By Charlie Wilson and Arnulf Grubler, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and IIASA Transitions to New Technologies Program
Solar-powered flying skateboards: Central to your typical 8-year-old’s vision of a climate-friendly future, but, alas, destined only for the world of science fiction.
But all is not lost. Many other forms of energy technology innovation lie squarely within the realms of science. And scientists working on how to address climate change see innovation as key to addressing climate change.
“The history of energy innovation is littered with over-exuberance…”
The question is how do we innovate successfully? The history of energy innovation is littered with over-exuberance, pipe dreams, and white elephants. But it’s also marked by striking successes, such as the world-leading Danish wind power and Brazilian ethanol industries, or the energy efficiency of Japanese consumer products.
Our new book scours the pages of history to work out what has distinguished past successes from failures. We cast a critical eye on twenty varied innovation histories of energy technologies, from large to small, old to new, and supply to end-use. We are interested both in the technologies that now dominate our landscape as well as technologies that have faded from public view.
Our motivation for the book was to find out: how can we innovate successfully to address climate change? We don’t come up with all the answers, but we do think we can point the way.
A systemic perspective on energy technology innovation
Successful innovation is like a puzzle: you need all the pieces to see the whole picture. But history shows us that innovation policy, research, analysis, and market activity have too frequently focused on a particular piece of the puzzle.
Research and development (R&D) is a good example. Energy-related R&D activities are dominated by private firms. But governments play a crucial role in supporting and investing in R&D with less immediate prospects and less certain pay-offs. When we looked at the history of R&D, we found that public R&D efforts often targeted early and rapid upscaling of promising new technologies. This was particularly the case for energy supply technologies, including wind turbines, solar thermal plants , synthetic fuels, and nuclear power.
Building big can help reduce costs. But cost reductions from upscaling are by no means guaranteed. They depend on all sorts of other things: experimentation and testing, often for prolonged periods; entrepreneurs trying out applications in different market niches; early adopters demonstrating its advantages; underlying investments in skills, training, and human capital; shared expectations around a technology’s prospects; mechanisms to share and exchange knowledge about what works; a consistent market environment without cyclical or stop-start activity that leads to turnover in workforces and the loss of acquired knowledge.
These are just some of the other pieces of the puzzle, elements of the broader innovation system. The cost reductions sought by policymakers and technology developers may be the corner piece that holds the rest together. But it doesn’t make a picture on its own.
This is why advocates of an Apollo program or Manhattan project for low-carbon technologies are wrong. These historical examples of singular science-led R&D programs are poor analogues for what’s needed in today’s energy market environment, with discerning consumers, profit-seeking developers, and cash-poor governments.
We need silver buckshot not silver bullets, diverse portfolios of options not one-shot, large-scale panaceas. Diversity means entrepreneurialism, risk-taking, variety, and experimentation in technology development, learning processes to sustain performance improvements through market deployment, and support for and protection of niche markets by public policy. More and more pieces of the puzzle.
What does it take to bring down the costs of new technologies? A systemic approach to innovation is key.
Learning from history
Our book identifies the hallmarks of historical innovation successes and sets out how we can apply these lessons towards a low-carbon future. We put the puzzle together to reveal the picture of a comprehensive yet simple framework for analyzing energy technology innovation.
An innovation systems perspective makes transparently clear that successful innovation is founded on effectively functioning innovation systems. An inter-dependent mesh of knowledge, institutions, use, and resources that cohere to support new technologies through development and out into the market. With a critical role for consistent, continuous and aligned policy support for all the elements of the energy system.
That corner piece? Well, it’s an important piece of the puzzle … but it’s only a piece.
The book ‘Energy Technology Innovation: Learning from Historical Successes and Failures’ is edited by Arnulf Grubler and Charlie Wilson, and published by Cambridge University Press. It’s also available on Amazon.com.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
By Matthias Jonas, Senior Research Scholar in the Advanced Systems Analysis Program, IIASA.
Earth’s Future, Wiley’s open-access journal devoted to documenting global change and sustainability, published online a commentary by scientists from IIASA and Brazil tackling the tough question of how to ensure that actions taken locally do not—collectively—contribute to overreaching planetary boundaries.
By Robbert Biesbroek, Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands
Over the past years, a series of reports by the World Economic Forum have identified “failure to adapt to climate change” as being of highest concern to society. But in practice, what does adaptation to climate change mean? What makes adaptation particularly challenging for those policymakers, consultants, businesses and other practitioners working on adaptation in practice? An often heard answer is, “Because there are barriers to adaptation.”
