Academician Huang Zhen: In the future, energy will move from "otherness" to "self-determination"
At the opening ceremony of the 2024 SNEC Conference held recently, Huang Zhen, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, dean of the National Power Investment Intelligent Energy Innovation School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, dean of the Energy Development Research Institute, and dean of the Carbon Neutrality Development Research Institute, attended the meeting and delivered a speech. He mentioned that we are facing an unprecedented green energy transformation from fossil energy to new energy. During the transformation process, new energy will move from the current supplementary energy to the main energy.
At the same time, Huang Zhen also mentioned that my country's energy green transformation is showing three major trends:
The first trend is that energy development and utilization will shift from resource attributes to scientific and technological attributes, that is, from underground energy development and utilization based on underground resource endowments to new energy development and utilization based on scientific and technological innovation;
The second trend is that electricity will be the most important secondary energy source in the future. Energy transformation will be a process of electrification based on green electricity. Renewable fuels based on green electricity will achieve decarbonization of non-electric energy fuels;
The third trend is that the development and utilization of energy will move from heteronomy to self-determination.
The following is the full text of the speech:
As we all know, when we talk about the "double carbon" goal, the most important thing is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. First, let's take a look at the current concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. It is about 422.5 ppm, compared with about 275ppm before the Industrial Revolution.
If we further mark the time of the three industrial revolutions, from the perspective of the first, second and third industrial revolutions, the large-scale use of fossil energy (coal, oil, and gas) has greatly improved labor productivity. Over the past 200 years, while human society has achieved great prosperity and development, serious environmental problems have also arisen, including PM2.5 and a very important topic today-carbon dioxide issue.
According to statistics, since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide produced by fossil energy combustion has reached 2.2 trillion tons, and the global average surface temperature has increased by about 1.1℃ to 1.2℃. According to this trend, the temperature rise will exceed 2℃ in this century; by the end of this century, the temperature rise will reach 3℃ to 4℃. Therefore, in 2018, the special report of the IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reminded the world that the impact of a 2 ° C rise on the world was unbearable, and the temperature increase must be controlled within 1.5 ° C.
So you can see that at the recent world climate conferences, a very important topic is how to control the temperature rise to within 1.5 ° C.
Last year, I attended the World Climate Conference in Dubai. When I went there, I was in a very heated discussion. There were two words, one called Phase down and the other called Phase out, which means whether to gradually reduce or eliminate them. What are the targets for elimination? It's fossil energy. Finally, the Climate Conference reached a consensus and used the word "Transitioning away from fossil energy", and "transitioning away from fossil energy" has also become a global consensus.
This is considered to be the beginning of the "gradual exit of the fossil fuel era." We know that so far, 151 countries around the world have announced that they will achieve carbon neutrality or zero-carbon goals by around 2050 (my country is before 2060). I often say that in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and the Middle East that rely on oil, a global consensus has been reached-it is a very milestone to break away from fossil energy.
As we all know, my country announced on September 22, 2020 that China will peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and be carbon neutral before 2060. According to statistics from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, my country has the largest carbon dioxide emissions in the world, and 88% of them come from the utilization of fossil energy. Therefore, towards the goal of carbon neutrality, we are facing an unprecedented green transformation from fossil energy to new energy.
In this transformation process, new energy will move from the current supplementary energy to the main energy. We know that our thermal power has now developed from 300,000 kilowatts to 600,000 to million-kilowatts units, and then it is distributed to every household through power generation, transmission, and distribution. Its biggest feature is that it is continuously controllable. In the future, we will use new energy sources such as photovoltaics and wind power as the main source of new energy supply.
Of course, it (new energy) also has some problems, including volatility, randomness, intermittent, etc. Therefore, we must promote an energy revolution and build a new energy system with new energy as the main body.
Today, many of us are friends in the photovoltaic industry. Over the years, we have all felt the rapid advancement of new energy technologies, such as photovoltaics from p-type to n-type, battery PERC to TopCon, including the perovskite stack being developed in recent years, and photovoltaic technology The iteration and update can be said to be very fast.
We have also seen that wind power technology has gone from the earliest wooden blades to metal blades, to composite materials to the current innovative blades; in 2025, the single unit capacity of wind turbines is expected to reach up to 15 MW. In fact, we have already advanced it. Last year, my country's offshore wind turbines reached a maximum of 16 MW, and this year our floating offshore wind power is 16.5 MW. This can be said to come faster than we expected.
At the same time, we have seen that due to the rapid development of new energy technology and equipment industries, the overall price of new energy in my country is declining. In 2008, my country's earliest photovoltaic power stations were connected to the Internet. The National Development and Reform Commission's on-line guidance price was 4 yuan/kWh. By 2020, it had dropped to 0.35 yuan/kWh, a drop of more than 90%.
