How well is the UK on track for zero emissions by 2050?

By 2020 the UK will have very nearly halved its emissions over 30 years.  Reducing emissions by the same amount over the next 30 years will get the UK very close to zero.  However this will be very much more difficult.

A robust net zero target has been recommended for the UK …

A recent report by the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the Government’s official advisory body, recommends that the UK adopts a legally binding target of net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050[i], that is remaining emissions must be balanced by removal from the atmosphere.  If the Government agrees, this will be implemented by amending the reduction mandated by the Climate Change Act, from an 80% reduction from 1990 to a 100% reduction.

The target has several features that make it particularly ambitious.  It:

• sets a target of net zero emissions covering all greenhouse gases;
• includes international aviation and shipping;
• allows no use of international offsets; and
• is legally binding.

This is intended to end the UK’s contribution global warming.  It has no precedents elsewhere, although in France a bill with comparable provisions is under consideration[ii].

Progress to date has been good …

The UK has made good progress so far in reducing emissions since 1990.  Emissions in 2018 were around 45% below 1990 levels, having reduced at an average rate of about 12.5 million tonnes p.a. over the period.  On current trends, over the thirty years from 1990 to 2020 emissions will be reduced to about 420 million tonnes p.a., 47% below their 1990 levels.  Emissions will thus have nearly halved over the 30 years 1990 to 2020, half the period from 1990 to the target date of 2050.

Chart 1 shows how the UK’s progress compares with a linear track to the current target of an 80% reduction, to a 95% reduction and to a 100% reduction.  (For simplicity I’m ignoring international aviation and shipping).  The UK is currently on a linear track towards a 95% reduction by 2050.

Chart 1: Actual UK emissions compared with straight line progress towards different 2050 targets

 

Source: My analysis based on data from the Committee on Climate Change and UK Government.  Data for 2018 is provisional[iii]

The largest contributor to the total reduction so far has been the power sector.  Analysis by Carbon Brief[iv] showed that the fall in power sector emissions has been due to a combination deploying renewables, which made up about of third of generation in 2018, reducing coal use by switching to natural gas, and limiting electricity demand growth.

Industrial emissions have also fallen significantly.  However some of this likely represents heavy industry now being concentrated elsewhere in the world, so likely does not represent a fall in global emissions.  Emissions from waste have also fallen, due to better management.

Reducing emissions will be relatively easy in some sectors …

There are also reasons for optimism about continuing emissions reductions.  Many technologies are now there at scale and at competitive prices, which they were not in previous decades.  For example, falling renewables costs and better grid management, including cheaper storage, will help further decarbonisation of the power sector.  Electrification of surface transport now appears not only feasible, but likely to be strongly driven (at least for cars and vans) by economic factors alone as the cost of batteries continues to fall.

But huge challenges remain …

Nevertheless important difficulties remain for complete decarbonisation.

CCS is identified by the report as an essential technology.  However, as I have noted previously, it has made very little progress in recent years in the UK or elsewhere[v].  CCS is especially important for decarbonising industry.  This includes a major role for low carbon hydrogen, which is assumed to be produced from natural gas using CCS – although another possibility is that it comes from electrolysis using very cheap renewables power, e.g. at times of surplus.  CCS also looks to be necessary because of its use with bioenergy (BECCS), to give some negative emissions, though the lifecycle emissions from this will require careful attention

Decarbonising building heating, especially in the residential sector, continues to be a challenge.  The report envisages a mix of heat pumps and hydrogen, perhaps in the form of hybrid designs, with heat pumps providing the baseload being topped-up up by burning of hydrogen in winter.  I have previously written about the difficulties of widespread use of heat pumps[vi], and low carbon hydrogen from natural gas with CCS is also capital intensive to produce and therefore expensive to run for the winter only.  The scale of any programme and consumer acceptance remain major challenges, and the difficulties encountered by the UK’s smart meter installation programme – by comparison a very simple change – are not an encouraging precedent.

Emissions from agriculture are difficult to eliminate completely, and no technologies are likely to be available by 2050 that enable aviation emissions to be completely eliminated.  This will require some negative emissions to balance remaining emissions from these sectors.

Policy needs to be greatly strengthened …

Crucially several of the necessary transformations are very large scale, and need long lead times, and investment over decades.  There is an urgent need to make progress on these, and policy needs to recognise this.  This includes plans for significant absorption from reforestation, as trees need to be planted early enough that they can grow to be absorbing substantial amounts by 2050.

