📈 The state of decarbonization in five charts
Special: Nat Bullard’s state of decarbonization
Hi all,
We invited Exponential View member
, one of the leading global analysts on energy, climate and technology transition towards net zero, to share his latest research with you.Every year, Nat releases a sweeping survey on the state of decarbonization. In this exclusive edition for Exponential View, he’s chosen five trends—from the latest 200-slide deck—that demanded the most effort to assemble and offer the greatest insight.
His work is too important to keep under wraps, so we’re making today’s analysis available to all our readers.
Enjoy and share Nat’s work!
Hi all,
here.I am happy to say that I’ve just published my annual presentation on decarbonization, all 200 slides worth. Exponential View team was kind enough to offer me a few paragraphs of space to talk about the deck and what it means.
The EV community is both sophisticated and (I would wager) quite experienced in its own right with making presentations. So rather than summarize 200 slides in a few paragraphs, I would like to highlight a handful.
And, I’ll highlight them with a particular lens: the slides that took the most time to compose.
1. Projections of US electricity demand growth
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) publishes an annual assessment of the reliability of the north American power grid. It includes an outlook for power demand growth on a ten-year compound annual basis. Importantly, its most recent outlook shows the highest winter demand growth in three decades – after years in which the summer outlook was higher than winter.
Why was this one time-consuming? Because the NERC report… doesn’t really have an outlook for the 2012 – 2021 time period. NERC doesn’t make a clear mention of that fact, meaning I had to spend quite some time with the data to puzzle it out.
2. China’s steel production
In 2020, China produced a billion tons of steel — 56% of global production. Since the 2010s, it has been at least 40% of the world’s production of the metal, but it is also well past its peak, and forecast demand for 2025 is lower than in 2019.
To state the data another way: from 2000 to 2023, global steel production outside of China increased by 160 million tons a year. China’s decline in production since its peak in 2020 is 159 million tons. China’s drop in production in four years is the same as the increase in global production over 23 years.
Why was this chart time-consuming? A lot of hand-loading of data from old PDF files.
3. Dark fiber and excess gas (generation)
Many Exponential View readers will be familiar with the massive expansion of US fiber optic networks in the late 1990s — a boom which quickly turned to bust in the early 2000s.
Telecom companies, buoyed by the dot-com frenzy and cheap capital, rushed to lay vast amounts of fiber cable nationwide. But when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, many lines went unused or “dark” and prices for internet bandwidth plummeted. Over time, as internet usage caught up with the installed capacity, segments of this “dark fiber” were eventually lit and utilised but the cautionary tale survives.
Fewer people remember that a similar boom occurred around the same time for combined-cycle natural gas power plants. The parallels are striking… Both sectors raced to build large-scale infrastructure (fiber networks and gas-fired plants) based on high demand expectations, only to see an oversupply when the market changed.
This chart was time-consuming because it required a lot of digging in old, poorly-indexed PDF files for the fiber aspect (power capacity, fortunately, was far more tabular).
4. Down on the Rappahannock
The Rappahannock Electric Cooperative in Virginia has a peak summer demand of about 1.2 gigawatts. It is not currently host to data centers, but its neighboring service territories in Northern Virginia have the world’s biggest data center cluster, and REC anticipates it will host data centers soon too, based on large load requests it is already receiving. How large? Large enough that just one asset might be multiple times the size of its existing peak demand.
Why was this one a challenge? Identifying the source docket where REC’s demand was being discussed, then cross-referencing that figure with other statewide figures, all of them in text and testimony, not tables. Fortunately, I used a tool my team at Halcyon built to expedite text analysis in PDF reports.
5. Long waves
Even the world’s largest systems are not static, though their dynamism may take years or decades to be clearly visible. The final chart in my deck captures this notion in the electricity sector, where new power generation technologies and fuels rise, hit a maximum share of total generation and then decline again. It’s worth noting that renewable power (excluding hydro) still does not have a greater share of total generation than nuclear power did in the early 1990s – and neither nuclear nor renewables has the share that oil-fired power did in the late 1960s.
This last chart was a cognitive challenge, more than anything. A long, iterative effort to understand the story, and then some fine grinding to get the chart together.
Thank you all for reading. My presentation is here.
@azeem - Can you bring back to the newsletter (say once a month) the decarbonization stats? I am referring to this (Dec. 2021):
CO2 level 416.77 ppm | 3,140 days until we reach the 450ppm threshold
The latest measurement of atmospheric CO2 (as of December 15, 2021): 416.77 ppm; December 2020: 413.11 ppm; 25 years ago: 360 ppm; 250 years ago, est: 250 ppm.