VIENNA: The world needs explosive growth in renewable energy for the next three decades, but even that probably won’t be enough to forestall catastrophic climate change.
“We need to continue building renewables at the maximum possible rate, but if we’re going to solve the problem we need new technologies,” First Light co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Nicholas Hawker said in an interview. At current rates, temperatures will rise at least 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, missing by a wide margin the 2015 commitments made under the Paris Agreement.
Even so, that would leave the world with a potential electricity shortfall as great as 20,000 terrawatt-hours, almost as much electricity as the entire world uses each year. “The internal tension in the field fusion comes down to size,” according to Hawker, who said that bigger machines, in which plasma reactions can be more easily be calibrated, also cost more for investors.