Energy

The economist and HKS professor is passionate about solving what may be humanity's most important and perplexing problem: How to untangle fossil fuels from the global economy.

On December 3, 2022, Nicola De Blasio, Senior Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP), chaired a panel discussion, “Is Hydrogen Our Future?,” at the Rome MED – Mediterranean Dialogue (Rome MED), an annual high-level conference on Mediterranean geopolitics. The panel discussion was part of ENRP’s Future of Hydrogen project’s ongoing engagement with global policymakers, who are increasingly viewing hydrogen as a solution to meeting their decarbonization and energy security goals. 

Low-carbon energy technology (LCET) startups could play a key role in accelerating India’s decarbonization. Yet, understanding of the LCET startup landscape and what shapes it remains low. This paper provides an analysis of the Indian LCET startup landscape to fill this gap.

ColdHubs, an innovative Nigerian agricultural enterprise that uses solar-powered refrigerated storage units to keep food from spoiling, is slowly but surely expanding to nearby West African countries. But it faces big challenges to scale up and finance its operations, company founder and CEO Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu told a Harvard Kennedy School audience celebrating the 2022 Roy Award winner.

This report studies the role countries could play in future green hydrogen industrial markets, focusing on three key applications: ammonia, methanol, and steel production. To elucidate the impact of the transition to a low-carbon economy on energy value chains, Eicke and De Blasio propose an analytical framework to cluster countries into five groups based on the variables of resource endowment, existing industrial production, and economic relatedness.

Policymakers guiding their economies to a low-carbon, prosperous future must strike the right balance between technology-push and demand-pull. The rapid build-out of solar photovoltaics in recent years has revealed the benefits of generous demand-pull policies, but also their limits. In this policy brief, the authors show why combining robust demand-pull and technology-push policies results in more effective policy mixes that go beyond innovation and deployment to help competitive domestic industries create more and better jobs.

Surging demand and dizzying price hikes have raised concerns that inadequate metal and mineral supplies may impede the clean energy transition. Given the urgency of reducing fossil fuel use, the science and policy worlds must solve two main challenges: how to ensure the availability and affordability of critical metals in the quantities needed, and how to manage the environmental impacts related to mining and processing them. The latter issue is likely to be much trickier than the former, argue Henry Lee and Xin Sun.

As latecomers to the industrialization process, developing countries may face barriers to upgrading from the production of mass-produced goods to higher-value technologies. Using a comparative qualitative case study focusing on three renewable energy technologies, this paper develops a typology of catching-up opportunities in green energy industries and finds that policymakers should target certain technologies in their industrial strategies based on certain technology characteristics, and should seek opportunities to capitalize on a local niche that creates a need for innovation.

The Model of International Green Hydrogen Trade (MIGHTY) is an optimization model to investigate renewable hydrogen production, consumption, and trade between countries. MIGHTY supports strategic analysis by policymakers and investors about the potential roles that countries and regions will play in future renewable hydrogen markets. This paper introduces the model and describes the model formulation.

Recent events have highlighted how wars, pandemics, and even supply chain issues can quickly blunt existing efforts and policies to address climate change. The solution cannot lie in globalization, argue authors De Blasio and Zheng, but instead in a long-term systemic focus on clean technology innovation. The path ahead will require a collective understanding of how developing and deploying the needed clean technology innovation will affect value chains, markets, and geopolitics.