A tiny sun trapped in a lab, producing enough energy to power entire cities, is just science fiction to most people. But it’s a vision Singaporean public investor Temasek takes seriously.

Late last year, Temasek joined more than 30 companies to raise US$1.8 billion to help build the world’s first net-energy nuclear fusion machine, which fuses atoms together⁠ – much like what happens in the core of the Sun⁠ – to produce energy, in the United States. . Nuclear fusion produces none of the long-lasting radioactive waste of traditional fission reactors that remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

Temasek also led an US$84 million funding round in 2020 for Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the US company that helped build the machine.

Singapore, an often cloudy island state in a fair sea, has struggled to take advantage of sun, wind or waves in its decarbonization efforts. Its 530 billion Singapore dollar (US$380 billion) economy is almost entirely fueled by natural gas.

This is why the country is betting on novel solutions that only cross the horizon of technical and commercial viability. A government document detailing 2050 scenarios specified the use of nuclear, geothermal and clean hydrogen energy, while calling for more studies on carbon capture technologies.

“Singapore, more than many other countries, will have to rely on technological innovations that have not yet been developed, or implemented at scale, in order to decarbonise,” Singaporean Minister Teo Chee Hean said in a statement. a speech at Ecosperity Week, a sustainability conference organized by Temasek.

But betting on new ideas also carries risks.

“The technology will present sustainable solutions so innovative that they evade current regulations. We need to find the balance to enable the rapid adoption of safe and transformative technologies,” said Lim Boon Heng, Chairman of Temasek Holdings, at the event, citing safety considerations for cleaner aviation fuel, low-carbon cement and electric vehicle batteries.

Globally, as climate change worsens, increasingly radical solutions have been proposed, some with technology seemingly ahead of proper governance and societal acceptance – such as solar geoengineering. .

There have also been rumors of the stepping up of traditional nuclear fission energy to replace coal, although a century of nuclear research has largely not solved the problem of safely dealing with radioactive waste. .

Carbon dioxide removal technologies, which are increasingly recognized as necessary to keep temperatures low later in the century, are also no silver bullet.

“I don’t think we’ll get to net zero directly, just through mitigation,” said Dr Ernest Moniz, president and CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative, a US-based think tank.

“[Energy Futures Initiative] has done a lot to put carbon dioxide removal on the map, but now we are concerned that carbon negative technology is being adopted a little too enthusiastically, to fill the mitigation gap,” said he added during an Ecosperity Week panel. Moniz was the US Secretary of Energy during the Obama administration.

Scaling up existing technology

More than a terawatt equivalent of solar and wind power projects need to be installed each year by 2030. But the world is only on track for less than half that amount, according to estimates from the International Renewable Energy Agency and industry group Global Wind Energy Council.

Ecosperity Week speakers gave various explanations about what is holding back renewable energy projects.

Damilola Ogunbiyi, chief executive of Sustainable Energy for All, a UN-backed nonprofit, said building a local ecosystem of workers, financiers and supply chains is key.

“However, one of the big challenges to achieving these goals is the grossly insufficient amount of investment for energy access, energy transition and climate action for developing countries,” she said. .

Money for renewables is not flowing to Southeast Asia due to uncertainty about the costs involved for investors, said Dale Hardcastle, head of energy and natural resources for Southeast Asia. South East at the consulting firm Bain & Company.

The US consultancy, in collaboration with Temasek, launched a report during Ecosperity Week, giving an overview of the current state of the green economy in the region. In the report, he said new and emerging technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen produced from renewables will take time to reach commercial viability and may be too expensive at the moment. Southeast Asia should instead focus on proven solutions such as improving efficiency.

“We simply haven’t fully recognized the real costs of introducing large-scale renewables and upgrading infrastructure. We also haven’t set a practical timeline for doing this,” Hardcastle said, pointing to high systems integration costs in Australia, Europe and the United States.

“A lot of work is needed to understand exactly what the costs are, as uncertainty will continue to inhibit investors,” he said, adding that a “more open and honest conversation” about how to finance the Network upgrades, interconnections and phasing out of existing assets is required.

Although electricity can be produced cheaply from solar panels and wind turbines, power grids need to be upgraded to handle these intermittent energy sources. Obsolete transmission technology is a major concern for renewable energy players in Asia, according to a recent report by engineering firm Black & Veatch.

Regulators in Europe and China are starting to require renewable energy players to include energy storage in their projects to reduce the variability of national grids, said Alfred Wang, co-founder and managing director of the Chinese company. Alpha-ESS energy storage. However, policymakers should give companies enough leeway to provide services and make money from the batteries they install. Otherwise, investors might not care about the quality of the infrastructure they provide, he added.

Meanwhile, hydrogen players at Ecosperity Week called for more government incentives. Hydrogen produced from renewables or fossil fuels, but whose emissions are captured, could replace natural gas as a cleaner fuel if costs come down over the next few decades.

But 88% of projects globally have failed to make final investment decisions due to a lack of clear demand signals, according to Daryl Wilson, executive director of global trade group Hydrogen Council.

“Regulation is a tool governments have, and if used wisely in areas where hydrogen can have the greatest impact, it can unlock demand and get things moving,” he said, highlighting how government support is accelerating projects in China and South Korea.

As things stand, not everyone is on the same page on clean hydrogen policy.

Wilson said a proposed European Union rule that requires the bloc’s renewable hydrogen producers to use dedicated clean energy sources, instead of what is fed into the grid, would make the deployment of the hydrogen more difficult.

The same rule is also under attack from environmental groups, who have said the grace period until 2027 and the definitions used are too lax.

Ripple effects of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict

The use of coal, the dirtiest but cheapest form of fossil fuel, has already peaked thanks to a rapid recovery in industrial activity after the Covid-19 pandemic last year.

It may well rise further, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred embargoes and choked off oil and gas supplies from the major energy company. Europe will likely return to coal to make up for short-term energy shortages, although it promises a faster transition to renewables this decade. Fossil fuel prices have risen across the board.

“The tragedy in Ukraine and the ripple effects in the energy market show how easy it can be to set us back,” said Teo, Singapore’s chief minister, adding that collective decarbonization ambition should not be messed up.

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict would likely just be a “roadblock” in climate action, said Moniz of the Energy Futures Initiative.

“The problem with bumps in the road is that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is cumulative. When we have a bump in the road for several years, the extra emissions are something that we eventually have to pay for,” did he declare.