More than 50% of the world’s
population live in urban areas. By 2050, it could be
nearly seventy percent. Big cities have big needs when it
comes to water, food, and energy. This heavy demand on resources
poses daunting challenges to researchers in a world
grappling with climate change. Those cities and towns will
need large amounts of energy. Revolutionizing the complex
systems of our energy supply is one of the biggest challenges for
a global transition to green energy. And for people, probably
the most tangible. So, for us, as cities, and responsible
for the policy in the cities, I think it’s so important
that we take a leading role. Because it is possible
for cities to change. So we are very conscious that
we need to move into an economy that is renewable and
circular and nature positive, all those at
the same time. Actually, we don’t
have a choice. I think that we have little
time left to save the planet. So, we have to do whatever
we can as fast as possible. To see how a sustainable
energy supply can work in practice, we head to the
United States. There, a California
city is aiming to become the first carbon-neutral
community in the country. Lancaster is home to
about 175,000 residents. In 2009, officials started
on a journey to go green fundamentally transforming the
city’s economy and infrastructure. Not only was it a
technological overhaul more importantly, it
was a shift in mentality. It’s the purpose of government to
assist people, not to delay people. It used to take a
minimum of six months if this person wanted to
put solar panels on their roof. They have to
get a permit. Somebody would always
have a design change, but it would take six months
just for them to be allowed to do it. And so when I found that
out, I sent out a memo. It now takes 45 minutes,
and it better be 45 minutes. In the city of Lancaster,
the hardest part was changing the
culture within the city staff that we look for reasons to say yes,
we don’t look for reasons to say no. You know, when we
started out down this path, we were laughed at, we were
scorned, we were, you know, Facebook lit up every day, but we set out to develop
a model for a city that, once the world woke up, it
would be easier for them to do it. As we went
down this path, we made more money than
you can possibly imagine. Alternative energy is profitable
and it’s profitable in a huge way. Lancaster’s mayor, Rex Parris, began by having
photovoltaic panels installed on all municipal
buildings. The generated electricity
was used for public lighting. In the process, Parris discovered
it saved the city a lot of money. The saved dollars were put
towards installing even more photovoltaic panels on the
roofs of private residences. These systems also became
mandatory for new buildings. Bit by bit, Lancaster created
an alternative energy network. Excess electricity started
being used to generate hydrogen to fuel public
transportation. The low-cost electricity and cheap
hydrogen attracted new, large companies. And Lancaster solidified its
reputation as a green boomtown in the United
States. I traveled a lot. I went to the World Economic Forum
in Tianjin, I went to Saudi Arabia, I went to the Middle East every energy
conference, and I learned a lot. Thanks to the
sunny weather and the already existing solar
and wind parks in the area, green energy and hydrogen
production continued to expand. When Lancaster began the process
of transforming its own energy system in 2009, the unemployment
rate was at 17%. In 2023, it dropped
to around 6%. Lancaster became a self-sufficient
green energy powerhouse and highly
profitable too. Once people start being
innovative and creative, it doesn’t stop with the
immediate goal in front of you. It extends
everywhere. This really is the most exciting city
in the world, I think, for that reason. We have a common purpose,
and it’s a simple purpose. It’s that our
children survive. You know, that’s
not hard, you know. And when you have that
as a common purpose, you can put aside all the differences
and you can make things happen. You can build things that
have never been built before. You know, this project here,
is actually quite remarkable. In recent years, both the city
of Lancaster and Mayor Parris have been recognized with
many awards for the achievement. From the US state of
California to Wunsiedel, in the German
state of Bavaria a rural region where
the forest industry is key. When Marco Krasser took the
helm of the regional energy supplier, everything
here changed. What would an
energy supply look like if we only could use renewable
energies and sustainable raw materials? Well, we harness sunlight
and wind energy and store them. Wunsiedel shifted
to a circular system that effectively linked its
regionally strong timber industry with the local
energy system. The idea was to re-use as much
energy as possible, multiple times. And wherever excess
energy accumulated say, in the form of wood waste
or waste-heat from machines it shouldn’t be lost
but rather harnessed. We have wood, we have
biomass, we have sun and wind. We may not have hydropower, but we
use everything locally that we need. Surplus energy generated
from solar and wind power is used to press forestry
waste into wood pellets. The pellets can then be
burned to generate heat, or to power a
turbine for electricity. It forms a cascaded system which
always consists of the same thing: solar and wind, battery storage,
and combined heat and power. It’s the perfect system which
