Why Innovation is Essential for Our Energy Future
Haley Zaremba

The world is facing an intensifying energy trilemma. The three sides of this energy quagmire are sustainability (i.e., clean energy), accessibility (i.e., energy security), and affordability (i.e., equity). Achieving a balance of these three energy goals is incredibly difficult in the best of circumstances, but remarkably tricky on a global scale considering the enormous diversity of energy system contexts and constraints in different regions and nations around the world. 

This is a global issue, as relevant in Europe as it is in sub-Saharan Africa. Some nations are rich in abundant and affordable fossil fuels, but struggle with meeting decarbonization goals. Others have expansive clean energy systems, but face energy affordability crises. Achieving a net solution to the global energy trilemma will require unprecedented global cooperation, as well as unprecedented sensitivity to regional differences in energy realities, opportunities, and constraints. 

In order to help solve this puzzle at the level of international policy and programming, the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Energy Technology Frontiers initiative is working on building a framework for understanding which factors and stakeholders are essential to building an enabling environment for a more secure, equitable, and sustainable energy future. As a part of this project, the initiative has narrowed down three primary factors at the heart of energy system complexities which must be jointly “understood and addressed for innovation to succeed”:

• Physical ecosystem dependencies (i.e., energy demand, energy supply, and energy delivery)

• Political, geopolitical and regulatory challenges (national and international regulations and pledges)

• High-risk potential with extreme risk aversion  

Physical dependencies are a major barrier for innovation in rich countries as well as poor. In the United States, for example, a lack of available grid connections and power line infrastructure is resulting in yearslong delays for new solar energy plants to come online. Meanwhile, in Africa, leaders are faced with a historic challenge – leapfrogging straight over traditional electrification and straight toward massive buildout of utility-scale clean energy projects to bring electricity to the 600 million Africans who still live without it. 

Political and regulatory challenges are also global in scale, and complex down to the smallest local levels. Leaders have to navigate the realities of local assets and needs, global supply chains, and meeting with enshrined laws and pledges at multiple overlapping – and often contradictory – scales. Journalists have been reporting for years on the quagmire of red tape that is curtailing new energy projects, from the United States to the European Union. The TransWest Express project, a particularly dramatic example from the U.S. took a full 18 years to get approved thanks to compounding state- and federal-level bureaucratic boondoggles, and is still not expected to come online until 2030.

Finally, our world is so extremely energy-dependent that we have to prioritize near-term energy security above nearly everything else, even if it is at the expense of future generations’ ability to enjoy the same electricity-enabled luxuries, necessities, and realities. Over and over, nations choose immediate grid stability at the expense of decarbonization and long-term stability. What choice do they have? 

“There is no appetite for operational risks in this sector; this is consequently reflected in most regulations and is certainly a barrier to innovation,” reports the World Economic Forum. “In fact, the energy sector has traditionally been a late adopter of new technologies.”

But in order to overcome the paralysis of this decision-tree, which is consistently pushed to leave the future on the back burner, innovation is imperative. Malthusian panic over diminishing resources and rising demand is a natural conclusion, but technology and innovation have prevailed over scarcity projections before, and they can again. 

While the energy industry is historically slow to adapt, artificial intelligence is already remaking global energy systems in real time. And while AI integration is posing a significant threat to energy systems in the short term, experts are adamant that it will soon more than make up for its own energy consumption by making the whole world around us more energy-efficient. 

“New solutions are needed to manage risks, navigate the energy trilemma and modernize the system,” argues the World Economic Forum. “However, success depends on creating a tailored energy innovation ecosystem that recognizes these unique complexities and operates under its own set of rules.”

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com 

Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the Bay Area, and music/culture reviews.

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