The UK’s progress on emissions reduction so far has been good, having made greater reductions than any other major economy[vii].  And technological advances in some areas are likely to enable substantial further progress.  However much more is needed.  In particular policy needs to look now at some of the difficult areas where substantial long-term investment will be needed

Adam Whitmore – 22^nd May 2019

 

 

[i] https://www.theccc.org.uk/2019/05/02/phase-out-greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-2050-to-end-uk-contribution-to-global-warming/

 

[ii] The CCC report notes that Norway, Sweden and Denmark have net zero targets, but they allow use of international offsets (up to 15% in the case of Sweden).  France has published a target similar to the UK’s in a bill.  The European Commission has proposed something similar for the EU as a whole, but this is a long way from being adopted. California has non-legally binding targets to achieve net zero by 2045.  Two smaller jurisdictions (Costa Rica, Bhutan) have established net zero targets but these are expected to be achieved mainly by land use changes.  New Zealand has a draft bill to establish a target, but eliminating all GHGs will be difficult because of the role of agriculture in the New Zealand economy.

 

[iii] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/provisional-uk-greenhouse-gas-emissions-national-statistics-2018  The change from 2017 to 2018 is applied to the data series from 1990 produced by the CCC (the two data series differ very slightly in their absolute levels).

 

[iv] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-generation-2018-falls-to-lowest-since-1994

 

[v] https://onclimatechangepolicydotorg.wordpress.com/2018/04/25/a-limited-but-important-medium-term-future-for-ccs/

 

[vi] https://onclimatechangepolicydotorg.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/reducing-the-costs-of-decarbonising-winter-heating-needs-to-be-a-priority/

 

[vii] https://onclimatechangepolicydotorg.wordpress.com/2017/05/09/uk-emissions-reductions-offer-lessons-for-others/

 

Five years on

The past five years have given many reasons for optimism about climate change

I have now been writing this blog for just over five years, and it seems timely to step back and look at how the climate change problem appears now compared with five years ago.

In some ways it is easy to feel discouraged.  In the last five years the world has managed to get through about a tenth of its remaining carbon budget, a budget that needs to last effectively forever.

However, in many ways there seem to be reasons for much greater optimism now than five years ago.  Several trends are converging that together make it appear that the worst of the risks of climate change can be avoided.

There is increasing action at the national level to reduce emissions, reinforced by the Paris Agreement …

Legislation is now in place in 164 countries, including the world’s 50 largest emitters.  There are over 1200 climate change and related laws now in place compared with 60 twenty years ago[i].  And this is not restricted to developed countries – many lower income countries are taking action.  Action at national level is being supported around the world by action in numerous cities, regions and companies.

This trend has now been reinforced by the Paris Agreement, which entered into force in November 2016, and commits the world to limiting temperature rises and reducing emissions.

There is increasing evidence of success in reducing emissions …

Many developed countries, especially in Europe, have shown since 1990 that it is possible to reduce emissions while continuing to grow their economies.  Globally, emissions of carbon dioxide from energy and industry have at least been growing more slowly over the past four years and may even have reached a plateau[ii].

Carbon pricing is spreading around the world  …

Among the many policies put in place, the growth of carbon pricing has been especially remarkable.  It has grown from a few small northern European economies 15 years ago to over 40 jurisdictions[iii].  Prices are often too low to be fully effective.  However, carbon pricing has also been shown to work spectacularly well in the right circumstances, as it has in the UK power sector.  And the presence of emissions caps in many jurisdictions gives a strong strategic signal to investors.

Investors are moving out of high carbon sources and in to lower carbon opportunities …

Companies are under increasing pressure to say how their businesses will be affected by climate change and to do something about reducing emissions.  And initiatives such as the Climate Action 100+, which includes over two hundred global investors controlling over $20 trillion of assets, are putting pressure on companies to step up their action.  This will further the trend towards increasing investment in a low carbon economy.  Meanwhile, many funds are divesting from fossil fuels, and vast amounts of capital are already going into low carbon investments.

Falling costs and increasing deployment of renewables and other low carbon technologies …

Solar and wind power and now at scale and continuing to grow very rapidly.  They are increasingly cost-competitive with fossil fuels.  The decarbonisation of the power sector thus looks likely to proceed rapidly, which will in turn enable electrification to decarbonise other sectors.  Electric vehicle sales are now growing rapidly, and expected to account for the majority of light vehicle sales within a couple of decades.  Other technologies, such as LED lighting are also progressing quickly.

