so. This is especially important because the next innovations are already on the horizon: Professor Harry Atwater conducts research at the California Institute of Technology.

He is one of the world's leading experts in the field of solar energy conversion, converting sunlight into electricity and heat. A relatively new branch of research is working to mimic nature's most fundamental energy-harvesting process: photosynthesis. Nature has this wonderful ability in the leaf of each plant to do something almost miraculous, which is to collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere along with water, in the presence of sunlight, and transform those chemical reagents into complex sugars and starches that sustain life. in a plant. Those complex sugars and starches are essentially fuels. So we took huge inspiration from nature to imagine a process we call artificial photosynthesis that uses materials designed to perform the same type of reduction and oxidation reactions that allow the formation of fuels directly from sunlight.

Artificial photosynthesis mimics this process that occurs in nature. Instead of sunlight shining on a leaf as it does in nature, researchers use structures made of intricately manufactured semiconductors. That is, an artificial leaf. And with it, solar energy can convert water into hydrogen and oxygen. The efficiency of artificial photosynthesis is currently 19.3% and was achieved jointly by laboratories in Pasadena, Ilmenau and the Fraunhofer Institute. If this process could be scaled up for industrial use, hydrogen would be cheaper than any other fuel. That is why research on artificial photosynthesis is being carried out all over the world. Now we are talking about the application of such semiconductor structures in what is known as an "artificial place", that is, an integrated device that does not need any wiring to the outside, as is the case with plants.

Basically, we can produce hydrogen and oxygen more or less from nothing, just through sunlight and water. Now, for the first time, we are in a position where we can essentially provide free energy using photovoltaics in the same way that nature has been doing for a long, long, long time. And this has never been possible before. It is difficult to overstate the importance of semiconductors. They are small and discreet, but they are the basis of all advanced technologies. And it can be made from many different types of materials. Researchers at the Technical University of Ilmenau work with so-called three-five semiconductors: III-V semiconductor compounds are the ones that we can design perfectly.

Using silicon as a base material would of course be extremely cost effective. That's where high performance would be combined with cheap materials and low costs. Of course, not all parts of these new energy systems are ready to go into action. But the key will be bringing innovation to communities and industries. There are still many scientific advances and technological innovations that have not yet been widely implemented for public use. If we learn in silos, as we have in the past, we will succeed. But we won't get there in time. And we all know what it will cost us not to arrive on time from a climate perspective.

The hope of a circular system is what drives us. Prosperity must be more sustainable. We do not inherit this planet from our parents, but rather we borrow it from our children. Researchers have made enormous progress in recent years. Technology has come a long way. But successfully transforming our energy supply to make it sustainable depends on our ability to scale up these solutions. They must be integrated into broad sectors of society before it is too late.