Technovative Solutions’ nGEL project aims to overhaul traditional geothermal plants to help accelerate decarbonisation.
The shift towards renewable energy is critical for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), 90% of the world’s electricity should come from renewable sources by 2050. Today, fossil fuels still account for over 80% of global energy production and are responsible for 75% of greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, only 29% of electricity comes from renewable sources, but this number is set to rise, driven by policies from the European Commission.
The push for renewables focuses not only on solar and wind but also on geothermal energy, which offers a cleaner and more reliable source of power. Geothermal energy has the lowest carbon footprint compared to other renewable sources like biogas and fossil fuels, emitting just 20-30 kg of CO₂ per MWh. However, geothermal energy remains under-utilised, largely due to high costs. Technovative Solutions Ltd. (TVS) is at the forefront of overcoming these challenges with its innovative technologies and projects, including the nGEL project.
The nGEL Project: Transforming geothermal power plants
The nGEL project aims to revolutionise geothermal energy by converting traditional geothermal organic Rankine cycle (ORC) plants into flexible tri-generation systems. These upgraded plants will be capable of producing electricity, heating, and cooling, making them essential in balancing power and thermal grids. This will be achieved through the integration (with the geothermal ORC) of absorption chiller, thermal energy storage (TES), cold thermal energy storage (CTES), heat exchangers (HXs), smart control and energy management system (EMS) with artificial intelligence (AI) functionalities.
The nGEL project is a crucial step in making geothermal energy a key player in the global transition towards renewable energy. In the nGEL Project, Technovative Solutions Ltd. will be using its proprietary technology to increase geothermal power production during higher ambient temperatures to increase the reliability of geothermal ORC. TVS will also develop life cycle assessment (LCA) models, and thermo-economic models to evaluate the environmental and economic performance of the geothermal ORC plant and will establish a digital twin of the geothermal ORC plant operations by implementing AI models.
Co-ordinated by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (IEG), the project includes partners such as Vlaamse Instelling Voor Technologisch Onderzoek N.V. (VITO), Zorlu Enerji Elektrik Üretim, Geolorn Ireland Ltd., REPG Energy, Naldeo Technologies Et Industries, and Technovative Solutions Ltd. (TVS). The total budget allocated for the nGEL Project is nearly €6m.
nGEL is a four-year project, launched in June 2024 and funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) under Research and Innovation Actions, grant agreement No. 101148170, in response to the call: ‘Horizon-CL5-2023-D3-02 (Sustainable, Secure, and Competitive Energy Supply)’.
The future of geothermal energy
Geothermal energy offers a unique combination of reliability and low emissions, making it an ideal complement to intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar. As the world moves towards net-zero emissions, geothermal energy will play an increasingly important role in stabilising power grids and reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 20th edition of our quarterly publication.
Nuclear-energy deals by technology giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google have sparked media attention around the world in the past few months. But several companies, including Meta and Google, are also investing in another source of low-carbon energy — next-generation geothermal. The agreements show that this technology is “on the cusp” of widespread commercial success, says Lauren Boyd, a geologist who heads the Geothermal Technologies Office at the US Department of Energy (DoE) in Washington, DC.
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On 17 October, Fervo Energy, a start-up based in Houston, Texas, got a major boost as the US government gave the green light to the expansion of a geothermal plant Fervo is building in Beaver County, Utah. The project could eventually generate as much as 2,000 megawatts — a capacity comparable with that of two large nuclear reactors. Although getting to that point could take a while, the plant already has 400 MW of capacity in the pipeline, and will be ready to provide around-the-clock power to Google’s energy-hungry data centres, and other customers, by 2028. In August, another start-up, Sage Geosystems, announced a partnership with Facebook’s parent company Meta to deliver up to 150 MW of geothermal power to Meta’s data centres by 2027.
Not your grandma’s geothermal
Sage, Fervo and other companies worldwide are racing to tap the heat that’s constantly flowing from Earth’s depths. Unlike conventional geothermal energy, which has been around for the better part of a century, these projects do not rely on natural hot springs; instead, they create their own.
The process involves drilling a borehole up to several kilometres deep, where the rocks are at a temperature of around 200 °C, and injecting water and sand at high pressure. This makes fractures in the rocks, increasing their permeability and creating a reservoir of heated water that can be continuously extracted through a second borehole. The hot, pressurized water is then used to generate electricity (see ‘Enhanced geothermal’).