This is not only making emissions reductions look achievable, it is making it clear that low carbon technologies can become cheaper than the high carbon technologies they replace, and can build whole new industries as they do.  As a reminder of just how fast things have moved, in the last five years alone, the charts here show global generation from wind and solar since 2000.

Falling costs of low carbon technologies, more than anything else, gives cause for optimism about reducing emissions.  As lower carbon alternatives become cheaper the case for high carbon technologies will simply disappear.

Charts: Global Generation from Wind and Solar 2000 – 2017

Sources:  BP Statistical Review of World Energy, Enerdata, GWEC, IEA

Climate sensitivity looks less likely to be at the high end of the range of estimates …

The climate has already warmed by about a degree Celsius, and some impacts from climate change have been greater than expected.  However, the increase in temperature in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases has so far shown few signs of being towards the top end of the possible range, although we can never rule out the risk of bad surprises.

Taking these trends together there is reason to be cautiously optimistic …

There will still be serious damage from climate change – indeed some is already happening.  And it is by no means clear that the world will act as quickly as it could or should.  And there could still be some nasty surprises in the earth’s reaction to continuing emissions.  Consequently, much effort and not a little luck is still needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

But compared with how things were looking five years ago there seem many reasons to believe that things are beginning to move in the right direction.  The job now is to keep things moving that way, and to speed up progress.

Adam Whitmore – 10^th April March 2018 

[i] http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publication/global-trends-in-climate-change-legislation-and-litigation-2017-update/

[ii] http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/cms/publicaties/pbl-2017-trends-in-global-co2-and-total-greenhouse-gas-emissons-2017-report_2674.pdf

[iii] https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28510

Half way there

The UK has made excellent progress on reducing emissions.  But the hard part is yet to come.

The UK’s Climate Change Act (2008) established a legally binding obligation to reduce UK emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.  This is an ambitious undertaking, a sixty year programme to cut four in every five tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously growing the economy.

The story so far is, broadly, an encouraging one.  2016 emission were 42% below 1990 levels, about half way to the 2050 target[1].  This has been achieved in 26 years, a little under half the time available.  And it has been achieved while population has grown by about 15%[2] and the economy has grown by over 60%.  The reduction in emissions from 1990 to 2015 is shown on the chart below, which also shows the UK’s legislated carbon budgets.   There is of course some uncertainty in the data, especially for non-CO₂ gases, but uncertainties in trends are less than the uncertainty in the absolute levels, and emissions of CO₂ from energy, which is the largest component of the total, are closely tracked.

The UK is half way towards its 2050 target, in a little under half the available time …

Source: Committee on Climate Change

The chart below shows the sectoral breakdown of how this has been achieved, and this raises some important caveats.

Progress in some sectors has been much more rapid than others …

Source: Committee on Climate Change

The largest source of gains has been the power sector, especially if a further fall of a remarkable in emissions from power generation in 2016 is included (the chart only shows data to 2015).  While renewables have made an important contribution, much of this fall has been due to replacing coal with gas.  This been an economically efficient, low cost way of reducing emissions to date, to which UK carbon price support has been a major contributor.  However coal generation has now fallen to very low levels, so further progress requires replacing gas with low carbon generation – renewables, nuclear and CCS.  This is more challenging, and in some cases is likely to prove more expensive.

The next largest source of gains, roughly a third of the total reduction, is from industry.  However, while detailed data is not available, a large part of this reduction may have been due to broader economic trends, notably globalisation of the world economy leading to heavy industry becoming more concentrated in emerging economies.  This trend may also have had some effect on electricity demand and thus emissions.  The aggregate reduction in global emissions may thus be smaller than indicated by looking at the UK alone.  Reducing global emissions still requires a great deal more progress on industrial emissions, especially in emissions intensive sectors notably iron and steel and cement.

Progress in reduction of emissions from waste, especially methane from landfill, has been a third important contributor.  Again, this has been highly cost-effective reduction.  However about two thirds of emissions have now been eliminated so further measures will necessarily make a smaller contribution, though there is much that can still be done with the remainder such as eliminating organic waste from landfill.

Other sectors have done much less, and will need to do more in the years to come.  Progress on f-gases may be helped by the recent international agreement on HFCs, although more will still need to be done.  Transport emissions have made only slow progress in recent years.  It is essential that electrification is encouraged so that a large change similar to that achieved in the power sector can be achieved in transport.  The buildings stock remains an intractable problem, and the first priority must be to at least make sure that new buildings are built to the highest standards of insulation.