I learned that at present, the lowest on-grid price reported in our country appears in June 2021. The on-grid price of the State Power Investment Corporation's 200MW photovoltaic project in Ganzi, Sichuan is 0.118 yuan/kWh.
In the middle of last year, the National Development and Reform Commission announced that my country's installed capacity of renewable energy power generation exceeded that of thermal power for the first time. At the end of the year, it announced that my country's installed capacity of renewable energy exceeded 50% of the total installed capacity for the first time. By the end of the first quarter of this year, it had reached 52.9%. It can be said that our renewable energy, especially photovoltaics and wind power, has become a new force to ensure power supply. From 2019 to last year, my country's annual new photovoltaics and wind power accounted for more than half of the world's total.
We now estimate that the total installed capacity will be at least 2.2 billion kilowatts in 2030, and is likely to double to 2.4 billion kilowatts.
Of course, due to the characteristics of wind and light itself-randomness, volatility, and intermittent--to make new energy the main energy source, it is important to build a new power system with new energy as the main body. Such a power system is on the power supply side It is necessary to realize the multi-energy complementarity of wind and light, thermal power, and hydropower. It is necessary to vigorously develop energy storage technology, and at the same time make the power grid smarter and more digital. At the load side, that is, the user side, we must vigorously develop distributed power supplies. Load aggregation services and virtual power plants.
Of course, in addition to the technical aspects of the new power system, we must also increase the reform of the power system, accelerate the formation of a mechanism to regulate electricity prices, and promote the rapid development of the power market. These are all indispensable.
In terms of trends, our energy transformation mainly has three aspects.
The first aspect is that our energy development and utilization will shift from the current resource attribute to the scientific and technological attribute.
What do we currently rely mainly on for energy development? Coal, oil, and natural gas. For example, the Middle East can be rich if it has oil. Ordos has coal mines, and its per capita GDP is very ahead. But in the future, all underground resources will be limited by domestic and foreign carbon constraints, so we must move from energy development and utilization based on underground resource endowments to new energy development and utilization based on technological innovation, that is, we must use our scientific and technological progress and technological innovation to continuously control wind and light are transformed into green electricity. Therefore, we must rely on a series of transformative energy technologies as strategic support to promote green energy transformation.
Second, in the future, electricity will become the most important secondary energy source in the future. At the same time, we can also see that the future energy transformation must be a process of electrification based on green electricity. That is to say, with a large supply of green electricity in the future, we can replace coal with electricity, oil with electricity, and gas with electricity. We can electrify as much as possible, so that all walks of life can move towards decarbonization.
In addition, renewable fuels based on green electricity will decarbonize non-electric energy fuels. We can see in the figure that a large amount of zero-carbon electricity can also be indirectly electrified in addition to being re-electrified. We can use green electricity to produce hydrogen, green methanol, and green ammonia to get rid of our dependence on oil.
In the last aspect, the development and utilization of our energy will move from heteronomy to energy self-determination. At present, our energy is concentrated. Large power generation bases + large power grids are a kind of super monopoly, and in the future, they will develop into more and more small, decentralized distributed energy + microgrids. Divide and govern.
At present, our energy development and utilization, production and consumption are relatively independent. In the future, the concept of producers and sellers will emerge. That is, after photovoltaics are laid on the roofs of all factories, schools, and shops, they will be both energy producers and energy consumers. Just like our computers can upload and download, they are a concept of producers and sellers.
It should be said that I am very optimistic. We can see that the energy provided by the sun to our earth every day is huge. The energy that shines on the earth every day is equivalent to more than 400 billion tons of coal, which is equivalent to 5 million tons per second. Therefore, I propose a vision:
In the past world, we relied on the products of sunshine shining hundreds of millions of years ago-coal, oil, and natural gas buried underground; in the future world, through scientific and technological progress and industrial development, daily sunshine will provide us with inexhaustible and inexhaustible heat and electricity, as well as various renewable green fuels made from green electricity.
I think that as an energy transformation under the goal of carbon neutrality, it will definitely lead us to jointly build a new zero-carbon industrial system, which will trigger tens of billions of investments and industrial opportunities, and a large number of new technologies, new industries, new business formats, and new business models are all being born, or have already been born.
The general secretary pointed out that green development is the background of high-quality development, and new productivity itself is green productivity. Therefore, we must accelerate the green transformation of development methods and help carbon peak and carbon neutrality.
I think that through everyone's joint efforts, through revolutionary breakthroughs in science and technology, through innovative allocation of production factors, and through in-depth transformation and upgrading of industries, we will jointly promote the transformation of energy under the goal of carbon neutrality, which will surely give birth to new quality productivity to promote the high-quality development of our country's economy and society.
That's all for my speech.