couples both sectors and industries. The construction industry is
linked to the timber industry; the timber industry is linked
with agriculture or forestry. This creates local circular energy
economies that can be scaled up to all levels, which in turn
satisfy the energy demand in the form of
electricity and heat. And electricity in
terms of mobility. Wunsiedel in Bavaria
and Lancaster in California: Both have tapped into their locally
available resources as best they can. And both have created
infrastructures in which green energy can be used as efficiently as
possible in an ongoing cycle. Of course, such systems
are ideally integrated into construction projects
from the very start. In Copenhagen, a newly-built
district called Nordhavn served as the testing ground
for the “EnergyLab” project a living laboratory for
research into innovative and more efficient
energy cycles. Well, the essence is that we
test the solutions in real life. In EnergyLab Nordhavn, we have
also been looking into business models because that’s also
part of the solution. Innovation and business
models is part of the solution. In this sector coupling context,
it’s very important that we utilize the energy that is available
and this is basically something that we are demonstrating
here in the Nordhavn project. We can say that the energy
system has to develop, we have to do it in
a more smart way, and that means that we need to
see what other sources are available and how can we in the best
possible way actually utilize them. The buildings here are
well-insulated and retain heat. That’s a money-saver — and is
especially important at peak hours in the early
mornings. Plus, commercial businesses
in the neighborhood can compress
their waste-heat and supply it to the
district heating system, which provides heat to
the surrounding buildings. The compressors for
cooling down the goods, they are run by electricity and
by using a little bit more electricity in the compressors, we
get way more heat available. So in situations where we have
surplus electricity from wind turbines or photovoltaic, we can
actually optimize operation of the compressors and
convert that into a lot extra energy that can be used
in the buildings. And in that way, is this system
actually a smart component in the sector coupled
energy system. Here again, an ingenious cycle. The energy put into the system is not single-purpose —
rather, it’s used several times. And the whole
neighborhood benefits. The goal of a modern circular
economy is to save energy and increase
efficiency. These cycles are optimized to
make energy competitive in price while serving as an extension
or even an alternative to the large, centralized grids. Norway and its capital
Oslo are among the pioneers in the green
energy transition. Oslo is aiming to reduce
CO2 emissions to zero by 2030. Mayor Marianne Borgen helped to draft and pass a
series of concrete measures. We have all the way
tried to tell our inhabitants that this is not
about restrictions. So it’s not about
restrictions. It's about
opportunities. When we are building new
kindergartens and schools, they are built with
solar cell panels. And they also produce more energy
than they need to use themselves. So we can put it over
to other buildings nearby. Oslo is considered the
world capital of e-mobility. It’s also made
significant headway in making its construction sector
carbon-neutral with advancements in heating and
building materials. We have said in Oslo that we want
to be the first zero emission city in the world by 2030, which is a very
ambitious goal, but it is possible. I think that is so important both
to try to reduce the consumption, of course, but also reduce the waste
and also to reuse and also recycle. I think that these are all important
elements in the total policy. To achieve this
ambitious goal, both residents and businesses
must play an active part. Hege Schøyen Dillner spent
several years of her career working at a large Scandinavian
construction company based in Oslo. The company has more
than 8,000 employees and carries out
projects worldwide. As a board member, she pushed
the company to publicly commit to implementing the goals of the 2015
Paris Agreement on climate change. She also supported
Mayor Borgen's measures. I think the biggest
moment in my career was when the whole
management team decided that we would work
towards the Paris Agreement. We didn’t know exactly how we should
do it, but we set a clear direction. And I think that was so
crucial, to set the direction. And then some people said:
But what if we can’t make it? And I said: Well, I’m
not so afraid about that. I'm afraid that we don't
dare to set the direction. With all her experience, Hege
Schøyen Dillner sat for years on the board of the Norwegian
Green Building Council, which is part of the World
Green Building Council. I think it will be very important how
we build our cities the next 30 years. In 2022, we reached eight
billion people on Earth, and by 2050 there
will be 10 billions. That means a city the size of Vienna
will be built every week until 2050. That's a lot of aluminum and steel
and glass and wood and concrete and plastic
and bricks. So we have
to go circular. We have to build
with less for longer. Sonja Horn manages a real
estate company in Norway. When constructing
new buildings, the company aims to reuse as many
elements as possible from old office buildings that are
being torn down. When building a modern office complex
in Oslo, the company fused old with new. It was a pilot project, meaning