So continuing the trend of falling emissions in future will be difficult and will require new and enhanced policy measures.  But in 1990 the prospects of achieving what has already been achieved doubtless looked daunting, and progress to date should encourage further efforts in future.

Adam Whitmore -25^th April 2017

Material in this post draws on a presentation by Owen Bellamy of the Committee on Climate Change at a British Institute of Energy Economics seminar on 5^th April 2017.

[1] The UK’s domestic emissions need to go down slightly more rapidly than the headline target would suggest due to the role of international aviation and shipping.  This is shown on the chart.  However the broad message is the same.

[2]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/mar2017

How fast could the market for electric vehicles grow?

Various policy driven scenarios show electric vehicles gaining market share over the next few decades but with the turnover of the vehicle stock taking longer.

I recently argued that BP’s projections showing almost no take-up of plug-in vehicles[1] by 2035 was unrealistic in view of several convergent trends.  There is increasing pressure to reduce CO₂ emissions, there is large and growing concern about urban air quality,  and electric vehicles are likely to prove attractive to consumers in many respects.  In line with these drivers, sales are growing very quickly and many new models are coming on line, while battery technology is improving rapidly, with costs falling sharply and energy density rising.

However while these factors suggest that electric vehicles will gain substantial market share it does not say how much how soon[2].  So how fast might the market for plug-in vehicles grow if policy drivers are strong and matched by favourable economics?  Here I consider how quickly electric vehicles could gain market share on that sort of optimistic view.

Market share gains for new technologies

The transition to electric vehicles is in its early stages, so extrapolating historical trends offers only limited guidance.  Similarly, highly detailed modelling may not offer robust insights, because too many assumptions are required.  Instead it seems appropriate to look at some broad indicators.

A good starting point is to look at adoption other new technologies.  The chart below shows the rates of penetration of new technologies in the USA over the 20^th and early 21^st centuries.  It shows variants on a characteristic s-curve shape, with most technologies reaching eventual penetrations of 80-100%.  The typical time to reach about 80% penetration following the first 1% or so of deployment (about where plug-in vehicles are now) is around 20-30 years, although some modern highly scalable technologies have become nearly ubiquitous faster than this, and other technologies have taken as long as fifty years or so to reach high penetration.

For example, cars themselves experienced rapid growth between around 1910 and 1930, reaching 60% of households, before experiencing hiatus and decline during the Great Depression and Second
World War, before growing steadily again through the to the second half of the 20^th Century.

However these timings are for the USA, and, even in increasingly homogenous, world global adoption may take a little longer.

Chart:  Transitions of major technologies

 

The chart mainly shows technologies that fulfil a new function, rather than those that replace existing technologies, as plug-in vehicles do.  However replacement technologies can also gain market share quickly.  Digital cameras replacing film almost completely over a period of around 15-20 years, and DVDs replaced VHS in less than 10 years.  In these cases the new technology brought clear advantages.  For plug in vehicles a combination of some advantages plus regulatory drivers could play a similar role.

Modelling the transition

EVs are rather different from many of these cases in that there is a large existing capital stock which is expensive to replace – a new car is much more costly than a new camera.  This limits the rate of change of the stock.   I have therefore applied the sorts of timescales shown above to a rough and ready model representing the potential rate of gain market share of new vehicles, rather than changes to the stock.  The model uses a standard s-curve (logistic function).  Changes in the stock are then calculated considering stock turnover.

I have developed three scenarios representing respectively strong policy drivers, more moderate policy drivers, and a delayed transition representing either weaker policy or greater practical or economic obstacles.  The strong policy case fits better with the historic data, but this may not be a reliable marker as the history is so short and there are a number of particular circumstances at work.

I have assumed plug-in vehicles will eventually account for 80%-90% of the market for light vehicles, with markets for internal combustion vehicles likely to remain where consumers seek low capital costs or they need long range with poor infrastructure.  There will doubtless also be small niches for car enthusiasts seeking experience of the internal combustion engine, just as there are for taking photographs on film.  However these are likely to play only a small role.

The rate at which the stock of vehicles is replaced depends on how long vehicles last.  I have assumed this to be 15 years, although there is obviously a distribution around this.  If this were to lengthen further it would slow the change in the stock, or could be shortened by incentives to scrap older vehicles.  The life of new electric vehicles is unproven (although battery guarantees of typically around 8 years are available), but in any case I have assumed buyers replace their battery packs, or replace their EVs with other EVs rather than returning to internal combustion engines.

