Finding net zero will require a national effort, expert says

Getting the United States to the goal line of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 is a winnable race, but the nation needs to pull itself together right away and lay the groundwork that will get new energy technologies and infrastructure developed and deployed in the coming decades, an assistant professor at Princeton University said Wednesday at the Edison Electric Institute’s “The Road to Net Zero” virtual conference.

Jesse D. Jenkins, a macro-scale energy systems engineer with a focus on the rapidly evolving electricity sector, said the basic technologies that will be used to shift the country to emissions-free energy already exist, but 2050 is not that far off and it will take the collective political will of the entire nation to prepare for wide-scale investment and construction of infrastructure that will accommodate “nothing less than a transformational change in how we make electricity.”

“We need to be doing everything all at once,” said Jenkins, who leads Princeton’s ZERO Lab, which late last year put out “The Net-Zero America” a deep-dive report detailing the possible policy roadmaps the nation could follow to reach net-zero, including many options 0that won’t get us there by 2050.

“We have to approach this like a nation-building exercise,” Jenkins added. “It’s not a utility-by-utility or even a state-by-state type of project.”

President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal includes a stab at building-out infrastructure to accommodate clean energy, but it ran afoul of Republican legislators who balked at the price tag and preferred spending be limited to transportation, such as patching up bridges and upgrading off-ramps. In addition to political hurdles, experts such as the Brookings Institution pointed out that any major expansion of transmission lines carrying terawatts of green energy will run into a thicket of environmental regulations and local permitting processes.

Those are exactly the types of issues that Washington needs to tackle in 2021 if it is going to attract the huge amount of private investment that will be required to bring technology to scale and carry out pilot projects not only for transmission, but also fledgling concepts such as next-generation nuclear plants and new pipeline networks to move hydrogen fuel or ship carbon dioxide gas to new underground storage complexes.

It also will be necessary, Jenkins said, to provide non-technical support such as changes to the tax code and relief for communities that rely on fossil-fuel production as well as new training for displaced workers who may have been making tidy six-figure salaries working in refineries or power plants. Such steps would be necessary to win the support of members of Congress who represent such constituents.

It would be a reasonable reaction to try to prioritize all of these moving parts, but Jenkins said that would prove difficult to do since everything needs to fall into place at the same time in order to move on to the next phase in which Wall Street, regulated utilities, and private companies move in and do the actual development. It is especially important to remove as many roadblocks as possible because green energy and transmission infrastructure are the types of projects that require huge upfront costs.

In many ways, all of the priorities matter, Jenkins said. “This is a scale of capital that we will need to incentivize and we need something that checks all of the boxes.”

Biden made climate change a top priority in his campaign, and it would be no surprise that he would hit a seeming brick wall in his first major initiative.

But, as Jenkins said “We can’t wait another four years to start this or we will never hit the timelines we need to hit.”