The most effective way to combat climate change is to shift as quickly as possible to renewable energy. This is what states a study authored by an international team that includes Ugo Bardi and just published in the scientific journal Nature Energy (“Comparative net energy analysis of renewable electricity and carbon capture and storage”).
The international team — composed of researchers from Lancaster University, Khalifa University, Clemson University, UiT The Arctic University of Norway and University of Florence — was the first to compare the energy investment needed to move to plants that exploit the energy derived from the sun and wind with the cost necessary to implement new techniques to ‘capture’ CO2 applied to fossil fuel power plants such as gas and coal.
“The study answers a fundamental question — explains Ugo Bardi, professor of Physical Chemistry of the University of Florence: in the situation of climate urgency in which we find ourselves, it is more convenient to reduce the emissions of conventional plants, or shift directly to the production of energy using clean and renewable technologies?”
“At the basis of the 2015 agreement on climate change in Paris, explains Bardi, there are models that are based on the possibility of ‘capturing’ the carbon emitted by coal and gas power plants and burying it underground to prevent it from going into the atmosphere and cause greenhouse heating. But burying carbon is like sweeping the problem under the carpet — the researcher continues — and it is a technology that has still to be evaluated since it has never been tested on a large scale.”
Researchers calculated energy efficiency in relation to the energy invested in carbon capture technologies in a series of fossil fuel power plants, including coal and natural gas, using a so-called ‘life cycle’ method, which evaluates the energy needed to build plants, manage maintenance and then dismantle them at the end of the operating cycle.
They then compared these results with the return obtained from investments in renewable energy systems, such as wind farms and solar panels, evaluating the variables linked to the cost of producing and maintaining solar panels and turbines and the characteristics of the places where they are installed — including the need to store the energy produced. The result is that, even in the case of moderately efficient renewable sources, the return in terms of energy is better than what would be achieved by building new fossil fuel power plants with carbon capture.
“The results are clear, comments Bardi, for every reasonable combination of parameters, renewable energy wins over the ‘capture’ of carbon. The advantage, which is not just monetary, suggests that we should do our utmost in this direction to combat climate change.”
