CONTENTS Can the cost of clean energy be reduced enough to replace fossil fuels as the world’s primary source of power? A group of leading experts thinks it can. Richard Layard explains why the world needs the Global Apollo Programme to tackle climate change. G overnments faced with existential threats have traditionally called on their scientists and engineers to provide solutions. Yet, although leaders around the world speak often of their concern about, and desire to tackle, climate change, incredibly, only 2 per cent of the world’s public research and development is directed towards meeting this challenge. This must change, and it is why a group of individuals across the worlds of science, public service and academia put forward a proposal earlier this year for a concerted, international effort of research and development – a Global Apollo Programme. The objective is blindingly simple. If clean energy can be made less costly to produce than energy from fossil fuel, the fossil fuel will simply stay in the ground. And the need is urgent. Climate change threatens us all with increased risk of drought, flood and tempest, which in turn will lead to mass migration and conflict. On present policies the world’s temperature will reach 2˚C above the pre-industrial level soon after 2035 and stay above that level for a few centuries. Eventually the whole Greenland ice cap will have melted, and the sea level have risen by 6 metres. Fortunately governments of the world are beginning to realise the need for publicly funded research to stop this happening. After the recent G7 meeting in Bavaria, the leaders declared: “We will work together and with other interested countries to raise the overall co-ordination and transparency of clean energy research, development and demonstration, highlighting the importance of renewable energy and other low-carbon technologies. We ask our Energy Ministers to take forward this initiative and report back to us in 2016.” The Global Apollo Programme proposed by seven authors including myself in June this year is the obvious way to proceed. Like the moonshot Apollo programme before it, it is a ten-year programme with one clear goal: to reduce the cost of clean energy, and to do it fast. Within ten years, base-load electricity from wind or sun has to become less costly than from coal throughout the world. Is this feasible? Although undeniably a challenge, we think it is. There is an almost exact precedent in the history of semi-conductors, whose price has fallen steadily for 40 years. This is called Moore’s Law, but it did not happen by magic. It happened largely through a major pre-competitive programme of research and development, financed chiefly by governments. This whole effort has been co-ordinated by an International Technology Roadmap Committee of the world’s leading countries and companies. 7 I LSE Connect I Winter 2015 I This committee has identified year by year the bottlenecks to further price reduction, and has commissioned research to unblock those obstacles. Leading scientists like Martin Rees and businessmen like John Browne believe that the same could be done with energy from sun and wind. The price of silicon photovoltaic solar modules (which are semi-conductors of a kind) is already falling rapidly, as the graph shows. But it needs to fall even further and faster, as does the cost of the remaining “balance of systems”. Though in many sunny areas solar, and in many windy areas wind, are now competitive when they are in use, they are intermittent. They cannot currently provide a baseload 24-hour service. For sun and wind to be able to do so, we need cheap methods of storing electricity and better ways of feeding intermittent electricity into the grid (using smart grids and better interconnectors). And, to further cut CO2 emissions, we need to be able to electrify all land transport, which means cheaper mobile storage of electricity. These are scientific challenges. They are problems, like putting a man on the moon, that can be cracked if the effort is properly organised and financed. Hence the proposal for a ten-year Global Apollo Programme involving as many of the world’s nations as possible.