Carbon Neutrality Archives - Biofuel Resource

Many articles were mentioning about implementing green energy for achieving carbon neutrality. Unfortunately, we are ambiguous about the implementation. We have discussed carbon neutrality in many articles, now we want to talk about the approach to achieve carbon neutrality. One of the strategies is switching the energy source from coal to green energy, but this will definitely incur an impact on energy cost.

Even though achieving carbon neutrality is our ultimate goal but we have to implement it wisely so that it will not sacrifice the overall economy, and make it not sustainable.

Implement green energy is a way to achieving sustainable Carbon Neutrality.

Switching to Green Energy

Renewable Energy — Solar Energy – Green Energy

Promote and encourage the use of green energy is a way to reduce carbon footprint in the environment. However, fossil fuel and coal which is more cost-effective than any green energy. Hence, bringing down the overall green energy cost becomes the key challenge to determine if consumers are willing to switch to green energy.

From the economic, we understand the cost is affected by two importance factors:

Scale
Productivity

If both the usage of green energy scale and productivity could be improved, then we have enjoyed the fruit of green energy. Furthermore, we will also reduce the carbon footprint and achieving carbon neutrality in long run.

Implement Green Energy

We need a sustainable strategy while comes to implement green energy in our society. We have to set up a strategy in order to achieve a sustainable carbon neutrality goal. There is a three-way implementing green energy strategy setup:

Green Energy Production
Energy Transmission
Consumer

This three-way energy triangle becomes a course-effect relation, any improvement will promote the growth for the next categories.

For instance, the improvement of Green Energy Production will nourish the growth of Energy Delivery. Furthermore, the convenience of Energy Transmission will encourage Consumers to consume this green energy. As a result, green energy consumption will become the catalyst to enhance energy production.

The Implementation Stages

The 3-ways strategy setup for green energy are the important pillars for implementing green energy. Let us discuss a little details for individual steps.

Green Energy Production

Solar energy is one of the green energy. Perhaps, this sector is the key green energy source. So, converting solar energy to electric power is a photovoltaic process. The efficiency of energy conversion and energy storage becomes a challenge for the industry.

The improvement of photovoltaic for the past 10 years is enormous. With the technology improvement, the photovoltaics cost is reduced 89% since 10 years ago. With the technology improvement, the industry is looking for half the cost in the next 10 years.

Energy Transmission

In Malaysia, most of the population and industry are located on the west coast, whereby east cost has less crowded. Hence, the east coast could be a good location for developing green energy production, this includes solar and offshore wind energy.

In this case, the transmit of east coast energy to the west coast becomes a challenge. In order to reduce the energy loss during the energy transmission, one of the methods is implementing Ultra High Voltage (UHV) technology. Current high-voltage transmission is carried out at 220kV, whereby UHV technology will increase to 800kV. Among all the UHV development, China is leading in the world for now. Our reader is advised to understand the situation in the China UHV video clip.

Consumers

How we are going to encourage consumers to adopt green energy in Malaysia? You are right, let’s move toward the electric car. The government is giving incentives for electric cars so that fossil fuel consumption will reduce and replace by green energy.

The needs and convenient access of green energy becomes the driver for Green Energy Production.

There is no shortcut to implement green energy. There are many challenges along the way. This article reveals a method and strategy for how green energy could slowly come into our life with minimum cost impact. I believe, there are many other approaches while the time comes.

You should have noticed that many countries already started talking about carbon neutrality. Europe already made an announcement that they want to achieve carbon neutrality in the year 2050. Whereby the China government also announced achieving carbon neutrality in the year 2060.

Many should have said that there are at least 30 years from now, but time is running short. Unless we are having some basic fundamentals from several aspects, else we are unable to fulfill the goal.

Carbon neutrality is to ensure neutral impact on environment.

What is Carbon Neutrality

The carbon over here stands for carbon dioxide discharge from human activity into the environment. In our daily life, we are creating carbon dioxide via our breathing, activity, manufacturing, etc. The carbon discharge indicates the footprint of human activities on the environment.

In order to maintain a sustainable living environment for our next generation, many countries have pledged to achieve neutrality in the year 2050 or 2060. The carbon-neutral means the amount of carbon discharge from the human is equal to the amount of carbon absorbed.

The first step to achieve carbon neutrality is reducing the carbon footprint.

Let me show you some figure why achieving carbon neutral is not a simple assignment even though the strategy could be simple, plant more trees.

The Carbon Amount

Many say the absorb of carbon dioxide is simple, can be achieved by the photosynthetic of a tree. The leaf needs carbon dioxide in order to carry out the photosynthetic process, hence the tree has become the hope to absorb the human discharged carbon dioxide. Let see what is the figure says.

The Carbon Discharge & Absorb

This is the figure from the USA government. An adult is generating 270kg of carbon dioxide every year. Whereby, a 10 years-old woody plant only able to absorb 22kg of carbon dioxide per year. This means an adult needs 12 woody-trees in order to offset his carbon discharges every year.

By the way, do you think the tree itself is creating carbon dioxide? For instance, a fallen leaf is rotten, and this process also consumes oxygen and discharges carbon dioxide into the environment. So by simply planting more trees may not be sufficient to achieve carbon neutrality.

Technology Application

By understanding the human carbon footprint and the carbon discharges figure, we could conclude that planting trees or back to nature kind of lifestyle may not be sufficient to achieve carbon neutral. In short, we need technology improvement to help us in reducing carbon discharge.

Reduce CO2 Discharge

Among these 3 petroleum products, coal, gasoline, and natural gas, coal is charging the most CO2 among the 3. And natural gas is less CO2 discharge. Under this circumstance, reducing the coal application is the goal. Even though coal is still the highest energy source consumed every year but the trend is reduced since the year 2013. However, the world is consuming 8.5million tons of coal per year and this converts to 30billion tons of CO2. It is really a huge figure.

We are seeing more and more choices of renewable energy are introduced into the overall energy supply industry.

Improve CO2 Absorbtion

The leaf absorbs CO2 by the photosynthesis process but the absorption rate is low. Furthermore, not every place we can plant trees. So engineer is identifying an efficient way to collect the CO2 discharge. One of the technology is collecting the CO2 at the discharge area and converted to carbonate mineral via a chemical process. Under this technology, the CO2 is contained and not discharged to the environment. This also fulfills the greenhouse effect too.

We believe with the worldwide effort, more technology is yet to improve and reduce the CO2 discharge into the environment. From current technology and energy consumption, achieving carbon neutrality still, be a great challenge.

Category: Carbon Neutrality

Implementing Green Energy in our Daily Life