The fear is that fossil fuels will still be needed: but we are only at the beginning of the electric transition, which will serve precisely to enable adaptation.
The path towards the ecological transition has been laid out, yet there are those who continue to maintain that in Europe it will always be fossil fuels that generate the majority of electricity. This is despite the fact that in the first six months of 2024 renewables surged ahead, generating 30 per cent of electricity in the European Union against a 17 per cent decline in electricity production from coal, oil and gas. "In truth – explains Ugo Bardi, who until 2022 was a professor at the School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Florence and who continues his research as a member of the Club of Rome, the World Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Interuniversity Consortium for Science and Technology of Materials – the ecological transition has not yet fully begun, since both renewable and fossil energies continue to grow. We have yet to see a clear decline in fossil sources, which would be a clear signal that a transition – at that point unavoidable – had truly started." Despite the overtaking that occurred in the first half of 2024, we cannot yet confidently claim to have embarked on this path. But at the same time, "maintaining that fossil fuels are also the future is an attitude akin to a form of ideological denial, rather than rational thinking based on data."
From his studies on mineral resources, Bardi concluded that it is urgent to replace oil with other sources, and for this reason he has dedicated himself to research on electric vehicles, personally using prototypes and working on a European Commission project called "Ramses" for the study and development of an electric agricultural vehicle. Detractors of renewable energy consider them still marginal because globally they produce 20 per cent of energy, compared to 75 per cent from fossil fuels (with nuclear accounting for a further 5 per cent). "At the moment this is the picture – he stresses – but from a future perspective, one needs to analyse what, where and why: in essence, we need to anticipate the path the ecological transition will take. Already today, in certain countries and certain specific sectors, renewables are well beyond 20 per cent, and one of those countries is Italy itself."
Over the span of a few decades, enormous strides have been made, and the geopolitical landscape has contributed greatly to the acceleration of recent years, starting with the war between Russia and Ukraine. This is because "for years Italy relied on Russian gas, now replaced by liquefied natural gas from the US, which is far more expensive." According to Bloomberg's calculations, American liquefied natural gas production increased by 14.7 per cent in one year, surpassing 90 million tonnes; of these, more than 60 per cent was sold to Europe, which remains the United States' primary customer.
"The fact that Italy cannot afford large quantities of American LNG – Bardi argues – is one of the main drivers of this acceleration towards renewables. All new technologies initially travel through niches rather than across the board; then from those niches they expand. This is exactly what is happening with renewables, which started from the niche of electricity production – their most natural and appropriate development environment – but are now expanding into another niche, that of electric vehicles." Bardi works on sustainability technologies and studies on ecosystems and the global economy, and is the author of many studies on the subject, the most recent of which is "Il trasporto elettrico" (Electric Transport). In light of his research, the professor has become convinced that "renewables, understood as energy to power vehicles, are a kind of gun pointed at the heart of the oil industry, given that currently around 75 per cent of transport is based on oil and its derivatives. Removing this market share from the oil industry is like pulling the oxygen tube from a critically ill patient. The development of renewable energies applied to electric vehicles will render oil obsolete within a few decades."
Certainly, ever-greater development of renewable energies can help mitigate the ongoing climate crisis. According to the professor, "we have reached a point where the climate crisis cannot be resolved but only limited, which means we will need to be able to adapt. We will find ourselves in a decidedly warmer world that is harder to manage – just consider that over the last twenty years average temperatures in Sicily have risen by more than 3 degrees: it would take a century to reverse that. So we must mitigate and adapt, and renewables represent one of the best solutions we have available."
The impact of the automotive sector on the quality of the air we breathe and on climate change is now well established. Indeed, Bardi points out, "the two aspects go hand in hand, because we know full well what the most harmful factors are for the air we breathe and for our health. On this point, I note that the issue of citizens' health struggles to enter the debate on political platforms, which often focus on topics such as the 30 km/h speed limit in urban centres: a commendable measure, to be sure, but frankly marginal compared to the issue of replacing internal combustion vehicles with electric ones, which would bring about a demonstrable and evident improvement in citizens' health. We will manage this transition; the question is similar to that concerning the ecological transition as a whole: at what speed?"
Suppose we were faced with an extremely rapid transition: many wonder whether our grid would be capable of powering a totally electric vehicle fleet. The answer is "obviously not, but we are talking about a scenario that is not realistic because it will take at least 20 years. And by that point we will be able to count on a completely different, adapted grid system, where first and foremost we will consume far less energy, since electric cars are much more efficient than internal combustion ones; and secondly, batteries are evolving towards the model of the electric prosumer." First proposed in 1980 by American sociologist Alvin Toffler, the term can be summed up as "producers who are at the same time consumers (producer + consumer)"; electricity prosumers produce electricity from a renewable source, consume it, and feed any surplus back into the grid, receiving a value determined by the sale of that surplus. In practice, "the electric car will become a stabiliser of the grid itself, with vehicle owners selling the energy from their batteries when the grid needs it, and the grid in turn returning that energy during periods of excess. We are talking about the so-called smart grid, composed of an integrated system of static and vehicle batteries that also serve as storage when necessary – for example in particular weather or seasonal situations, which at that point become less significant than they are now, because they can be managed through storage."
Read the full version of the chapter at this link.