How the energy transition is made: ends, means, unknowns
Energy transition: ends, means, unknowns. Notes after the establishment of the ministry entrusted to Cingolani. The analysis by Alessandro Lanza, director of the Eni Enrico Mattei Foundation, taken from Lavoce.info
WHAT WILL BE THE MINISTRY OF ECOLOGICAL TRANSITION
Among the questions opened after the formation of the Draghi government, that on the Ministry of Ecological Transition appears particularly relevant, if only because part of the funds of the Recovery and Resilience Facility and its translation into our own Pnrr (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) will be managed through this dicastery. Someone called him a grillino “scalp”, that is the price to pay for the necessary support to a majority that otherwise would not have existed. In reality, this is a good idea, but one that we should have done ten years ago. Now, one of the risks is given by the difficulties in establishing a coherent perimeter in carving out competences taken by different ministries.
Fortunately, the unfortunate hypothesis that the Ministry of Ecological Transition was born from the merger of three ministries: Economic development, Environment and protection of the territory and the sea, Infrastructure and transport, soon disappeared. It would have been a bad choice because it would have created a monstrous ministry totally unmanageable, with over 10 thousand employees.
Having avoided the danger, it remains to be understood exactly which parts of the different ministries will be merged to form the new one.
TWO KEY POINTS
An ecological transition has long been a fundamental concept for environmental movements around the world. Generally, it is stated that the ecological transition involves the transformation of the production system into a more sustainable model (impalpable definition) that makes energy production, industrial production and, in general, the lifestyle of the women less harmful to the environment. people.
Wanting to be more coherent and clear, in the ecological transition all policies should be oriented towards a sustainability objective which must be national, but in a global context. In other words, emissions of greenhouse gases must be rapidly reduced, starting with carbon dioxide. But the reduction must a) be read in a global context; b) be better qualified to understand where we can act.
Graph 1 shows Kaya's identity. In extreme synthesis, it expresses this concept: the increase in emissions depends on the increase in per capita income and the population, while the reduction in emissions contributes to the increase in energy efficiency and the reduction of the carbon content per unit of power.
The problem lies here: per capita income has grown a lot on a planetary level (+250 per cent in 60 years) as has the world population (+150 per cent), but the same cannot be said for those variables that they should have played a role in reducing global emissions, i.e. increasing energy efficiency and decarbonising the energy supply.
The Ministry of Ecological Transition will have to work exactly on these two points at the national and international level. And perhaps it is no coincidence that a scientist expert in new technologies was called to lead it. Increases in energy efficiency are achieved only through prototype development and the adoption of new technologies at all levels: of single industrial plant and in end uses. Decarbonisation is the result of the change in the mix of energy supply / demand. More natural gas and less coal in the field of fossils; more renewable and fewer fossils in general.
There are, of course, minority currents of thought that argue that the result of CO2 reduction from a Kaya perspective should be achieved above all through reduced economic growth (happy degrowth) and greater control of population growth dynamics (in developing countries, because in our latitudes the problem is if anything the opposite).
THE ENERGY TRANSITION
The ecological transition also implies an energy transition, the definition of which is less elusive than the first. The history of man is built on energy transitions.
Over 1 million years ago, we started controlling fire. It was an exclusively human discovery, closed to other living beings, a central moment that revolutionized the existence of man on earth. Without the mastery of fire, human evolution would not have been what we know. The fire provided the decisive trigger, accelerated it, shaped it. With the fire, man began to eat healthier foods because they were cooked, to warm up against the cold. Productivity has soared.
In much more recent times, Britain's first industrial revolution was essentially an energy transition. The canals that carried goods and people in the UK at the time were quickly replaced by railways and coal-fired locomotives, proving that, for a transition, several components are needed: a "new" energy source, an equally new technology and, as a result, a huge increase in productivity with the relative generalized well-being.
In this historical moment it is difficult to understand how our transition will take place. We do not have a "new" source and we do not see a technology that will be able to assert itself thanks to the new source, as it was in the cases of coal-steam-locomotive and, later, of oil-mobility-internal combustion engine.
Vaclav Smil, scientist and political analyst, recalls that energy transitions have always occurred in a very long time. In support he gives a simple and eloquent example. The first tractor was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century, but did not spread significantly among American farmers until the sixties of the twentieth century, due to a certain inertia in the use of horses. And therefore we should not be surprised if, after an endless debate, the share of fossil fuels in the total world energy supply has gone from 93.7 percent in 1965 to 84.3 percent in 2020, only less than 10 points. percentages in over half a century.
The new ministry certainly has a difficult task ahead of it, will your minister be able to take up the challenge? We hope so, for him and for all of us.
Article published on LaVoce.info, here the full version.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/come-si-fa-la-transizione-energetica-fini-mezzi-incognite/ on Sun, 21 Feb 2021 06:08:29 +0000.