This approach — known as enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) — has been attempted since the 1970s, but most projects have failed to extract notable amounts of energy.
Improvements in the past decade have come from adopting techniques that are used in the oil and gas industry, including better ways to fracture the rock and drill horizontally. Researchers have had to adapt those methods to drilling in rock at high temperatures, or find their own solutions. Boyd was directly involved in Utah FORGE, a DoE project to push EGS technology, which she says has introduced a number of innovations that have nearly halved the drilling costs.
Tunnelling sideways
Horizontal drilling, in particular, has been crucial for the success of EGS, says Joseph Moore, a geologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, because the cracks made by fracking “tend to go vertically”. A horizontal borehole will cross many fractures and inject water into — or extract it from — a large volume of rock, says Moore, who heads Utah FORGE.
South Korea’s most-destructive quake probably triggered by geothermal plant
Although Utah FORGE has pushed the boundaries of EGS, and has developed techniques to drill into deeper and hotter rock than had previously been possible, Fervo’s nearby Utah plant and two earlier pilot projects have shown that the EGS concept can work using off-the-shelf tools, says Fervo’s senior geologist, Emma McConville, who is based in Reno, Nevada, “We can deliver massive amounts of geothermal to the market at extremely fast rates,” she says.
Executives at next-generation geothermal companies say that the vast workforce of people who are experienced in drilling for oil and gas is a readily available resource that should help their businesses to grow quickly. There is also a substantial overlap with the oil and gas industry in terms of equipment: the 30-metre-tall derricks for drilling wells are the same ones that would otherwise be used for extracting hydrocarbons, says McConville. “Being able to keep those going — but working for carbon-free energy — is one of my favourite parts of this industry.”
Reducing quake risks
The development of EGS has been held up partly because the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) processes involved can cause seismic activity. Some projects, including one in Basel, Switzerland, and another in Pohang, South Korea, have had to shut down because the fracking was linked to considerable earthquake activity.
Utah FORGE, Fervo and other companies are following DoE guidelines to limit induced seismicity, and they continuously monitor their sites with seismographs. “If we exceed a certain threshold, we shut down,” says McConville. Although the fracking does produce quakes, these have typically been of a magnitude less than 2, she adds. “If we’re careful and we’re not drilling into faults that could slip, we shouldn’t get events that you can feel,” says Moore.
Another company has taken an even more risk-averse approach. Eavor, based in Calgary, Canada, calls its geothermal technology ‘advanced’ rather than ‘enhanced’, and foregoes fracking altogether. Instead, the company has developed a sophisticated magnetic guidance system, in which the drill heads from the two boreholes guide each other and form closed loops underground. “There’s no GPS when you are four and a half kilometres underground,” says Matt Toews, the company’s chief technology officer.
In an Eavor project, each borehole branches out into a grid of parallel, horizontal pipes, which then reconnect at the other borehole. This also means that the water never comes into direct contact with the rock, but has to absorb heat through the pipes’ casings. “The advantage is that we don’t have to frack,” says Carsten Reinhold, chief geologist at Eavor’s German arm in Düsseldorf.
Eavor is building its first commercial geothermal plant near Geretsried, Germany, and this should start exploiting 160 °C water from a depth of 4,500 m next year. The plant will mostly provide heating to buildings in the nearby town, but will also generate about 8 MW of electricity.
Future markets
Drilling to kilometres of depth is a very expensive business, and each borehole can cost millions to make. Although costs are expected to come down, next-generation geothermal is still projected to be more expensive than many other forms of energy. But because it can be available at any time, it could complement low-carbon resources that are inherently variable, such as solar and wind. “It fills a niche where there are really not many options,” says energy-systems researcher Wilson Ricks at Princeton University in New Jersey. Its main competitors would then be other expensive energy sources, such as nuclear, biomass and hydrogen.
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Whether or not geothermal will be an economical solution will also depend, in large part, on geography. In general, the deeper you drill, the hotter the rock, but the vagaries of geology mean that the depths at which rocks reach temperatures high enough to enable electricity generation — around 200 °C — vary greatly around the world. High temperatures tend to be found closest to the surface in regions with active volcanism, or where the continental crust is thinner than average. A survey by the DoE, for example, shows that the western side of the United States has a much greater potential than the eastern side for extracting this energy at a profit (see ‘Patchy potential’).