success was not guaranteed. But almost immediately, startups
and tenants started moving in precisely because they
were drawn to the concept. Hege Schøyen Dillner also
had an office there for some time. It’s a reused
reflector panel. Also the fence here used to be
on the floor in the swimming pool in the technical room and
is being used all the way up as a railing
in the atrium. So those are some of the
more interior aspects of re-use, we also refer to
it as upcycling. So it goes from one thing to
be upcycled to something else. We’ve been working
systematically on finding out how we can make
buildings part of the solution. I mean, buildings account for around
40% of carbon emissions globally, 40% of energy use, so a
huge part of the problem. Meaning that we also
have the opportunity to be a huge part
of the solution. In 2019, an
office building commissioned by Sonja
Horn's company was inaugurated in the Norwegian
city of Trondheim. It was named:
"Powerhouse." The roof is covered
with solar panels, angled optimally to capture
the sun’s rays in northern Europe. As a result, the Powerhouse, with
its 3,000 square meters of panels, produces an annual average of
500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. That is more than double
the amount it consumes itself. The surplus electricity is
used on a local micro-grid to supply neighboring buildings,
and electric buses and cars. And this is a pioneer project, it’s
one of a kind, the first of its kind. So it’s attractive for young
people to sit and work here. And it feels good. Whenever we build new, we have
focused on mainly three aspects: One is to use less
resources and materials, so whatever you
can reuse is excellent. If you can’t reuse, maybe
you can use recycled materials before you start
sourcing new materials. More and more of the construction
sites that we have in Oslo are now zero emission
construction site because the
technology is in place. We need to challenge
the establishments, the industry and also show the way. The employers and employees in business
are now largely as a general trend, very much on board,
that cutting emissions is not only the right thing
to do for the world's climate and the future of our kids but is
actually also smart in the economy. Like Oslo, the rest of Norway is
aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030. The country has a
large oil and gas sector, but it also has a
wealth of hydropower. Norwegian Minister Espen
Barth Eide is confident that the necessary transition
to a carbon-neutral economy comes with more opportunities
than risks for domestic industries. We’re also seeing that the
service industry that was developed because of the 50
years of petroleum is now very eager to themselves
go into these new areas. Because if you can run oil or
gas platforms in the North Sea in 10-meter high waves
and extreme conditions, you can also
do floating wind. If you’re good at building fossil
ships with advanced technology, you’re also good at building
hydrogen or ammonia driven ships with advanced
technology. This circular energy economy relies
as much on technological innovation from major industries
as it does on a stable grid that can provide constant
and reliable green power. In northern Europe, that can
best be achieved with wind power from offshore parks
and with hydropower. If the countries
bordering the North Sea can help balance one another’s
demand for green power, it could result in
an international grid, which could become
a model worldwide. The longest of these subsea links
to date was constructed in 2021 to connect Norway with
England's eastern coast. At some hydroelectric
power stations in Norway, water drops hundreds of
meters to propel turbines that generate
gigawatts of electricity. At Kvilldal, hydropower is
converted for onward transmission and transmitted
to Blyth in England, where gigawatts of electricity
are generated from offshore wind. What we’re installing
in here at the moment which is a
converter station that physically does the
conversion of the current, so it converts direct current down
to alternating current or vice versa. Ultimately, we have interconnectors
to allow where we can take in, you know, green energy from
lakes of Norway, hydro energy, into the
country itself, so it’s enabling that transition of
green energy not just for the UK but our neighboring countries,
whether that’s Norway, whether that’s France, whether
that’s Denmark or is somewhere else. Britain has become a leader in Europe
in developing offshore wind power in the North Sea. It’s now become an
exporter of green power. It’s a super-fast
green highway that allows the transfer of energy from
either country we’re connecting to. It also brings
security of supply. Once a prosperous
mining town, Blyth suffered a sharp economic
blow from the decline of coal mining. Port of Blyth Manager Martin
Lawlor hopes the power link will help return the
town to its former glory. So the Port of Blyth is already
a major offshore energy hub for the UK and that’s actually helping
to attract further investments, so companies want to
be part of this cluster, they want to feed off some of the
specialty hydraulics and electrics, some of the vessel operators,
and those building cable factories, and that will help to drive further
investments all around the estuary. Are the first signs of an
economic upswing due to the energy transition
on the horizon? We are seeing this growth
accelerating around the Blyth estuary. So the Port of Blyth is very
