What's Better Than Renewable Energy? | Unveiled

What’s Better Than Renewable Energy?

We’re running out of time to change our ways and stop the world from descending into a climate nightmare. UN targets give us until 2030 to cut emissions in half, before the fight becomes a severely uphill battle. On the surface of it, one of the best ways to curb emissions is by investing in green energy sources – but is green, renewable power actually enough?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what’s better than renewable energy?

The targets lain out at the Paris Agreement in 2015 give us just a decade more until it becomes impossible to prevent global warming of around 1.5 degrees Celsius - which sounds like a small hike, but in reality would be disastrous! Considering, as well, that critics say the Paris goals don’t account for the impact caused by various environmental tipping points that now loom on the horizon (like sudden, accelerated change caused by melting permafrost or deforestation)… and that we’ve already seen some high-profile withdrawals from the Paris Agreement, the outlook isn’t getting any better! According to some projections, simply switching to renewable energy sources might not be enough anymore!

Now, we need to seriously look at becoming “carbon negative”. There’s no doubting that such a shift would be difficult to implement, but we have seen large-scale energy switches made across human history in the past; there are a myriad of reasons why we no longer use whale oil to power lamps, after all. Change on this scale is possible, but what would it entail?

One of the best technologies currently available (and even being used in some cases today) is Carbon Capture and Storage. CCS involves harnessing CO2 from particularly large producers - pollutant-heavy factories, for example - before it even has a chance to escape into the atmosphere. The waste CO2 is then pumped deep underground or deep underwater, to be stored where it can’t contribute to global warming. The idea sounds even better when CCS is combined with the burning of renewable biomass for fuel - for what’s been called “Bio-CCS”. Because biomass is a renewable supply, the process ultimately becomes a carbon negative energy solution.

There are two significant problems with CCS, however. First, there could be an environmental downside as some fear the carbon dioxide stores could contaminate wherever they’re pumped into. And second, CCS doesn’t boast much of a “return investment”. There isn’t yet a way to do anything profitable with the CO2 that gets captured, which unfortunately means that the technology doesn’t have an awful lot of investors. In fact, in 2019, there were only seventeen operating CCS projects across the globe, out of the tens of thousands of otherwise non-environmentally friendly power plants. CCS could reportedly capture up to 90% of the CO2 generated by factories and industrial centres, but only if it’s actually installed - and right now we’re not even making a dent in our climate woes with it.

The caveat here, though, is that almost every form of energy has some downsides to it – even renewables. The key is to strike a workable, effective balance. Clearly, CCS and renewables in general offer plenty of benefits; namely not polluting the planet anywhere near as much and offering an unlimited supply! There’s also that we’re now seeing the consumer cost of renewable energy fall as the price of finite fossil fuel rises. Yet vast solar plants, wind farms, or hydroelectric dams, for example, can have negative impacts. Some worry about the danger that wind turbines pose to birds and bats, for example, while others bemoan renewable energy infrastructure as an eyesore.

More broadly speaking, building and installing huge solar plants could also threaten local wildlife habitats - providing renewable energy but at the expense of endemic species. While another criticism that’s often levelled at them is that they’re fickle in how much (or how little) electricity they generate because they rely so much on changing weather patterns. By no means are these reasons to stop building renewable energy generators, but they do further highlight how simply “being renewable” isn’t all that’s required anymore. Green energy sources now need to be managed and optimized so that they can push past goals for carbon neutrality; past “net zero” emissions and into “sub zero”!

Another way we might achieve this is by combining renewables with techniques for Direct Air Capture. Like CCS, DAC seeks to capture the carbon stored in the air - but it doesn’t target just one large output source. Direct Air Capture works anywhere. Perhaps, in an ecologically minded future, we’ll have mobile DAC devices, or energy firms will run carbon capture schemes concurrently with their energy generation. Then we’d see a true shift in the status quo. Today, energy providers using fossil fuels essentially take from the environment to give back damaging carbon dioxide… but, were renewables and carbon capture schemes to team up, we’d have energy providers taking much less from the environment while also reducing CO2 Levels. We’ll have enabled true “carbon negative” living.