In a study published early this year in Nature Energy1, Ricks and collaborators, including Fervo co-founder Jack Norbeck, simulated US energy markets. Ricks says they found that geothermal could be cheaper than nuclear in much of the western United States. But a crucial assumption in the study was that plants can ramp their electricity generation up and down in response to swings in demand. Whether this can be done without causing excessive wear-and-tear will be a major test for upcoming facilities.
Christoph Zipf, Spokesperson at WindEurope, stresses that EU governments must revitalise implementation in order to accelerate Europe’s wind industry.
As it stands, Europe is not building enough new wind turbines to reach its 2030 energy and climate targets. After several challenging years, the European wind energy supply chain has started to ramp up. The European Commission has tabled an excellent Wind Power Package in late 2023 – 15 immediate actions to strengthen Europe’s wind industry. Now, it’s up to European governments to implement these European Union (EU) rules on the national level. ‘Implementation’ might sound boring and dusty, but, for Europe’s wind industry, the timely and efficient implementation of the Wind Power Package might well be matter of survival.
The challenges Europe faces today – declining competitiveness, geopolitical uncertainties, and climate change – are significant. Wind energy is uniquely positioned to help tackle all three. It reduces fossil fuel imports, creates jobs, strengthens the industrial base, and plays a pivotal role in reducing carbon emissions. By fully embracing wind energy, Europe can bolster its energy independence, boost economic growth, and lead the global transition to clean energy.
And there’s great news: we don’t need much additional EU legislation to start a new wind energy boom across Europe.
In 2023, the European Commission tabled an excellent Wind Power Package with 15 immediate actions to strengthen Europe’s wind industry. The revised EU Renewable Energy Directive further made the deployment of wind energy a matter of overriding public interest. Now, the EU is switching to implementation mode.
Presenting his programme for the next five years to the European Parliament, European Commissioner-Designate for Energy and Housing Dan Jørgensen wrote: “implementation is central to European competitiveness.” Jørgensen is spot on. Yes, the next European Commission mandate will need to focus on implementation. And yes, Europe’s new rules on permitting, its electricity market design and its Grids Action Plan will help generate lots of cheap renewable electricity to boost the competitiveness of Europe’s businesses.
Europe’s wind industry at a crossroads
But Europe’s wind industry is at a crossroads. Europe built 6.4 GW of new wind farms in the first half of 2024. At this rate, it isn’t building enough new wind farms to meet its 2030 energy security and climate targets. The EU is projected to build 22 GW of new wind farms a year on average over 2024-30, with annual installations sharply rising towards the end of the decade. This puts the EU on track to have 350 GW of wind energy capacity by 2030: 296 GW onshore and 54 GW offshore. The EU wants 425 GW by 2030.
The European wind energy supply chain is doing its part. Our companies are currently investing more than €10bn in building new factories or expanding existing ones. 30 major factory investments include new production capacities for blades, towers, nacelles, offshore wind substations, cable, and grid equipment production. By 2025, the European supply chain is expected to have the capacity to manufacture 9.5 GW of offshore and 22.5 GW of onshore wind turbines annually.
The EU is supporting in this. The European Investment Bank has set up a counter-guarantee facility for wind energy manufacturing investments and the EU Innovation Fund has selected six wind energy manufacturing projects in its latest call for projects.
But international competition is growing. As things stand, nearly all the wind turbines built in Europe today are European wind turbines – produced by European manufacturers and assembled in Europe. But there is a very real risk that the expansion of wind the EU wants will be made in China, not in Europe. Chinese manufacturers are starting to win first projects in Europe now.
The European wind industry is already providing 370,000 jobs in Europe today. By 2030, this could grow to almost 600,000. But this big promise of new jobs and sustainable growth faces hurdles. European manufacturing capacity is not the problem here. It’s other challenges that are preventing the wind energy market from reaching its full potential and Europe from delivering the volumes needed to reach the 2030 targets.
This is where our dear implementation comes in: EU Member States must implement the excellent EU rules. They must adapt EU permitting rules, ensure grid connections are ready on time, improve the business case for new wind, and they must get the supporting infrastructure in place: ports, roads, vessels. They must ensure that implementation is done efficiently and effectively. There’s much on the line here: Europe’s clean technology leadership.
Electricity grids: Enable the massive deployment of wind
Electricity grids are rapidly becoming the number one bottleneck to the expansion of wind energy in Europe. The lack of robust grid infrastructure risks delaying in the green energy transition. Across Europe, investments in expanded and optimised grids of €584bn are required by 2030. The cheapest and cleanest electricity becomes worthless if it cannot be transported to the end consumer. The EU has put forward a Grids Action Plan. Governments must not waste any time implementing it!