much part of the town of Blyth. And the community is very much with
the port in what we’re doing here. They see the jobs coming in,
they see the benefits to the economy and looking
to the future, we’re going to hope that the majority
of those jobs will go to local people, so they are very
much with us. The world's largest network
to reliably generate energy has been under construction
in the North Sea since 2020. In order for a new energy
economy to succeed, it’s crucial to build large green
power grids that are stable. By becoming partners
in a new North Sea grid through direct
coast-to-coast lines, border countries are inching closer to
the goal of attaining energy security. Europe has to be able
to collaborate even better. I think every European state leader
and the European Union leaders, it has dawned to them
that we need to collaborate much stronger than we ever
thought we were that was possible. This North Sea grid will
deploy the latest technology to exchange generated energy
back and forth on demand. Large industrial centers
will be built at the hubs, like this planned “energy
island” off the coast of Jutland. More should follow
and be interconnected. In the future, they could form a kind
of inner network on the high seas. Essentially, it’s an artificial island
that can be expanded over time. But what is really great
about an energy island is that it can actually
power different countries around the North
Sea at the same time. The first of these energy islands
is to be built about 80 kilometers off the coast of Jutland and,
according to the latest estimates, cost more than
30 billion euros. It is the first of several hubs
for the new energy sector. The island alone should
one day provide electricity for up to 10
million households. This will require large substations
where alternating current can be converted to direct
current and back again. That’s vital to transmit
electricity over long distances. It started very much as a
technology that would help integrating large bulk power and
transmitting long distances with a much better efficiency
because of much lower losses. The more systems
we integrate, the more complex the entire
energy system becomes. If I need to
integrate the next 20, 30% of electrical vehicles
into the electricity system, if I need to integrate 40, 50, 60
gigawatt worth of offshore wind, there is a need to anticipate
the planning and the investments in order to deploy the
grid technology on time. Sixty gigawatts is
roughly equivalent to the capacity of forty
nuclear power plants. On the eastern
coast of Britain, construction on a new power
cable was recently completed. It connects the grids of Britain
and Denmark and will supply them with electricity from both
countries’ offshore wind parks. The new interconnector between the two
countries is called the Viking Link. With a length of
765 kilometers, it’s the longest subsea
power cable in the world. To meet an ever-growing
need for energy in the future, large storage facilities
will be required in addition to transmission
infrastructure. Hydrogen has immense potential as a
storage medium for green electricity. At a Siemens
Energy site in Berlin, a simulator shows the total demand for energy in a complex
industrial society. Hydrogen could become
the new optimal energy carrier. Which means the technology
to produce hydrogen already holds great
strategic significance, even if the industrial infrastructure
is only just being built now. One way to make
Hydrogen is via electrolysis, a process which uses an
electric current to split water into hydrogen
and oxygen. The electricity to
carry out this process must come from renewable sources
so that its production is sustainable. The advantage of electrolyzers
is that they can be integrated into existing economic
cycles relatively easily. Anne-Laure de Chammard is a member of
the Executive Board of Siemens Energy. The whole idea is to
have a modular system where you can actually
add them to each other, so it’s the same building
block but you can add them to each other to be able
to reach the right scale, the gigawatt scale that
is needed and really stick and be very able to adjust to
the demand of our customers, depending on if it’s
a small industrial site or a very large utility
scale hydrogen production. In the future, an industrial
site could use electrolysis to secure its electricity
supply with hydrogen storage. How much is needed
during daily peak hours? How much hydrogen
would it take to replace a conventional power
plant for example? These estimates can be used to determine the best
energy alternatives. Hydrogen is available in
virtually unlimited quantities and could become
the key to future supply. I would say there’s maybe three
levers for the energy transition: the energy
efficiency part, which is reducing the energy
consumption by really going there and finding everywhere
where we can have recycling of the energy
that is produced. Then, electrification,
everywhere where it is possible because this is going to be the
cheapest way to decarbonize. And then, hydrogen and green
molecules where this electrification would not be enough and
where we need to capture that to be able to store it and
reuse it elsewhere or in processes. But hydrogen can
do more than that. It can be further refined
with CO2 into new fuels. Until now, these fuels have been
supplied primarily by fossil fuels in heavy industry. The hope is that
hydrogen can be the basis for a whole range
