Actually, we are heading to net zero faster than we think

On an industrial estate outside Glasgow, hidden in a row of white boxes, there is a sign that the world is changing fast. When the wind turbines off Scotland are spinning quickly, the batteries inside these boxes take energy from the grid and store it. Then, when the weather calms again, they dispense it, supplying clean energy whatever the conditions.
Soon there will be far more wind turbines in Scotland’s seas, helping the British government to meet its goal of 100 per cent clean power by 2035. As they multiply, so too must these batteries. Otherwise, there will be times when there is too little renewable energy to meet demand, and other times when there is too much, requiring the turbines to be switched off.
Fortunately, they are multiplying — far faster than their developers once imagined. This facility in North Lanarkshire was switched on earlier this month, and it is the first of several projects being developed across Scotland by Zenobe, an energy storage company. The company intends to double Scotland’s battery capacity by 2026, storing enough energy to power every home in the country for two hours.
This is only one part of Zenobe’s plans for rapid expansion in the coming years. The firm has 430 megawatts of batteries either operating or under construction, and triple that amount in development. According to its director, James Basden, even he and his co-founders have been surprised by the pace at which the business has grown. “The whole market has developed faster than we thought,” he says.
Basden and his co-founders, Nicholas Beatty and Steven Meersman, began the business six years ago in a tiny office in Paddington, west London. “It was freezing in winter and boiling in summer,” Basden recalls, “and we were right next to the lift, so on every phone call you could hear ‘doors opening, doors closing’.”
Now, having moved to more comfortable offices in Charing Cross, they oversee a multinational business of 250 employees. Basden and his co-founders have so far raised £1.8 billion, and they expect to raise a further £2 billion in the coming year. By 2030, they are aiming to grow the company up to tenfold, expanding operations in America, Australia and Europe.
If Britain, and indeed the world, is to reach net zero by the middle of the century, many clean energy companies will have to grow as boisterously as Zenobe. Not just companies making batteries, but those making heat pumps, electric cars, hydrogen, solar panels, wind turbines and clean steel, taking carbon out of the air, synthesising meat and recycling rare metals. Some of these technologies, such as electric vehicles, are beginning to spread widely. Others have hardly left the lab. All need to become ubiquitous within two decades.
The good news is that other technologies have spread this rapidly before. In 1925, only 10 per cent of US households owned a radio. Twenty years later, 88 per cent did. In the UK, internet access grew even quicker, from 1.9 per cent of households in 1995 to 70 per cent in 2005. Neither of these technologies grew in a straight line. They took a while to reach 10 per cent of people, then not much longer to reach 90 per cent. Change happened slowly at first, then really fast.
This “S-curve” is the pattern followed by many technologies such as TVs, mobile phones and cars. In each case, the technology began as the preserve of the rich, growing slowly because it was expensive.
But as it grew it became cheaper to make, leading more people to buy it, leading to further cost declines, creating a self-reinforcing dynamic that quickly spread the technology throughout society.
It seems that batteries are following this trajectory. The business intelligence company Rystad Energy predicts that the UK’s grid-scale battery storage capacity is set to grow from 2.1 gigawatts in April this year to 24 gigawatts in 2030. Together with other forms of energy storage such as hydropower, this would give the country the 30 gigawatts it needs to keep the lights on even when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
Such growth would make the UK fourth in the world for battery storage capacity, behind only Germany, the US and China. “The growth of battery storage is a huge success for the UK,” says Wendel Hortop, an analyst at Modo Energy. “I think that, outside the grid-scale battery industry, it’s kind of gone under the radar, probably because it’s not very sexy. Like, it’s just boxes in fields.” But what about the other technologies we need to get to net zero? Are they also following the S-curve?
According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, the answer is yes — at least for some of the most important carbon-cutters such as EVs, solar panels and wind turbines.
RMI predicts that if solar and wind capacity continues to grow at its historical annual rate of 15-20 per cent, then by 2030 it will triple or quadruple, tracking or even exceeding the trajectory it needs to follow if the world is to reach net zero by 2050. That’s fast enough to outstrip the growth in the world’s total energy demand, cutting demand for fossil fuels by 16 and 30 per cent this decade. Its prediction for EVs is even more vertiginous: tenfold growth this decade.
“This is just how change happens,” says Kingsmill Bond, an analyst at RMI. “Everyone had Nokia phones and then everyone had iPhones. Everyone had gas lighting and then everyone had electric lighting. It’s the same old story.”
If RMI’s predictions are correct, the upshot is a remarkable conclusion that you won’t hear from environmental organisations, or from the fossil fuel companies with whom the are locked in combat: the world is actually on course to achieve the goal of the Paris agreement. Almost definitely not its “stretch goal” of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, but plausibly its lesser goal of limiting it to “well below 2C”.
Bond believes the planet is heading for between 1.6C and 1.8C of warming by the end of the century, up from about 1.2C now. This would still have severe effects worldwide — it could still, for instance, destabilise the Greenland ice sheet, submerging coastal cities beneath seven metres of sea level rise in the coming centuries.
But it would be a far cry from the rapid descent into apocalyptic conditions that the world seemed set for not so long ago. Before the Paris agreement, it seemed the world was headed for 4C or even 5C of warming this century, which could plunge it into food deficit and make tropical regions uninhabitable.
Bond’s prediction is far more optimistic than many others, including a report released earlier this month by the United Nations environment programme, which concluded that lax government policies meant the world was on course for 2.9C of warming by 2100.
What explains this discrepancy? Bond says it’s that the programme’s modellers are not very good at forecasting the pace of innovation. “They use models that don’t assume falls in the price of renewable energy, and therefore they believe that all of the work has to be done by policy and carbon pricing.” He adds that, by underestimating how quickly clean technologies can get cheaper, they also underestimate their potential to grow exponentially. “They’ll say, ‘look, we deployed 200GW of solar last year, let’s assume that we continue to deploy 200GW of solar a year; that’s not enough because we need to be deploying 1,000 a year’.
“And I say to them, guys, wake up! We actually deployed 250 last year, this year we’re deploying 400, and by the end of the decade we’ll be deploying 1,000 a year and more after that. So therefore we are still absolutely on track to deploy the volume we need for net zero. They have a static vision of the future and we have an exponential vision which is much closer to reality. Disruption is absolutely baked into the fossil fuel economy at this point, and that gives us a chance of staying under 2C.”
But there are other energy analysts who, although they acknowledge that exponential growth, are less confident we can stay beneath 2C. One is Frank Geels, a professor of system innovation and sustainability at the University of Manchester. “Kingsmill is right that there are now four or five technologies that are being deployed at the right speed, but they’re mostly confined to the electricity and transport sectors.”
He says that less progress is being made in cutting the greenhouse gas emissions of other activities, such as agriculture, construction, industrial processes and heating buildings. “Kingsmill is focusing on the success stories, which are real, and in that sense I agree with him. But we can’t assume that these steep cost declines will happen to other technologies to the same degree.”
Geels adds that another reason for some pessimism is that developing countries pay a higher cost of capital, meaning that they struggle to afford the initial investments in green technologies.
For his part, Bond stresses that although we now seem to be making progress on climate change, that progress won’t necessarily continue of its own accord. “It doesn’t mean we can take our foot off the pedal for one minute,” he says, “but there is a path out of this mess. We are on it and we need to stay on it.
“That means that we need to elect governments that will allow us to continue to roll out renewables and build the necessary infrastructure. And if we do that, we can avoid the worst impacts of the climate disaster, and we will have an energy system that is cheaper and cleaner and provides local jobs. There are clear positive benefits of going down this route.”