Grid connection queues are growing. Across Europe, more than 500 GW of potential wind energy capacity in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Ireland, Croatia, and the UK are waiting for an assessment of their application for a grid connection. Italy and the UK each have more than 100 GW of projects waiting. Speculative projects are clogging up the system. Today, it can take up to nine years to get a grid connection permit. Governments must implement effective filtering and prioritisation criteria to unlock the most promising wind energy projects and rapidly greenlight them.
Permitting: Make the overriding public interest count
Another key area requiring improvement is permitting. Long, complex permitting processes slow down wind farm development across Europe. As part of the latest Renewable Energy Directive revision, the EU has proposed various measures to resolve that. This includes stricter permitting deadlines and, crucially, making the expansion of wind energy a matter of overriding public interest.
But nearly a year after the revised Renewable Energy Directive (REDIII) permitting deadline, implementation across the EU remains inconsistent. Germany has rapidly implemented the new measures and now leads with 4.7 GW of new wind permitted in the first half of 2024. Others fall behind. Take France with 750 MW and Sweden with close to no new projects. The European Commission has even initiated infringement proceedings against several other EU Member States for not implementing the new permitting provisions in time.
Faster permitting is crucial to unlocking the new wind volumes needed for 2030. This includes digitalising the overall permitting processes, establishing overriding public interest and providing efficient one-stop shops. This causes much implementation work for the Member States.
Business case: Move away from price-only auctions
Auction design is another crucial lever. Governments across Europe need to embrace non-price criteria in their auctions to ensure a balance between cost-efficiency and environmental, social, or industry political goals. The Netherlands serves as a positive example. They pioneered non-price criteria on biodiversity and energy system integration in their offshore wind auctions.
The EU Wind Power Package wants Member States to follow the Dutch example. Governments must act and improve their national auction designs. They must apply proper implementation, ensure that the auction prices reflect today’s market realities, and stay away from uncapped negative bidding.
Demand side: Electrify heating, transport, and industry
Europe is making quick progress in decarbonising the power sector, but other sectors of the economy are stalling. Here, we are still using fossil fuels – the gasoline in our cars, the gas in our boilers. The problem: electricity is still less than 25% of all energy consumed in Europe. This needs to change. Member States must ramp up their efforts to electrify transport, heating, cooling and industry.
Steel, cement, and chemicals are central to the production of modern wind turbines. We need to help them decarbonise – with finance and flexible state aid. It’s great that Dan Jørgensen pledged to present an Electrification Action Plan to help government deliver on this. The Plan cannot come early enough and must be sufficiently ambitious, aiming for 35% electricity in the energy mix by 2030. In the meantime, Member States have plenty of cross-sectoral Green Deal legislation to implement in order to boost electrification already today.
Supporting infrastructure: Prepare for the boom
Wind energy is not only the manufacturing of turbines. It is also about getting the supporting infrastructure in place. This includes ports, roads, and vessels. Europe will need to invest €9bn in its port infrastructure by 2030 to unlock the coming offshore wind boom. But ports and their hinterland connections – roads and bridges – are also key to the expansion of onshore wind. Many of the large wind turbine components are stored and handled in ports before being transported further land inwards. Next to the physical infrastructure investments, government will also need to invest in their human resources. The wind industry stands ready to generate hundreds of thousands of jobs across Europe, but we need education and training offers that ensure we have the skilled staff to match this job offering.
Growing geopolitical tensions make energy security an urgent priority. Cheap and home-grown renewables can deliver. The EU has understood this and wants to make wind energy a cornerstone of Europe’s green energy future. The proposed EU Clean Industrial Deal will enable European industries to reap all the benefits of wind energy generation. But the EU can only do so much. The ball is firmly in the court of the Member States now. To paraphrase Dan Jørgensen’s quote in the broadest sense: Europe’s industrial competitiveness will not least depend on whether Member States manage to make implementation easy, efficient and sexy.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 20th edition of our quarterly publication.
