A recent release by the London-based think tank Ember identified that carbon dioxide emissions from the global electric power sector exceeded pre-pandemic levels during the first half of 2021. As such, carbon dioxide emissions have already resumed setting new record highs less than 12-months after much of the world economy was initially shut down in response to COVID. Adding insult to injury, coal spot prices are now at decade highs thanks to strong global demand.

Global coal futures prices, source: TradingEconomics (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coal), dated 2021-08-26

While certainly there was not enough time or resources available during those few months to build the scale of green energy assets necessary to substantially change the global portfolio of energy production assets, few realize that some of the most severe bottlenecks to transforming this industry reside in the scaling up of foundational materials near the beginning of the supply chain.

While there is no lack of ideas and potential solutions to replace dirty energy for green, the use of batteries, hydrogen, solar and geothermal to replace the world’s existing energy infrastructure will take massive quantities of material resources — many times more than what is currently available.  The great challenge lies in the fact that scaling-up even one of these materials to meet just one aspect of the total global energy needed (special metals for car batteries, glass and carbon fiber along with resins for the sea and wind turbines to power residential and commercial buildings, and hydrogen for heavy transport to name but a few) — much less all of them simultaneously — creates a demand for raw materials that, as of present, could very easily take many more years to achieve than current government and NGO deadlines would find acceptable. 

Scaling up the production of the fibers and resins, hydrogen, and specialty metals to build the assets that ultimately are to meet global clean energy targets in the next decade(s) will be a world-changing technical challenge. Because in nearly every instance the targets for meeting vehicle and power generation emissions will require many times more carbon fiber, polymers, resins and precious metals than the world can produce today, investors and visionaries need to be working ‘all hands on deck’ right now if there is to be any chance of achieving these goals.

Given all of the above, every manufacturing leader and visionary should be devoting some of their thinking and consideration not just to the exciting, sleek, and good looking end-products of the green energy transformation, but rather the fundamental production of the material components needed for this transformation. Not only will the volumes be there to support your investments, but the immediate need for those materials in so many different ways in the immediate future will help speed you toward generating positive ROI.