It was a remarkable week of unrivaled events at New York’s Climate Week 2024. As the world converged on New York for the annual UN General Assembly meeting the clean tech community kicked into high gear for a green wave of meetings, events, networking, and collaboration. Leaders from the clean tech and energy transition industries switched from diplomatic to economic mode for a wall-to-wall exchange of ideas.
One such event was the Dynamo Energy Transition Summit. This sold out event offered unique insight into the accomplishments and challenges in the energy transition space. One notable takeaway is the irreversibility of energy transition to clean sources of energy. Based on factors that include changes in political winds, international peace and stability, and reliance on international rules and order, the pace of this transition may vary, but economic forces behind this transition have passed the inflection point. It is only a question of when, not if, the transition will be complete.
There was also great awareness shown for the changes to power grid infrastructure that will be needed to accomplish this transition. For example, distributed battery or other energy storage systems can smooth peak energy usage curves to reduce overall grid capacity ranges, facilitating infrastructure changes. Even further, economic incentives behind bi-directional charging between the overall national electric vehicle fleet and the power grid can smooth demand curves – for example by charging EVs during low demand periods, and providing electrical power from privately owned vehicles back into the grid to offset high demand periods. With appropriate economic incentives private EV owners could monetize the battery pack sitting in their driveway in a manner that simplifies national grid infrastructure.
The future of the offshore wind industry was also a hot topic of discussion. As has been known in the industry, high interest rates coupled with supply chain disruptions and other issues such as localized opposition have created headwinds in the offshore industry in the post-pandemic period. Interestingly, the recent reduction in interest rates may not directly mitigate these difficulties, as the markets have predicted these interest rates adjustments and proactively reacted accordingly, dulling any immediate impact of the recently announced reductions in the US and elsewhere.
The momentum behind climate week is growing each year, and we are already looking ahead to next year’s events where the progress we will achieve over the next 12 months will be broken down for all to see. For more information on the latest cleantech developments and energy transition issues, please contact James De Vellis, Partner and cleantech patent attorney at Foley & Lardner.