of fuels in the future. Hydrogen per se will
be used as hydrogen, but a lot will also be transformed
into what we call e-fuels so where we capture carbon,
that we mix with this hydrogen, to then be able to do
in a synthetic manner any of the fuels
that you know today. Professor
Bernd Rech is the Scientific Director at
the Helmholtz Centre in Berlin. He oversees projects that use
BESSY, a particle accelerator. BESSY is used to
conduct targeted research into energy conversion
and storage mediums. That includes making
solar cells more efficient and refining hydrogen
into new fuels. Since when have I been convinced
that something about our energy supply and energy system
needed to change? It was simply the idea
that the physical potential of renewable energy is great enough
to supply our planet and humanity and that it’s relatively
easy to achieve. That’s what’s
convinced me and has gripped
me ever since. So to translate that into modern
materials and technologies, we can convert the energy of
the sunlight into electrical energy. And that energy we can
convert into green electricity. And then we
can, for example, use electrolysis to split water
into hydrogen and oxygen. And through
this process, we have chemical energy
carriers that we can use. And if we think big picture,
we could be in the position to, for example, bind hydrogen
to CO2 from the atmosphere and then generate
synthetic fuels. Sonya Calnan leads a research
project at the Helmholtz Centre. The goal is to use solar
energy and hydrogen to produce cleaner
cooking fuels. These could
be sold in places where there’s no electricity
available for cooking which is the case in many
areas around the world. The project is a collaboration
between the team in Berlin and the University of
Cape Town in South Africa. I always start from the
photovoltaic cells because right now, since when I started, right now
they’ve become something common place, so I tell them: Do you see
those solar cells on their roof? You can use them not
only to make electricity but also to make hydrogen and
other things, even to clean water, if you connect them to the
right type of chemical reactor and they provide the power and
then you can almost do anything without needing a diesel
generator for example. In many poorer
parts of the world, wood and fossil
fuel products such as propane are used
for both cooking and heating. Converting hydrogen
and CO2 into a clean fuel would be a
sustainable alternative. When you go to buy your
cooking gas, you go once, once maybe every month,
instead of collecting firewood is quite bulky so if you collect
some firewood for one day, it’s not enough, then you
have to go the next day and so time spent going
to collect the firewood all the time is kind of saved and
this time can be used for other, more developmental
activities. Projects like these are still
in the experimental stage. But the hope is that they’ll
become building blocks in an ever-expanding
circular energy economy. All around the world,
more and more research is being conducted
into green technologies. Singapore especially is considered
a laboratory for the future. Professor Madhavi
Srinivasan is tackling one of the main problems
of the new energy economy. Along with hydrogen, batteries are
the most important storage medium. But they’re made of costly
materials which are becoming more and more scarce as
global demand grows. Madhavi is researching how
to recycle lithium-ion batteries and other e-waste so that they can be
reintegrated into the production cycle. There has to be a mind shift
towards a circular idea of economy. Otherwise, we will fall
into we, as in, the world will fall into a trap of, you know, we
might not have resources anymore. Nanyang
Technological University, alongside other prestigious
institutions like Berkeley and Stanford, is among the world’s most
well-regarded research hubs. It focuses on
developing tech that could be rapidly
deployed in future industry. This building on NTU’s campus
is called the Learning Hub and was designed specially
for Singapore’s tropical climate. Its atrium is naturally
ventilated, which saves energy. I decided very early that batteries
would be my field of research. That was my
PhD topic. I’ve been doing
batteries my entire career, energy storage, circular
economy my entire career. From early on, I always
wanted to do something that would make
change in people’s lives. These are all shredded
to something like this. You get the shredded
batteries and the black stuff that you see that is sticking here is
where all the elements are present: lithium, nickel,
cobalt, manganese. How do we
extract them? We first physically separate
the black powders that are there and get what is
called as a black mass. This black mass is what
has all the elements inside. The way we recover today, is
by actually using orange peels, we just add orange peels to
the black powder or instead of that we add bacterial
cultures to this black powder. So bacterial culture
plus this black mass, we are able to extract all
the elements, about 99%. Madhavi’s research is
aimed at making a closed loop where the use of
entirely new materials can be reduced to
an absolute minimum. Her innovations have
resulted in thirty patents to date, and in 2019, she
was recognized as one of “Asia's Top
Sustainability Superwomen.” There’s a lot of synergistic
effort between materials research and circular
economy of materials. Today, both of them
are done in silos, but I think there’s
a lot of linkages and my research is
