Building green energy facilities can generate significant carbon emissions, study shows

November 21, 2022

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Building green energy facilities can generate significant carbon emissions, study shows

But an accelerated transition may have nearly offset the impact

Building infrastructure for clean energy production itself generates carbon emissions, but the faster it happens, the fewer emissions, a new study shows. (Illustration by Julie Movante Motreui)

First, the bad news: nothing comes for free. Shifting the world’s energy system from fossil fuels to renewables is inherently carbon-intensive, as wind turbines, solar panels, and other new infrastructure builds consume energy—some of which must necessarily come from the very fossil fuels we’re trying to wean ourselves off. The good news: If that infrastructure can be brought online quickly, those emissions will be drastically reduced, because more renewable energy early on will mean far fewer fossil fuels are needed to power the switch.

That’s the conclusion of a study that, for the first time, estimates the cost of the green transition not in dollars but in terms of greenhouse gases.Research appeared this week in the magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The message is that energy is needed to rebuild the global energy system, and we need to take that into account,” said the lead author Corey Lesk, who conducted research as a Ph.D.Student at Columbia Climate Institute Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory“No matter what you do, it can’t be ignored. But the more renewable energy you can bring in initially, the more you can power the renewable energy transition.”

The researchers calculated emissions from potential energy use in mining, manufacturing, transportation, construction and other activities that require the construction of large-scale solar panel and wind turbine farms, as well as more limited geothermal and other energy bases facility. Previous research has projected the cost of new energy infrastructure in dollars — $3.5 trillion per year — and won’t achieve net-zero emissions until 2050, according to a studyor about $14 trillion in the U.S. alone over the same period, according to anotherThe new study appears to be the first to predict the cost of greenhouse gases.

Extraction of raw materials, transportation, manufacturing and construction are all energy-intensive industries. Here, a mining vehicle is at an open pit mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories. (Kevin Krajik/Earth Institute)

Given the current slow pace of renewable infrastructure production, which is expected to contribute to global warming of 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the researchers estimate that these activities will generate 185 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by 2100. That alone is equivalent to five or six years of current global emissions—a heavy burden on the atmosphere. However, if the world builds the same infrastructure fast enough to limit warming to 2 degrees – the goal that current international agreements aim to achieve – those emissions could be halved to 95 gigatons. And, if the truly ambitious path of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is followed, the cost will be just 20 gigatonnes by 2100 – only about six months of current global emissions.

All of their estimates are likely to be very low, the researchers note. On the one hand, they do not take into account the materials and structures required for new transmission lines, nor the batteries used for storage – both products are highly energy and resource intensive. They also don’t include the cost of replacing gasoline and diesel-powered cars with electric ones or making existing buildings more energy-efficient. The study also only focused on carbon dioxide emissions, which are currently responsible for about 60 percent of the ongoing warming, and not other greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide.

Other impacts of switching to renewable energy are difficult to quantify, but could be substantial. All this new high-tech hardware requires not only large quantities of base metals, including copper, iron, and nickel, but also rare elements that were less used before, such as lithium, cobalt, yttrium, and neodymium.Many items may have to come from previously untouched places with fragile environments, including deep sea, African rainforests and rapidly melting Greenland. Solar panels and wind turbines will directly consume vast tracts of land, with potential impact About the ecosystem and the people who live there.

Rare commodities such as lithium, yttrium and neodymium, which are newly demanded by green technologies, will have to come from new sources. These include rapidly melting Greenland (its southeast coast, above), which is rich in these substances. (Margie Turrin/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)

“We’re working on lower bounds,” Lesk said of the study’s estimates. “The ceiling could be much higher.” But, he said, “the results are encouraging.” Given the recent price drop in renewable technologies, 80 to 90 percent of what the world needs could be installed in the next few decades, Lesk said, Especially if current subsidies for fossil fuel production are shifted to renewable energy. “If we take a more ambitious path, the whole problem will be solved. If we don’t start investing in the next five to 10 years, it will only be bad news.”

As part of the study, Lesk and his colleagues also looked at carbon emissions from adaptation to sea level rise; they found that, in a 2-degree scenario, by 2100, building sea walls and moving cities inland land will produce 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Again, this is only part of the cost of adaptation; they don’t take into account infrastructure to control inland flooding, irrigation in areas that may become drier, projects to adapt buildings to higher temperatures, or other needs.

“Despite these limitations, we conclude that CO2 emissions in broader climate transitions have geophysical and policy relevance,” the authors write. “Transition emissions could be substantially reduced during faster decarbonization, adding new urgency to policy progress towards rapid deployment of renewable energy.”

The study’s other authors are Denes Csala, Lancaster University, UK; Robin Krekeler and Antoine Levesque, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany; Sgouris Sgouridis, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority; Katharine Mach, Miami University; Horen Greenford and H. Damon Matthews; and Radley Horton of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Corey Lesk is now a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College.