LONDON — Scientists and economists including BP Plc’s former
chief executive officer, John Browne, are inviting governments to join a
$150 billion program that aims to make clean energy cheaper than coal. The 10-year plan, known as the Global Apollo Programme to Combat
Climate Change, will fund research into renewables, power storage and
smart-grid technologies to make them cheaper than fossil fuels.
It aims
to create an international task force of scientists, entrepreneurs and
policymakers. “There is a looming catastrophe that can be avoided,” David King, an
Apollo founder and former chief scientific adviser to the U.K.
government, said in London. “What we need to do is create clean energy
that is less costly than fossil energy, and once we get to that point,
we’re winning all battles.”
Apollo already has attracted considerable interest from countries
including India, China, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the U.S. and the United
Arab Emirates, King said. The project plans to make public its members
by November, ahead of the United Nations climate change talks in Paris
the following month.
Apollo’s goal is for new-build renewables to be cheaper than
new-build coal plants in sunny countries by 2020, and worldwide from
2025. Generating electricity from the sun currently costs about $136 a
megawatt-hour on average, compared with about $91 for coal, according to
Bloomberg estimates.
Rising Concentrations
Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rising at
about 2 to 3 parts per million annually, and for the first time it
averaged more than 400 parts per million in March, according to U.S.
government measurements. The UN has said that greenhouse gases should
peak at no more than 450 ppm this century to maximize the chance of
limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celcius.
Climate negotiators are gathered in Bonn for 11 days of talks to iron
out their differences ahead of the Paris conference. The goal of envoys
from more than 190 nations is to agree on a deal that for the first
time would require developed and developing countries to take action.
Participants in Apollo would be required to spend an average of 0.02
percent of gross domestic product from 2016 to 2025, largely in their
own jurisdiction, to help fund the technology development. The program
will have a Commission with representative from each member country, and
there will be a Roadmap Committee that will produce a document of
research and development areas that need to be addressed.
‘Man on the Moon’
“This challenge is at least as big as the challenge of putting a man
on the moon,” Richard Layard, another Apollo founder and the director of
the Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics’ Centre for
Economic Performance, said. “We don’t think that this problem can
ultimately be cracked unless we reduce the cost of clean energy below
that of dirty energy.”
Other founders of the program include Gus O’Donnell, the former U.K.
cabinet secretary, Martin Rees, former president of the U.K.’s Royal
Society, Nicholas Stern, chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment and Adair Turner, senior research
fellow at the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
Copyright 2015 Bloomberg
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/2015/06/coalition-of-scientists-start-150-billion-program-to-cut-clean-energy-costs.html