really trying to link. Back in Copenhagen, many
of these practical experiments are being organized in a database
to examine the most promising results. Tejs Vegge directs this center at
the Technical University of Denmark. Improbable approaches are oftentimes
followed by fresh and innovative ideas. Pinpointing them and
sharing recommendations with laboratories around the world
is one core mission of the institute. I mean, the models that we develop
here are what we call physics aware, but they are also
uncertainty aware. So they need to know
when they don't know. And sometimes the best way of
gathering additional information is actually not
from the robot. It is from
the expert. It could be from the people
that work daily with the production of new battery materials,
their specific insight to guide the
development. So it's a
multinational, it's a multi-facility undertaking
and it's also asynchronous. So it’s, you could say, continuously
operating around the world, 24/7, gathering the
data that’s needed, controlling experiments and
equipment at other places. It’s really a global challenge
and a global solution. It often takes two decades for basic
research to reach industrial maturity. But amid the climate
crisis, time is of the essence. Solutions need to
be employed faster. It’s an incredibly
complex challenge so complex that applied
research will need to adapt too. I would actually argue
that the main challenge and the main potential
solution lies in reinventing the way we invent new
materials for the green transition. It's actually rethinking the
way we do materials discovery, we do system
development, and we need to
reinvent the process itself and integrating all parts
of the discovery production and end use
cycle to do so. This is especially critical
because the next innovations are already on the horizon: Professor
Harry Atwater conducts research at the California
Institute of Technology. He’s one of the
world's leading experts in the field of solar
energy conversion, turning sunlight into
electricity and heat. A relatively new branch
of research is working to imitate nature's most fundamental
energy-harvesting process: photosynthesis. Nature has this marvelous capacity
for in the leaf of every plant of doing something
that’s nearly miraculous, which is harvesting carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere together with water, in the presence
of sunlight, and transforming those chemical
reactants into complex sugars and starches that
sustain life in a plant. Those complex sugars and
starches essentially are fuels. So we had drawn a huge
inspiration from nature to envision a process we call
artificial photosynthesis which uses engineered
materials to perform the same kind of reduction
and oxidation reactions that enable the formation
of fuels directly from sunlight. Artificial photosynthesis mimics
this process that happens in nature. Instead of sunlight shining
on a leaf as it does in nature, researchers use structures made of intricately-manufactured
semiconductors. In other words,
an artificial leaf. And with it, solar energy can turn
water into hydrogen and oxygen. The efficiency of artificial
photosynthesis is currently at 19.3% and was jointly
achieved by laboratories in Pasadena, Ilmenau, and the
Fraunhofer Institute. If this process could be
scaled up for industrial use, hydrogen would become
cheaper than any other fuel. That’s why research into
artificial photosynthesis is being conducted
worldwide. We’re now talking
about the application of such semiconductor structures
in a so-called ‘artificial place’ meaning, an integrated device that does
not need any wiring to the outside, similar to plants. So that we can basically
produce hydrogen and oxygen more or less from nothing,
just through sunlight and water. Now for the first time,
we’re in a position where we can essentially provide
free energy using photovoltaics the same way nature has been doing
for a very, very, very long time. And this has never
been possible before. It's hard to overstate the
significance of semiconductors. They’re small
and inconspicuous, but they are the basis of
all advanced technologies. And can be made of many
different types of materials. Researchers at the
Technical University of Ilmenau work with so called
three-five semiconductors: III-V semiconductor compounds
are ones we can design perfectly. Using silicon as
the base material that would of course
be extremely profitable. That’s where high performance would
meet cheap materials and low costs. Of course, not every single
part of these new energy systems is ready
for action. But rolling out innovation to
communities and industries will be key. There are still many
Scientific breakthroughs and technological
innovations that have not yet been widely
implemented for public use. If you go through learning in
silos, like we did in the past, we will get there. But we will not
get there on time. And we all know
what it will cost us not to be there on time
from a climate perspective. The hope for a circular system
is the thing that propels us. Prosperity must be
made more sustainably. We didn't inherit this
planet from our parents, rather we’re borrowing
it from our children. Researchers have made
tremendous strides in recent years. Technology has
come a long way. But successfully
transforming our energy supply to make it sustainable hinges on
our ability to scale these solutions. They must be integrated
into large sectors of society before it’s
too late.