It doesn’t all rest on humans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, however. As far as capturing and storing carbon goes, the natural world is already designed to do it – albeit perhaps not on the scale we need. Plant-life in general needs CO2 in order to photosynthesise and survive, providing us all with oxygen in the process. But there’s something even better than plants and trees when it comes to collecting carbon, and that’s salps. Salps are bizarre invertebrates that feed on CO2-rich algae, consuming the carbon and then excreting it in small but heavy pellets, which sink all the way to the bottom of the ocean. It’s little wonder that they’re often referred to as the planet’s natural carbon vacuums. Importantly, though, the fact that salps exist is nowhere near enough for us to get complacent over our own efforts. Something like salp carbon conversion is vital, and might even be optimized were humans to start building “salp farms”… but, ultimately, salps are a key ingredient in how the Earth could (and would) survive humans and heal itself; their CO2-guzzling presence isn’t enough to save humans from themselves.

If there is a miracle solution, some argue that we haven’t found it yet. Others believe that we do already have an answer to the fossil fuel crisis… in nuclear power. Unlike carbon capture schemes, nuclear energy is hardly new news. There are nuclear power plants in more than thirty countries - with sixty in the US alone - and lots more currently under construction. For advocates, nuclear energy ought to be part of the solution to the climate crisis. It’s efficient and low in carbon emissions, and its acceptance is only being held back by overzealous environmentalists. For others, though, the risks involved far surpass the supposed rewards.

While you’d be hard-pressed to find many who can name a nuclear disaster other than Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima, there have been more than 100 accidents since we started using nuclear power in 1954. While this doesn’t average out to nuclear energy being particularly high-risk, it’s hard to shake the memory of an event like Chernobyl from the public consciousness. For those against, the other downsides of nuclear power include that it’s reportedly much more expensive than renewable sources to build and maintain a facility, plus nuclear plants demand lengthy decommission times. And then there’s the issue of the difficult-to-dispose-of nuclear waste – the bane of many an anti-nuclear activist.

Arguably, then, nuclear power entertains a distinct middle-ground when it comes to energy. It poses its own, unique set of significant risks and problems, and it doesn’t remove existing carbon from the atmosphere… but it also promises efficiency and low emissions going forwards. The Chernobyl plant, for example, continued to produce electricity for fourteen years after the 1986 disaster - showing that even after the worst-case scenario, society has still drawn from nuclear energy. And there’s still talk of nuclear power being used for future spacecraft, as a possible answer for interstellar travel, so it’s not as though the planet is turning its back on it. Still, it would be hard to ever label nuclear as “better than” renewable. It’s a solution but probably not the solution to our energy plight.

Elsewhere, it’s not always about being especially new and innovative. Instead, we might take old ideas and make them work for the modern world. For a case in point, there’s increasing support for a method of energy production called “gasification” - which has been in use to some degree since the nineteenth century. Gasification uses oxygen combined with steam and pressure to create a gas for fuel. Significantly, though, it does so without combustion, meaning that it doesn’t produce CO2. When its paired with biomass energy production, what’s left behind is known as “biochar”, which can be reused as an incredibly effective fertiliser - prompting the regrowth of forests and plants. Gasification isn’t without its problems, too, but the fact that its waste can actually be useful is something which all energy production methods should aspire to - all while energy firms commit to carbon-scrubbing CCS techniques, as well.

Despite the various options, however, we’re still yet to see a definitive solution to the world’s energy problems be rolled out on a large scale. Renewable energy sources have far fewer downsides compared to fossil fuels; they’re infinite, and increasingly cheap and reliable. But it’s becoming more and more clear that they won’t be enough to curb climate change on their own. What’s vital is that the world invests in other, adjoining technologies, like carbon capture and storage, direct air capture or gasification. Meanwhile, we could do worse than to look to nature itself for the answers. If humans could tap into even a small part of what the salp does, then even something as ambitious as ocean fertilization could have a place in an ideal, ecologically resurgent future.

For now, carbon neutral power sources do exist around the world, but we’ll never be truly carbon negative until we start combining our technologies. And that’s what’s better than renewable energy.