Lines! More lines!

“The goals set by nearly 200 countries at COP28 can be transformative for the global energy sector, putting it on a fast track towards a more secure, affordable and sustainable future. To ensure the world doesn’t miss this huge opportunity, the focus must shift rapidly to implementation.”

The above comes from the latest hit release by DJ F Tih, featuring The Angry Activitettes to mark the occasion of New York Climate Week and the latest UN General Assembly. It is an excerpt from a new report that the IEA claims is “the first comprehensive global analysis of what putting the targets into practice would achieve – and how it can be done.”

The goal of tripling solar and doubling wind by 2030 is within reach, the IEA said, no doubt with an accelerated collective heart rate with all this excitement. Then that heart rate must have accelerated further because bad news had to be served as a side to the main implementation course. Well, I say news but…

In their own words, “greater capacity does not automatically mean that more renewable electricity will clean up the world’s power systems, lower costs for consumers and slash fossil fuel use.” Quite unfortunate for an organisation that has been assuring us for years that near total windo-solarisation of global grids was perfectly doable given the right amount of emotional, intellectual and, not to put too fine a point on it, financial support.

Alas, this is not the whole story. The whole story also features transmission lines. A lot of transmission lines. You could even say, guardedly, that transmission lines are the new battery storage in the transition canon — a Holy Grail that needs to be built before we declare success. With battery storage still very much in the game, we now must strive for not one, but two Holy Grails. And some trillions, but let’s not focus on petty technicalities.