Oh what truth you speak. To give you some numbers, we need to invest about $17 trillion in power generation from renewables, nuclear and gas with CCS until 2050 (according to BNEF). But what often gets forgotten is that we also have to invest about $9.2 trillion in new grid infrastructure and $4 trillion in existing grid infrastructure (…
Oh what truth you speak. To give you some numbers, we need to invest about $17 trillion in power generation from renewables, nuclear and gas with CCS until 2050 (according to BNEF). But what often gets forgotten is that we also have to invest about $9.2 trillion in new grid infrastructure and $4 trillion in existing grid infrastructure (all figures are worldwide and in today's dollars). In essence, for every dollar invested in sexy power generation projects that provide photo ops to politicians and business leaders we need to invest some 80 cents in the boring stuff that gets the power to factories and households. It's just that grids don't make for good photo ops and so we don't invest nearly enough in that stuff.
I fear the end result will be what we see with our water infrastructure in the UK right now. Businesses will underinvest for years and decades and when it starts to fail,m they will ask the government for a bailout.
Oh what truth you speak. To give you some numbers, we need to invest about $17 trillion in power generation from renewables, nuclear and gas with CCS until 2050 (according to BNEF). But what often gets forgotten is that we also have to invest about $9.2 trillion in new grid infrastructure and $4 trillion in existing grid infrastructure (all figures are worldwide and in today's dollars). In essence, for every dollar invested in sexy power generation projects that provide photo ops to politicians and business leaders we need to invest some 80 cents in the boring stuff that gets the power to factories and households. It's just that grids don't make for good photo ops and so we don't invest nearly enough in that stuff.
I fear the end result will be what we see with our water infrastructure in the UK right now. Businesses will underinvest for years and decades and when it starts to fail,m they will ask the government for a bailout.