Building Green Energy Facilities May Produce More Carbon Emissions, Study Says
But Speeding Up the Transition Can Virtually Cancel the Effect
A new study suggests that building infrastructure for cleaner energy generation itself will generate carbon emissions, but the faster it happens, the smaller it will be. (Illustration by Julie Morvant-Mortreuil)
First, the bad news: Nothing is free. Shifting the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources creates carbon emissions in itself, as the construction of wind turbines, solar panels and other new infrastructure uses energy—some of which must come from the fossil fuels we are trying to get rid of. in. The good news: If this infrastructure can be brought online quickly, those emissions will decrease dramatically, because more renewable energy sooner means less fossil fuel is needed to operate. the change.
This is the conclusion of a study that for the first time estimates the cost of a green transition not in dollars, but in greenhouse gases. The study appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The message is that it’s taking energy to rebuild the global energy system, and we need to account for that,” said lead author Corey Lesk, who did the research as a Ph.D. student at Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Any way you do it, it doesn’t matter. But the more you can bring in renewables, the faster you can make the transition to renewables.
The researchers calculated the potential emissions produced by the use of energy in mining, manufacturing, transportation, construction and other activities needed to create large farms of solar panels and wind turbines, along with more limited infrastructure for geothermal and other energy sources. Previous research projects the cost of new energy infrastructure in dollars—$3.5 trillion per year per year until 2050 to reach net-zero emissions, according to one study, or up to $14 trillion for the United States alone in same time, according to the other. The new study appears to be the first to project the cost of greenhouse gases.
Mining for raw materials, transportation, manufacturing and construction are all energy intensive. Here, a mining vehicle in an open-cast mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories. (Kevin Krajick/Earth Institute)
At the current slow pace of renewable infrastructure production (predicted to lead to 2.7 degrees C warming by the end of the century), researchers estimate that these activities will produce 185 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2100. This alone equivalent to five or six years of current global emissions—a heavy additional burden on the atmosphere. However, if the world were to build the same infrastructure hard enough to limit warming to 2 degrees — the current international agreement aims to get under it — those emissions would be cut in half by 95 billion tons. . And, if a truly ambitious path is followed, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, the cost will be only 20 billion tons in 2100—six months or more of current global emissions.
The researchers point out that all of their estimates are likely low. For one, they don’t consider the materials and construction needed for new power transmission lines, or batteries for storage—both energy-intensive and resource-intensive products. They also don’t include the cost of replacing gas and diesel-powered vehicles with electric ones, or making existing buildings more energy efficient. The study looked only at carbon-dioxide emissions, which currently account for about 60 percent of ongoing warming—not other greenhouse gases including methane and nitrous oxide.
Some impacts of the shift to renewables are difficult to quantify, but could be substantial. All this new high-tech hardware will require not only large amounts of base metals including copper, iron and nickel, but previously less used rare elements such as lithium, cobalt, yttrium and neodymium. Many commodities will likely have to come from previously untouched areas with fragile environments, including the deep sea, African forests and rapidly melting Greenland. Solar panels and wind turbines directly consume large areas of land, with potential impacts on ecosystems and the people who live there.
Unique commodities new demand for green technologies such as lithium, yttrium and neodymium must come from new sources. This includes the rapid melting of Greenland (on its southeast coast, above), which is rich in these substances. (Margie Turrin/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)
“We put a lower bound,” Lesk said of the study’s estimates. “The upper limit will be much higher.” But, he said, “the results are encouraging.” Lesk says that given recent price drops for renewable technologies, 80 to 90 percent of what the world needs could be installed in the next few decades, especially if the current subsidies for fossil-fuel production will be shifted to renewables. “If we go on a more ambitious path, this whole problem will disappear. It’s bad news if we don’t start investing in the next 5 to 10 years.
As part of the study, Lesk and his colleagues also looked at carbon emissions from adapting to sea level rise; they found that building sea walls and moving cities on land where necessary would generate 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide by the year 2100 under a 2-degree scenario. This, again, may be only part of the cost of adaptation; they are not looking at infrastructure to control land flooding, irrigation in areas that may become drier, adaptation of buildings to higher temperatures or other necessary projects.
“Despite these limitations, we conclude that the magnitude of CO2 emissions embedded in broader climate change is geophysically and policy-relevant,” the authors wrote. “Emissions in the transition can be significantly reduced under faster decarbonization, which will give new urgency to the development of the policy of rapid deployment of renewable energy.”
Other study authors are Denes Csala of the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom; Robin Krekeler and Antoine Levesque of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany; Sgouris Sgouridis of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority; Katharine Mach of the University of Miami; Daniel Horen Greenford and H. Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Canada; and Radley Horton of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Corey Lesk is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College.
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Kevin Krajik
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