The Clean Energy Revolution Enables a New Approach to the Energy-Water Nexus (Invited Paper 664849)Daniel M KammenEnergy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:

Dramatic improvements in the performance and cost of renewable energy systems enables a new approach to tacking together the interlinked challenges of climate change, environmental conservation and development. With both solar and wind energy costs having fallen by over 60% during the past decade and storage costs on a similar trajectory (Kittner et al, 2019), the integration of clean energy supply technologies can be utilized in new ways to provide needed energy, manage water for agriculture, and both return land to nature and utilize natural resources with a far less ecological and cultural damage than in many past projects. Distributed renewable energy offer higher levels of job creation and investments directly in many of the hardest-hit and poorest communities worldwide.

Even with solar and wind now at or below the cost of all other energy supply options, including hydropower and natural gas, these gains are not always easy to realize because they generally require holistic approaches to infrastructure systems planning. While widely acknowledged among academics, practical approaches to energy, water and other needs at local to national scales tend to focus on single-variate least cost solutions.

In our past work in Malaysian Borneo, we have been able to identify cases where systems approaches based around renewable energy resulted in the cancellation of coal-fired projects, and cases where a mega-dam was cancelled over the opportunities presented instead by distributed networks of solar, wind and efficiency (Kammen, 2020). In this talk we also explore the case of Myanmar, where 40 GW of new large-scale hydropower projects have been proposed (Schmidt, et al, 2019: Figure 1).

At a time when economies worldwide are suffering, this shift would result in ecosystem-sparing reductions in emissions, job creation, and a chance to make social justice and climate justice a positive legacy from the destruction of COVID-19.

Kammen, Daniel M (2020) “Defeating energy poverty: Invest in scalable solutions for the poor” in WK Al-Delaimy et al. (eds.), Health of People, Health of Planet and Our Responsibility (The Pontifical Academy of Sciences Dialog).

Raphael JP Schmitt, Noah P Kittner, Matthias Kondoff, M, and Daniel M Kammen (2019) “Leverage diverse renewables to save tropical rivers”, Nature, 569, 330-332.