Equinox Summit: Energy 2030

This is John Preece guestblogging about the recent Equinox Summit, a week-long forum of the Waterloo Global Science Initiative with a mandate (this year) to bring about a clean, secure global energy future. Scientists, engineers, policymakers and other experts discussed a wide range of scenarios, producing a summary communiqué [PDF] with a comprehensive briefing to follow in the autumn. Our Consul-General in Toronto, Jonathan Dart, attended the final day and provided most of the information in this post.

The Summit recommended six priority actions, which, implemented together, could stabilise atmospheric CO₂ and meet global energy demand by 2030:

• Geothermal power: This has the potential to meet a large proportion of baseload energy demand, replacing coal.
• Renewables enabled by storage: The intermittency of renewable energy can be offset by advanced storage technology. Vanadium flow redox batteries are of particular interest given their high efficiency and long life, and the equivalent of feed-in tariffs for energy storage should be explored.
• Advanced nuclear power: Integral fast reactors and accelerator-driven thorium reactors can generate low-carbon electricity with a closed fuel cycle and little chance for proliferation. International collaboration is essential to the large-scale deployment of these technologies.
• Urban electric mobility: For the short-range trips made in urban centres, electric vehicles should replace gasoline ones entirely and mass transit should be expanded.
• Making cities energy-smart: With increasing urbanisation, modern cities need innovations like smart metering and passive solar design to increase sustainability.
• Rural electrification with flexible solar cells: Approximately 2 billion people worldwide have no, or very limited, access to electricity. Flexible organic solar PV has low efficiency, but it is cheap, rugged, easy to manufacture and recyclable, making it ideal for rural applications.

The is great scope for Canada-UK collaboration here, particularly in the deployment of advanced energy storage, advanced nuclear power and innovations in smart cities. Watch this space for how SIN will be involved!