The storm surge barrier Oosterschelde nearby Neeltje Jans in The Netherlands. With its low elevation and long coastline, the Netherlands is particularly sensitive to sea level rise, and has taken an early start to climate adaptation planning (Photo: Shutterstock)
In a recent study, we identified numerous examples of barriers to adaptation encountered by practitioners across the globe. These barriers to adaptation emerge from all angles and direction; they can be institutional (e.g. “rigid rules and norms”) resources (e.g. “lack of money”, “uncertain knowledge”) social (e.g. “no shared problem understanding”), cognitive (e.g. “ignorance”, “apathy”).
As scholars, we have proven to be very good in making lists of barriers to adaptation, but rather poor in understanding where these barriers come from, what the concept of “barriers” means to practitioners, why barriers are mentioned at all, or how barriers can be dealt with in an meaningful way. In a follow-up study, colleagues and I argued that listing barriers in isolation from their decision-making context is an interesting first step, but has hardly provided insights in the openings needed to adequately deal with them. In fact, they often lead to a linear argumentative logic – “Not enough money? Then we need more money or we need to spend the money we do have more wisely!” Such superficial advice is not particularly useful to practice.
By delving deeper in the questions of why adaptation is challenging, we found that what practitioners mention as barriers are mere simplifications of what really happened. Barriers become metaphors that capture people’s lived experience and evaluation of the process into easy to communicate messages – e.g. “no money.” We can argue about whether this is truly a barrier, because their interpretation stems from a complex and dynamic chain of events that only makes sense to those that were actively involved. By putting labels on these events, they automatically become static, therefore lacking the necessary insights in the dynamics that caused the process to become challenging and provide the necessary openings to intervene. We concluded that using barriers as units of analysis to explain why adaptation is challenging is therefore flawed: the analytical challenge is to go beyond barriers in search of the explanatory causal processes, or so-called causal mechanisms.
An example: In our study, we identified 24 different barriers encountered by practitioners during the design and implementation of an innovative adaptation measure for temporal water storage in the city center of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. By going beyond this list, we uncovered three underlying mechanisms that explain why the first attempt to implement the so-called “water plaza” failed. One mechanisms, we called the risk-innovation mechanism—which is basically a miscommunication about risk that leads to public outcry.
An illustration of the proposed water plaza in the Netherlands. (Image: De Urbanisten)
In this case, the government took a technocratic stance in communicating the risks and benefits of the project. Meanwhile the citizens, as mutual bearers of the risks, wanted to negotiate about what levels of risk were acceptable. By taking such stance the government avoided a moral debate about the risk of the innovation (the innovation was “adaptation”), but the result was angry citizens who to rebelled against the project and the municipal government. This analysis provided openings to change communication strategies – an intervention the project team used successfully in next stages of the process.
Insights from this study have broader implications. It explains, for example, why existing guidelines to support practitioners to overcome barriers to adaptation have not worked well: As I explored more deeply in my thesis, these guidelines are simply not tailored to the real reasons why adaptation is challenging. We can continue to make endless lists of barriers, but to advance theoretically and conceptually, and to provide meaningful strategies to intervene in practice, we need to rethink how we use the concept of “barriers to adaptation” and start searching for underlying causal mechanisms.
Robbert Biesbroek completed his PhD in January 2014, supervised by IIASA Director General and CEO Prof. Dr. Pavel Kabat.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
References:
(1) Biesbroek, G. R., Klostermann, J. E. M., Termeer, C. J. A. M., & Kabat, P. (2013). On the nature of barriers to climate change adaptation. Regional Environmental Change, 13(5), 1119-1129.
(2) Biesbroek, G. R., Termeer, C. J. A. M., Klostermann, J. E. M., & Kabat, P. (2014). Rethinking barriers to adaptation: mechanism based explanation of impasses in the governance of an innovative adaptation measure. Global Environmental Change 26, (1) 108-118
(3) Biesbroek, G. R. (2014). Challenging barriers in the governance of climate change adaptation. Ph.D. thesis, Wageningen: Wageningen University.
“We have to recognize that international approaches to climate change have basically failed. They are not going anywhere, maybe even backwards,” said economist William Nordhaus at a lecture for IIASA staff and young scientists on 23 June. The reason for this failure, he argued, is that international agreements have so far failed to deal with the problem of free riders.
The Kyoto Protocol, for instance, failed as countries dropped out one by one, as soon as mitigation started to become costly. Many countries never even ratified the agreement. Nordhaus explained, “There were no penalties for dropping out.”
