Explaining The Carbon Transition And The S Curve In The Glen

August just tied with July for being the hottest month on record since we began keeping such records. 2015 was the hottest year on record, but so far, 2016 looks set to usurp last year for this dubious distinction. These statistics are just individual drops in the deluge of news that the climate is changing, and a steady reminder that we need to make a transition to a zero-carbon energy future. To do that, we need some help from the genie that has always helped us make significant paradigm shifts in the past: technology.

There have been many technological revolutions in the past that left deep footprints on human development and societies' interactions, stuff like writing, telephones, steam power, air travel, and computers. The economies we have now are all mainly dependent on fossil fuels for energy, both for transportation and electricity.

The technological changes we need to transition to an energy infrastructure that does not make the planet hotter will require a fundamental shift in the way we power things, and that transition in already underway. Renewables--especially wind and solar--are already competitive in many places with electricity produced by burning coal, oil and gas. But that's not enough; keeping the power on during calm days and at night requires some way to store electricity. Without affordable storage, adding renewable capacity to existing electric grids can be difficult, as power produced during peak times (like mid afternoon on a sunny day) must be dumped if there isn't demand for it - and in many cases, there must still be fossil-fuel fired capacity to tide us over when the sun and wind are down. Scientific American has a good explanation of that phenomenon, also sometimes referred to as the duck curve.

In order to take full advantage of the ability of earth's natural energy endowments like sun, wind and tides, we need to be able to store electricity cheaply. We already know how to store it expensively, in existing batteries. There is a lot of effort devoted to finding cheaper ways to store electricity, in everything from ultracapacitors, to pumped storage, to flywheels, to better batteries.

While there are always some who have a great deal of fun pointing out disappointments in the enterprises dedicated to the clean energy transition, it's also clear that that fun won't last forever. Technology development and adoption proceed in what often feels like fits and starts, but in aggregate is often described with an s-shaped or sigmoid curve, with few people adopting new technologies in the early, expensive and buggy stages, but with increasing adoption, the kinks and costs are worked out, leading to more adoption, and finally market saturation. Remember the early days of video recorders, which were actually available in the 1960s? The first successful videotape recorder cost $50,000; versions marketed later in the 1960s still cost over $1,000. While those early versions were beyond the means of most people, they were profitable enough to fund further rounds of development, until most ordinary U.S. households could afford one two decades later. That's how technologies go, even successful ones. It's quite diverting to look back at famously wrong predictions of technological failure, like that of Thomas Watson, then president of IBM, who predicted in 1943 that the global market for computers would total maybe five.

So, back to renewables. While it is clear that some renewable technologies are already cost-competitive and being adopted, we need cheaper storage technologies to keep that progress on the S-curve, which is why news of promising new technologies is watched so closely. There was another announcement of a promising development recently with the installation of a new kind of battery that could be well suited to provide backup for a renewable electric grid. This new battery, the vanadium redox flow battery, has some significant advantages over current advanced batteries, and is yet another development in a key technology enabler of the low-carbon transition.

Another recent announcement featured the first large-scale tidal energy farm, a technology that has long been regarded as promising but expensive. Hopefully, this is the first of many developments that will add tools to our renewable energy toolkits.

It's worth noting that both the new battery and the tidal energy farm are in Scotland, which has emerged as one of the leaders among nations in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and deploying renewables.

Way to go, Scotland.