After listening to “carbon neutrality” for almost a year, in your perception, “carbon neutrality” is just a concept? Is it already changing your life? In late September, the northeast of the country opened the switch and banned electricity, and many people were drawn back to the distant memories of the power outage. After the flustered discussions, the policy of carbon neutrality and “dual control of energy consumption” was pushed to the center of public opinion.
After listening to “carbon neutrality” for almost a year, in your perception, “carbon neutrality” is just a concept? Is it already changing your life?
In late September, the northeast of the country opened the switch and banned electricity, and many people were drawn back to the distant memories of the power outage.
After the flustered discussions, the policy of carbon neutrality and “dual control of energy consumption” was pushed to the center of public opinion. The main reason for the curtailment is considered to be the mismatch between supply and demand in the electricity market. There are also local governments’ “sudden brakes” and “replenishing operations” for energy consumption, restricting the production of coal power companies or even directly shutting them down.
The “double carbon” target of “carbon peak in 2030 and carbon neutral by 2060” was released for one year, but it was unexpected that the small target would require a “hard landing”. There are 39 years away from 2060. How can the next road be reliable instead of “sports carbon reduction”?
In fact, there are many “reliable” methods to achieve carbon neutrality.
01
Create a large-scale “power bank”
After the concept of carbon neutrality became popular, clean energy naturally attracted attention.
It seems that clean energy has been developed for so many years, and now it is finally useful. In the process of energy use, carbon dioxide is not emitted. For such a good thing, why hasn’t clean energy replaced the “dirty” energy-fossil energy?
Because there is no mature large-scale “power bank”-energy storage equipment.
PV
There have been frequent movements in the field of energy storage recently.HuaweiJust won the world’s largest energy storage project. On October 16, the 2021 Global Digital Energy Summit was held in Dubai. At the meeting, Huawei Digital Energy Technology Co., Ltd. and Shandong Power Construction Third Engineering Co., Ltd. successfully signed a contract with Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea New City Storage Energy project, the scale of energy storage reaches 1300MWh.
In the past few years, clean energy has been developed in stages, but the energy storage industry is still in the early stages of commercial application and is about to usher in an important development moment.
Since the beginning of this year, the state has issued a series of policies to support the development of the energy storage industry. On April 21, the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration issued the “Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Development of New Energy Storage (Draft for Solicitation of Comments)”. It was first proposed that by 2025, the installed capacity of new energy storage will reach 30 million kilowatts (30GW) or more. . According to estimates, by 2030, the energy storage market will reach more than 1.2 trillion yuan.
From the beginning of 2020 to October this year, more than ten provinces have successively issued new energy mandatory requirements for energy storage, roughly including “the scale of energy storage is 10%-15% of the project capacity” and “the duration of continuous energy storage is 2-3 hours.” And other terms.
Du Xiangwan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, once publicly stated that “energy storage technology is a key node for the future energy system to have flexible, inclusive and balanced functions.”
The reason why energy storage restricts the large-scale application of clean energy is that from the perspective of the fundamental demand for energy, clean energy has a fatal problem-instability. Wind, water, and solar energy all have indirect and regional problems, and their distribution in time and space is severely uneven.
If you rely on these electricity, you must carry out a lot of energy storage. The difficulty of energy storage is that it takes up a lot of space and needs to consider serious losses, which will inevitably cause a huge gap in electricity charges in different areas at different times.
It is envisaged that the energy storage technology can store the solar energy produced in the sunny summer for use in the winter, and store the wind power in the windy season for the low wind period. In fact, energy storage technology is far from achieving this goal, and wind and solar hydropower has long been a problem of waste and unevenness.
At present, the main energy storage projects in operation at home and abroad are mainly pumped storage. Data show that as of 2020, pumped storage accounts for 89.3% of the global installed capacity of energy storage, but pumped storage is highly regional. Followed by electrochemical energy storage, accounting for 9.2%. Lithium-ion batteries are the mainstay of electrochemical energy storage, accounting for as high as 88.8%.
Pumped storage hydropower station
Among the current electrochemical energy storage, lithium battery energy storage has the highest comprehensive cost performance. However, lithium batteries are suitable for energy storage at the minute to hour level. In the future, cross-season energy storage will require hydrogen production from renewable energy and other different solutions.
The United States, Japan, South Korea, Europe and Australia are the main electrochemical energy storage markets. According to CICC research data, electrochemical energy storage projects in the United States account for as much as 44% of the total number of global projects, Spain accounted for 28.5% of solar thermal power generation molten salt energy storage projects, and Japan accounted for 7.7% of electrochemical energy storage projects. In contrast, China only accounts for 5.5% of the global total in electrochemical energy storage projects, which is 1/8 of that of the United States.
In recent years, China’s energy storage battery market has grown rapidly. Data show that in 2020, China’s energy storage battery market will ship 16.2 GW (1 billion watts), a year-on-year increase of 71%. From May 2019 to July 2020, 113 electrochemical energy storage projects on the power generation side were newly added globally, and 59 electrochemical energy storage projects on the power generation side were newly added in China. The growth rate is the highest in the world.