Norhaus first introduced the concept of climate clubs at the IIASA 40th Anniversary Conference in 2012.
As the next round of climate talks approach this winter and next in Paris, many researchers say it is time for a new model for international climate change treaties. One new idea, which Nordhaus first proposed at the IIASA 40th Anniversary Conference in 2012, is the concept of “climate clubs.”
Nordhaus said, “Think of the treaty as a club. It’s a voluntary agreement, where members get certain benefits, for a certain cost.” A climate club would work like a free-trade union, such as the EU. It would encourage participation by penalizing non-participants, allowing members of the “climate club” to charge tariffs on all imports of non-participating nations. In his lecture on Monday, Nordhaus expanded on the concept he introduced in 2012, presenting the results of modeling work to determine the tariff rates and carbon prices that would be needed in such an agreement, and how participation would look.
Nordhaus found that more countries were likely to participate when carbon prices were lower. At a carbon price of 25 or 50 dollars, a majority of world regions would participate in the club, while at higher carbon prices of 75 to 100 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide, the highest participation rate would be only about half of that.
At IIASA on Monday. From left: William Nordhaus, IIASA Deputy Director General Nebojsa Nakicenovic, and IIASA Risk Policy and Vulnerability Program Director Joanne Bayer
The high carbon price, Nordhaus explained, would make the cost of participating much higher than the costs of tariffs for non-participants. However, with a lower carbon price, even low penalty tariffs of 3 to 4% could be enough to encourage participation. The idea of tariffs is simpler than previous suggestions of trade penalties based on the carbon emissions impact of specific goods—which in practice are difficult to define, and, as Nordhaus said, “not a big enough stick to induce participation.”
Like any trade agreement, though, Nordhaus’ climate club also means some win and some lose. When he examines the benefits on a regional level, the US, EU, and India appear to gain the most benefits, while Russia and China gain the least. What would it take to get such an agreement off the ground? Nordhaus said that a few key regions would be enough—for example, the EU, the USA, and China.
Watch Nordhaus’ 2012 Lecture at the IIASA Conference
William Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He has a B.A. from Yale University (1963) and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT (1967). More>>
By Anne Goujon, IIASA World Population Program and Vienna Institute of Demography
How will societies develop in the future? And what environmental, economic, and social factors will influence these changes? Can these problems be analyzed in a scientific way? And if so, what tools should we use? On 13 June, I took part in a workshop for a project aimed at answering these questions.
The workshop took place in Nanterre, France. Photo Credit: Bladsurb via Flickr
I participated in a round table where we discussed how to find tools for forward-looking analysis and how to develop and integrate them to analyze societal change. This implies the integration of different models (economic, territorial, environmental), which can be very challenging. It can be difficult to avoid overlaps between models, and also to account for possible feedback effects between different factors. We discussed how to choose between two overlapping outputs such as two different GDP projections produced by environmental and economic models. Shall we try to validate the models historically by checking which model is best able to reconstruct the past? A nice idea, but most researchers agreed it would be too time and data-intensive to be practical. Another alternative, much less rigorous but easier to implement, would be to compare the results of the two models and decide which one is the best among the FLAGSHIP team. But according to which criteria? The last alternative would be to decide upfront which model should provide which outcome. It is almost a philosophical decision to be made as none is right or wrong.
Innovation seems to be at the core of all models for the future of Europe, encapsulating more than Information and Communication Technologies and Research and Development, but also incorporating other components such organizational capital – the share of a firm at management level. At the moment, FLAGSHIP is envisaging two storylines for the future—namely socio-ecological transition and global growth—which are actually not very far from some of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios developed by IIASA and others for the 5th assessment of the IPCC . Another IIASA researcher, Samir K.C. presented these scenarios at the meeting as an invited expert.
In a 2011 Science article, IIASA researchers Wolfgang Lutz and Samir KC showed the importance of population heterogeneity, specifically related to age, sex, and level of education, whenever population is an important driver of change. At the workshop, KC talked about the steps involved in the process of developing global demographic and human capital scenarios for the SSPs, with an emphasis on the importance of dialogue, discussion, and interactive iteration between the demographers and the user community in shaping the quality of the product. He recommended more consultation between the demographers and other experts in the FLAGSHIP project to produce consistent and meaningful demographic narratives. He also argued that existing scenarios such as SSPs should be explored and might be useful with some alterations.
Since the project looks at the next 50 years, rather short-term from a demographic point of view, population will possibly enter the whole model with just one scenario.
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