“Barbados has committed to becoming fossil-fuel-free by 2030, but that will probably cause huge economic damage because not a lot of people here can afford an electric car. Brazil solved this problem with cars fuelled by sugar-cane biodiesel, but there’s not enough sugar cane grown here to copy that approach. One of my undergraduate students, Brittney McKenzie, saw a possible solution. There is a sargassum seaweed crisis in Barbados. One tourist resort was spending US$2 million every year to remove it from the resort beach. McKenzie asked, what if we use sargassum to make biofuel?
She tested it in the laboratory, and it worked so well that it shifted my whole research trajectory. In this photo, I’m collecting sargassum to put into a digester, along with rum distillery waste water. Under anaerobic conditions, the microbes in the mix, feeding on the sugar in the waste water, digest the sargassum and produce gaseous methane biofuel. All the islands in this region of the Caribbean have a sargassum problem and a rum wastewater problem — and ultimately a climate-change problem. This solution is a win–win–win.
We estimate that, if we converted 100,000 fossil-fuel-powered vehicles in Barbados — around 75% — to run on our biofuel, it would remove 17 million tonnes of carbon emissions from the atmosphere over the average vehicle lifetime of 14 years. It would also halve the cost of vehicle fuel for people in Barbados.
In 2021, my colleagues and I co-founded a start-up company, Rum & Sargassum, and now the first challenge is to find ways to scale this up to meet our initial target of 2,000 customers here. Then, we must convince investors that this is a scalable solution for renewable energy.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A recent policy brief from the SERENE cluster – a coalition of EU-funded projects – lays out essential actions to speed up the adoption of renewable energy technologies across Europe.
The SERENE cluster, which unites the SERENE, LocalRES, and SUSTENANCE projects, focuses on fostering community engagement, overcoming regulatory obstacles, and delivering scalable solutions to drive clean energy adoption.
Tackling barriers to renewable energy adoption
The SERENE brief identifies significant barriers to the adoption of renewable energy technologies, especially in smaller and isolated communities.
These communities often face societal resistance rooted in misinformation, a lack of technical knowledge, and concerns over upfront costs. Limited access to transparent information has further slowed the acceptance of sustainable technologies.
To address this, SERENE advocates for community-focused training programmes that can clarify the benefits of renewable technologies and promote local buy-in.
The SERENE cluster report highlights that Europe’s ageing energy infrastructure remains a substantial obstacle to renewable integration.
Outdated systems, coupled with data scarcity, make efficient energy management challenging, particularly in remote areas.
Regulatory obstacles compound these issues by limiting collaboration with Distribution System Operators (DSOs). SERENE’s recommendations include aligning EU and local regulations to streamline the transition to renewable energy.
Supporting small businesses to drive innovation
In addition to societal and technological challenges, the policy brief emphasises the industrial hurdles in the renewable energy sector.
These include a growing skills gap, a lack of standardised technologies, and the dominance of large corporations that can create mistrust in local communities.
To overcome this, SERENE suggests that small businesses and start-ups receive more funding to become competitive players in the energy market.
By fostering trust and competitiveness, the report argues that small companies can drive more localised, scalable solutions.
Key recommendations for accelerating renewable energy technologies
The SERENE policy brief offers eight major recommendations aimed at overcoming these barriers:
Recommendation 1 – Training Tools and Workshops: Provide structured training for communities to raise awareness and acceptance of renewable energy solutions.
Recommendation 2 – Align EU and Local Regulations: Streamline policies between EU and local governments for easier adoption of energy projects.
Recommendation 3 – Scalable Energy Solutions: Develop plug and-play technologies for simpler adoption by citizens and communities.
Recommendation 4 – Funding for Start-ups: Allocate EU and national funds to support small companies and start-ups in renewable energy.
Recommendation 5 – Simplify Procedures: Speed up administrative processes for energy projects, especially for smaller communities.
Recommendation 6 – Interoperability and Standardisation: Create EU-wide standards for renewable technologies to ensure compatibility.
Recommendation 7 – Promote Energy Sharing: Implement flexible legal frameworks to enable communities to share surplus energy.
Recommendation 8 – Combat Misinformation: Launch awareness campaigns to educate citizens on the benefits and debunk myths about renewable energy
SUSTENANCE final results
In addition to the policy brief, the cluster has also released a final results video of the SUSTENANCE project, which can be found below:
A vision for Europe’s renewable future
The SERENE cluster’s policy brief underscores the need for a multi-faceted approach to transition Europe toward a clean energy future.
By focusing on regulatory alignment, community education, and support for innovation, SERENE’s policy brief provides a clear path forward.
