Many cities, communities, and individual households in the United States have started to take the initiative to move towards more and more renewable energy sources. Earlier this summer, in the state of Texas, Georgetown became 100% powered with renewable energy. Today at COP24, renewables and efficiency on energy storage are seen as crucial in the efforts for lowering carbon emissions and preventing rises on global temperatures in order to maintain the 1.5° C goal.
Insights from the IPCC special report on global warming and modeling for the energy system and other society transitions were utilized in order to predict what would the future for renewable energies will look like. Technology advancements as well as well as trends on demand for renewable energy and programs were considered to forecast a transition. Models varied on their analysis and forecast.
The report presented by Steve Sawyer from Global Wind Energy Council reported that it is likely that emissions by the energy system continue to deeply decline and reach a level of zero by by 2050. This would entail to electrify energy-end use, decarbonize the power sector, and substitute residual fossil fuels with low carbon options. Although the trend seemed promising, some of the models predicted that depending on the type of renewable energy source, energy storage could become an issue in some countries after reaching a transition of 25% or their energy use. Distinctions between wind and solar energy in terms of storage needs were made concluding that solar energy requires a much larger capacity for energy storage.
Most models also predict higher increase on small and medium scale energy than on larger scales. Meaning that increase in the volume of production and social trends will produce a higher consumer demand positively impacting the renewable energy market.
Nonetheless, there was still some challenges that were signaled by the experts. The singular most important one was in relation to the costs of energy storage infrastructure. Yet, the hope is that technology advances and smaller scale energy storage increase efficiency and reduce fixed costs.
Another challenge worth mentioning was the public awareness needed in order to drive the market for renewables. While costs per kiloWatt have already matched and in some cases underpriced the costs of high-carbon and even low-carbon energy sources in many places, there is still much hesitation and advocacy to be made for their implementation.Thus, the challenge is to mobilize investments and policy to support renewables and make them more and more affordable and accessible for people.