During the last two years, MIT and Harvard have co-hosted the MIT A+B symposium on rapidly decarbonizing our society. These conferences have a unique approach that I really appreciate. The organizers call for presentations on A) mature, cost-effective technologies that are ready to deploy at scale, and B) potentially breakthrough technologies that may enable achieving a near-zero carbon emission society.
Unique conference structure
Splitting the presentations into these two categories or timelines does two things. It supports the urgency of the situation by emphasizing and exploring details of the abundant cost-effective, existing technologies that can be deployed now to make immediate impacts. These are the technologies that businesses can rely upon in the near-term and build into their business plans. They are also the technologies that policymakers should be looking towards to craft achievable near-term climate targets and policy.
The “potentially breakthrough technologies” category engages the research community and pushes the question of what is possible. Many studies have shown that achieving 80% carbon emission reductions is relatively simple. The last 20% of emissions that takes us to carbon neutral is by far the most difficult piece to solve in the carbon neutral puzzle. We need to cast a wide net to explore many possible technologies that could be available in a few decades to meet our final climate targets.
Electricity generation in systems with substantial wind- and solar-power
I submitted an abstract to the 2020 MIT A+B symposium focused on category A, deploying existing, cost-effective technologies. The abstract asked two questions: 1) how much traditional electricity generation capacity is needed to reliably meet society’s electricity demands as wind- and solar-power rapidly scale up? And, 2) how does the required traditional electricity generation capacity change year-to-year? This is an interesting question because the answer varies based on local industry and electricity use patterns and climate. A more detailed discussion of my presentation will follow.
For now, suffice to say, the abstract was accepted. A prerecorded virtual presentations is available online. Lastly, a short paper extending and refining the material in the presentation is now available in the conference proceedings.
I was invited to submit an extended version of the conference paper to the Applied Energy journal. The deadline for submission is Feb 1, 2021. Time to get moving.