With these strategies in place, Europe can enhance its role as a leader in renewable energy technologies and accelerate its progress toward a sustainable, resilient future.
The drive towards decarbonisation and the search for alternative, less-polluting sources of energy vex our planet and its politicians and decision-makers. Many wealthy countries are working to strip pollutants and emissions-belching elements out of our industrial processes and individual lives.
This is an age of environmental consciousness. At least that’s the argument. But it is one Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, a historian of science and technology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research,…
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) recent report on clean energy deployment reveals a complex landscape of growth and challenges in the first half of 2024.
This uneven progress underscores the need for supportive policies to help countries accelerate their clean energy transitions.
Solar power and electric vehicles drive clean energy growth
According to the IEA’s Clean Energy Market Monitor, solar photovoltaics (PV) and electric vehicles (EVs) are leading the global clean energy surge.
Solar PV installation has seen substantial growth, with new capacity additions up by 36% compared to the same period last year.
In the United States, solar deployment surged by an impressive 80%. This growth is attributed to lower equipment costs and expanded manufacturing, which have made solar energy more accessible for both residential and commercial users.
Similarly, EV sales have seen a robust increase, growing by 25% globally. This trend is especially prominent in China, where EVs accounted for nearly 45% of all car sales in the first half of 2024, crossing 50% in recent months.
The report highlights that clean energy transitions are gaining momentum in emerging markets as well; EV sales in developing economies doubled compared to last year.
Regional disparities in clean energy deployment
Despite these advancements, the IEA report highlights notable disparities among regions. Europe, for instance, has experienced setbacks in certain clean technologies.
Heat pump sales in Europe dropped by nearly 50% compared to the first half of 2023, while EV sales grew only modestly by 3%.
Germany’s reduced EV sales had a dampening effect on the overall growth rate in Europe despite stronger EV adoption in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
In contrast, India and China are making strides in solar PV capacity. India saw a 90% increase in solar PV installations, while China’s additions grew by over 30% during the first six months of 2024.
This growth is partly due to plummeting solar module prices in China, which have more than halved over the past year, making solar technology more affordable for households and businesses alike.
Falling equipment prices support green energy expansion
One positive trend identified in the IEA report is the decreasing cost of clean energy equipment, which is aiding faster deployment.
The Clean Energy Equipment Price Index, a quarterly tracker introduced by the IEA, shows that the first half of 2024 witnessed a 20% drop in solar PV prices, a nearly 10% decline in grid-scale battery storage prices, and a 5% decrease in wind turbine costs.
In China, the steep drop in solar module prices has been instrumental in accelerating solar PV installations, which in turn has led to cost savings for users.
Lower equipment costs also benefit the renewable electricity sector, enabling countries to build cleaner power systems.
However, the report notes that this price drop has impacted manufacturer profit margins, particularly in China’s solar PV sector. Meanwhile, China’s battery manufacturers reported stronger profit margins, reflecting resilience in that segment of the clean energy market.
Real-time data reflects carbon emission trends
The IEA’s Real-Time Electricity Tracker, another key feature of the report, reveals notable progress in reducing power sector emissions. This tracker estimates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from electricity generation in countries that collectively produce half of the world’s electricity.
According to the latest data, CO2 emissions in the power sectors of these countries were over 1% lower in 2024 compared to the previous year.
In the European Union, renewable energy accounted for nearly 50% of total electricity generation from January to October, marking a milestone in the region’s energy transition.
Coal and natural gas usage in the EU has dropped significantly, reaching a record low of 23% of total electricity generation, while wind and solar contributed approximately 30%.
The road ahead for clean energy deployment
The IEA’s latest findings underscore the potential for clean energy technologies to drive global decarbonisation.
However, they also highlight the urgent need for policy support to overcome challenges in certain regions and sectors. Investments in infrastructure, like EV charging networks and electricity grid upgrades, are crucial for sustaining growth.
With falling equipment prices and increased manufacturing capacity, countries have a golden opportunity to advance clean energy deployment and foster a more sustainable future.
The Secretary of State for Wales has visited two major employers in Barry, where a new clean energy hub will be developed as part of the UK Government’s mission to deliver economic growth.
Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens was given a tour of the Port of Barry and heard about Associated British Ports (ABP) and px Group’s plan for a clean energy hub, which aims to establish a cutting-edge facility where businesses can attract direct investment and create jobs.
The plan aims to transform a large area of the operational port into a green, high-growth infrastructure investment area.
