Today’s energy system is a huge and highly interlinked physical entity, encompassing millions of assets ranging from power plants to passenger cars to blast furnaces. While momentum is building, the energy transition is in its early stages. Decarbonizing this system while maintaining its high performance requires an understanding of the underlying physical transformation—including the technologies, infrastructure, and supply chains that will need to be built, and the interlinkages across the system. To explore this, MGI hosted a virtual event on the themes of its report, The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.
The session began with an overview of the report findings with report authors Chris Bradley and Mekala Krishnan, followed by a fireside chat with Rebecca Kujawa, President and Chief Executive Officer of NextEra Energy Resources, and a panel discussion moderated by Humayun Tai with:
- Jesse Jenkins, Assistant Professor and Macro-Scale Energy Systems Engineer, Princeton University
- Ann Mettler, Vice President, Europe, Breakthrough Energy
- Claire O’Neill, Former UK Energy and Climate Minister and Co-Chair of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
Questions discussed during the event include:
- How are some of the issues with organizations' transition journeys playing out across sectors in different parts of the world?
- What types of technological innovation have the greatest potential to transform our energy landscape into one that is affordable, low-emissions, and resilient?
- What roles should the public and private sectors play to help achieve this energy system transformation?
- What are the most effective approaches to rapidly scale up existing energy solutions?
For more on this topic, please watch the virtual event recording and read our report, The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.