The world’s giants have been gearing up to the field of energy storage. In 2019, Tesla and Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation reached a cooperation to deploy several giant battery energy storage devices called Megapack in a community in California. The energy storage capacity of the device is very powerful and will be able to provide “6 hours of electricity for every household in San Francisco.”
However, technological progress in energy storage is still extremely difficult. Bill Gates, who is committed to solving the climate problem, also sees the importance of this field, but he once said in his book, “I never thought I would lose so much money on battery investment.”
02
Carbon neutrality in the building
The energy consumption scenarios that people can perceive have already been “carbon neutral”, and the office buildings and communities where they work and live every day are also “carbon neutral.”
In both the construction and use of traditional buildings, there are too many industrial carbon emissions and energy consumption.
According to data released by the Energy Consumption Statistics Committee of the China Building Energy Conservation Association, the total carbon emissions of the entire building process in 2018 were 4.93 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for 51.3% of the national carbon emissions. If you continue to subdivide, building materials account for 28%, operating phases account for 22%, and construction phases account for 1%.
The production process of cement and other building materials is full of carbon emissions, and about 1 ton of carbon dioxide is generated for every ton of cement produced. The hidden carbon content of building materials is also the “original sin” of the building’s inability to be carbon neutral, affecting the carbon emissions and energy footprint of the building’s entire life cycle.
Shanghai Green Building LEED Logo
To achieve carbon neutrality, the development of low-carbon cement will be very necessary, and some companies are working to change the problem of high-carbon building materials.
The cement produced by Solidia, a startup company in New Jersey, USA, emits 30% less carbon dioxide than in the past. This process comes from Rutgers University, adding more clay and less limestone than the traditional process, and has lower temperature requirements, which reduces carbon emissions.
CarbiCrete, Montreal, Canada, completely eliminated the cement component in concrete and replaced it with steel slag, a by-product of steel smelting.
Chinese real estate companies and institutions have also entered into the promotion of green buildings. Landsea, Vanke and other real estate companies are committed to using low-carbon and clean materials from the entire construction process.
In the process of building use, the task of the building manager is to consider how to realize smart power distribution through digital products at the early stage of construction, so as to achieve long-term energy saving and emission reduction goals.
beautiful,GreeElectrical appliances companies such as Haier and Haier, as well as intelligent management systems such as Terminus AI Carbon Neutral Cloud, are designing a complete set of system energy-saving and emission-reduction technologies for buildings, and comprehensive energy consumption management for new buildings.
Building managers can realize data visualization management through the intelligent power consumption system, visually display the power consumption of each room through graphs and icons, track energy usage, optimize energy usage efficiency, and realize refined energy management.
The traditional buildings that have been built need to be transformed into the power distribution system.air conditionerSystem and thermal system, etc.
From 2018 to 2024, Taikoo Li, Sanlitun, Chengdu will gradually transform the existing water loop heat pump system into a more efficient and energy-saving chiller+GasThe boiler system is expected to save 13.4 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually in the owner’s area and tenant area of the project after the renovation is completed.
The emission reduction tasks of residents and building users in the community can be achieved through smart homes. Through digital energy monitoring, statistics and management, the emission reduction of buildings can be realized more scientifically.
The smart home system can adjust the time of electricity consumption according to demand, cut off the electricity demand for non-essential activities, and can also improve the stability of electricity consumption during peak electricity consumption.
03
“Capturing Carbon” and “Eliminating Carbon”
But even if a drop of fossil energy is not used, and a bite of meat is not eaten—not to mention this is not possible—human beings will still produce carbon emissions, and the true realization of carbon neutrality still needs to deal with the carbon that has to be emitted.
Carbon removal mainly includes natural climate solutions, namely planting trees, soil storage, etc., as well as carbon removal negative emission technology, which directly removes carbon from the air.
Tree planting is criticized because from the perspective of the tree’s entire life cycle, the carbon absorbed and emitted is almost the same, and it cannot really eliminate carbon. In addition, it also requires a lot of space and cost.
Carbon removal negative emission technology is used to filter and collect carbon dioxide in the air, and then store it. Microsoft invested in and used this technology.
Saudi Aramco Carbon Capture Technology Pilot Project
Microsoft provided funding for the first commercial-scale, fully renewable plant in Iceland by Climeworks, an air carbon capture and storage company. Microsoft is also its customer, buying captured carbon dioxide at a price of around US$600 per ton, and buying one ton will offset one ton of carbon emissions.
In 2020, Microsoft emitted the equivalent of 11,164,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. If carbon capture is used to achieve carbon neutrality, Microsoft faces a bill of nearly US$6.7 billion.
It can be seen that this technology is currently costly, and it will take time to popularize.
Another carbon capture and storage technology is to store carbon dioxide in concrete. CarbonCure, a Canadian company, mineralizes carbon dioxide generated in other industrial processes and stores it in concrete.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed his anxiety in a live speech in June this year. He said, “We hope that every Gmail email sent by people, every query in the Google search box, is completely carbon-free. This is our “moon landing plan”, which makes me feel pressure.”
Regardless of whether our perception of carbon neutrality is conceptual or practical, the dismantling of carbon neutrality goals 39 years later is not far away, or even imminent. It requires more people to “feel the pressure” and no longer have to worry about it. power failure.
