Dr Angela Wilkinson, Executive Director and CEO of the World Energy Council;
World Energy Council
It is becoming increasingly clear that the ambitious project adopted primarily by OECD countries to subsidize and enforce the energy transition away from fossil fuels and achieve net-zero global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is failing. In recent months, a wide range of companies and governments at all levels have announced they are postponing or abandoning it altogether, as market forces, resource and capital constraints, and simple reality make aggressive net-zero timelines and targets unrealistic and unachievable.
In the US, this trend has become very clear in both the electric vehicle and offshore wind industries over the past 12 months. In the automotive sector, many pure electric vehicle manufacturers are now in bankruptcy or on the brink of it, while traditional automakers such as Ford, GM, Volvo and Stellantis have spent much of this year explaining heavy losses and rethinking their strategic approaches and investments.
A recent disaster at the Vineyard Wind 1 project off the coast of Massachusetts, when a 105-metre-long blade broke off and scattered bits of fibreglass core across the Atlantic Ocean and onto the shores of Nantucket, forced federal regulators to halt the nation's only operating offshore wind project, tarnishing the industry's reputation and raising concerns about the vulnerability of such massive blades and turbines atop 850-foot-tall towers in the inevitable storms that will come their way.
Other OECD countries are grappling with these and other issues, all of which are causing countries to fall far behind on their ambitious net-zero targets. It now seems inevitable that visions of reaching net-zero by 2050 will force a retreat to net-zero in the near future.
“We need to have a different conversation about energy,” Dr Angela Wilkinson, executive director and CEO of the World Energy Council, said in a recent interview. She believes world leaders “have to stop treating energy like it's a problem that only has temporary solutions,” adding that it's important to “take it more seriously rather than trying to find quick fixes.”
As the World Energy Council celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2024, it will continue in its ongoing mission of serving as a convener and honest broker to create connections and facilitate dialogue among the myriad stakeholders that make up the global energy community. Or, as Dr. Wilkinson told me, “We like to say the Council has served as a voice of common sense for a century.”
In an interview, Wilkinson noted that “the transition is a complex and messy process, and we're all learning together because we've never been through it before.” Indeed, all involved are learning together, often the hard way, at great cost to national budgets, company profitability, grid reliability, and energy security.
Wilkinson believes one of the limiting factors preventing progress on the energy transition is a lack of full systems thinking and planning among decision-makers. “The energy transition is a change in the social fabric,” he points out. “It's not a simple story of replacing one technology with another and leaving everything else as it is. But there is a very simple story that says if you take the petroleum system and put in renewables, that's it, and nothing else will change. That's like saying you're going to amputate your femur, but you want to run a marathon.”
A transmission pylon near the Komati coal-fired power station operated by Eskom Holdings in South Africa's Mpumalanga province, operated by Eskom Holdings… (+) SOC Ltd. Photographed on Tuesday, January 12, 2021. For decades, South Africa has produced almost all of the electricity it needs to run Africa's most industrialized economy from a series of aging coal-fired power stations built along coal mines east of Johannesburg. Photo by Waldo Swegers/Bloomberg
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During our discussion, Wilkinson cited South Africa's transition efforts as an interesting example: “The World Bank put $497 million into trying to close coal mines and undertake a clean and just energy transition, and it didn't work,” she said. “And when the UK moved rapidly from coal to gas, as happened in Europe, I can't help but see parallels with South Africa trying to accelerate its move away from coal.”
The challenge of the power grid transition is another great example of the need for systems planning. “You have to change all the points to make the energy system work,” she points out. “You have to strengthen the grid, you have to expand it. To expand the grid, you need more copper. To build all these renewables, you're going to need twice as much copper by 2050 as we have on the grid today around the world, and you have to mine copper. You mine copper for green hydrogen, but the supply is not enough. So you have to be a systems thinker, and systems thinking is not enough for the energy transition.”
Conclusion
High-level thinkers, facilitators and coordinators like Wilkinson are key to the success of projects as complex and challenging as the current energy transition. Spend an hour with Wilkinson and it becomes clear that her job is one of the most challenging in any global effort. It also becomes clear that she is likely the best person to take on the job.
Everyone should hope she succeeds in advocating for the inclusion of systems thinking in this effort, as the piecemeal, piecemeal approaches that have been attempted so far do not appear to be truly sustainable.
