#energy-transition

#energy-transition

The market was the backbone of Europe's climate policy, running at close to a trillion euros in annual trading volume, and it was almost entirely closed to anyone who wasn't an industrial company or an institutional fund. Lautier founded Homaio in 2023 to change that.

Energy is the lifeblood of our societies and our industries. And we're still highly dependent on fossil fuels. The world still gets about 80% of its primary energy from fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. That dependence makes economies and societies vulnerable to geopolitical shocks.

We don't eat batteries. They take away the water; they take away life. This pronouncement, in Spanish, appears in a photograph that the artist Tomás Saraceno sent via WhatsApp last month from Salinas Grandes, a high-altitude salt flat in northern Argentina. There, in one of the world's largest lithium reserves, the artist is working alongside 11 Indigenous communities to build El Santuario del Agua (The Water Sanctuary), a monumental work about the global energy transition.

The Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA's) quarterly meeting in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, opened with a triumphant video homage to its work during Winter Storm Fern. Energy had come through, yet again, to defeat extreme cold. The montage credited this to the utility's "coal workhorses," then noted that nuclear provided "uninterrupted power" and "hydro responded instantly." The list ended there, despite years of promises that the agency would bolster renewables and battery storage.

We live in a new world of strategic competition between states over scarce but essential resources, with shocks to supplies from human activity and natural disasters an ever-present risk. This means recalibrating how we think about our economy: the new economic fundamentals today are resource constraints and climate and nature crises, and these, rather than human activity, will increasingly shape the world we inhabit. Flows of finance and stocks of wealth will matter less than stocks and flows of real material resources.

Most CEOs believe climate change is real. They need to deal with it to stay profitable, create resilient operations, and remain relevant to their customers and employees. Texas leads the country in the production of both fossil fuels and renewable energy, in part because everyone knows the state's power grid needs all the help it can get.

While many economists believe it will return to stronger growth in 2026, hopes of a quick recovery are fading amid doubts over Berlin's planned investment spree under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Before Christmas, Germany's Bundesbank lowered its growth forecast for 2026 to 0.6%, down from its previous June forecast of 0.7%. However, the central bank raised the forecast for 2027 to 1.3%, predicting that the pace of economic activity would pick up from the second quarter of 2026.

The historic industrial site of the former Leipzig power station, which used to produce electricity and district heating, is characterized by large brick buildings from the last century. The 'Sudwerk' was built on the site of the former estate brickworks between 1908 and 1910. However, the plants were shut down in 1996, but due to the growth of the city of Leipzig, it was decided to continue using the site as an energy supplier.

Let's begin with a birds-eye view. Progress has been better than many imagined, but also too slow to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. By the end of 2024, on average about 13.5 percent of all the low-emissions technologies required for 2050 had been deployed. This was a few percentage points more than two years earlier. But it was also roughly half of what is needed to keep warming "well below" 2°C.

To produce enough 'critical metals' such as copper, lithium and nickel to support the green-energy transition, the mining industry needs to boost operations two-to-fivefold worldwide by 2050. Geopolitical tensions, environmental damage and social conflicts will constrain this growth. But another threat needs much more attention: climate change. Extraction of the very metals needed to address global warming will be increasingly impeded by the extreme weather that accompanies climate change.

Welcome to Cold Call, where we dive deep into Harvard Business School's groundbreaking case studies. It's been 10 years since 195 nations signed the Paris Agreement, the landmark international treaty that formalized the concept of net zero emissions. Today, thousands of companies around the world have set ambitious goals to achieve net zero emissions, including Tata Power, India's oldest and largest private power producer.

With 160,000 employees and 1 million partners worldwide, Schneider Electric already has a robust ecosystem around its products. But Blum wants to evolve from being an energy technology company to an "energy technology partner" that leverages data and connects the grid to the data center in new ways to create more intelligent, efficient and adaptive energy systems for customers. Said Blum: "Our job is to make sure that we connect an ecosystem of people and provide the technology that will make it happen."

The government defended the meetings, saying ministers held meetings with a wide range of representatives from the energy industry, unions and civil society to drive forward our clean energy superpower mission. But the findings have raised concern among critics about the extent of the fossil fuel industry's influence over government at a time when ministers are trying to lower bills and transition to a more sustainable energy system.

The energy transition is seemingly under assault, with Congressional Republicans killing tax credits for clean energy and the Trump administration threatening to cancel billions of dollars worth of grants. But there are signs the setback might not be as catastrophic for the transition as the headlines make it sound. Investor sentiment, which judging by the size of two new funds, remains strong.

In particular, they seek "transition minerals," which are vital to the shift away from fossil fuels. These include lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel (often called critical minerals, essential for rechargeable batteries), as well as rare-earth minerals such as yttrium, scandium, and lanthanides (integral components of green infrastructure). Freedom from dirty energy, it would appear, requires doubling down on the decidedly nonrenewable practice of mineral extraction.

Artificial intelligence data centres are set to devour a massive share of the world's electricity growth over the next decade, according to BP's latest World Energy Outlook. The oil giant estimates that data facilities powering AI applications will account for 10% of global electricity demand growth by 2035. In the United States, the world's most advanced AI hub, that figure could skyrocket to 40%, raising urgent questions about the strain on energy systems.

across three continents to explore the landscapes, social movements, public policies, geopolitical conflicts, and corporate strategies that are shaping the extractive frontiers of the energy transition. With a focus on lithium, she draws, in particular, on over a decade of rigorous research on Latin America's mining and oil sectors. In doing so, she situates the energy transition from fossil fuels to electrification in the context of the long history of colonization, decolonization, the 1970s energy crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and escalating US-China tensions.

In 2022, the Australian mining and energy company Fortescue signed a deal with E.On, a German energy network and infrastructure operator, to supply up to five million tons of low-emission green hydrogen to Europe annually. "The race for large-scale production and transportation of green hydrogen has taken off," said Robert Habeck, then German minister for economic affairs and climate action, of the deal. Adding that it would be the start of a "future without fossil fuels."