It is designed to attract companies involved in innovative industries such as battery materials, rare earth metal processing and green energy manufacturing.
Developing key industries in Wales
The Welsh Secretary also visited Dow, a material sciences company based on Cardiff Road, Barry. The site manufactures silicones for use in automotive, aerospace, clean energy infrastructure, construction and other industries across the UK and Europe.
It employs more than 600 people, the majority of whom live in the Vale of Glamorgan, and partners with hundreds of suppliers—many based in and around Barry and South Wales.
The Welsh Secretary heard about how Dow contributes to the growth of the regional economy and about the company’s plans for the future.
She said: “My number one mission is to deliver investment and jobs to Wales, so it was fantastic to hear about the Port of Barry’s exciting plans for the Clean Energy Hub, which will attract business and investors while helping achieve our mission of making Britain a clean energy superpower.
“We want to work in partnership with businesses to drive growth, opportunity and prosperity, so it was also great to spend time at Dow and see the work that they do to realise these ambitions in South Wales.”
The clean energy hub will be at the heart of the green transition
Ralph Windeatt, ABP Group Head of Business Development, explained: “Associated British Ports’ five ports in South Wales are already becoming hubs at the heart of the green energy transition.
“With our partners px Group, we want to transform the Port of Barry to expand low-carbon, high-growth infrastructure investment.
“These plans will build on the low-carbon infrastructure we already have in place, including solar and wind power and green hydrogen production with our partners at EDF Hynamics and ESB International.”
He concluded: “ Our plans for a clean energy hub will create jobs, mobilise inward investment and boost local prosperity and opportunity.”
The UK Government is accelerating its mission to become a global clean energy superpower by developing a comprehensive plan to reshape the nation’s energy infrastructure.
This strategic move to optimise UK energy infrastructure is designed to fast-track the transition from fossil fuels and create a robust, sustainable energy system that benefits both the economy and the environment.
Minister for Energy Michael Shanks explained: “To help drive growth and investment in our clean energy future, we need to provide investors with the long-term certainty and stability that they have been crying out for.
“That’s why we need a more strategic approach to our energy system, ensuring we can quickly scale up investment in the right infrastructure where we need it to keep costs down and speed up our transition to clean power.
“Delivering the country’s first-ever spatial plan will be a major milestone for our new public energy body.”
This forward-thinking approach aims to provide long-term stability and certainty for investors, paving the way for rapid growth in the UK’s clean energy industries.
The benefits extend beyond the energy sector, with the potential for new jobs and improved quality of life in communities nationwide.
By streamlining planning and decision-making, this strategy aims to reduce grid connection waiting times, giving investors the confidence to build energy projects in key locations at the right time.
NESO’s holistic approach aims to ensure that UK energy infrastructure development is balanced with other vital sectors, such as transport and water supply, while also considering environmental impacts.
Planning UK energy infrastructure for 2050
Building on current efforts to achieve clean power by 2030, energy ministers from Scotland, Wales, and the UK Government have asked NESO to map out energy infrastructure needs up to 2050.
This will involve spreading projects strategically across both land and sea, creating a more resilient energy system, and cutting overall system costs, which could lead to lower energy bills for consumers.
Welsh Government Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Energy and Planning, Rebecca Evans, added: “We welcome this strategic approach to the energy system, which should reduce overall costs and bring certainty to communities.
“In Wales, we have been developing plans to meet our energy needs at the local, regional, and national levels for some years and look forward to working collaboratively with the NESO and others to feed into these UK-wide plans.
“Getting this right will help ensure we deliver the best possible outcomes for our communities and our industries through the considered development of the clean energy they will need to power them.”
The plan’s first draft, due in 2026, will focus on electricity generation and storage. It will explore the potential of offshore wind farms, hydrogen assets, and pumped storage hydro systems.
Several scenarios for the UK energy system will be developed and presented to ministers for consideration.
Public consultation to shape future infrastructure
The chosen UK energy infrastructure plan will undergo public consultation, ensuring that citizens, businesses, and environmental groups have a say in the future of the UK’s energy landscape.
With detailed environmental assessments to follow, the strategy represents a critical step toward a cleaner, more sustainable energy future for the UK.
Tim Fleet, Vice President of Business Development at Idox, discusses the exciting potential of AI for solving the green energy skills gap.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, is well known for its ability to enhance human creativity by making realistic variations of existing content, from auto-generated emails to whole books co-authored by machines. However, few realise that a recent paradigm shift in AI could also help overcome a growing energy skills gap by democratising decades of knowledge on everything from energy design to maintenance.
