3. Lo scenario internazionale della transizione energetica 39 Let me give you two points of evidence of that. Yes, the cost of wind and solar have gone up in the west over the last year. But they’ve come down quite dramatically in China, with the cost of wind turbines coming down 20% in 2021, and looking likely to come down another 20% in 2022. So the technologies which enabled us to drive down costs are still there. And if you look at solar Pv, what we are seeing is massive expansion of poly silicon activity capacity, which is likely to lead to a very significant reduction in the prices of solar panels in 2024 and 2025. Back in 2008, at the Climate Change committee in the UK, we were fooled by the fact that that was also a year in which solar Pv prices went up because of temporary capacity shortages. We produced forecasts then of what might happen to solar Pv prices over the next 10 years. Well, I have to tell you that I hope people have destroyed the copies of the reports we produced because they were so idiotically pessimistic, what happened was that the temporary increase in price actually then induced people to invest in so much capacity that two or three years later, the prices will come thumping down and in solar Pv the technological advances which are giving us higher yield, and the cost reductions coming from economies of scale and learning curve effects are continuing. So we remain absolutely certain that we can decarbonize electricity production at far lower cost costs than we dared believed possible only 10 years ago. With decarbonized electricity, we should electrify as much of the economy as possible. We should electrify all of passenger road transport, and quite a lot of truck transport as well. I think that electricity is going to dominate the whole of midsize trucks, urban buses, and even some would say, go into the heavy goods vehicle space, I was up in via Sweden and Gothenburg in March with Volvo Trucks and they gave me the great pleasure of putting me at the driving wheel of a 40 ton, 16 meter electric truck and letting me use on the test track, they are bringing that into production and selling it. This is a new development. We really didn’t imagine five years ago that electric trucks would be getting to that scale of truck size. So there are many sectors of the economy, where the answer is simply decarbonize electricity and electrify. But what do we do about those sectors, sometimes called the hard to abate sectors of the economy, where you can’t just electrify or at least not yet.
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