Growth of the vehicle fleet leads to a faster proportional changeover of the stock, assuming plug in vehicles gain the same share of the larger market, because current sales are a greater proportion of the historic stock.  I’ve here assumed a 2.5% p.a. global growth rate for car sales[3].

The results of this analysis are shown in the chart.  Annual sales of EVs reach 20-60% of the market by 2030, expected to be over 100 million vehicles p.a. by then.  They by then account for around 7-22% of the vehicle stock, or around 100-330 million vehicles.  By 2050 electric vehicles account for a majority of light vehicles on the roads in all the scenarios.

Global market share of plug in light vehicles

So do  these projections make sense, and what might stop them?

Cost competitiveness.  Analysis by a variety of commentators show EVs becoming economically competitive in the early to mid-2020s, varying between geographies depending on factors such as driving patterns and petrol prices.  This timing corresponds with the period when vehicles begin to gain market share much more rapidly in the above model, especially in the first two cases, which appears consistent.

China.  A large proportion of vehicle sales in the coming years will be in developing countries, especially China.  Concerns around urban air quality, development of the indigenous automotive industry, infrastructure development, and oil imports look likely to tend to favour EVs in China.  Driving patterns based around lots of shorter distance urban driving are also compatible with EVs.  For these reasons government policy in China strongly favours EVs.  Again this seems consistent.

Growth rate.  The compound annual growth rate for annual sales over the period to 2030 ranges from 25% to 33%, both well below current growth rates of around 60% p.a.

Scale-up.  The need to produce tens of millions of additional EVs by 2030 is a formidable challenge.  However the international car industry increased production by about 35 million units p.a. over the two decades between the 1990s and 2015, and added 20 million units p.a. in the last decade alone[4].  Replacing models with electric equivalents at this scale does not seem like an insuperable barrier, at least in the lower two scenarios.  However the challenges of achieving this for the stronger policy scenario are formidable, and policy drivers would need to be correspondingly strong to overcome these barriers.

Battery production would also need to be scaled up by orders of magnitude.  There don’t appear to be any fundamental barriers to supply of the vast quantities of lithium that would be needed, but it may take time to develop the infrastructure.

The need to ramp up production of both new models and batteries may act to slow growth, at least for a while and especially in the strong policy case, but do not seem likely to act as a fundamental longer term constraint.

Grid constraints.  EVs are likely to require reinforcement of grids, but again this does not look like a major barrier given the timescales involved.

Other projections

These projections show much faster growth than analysis by BNEF, which suggests 35% market share by 2045[5].  However the reasons that BNEF sees growth being so restricted are unclear, and there appear to be few examples where the penetration of a new technology has been so slow.  It seems a more likely estimate for a share of the stock by that date, though even then looks to be towards the low end of the range.

Goldman Sachs estimates 22% of the market being EVs by 2025[6].  This includes conventional hybrids, with the share of plug-in vehicles being only about a third of this, closer to the moderate case.  However it would not seem to require a fundamental change to the market’s development for a greater share of hybrids to be plug-in, so Goldman’s analysis seems at least potentially consistent with the strong regulation case shown here.

Other scenarios show something close to the moderate case shown here.  The IEA 450 scenario and Statoil’s reform scenario both show EV sales reaching around 30% of the market by 2030[7].

Outturn will doubtless differ from these projections.  But they do highlight the extent to which policy might succeed in stimulating a major transition in car markets in the next two or three decades.

Adam Whitmore – 24^th May 2016

 

[1] All estimates here refer to pure electric vehicles and plug in hybrids, which get much or all of their energy from externally generated electricity.  Depending on driving patterns, a PHEV may typically get 70% of its energy from external electricity.  I exclude conventional hybrids, which are essentially a variant of internal combustion engines with increased efficiency, in that still get all their energy from petrol.

 

[2] Some have made  the case that on pure resource cost grounds internal combustion engine vehicles will continue to predominate.  See  http://www.energypost.eu/can-battery-electrics-disrupt-internal-combustion-engine-part-1/  This is potentially true in the absence of any policy drivers due to emissions or other factors, but this seems unrealistic.

[3] For comparison, BP assume a doubling of the vehicle fleet by 2035, about a 3.5% p.a. growth rate (see there 2035 outlook).

[4] http://www.statista.com/statistics/200002/international-car-sales-since-1990/

[5] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-ev-oil-crisis/

[6] http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/new-energy-landscape-folder/report-the-low-carbon-economy/report.pdf

[7] See Lost in transition, Carbon tracker p. 102 for plots of these projections