Today, vital energy industry knowledge is often fragmented and accessible only to specialists. This hinders learning and development and prevents energy workers from accessing important information that could hold the key to improving infrastructure development or transforming operational safety. When data is sequestered behind departmental boundaries, this also hinders multidisciplinary collaboration and creates one-dimensional teams. Crucially, vital skills held by a handful of workers can be lost forever to retirements or layoffs, exacerbating skills shortages.
Just as programming languages once helped translate human instructions for machines, generative AI now holds the promise of translating specialist information for general human consumption, democratising skills across the energy industry. By rapidly synthesising, summarising and translating millions of records for human consumption and unlocking new insights from them, AI could also accelerate innovation and supercharge the green energy transition.
The skills bottleneck in the energy transition
We are witnessing a major surge in demand for energy infrastructure, with more new renewable energy capacity to be added in the next five years than in the previous 100. This is taking place alongside soaring demand for low-carbon fuels with a projected surge in Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) projects and nuclear power construction.
Yet the boom in new energy projects is being hindered by an unprecedented energy skills gap. This is driven by a perfect storm of an ageing workforce, demand for new skillsets to support digitalisation and decarbonisation, and the misalignment between traditional energy education and the skills needed for new energy.
There is an urgent imperative for energy skills and knowledge to be preserved and passed onto a new generation and for workers to be rapidly upskilled in the energy systems of the future. New advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) now have the potential to help overcome these skills bottlenecks and democratise energy knowledge and skills.
The emerging paradigm in human-computer relations
Human-machine interactions have undergone many paradigm shifts over time, from the days when human instructions were translated for machines through paper punch cards to the rise of voice user interfaces. LLMs represent a similarly game-changing evolution that could enable machines to return the favour by translating complex data for humans. These innovations enable machines to turn huge amounts of complex data into human-like text in any format or language, transforming human-machine interactions from one-way commands into two-way conversations. This has the potential to break down knowledge silos and turn data into a resource accessible to all workers.
Crucially, many of the risks associated with AI are now being overcome. While platforms like ChatGPT have fallen prey to errors and unreliable data due to the fact they were trained on data from the internet with no quality checks, industry-specific LLMs are changing the equation. LLMs can now be trained on reliable, industry-specific data such as verified energy safety records, operational best practices and regulations. They can then rapidly synthesise and summarise this data to auto-generate multilingual training materials drawing on the latest lessons learned, regulations and best practices.
LLMs could even scour records to identify the biggest skills deficits and deficiencies across an organisation and amass the leading expertise in those areas, thus helping both find and fill the energy skills gap. In future, AIs could even suggest novel new forms of training or improvements to everything from design to operations.
Their capacity to rapidly amalgamate and translate millions of records for human consumption means that LLMs can also fuel cross-departmental knowledge sharing and help create a more multidisciplinary workforce. This would put enormous cognitive resources at the fingertips of workers and could unearth vital new insights into everything from energy operations to design.
For example, workers could ask an LLM to identify and explain the three most common design faults across wind farms since they were first built, helping develop smarter future wind designs. Likewise, workers could ask an LLM to identify common faults affecting each battery type to help optimise battery usage.
As well as making information more widely accessible, AI could also democratise innovation itself. By deriving new innovations from patterns in existing data, LLMs could, in the future, auto-generate project templates or even infrastructure designs.
Data is the key
The success of AI technologies, though, depends on a number of factors. The key to the endeavour is ensuring the quality and availability of industry data. Engineering information management systems that are already widely used in the energy industry can now automate processes like version control and enforce rigorous document management standards such as sending reminders of overdue document deliverables.
For example, engineering information management systems now enable all data to be stored in a central digital environment with a complete audit trail of all changes and easily accessed through tag-centric search functions. Automatic revision control and auto-generated version histories of all changes further ensure the data integrity required for LLMs. Together, these systems are helping prune and preserve energy industry data in pristine condition for future AI applications.
This could transform industry knowledge and skills into a globally accessible resource that could be unlocked for new generations of workers. The resulting democratisation of information could transform workforce training, ‘level up’ knowledge across organisations, and unlock some of the biggest skills bottlenecks in the energy transition. It also holds the key to accelerating the energy transition itself by helping the industry realise the full potential of its immense data resources.
