Report: 8 Clean Energy Technologies Can Reach 'Gigaton Scale' in 10 Years

A new report claims the world can scale up eight clean technologies so massively and rapidly they could meet 60 percent of new energy demand and abate more CO2 than is necessary for climate stabilization in just 10 years.

Naturally, this scale-up won't come cheap. The report estimates that annual private investment worldwide would need to triple between now and 2020 to reach $500 billion to $800 billion per year:

At this scale, clean energy investments would be in line with fossil-fuel investments.

This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Current global investment plans for maintaining and expanding energy infrastructure are on the order of $13 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States alone has a planned investment of close to $1 trillion.

Shift a sizable chuck of that money into ready cleantech solutions, the authors argue, and the results would be world changing: climate mitigation, energy security and 5 million new jobs planetwide.

"The Gigaton Throwdown" report is the brain child of Sunil Paul, the cleantech venture capitalist and founder of Silicon Valley’s Spring Ventures.

In 150 pages, Paul and a team of investors, CEOs and researchers seek to redefine what's possible for clean energy by 2020. And they do it through an uncommon metric: the gigascale.

To attain gigaton scale, a single technology must reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO2e) by at least 1 billion metric tons — a gigaton — by 2020. For an electricity generation technology, this is equivalent to an installed capacity of 205 gigawatts (GW) of carbon-free energy (at 100 percent capacity factor) in 2020.

Specifically, the researchers analyzed nine clean energy technologies "currently attractive to investors" for their potential as gigascale solutions. Eight met the criteria, seven of which are ready for aggressive deployment today.

They are: building efficiency, concentrating solar power, construction materials, nuclear, biofuels, solar photovoltaics and wind.

Each of the eight solutions could feasibly deliver a giagaton of global energy, and each could avoid one gigaton of emissions from being discharged into the atmosphere by 2020.

Notably, just one of the technologies, geothermal, requires an intense period of R&D and pilot plants for new enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) before it can be "gigascale ready." Wind power, for its part, is already growing fast enough to achieve that mark, the report says:

The wind industry has been growing at an annual rate of 28 percent over the past decade and will soon reach 150 gigawatts of installed capacity globally. At currently projected growth rates, it will exceed half a terawatt (TW) of installed capacity by 2020 and deliver close to 1.5 gigatons of CO2e emissions reductions.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were the sole technology among the nine considered not to make the cut. The reason? The industry would need an estimated 300 million of them on the road in 2020. That's equivalent to the total number of new cars to be added to the fleet worldwide in the next 10 years.

Having a gigaton of new nuclear capacity on the list (with a price tag of $1.27 trilllion) may raise eyebrows, although the authors do deliver a disclaimer: "Concerns surrounding weapons proliferation, waste disposal, and safety make nuclear uniquely challenging."

Same with biofuels as a replacement for gasoline. The report clearly states that corn-based ethanol "cannot deliver 1 gigaton of Co2e reductions because of massive land use requirements." The answer they say is in next generation fuels like cellulosic ethanol.

If it's tough to wrap your brain around the magnitude of a gigaton, the Department of Energy has a guide. There they list the monster actions that add up to one gigaton of CO2 mitigation, including: