BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 28. Green and more efficient energy has actually become more competitive, Anne-Laure de Chammard, Group Executive Vice President, Member of the Executive Board of Siemens Energy, said, addressing the 9th Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue, Trend reports.
“Indeed, in Europe, and also specifically in Germany, we actually built our industries on cheap gas coming from Russia. The Ukraine crisis had the effect of having these prices rise with many other things, dramatic inflation, high cost of supply chain. We managed to go through the winter, but in the long term, we will have an impact. However, the positive thing about this is that it did enable green and innovative, and more efficient energy to actually become more competitive in regards to the gas price,” she said.
Anne-Laure de Chammard believes that there are five actions that need to take place for the industry to be able to become less dependent on fossil fuels.
“The first one is energy efficiency. We really need to do much better on that, and this goes through greater electrification of our industrial processes, and also green hydrogen where electrification is not possible. For this, we need a huge and massive expansion into power renewables. We're talking about three times more in the US, four times more in Europe, ten to 30 times more in the Middle East and Africa by 2050.
Third level is the fact that it will actually have a huge impact on the grid. We will need a more resilient stable grid to be able to sustain this new renewable rush. Fourth, we will also need to continue to rely on gas, and on the existing infrastructure, because, as you all know, renewable being very strongly intermittent, you need to have some ways of producing energy in a very fast back-up mode to be able to stabilize your electricity. This goes through gas turbines and power plants which will then be able to switch to green hydrogen, or be decarbonized through CCS. Finally, the most critical one today, we will need really to get a grip on the supply chain issue and the raw minerals issue,” she explained.
Siemens Energy’s executive vice-president pointed out that today, producing energy from a windfarm actually requires nine times more minerals than from a gas power plant, for the same amount of energy.
“The amount of rare minerals that you need to be able to produce energy compared to 2010, rose up 50 percent, and this has two impacts and two dangers. The first one is the costs of this are sky-rocketing, and industries don't have the means to be able to deal with that. Secondly, there is a big issue in terms of strategy or security and autonomy of the different countries and of Europe with this,” she said.
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