An outcome of COP28 was an agreement to transition from fossil fuels energy systems and achieve Net Zero by 2050. What are your thoughts on the agreement?

Transitioning away from fossil fuels is a pragmatic step toward reducing global demand for these resources. While specifying a percentage reduction in fossil fuel demand by each country would have been more impactful, I believe this agreement sets a positive direction. Before committing to a complete phase-out of fossil fuels, it's essential to evaluate the impact of reducing demand. If we can agree on demand reduction, the phase-out process may happen organically.

Would you highlight how the timelines for clean innovations from demonstration to market saturation can be shortened?

One of the challenges of decarbonization is the sluggish adoption of clean innovations, especially in hard-to-abate sectors such as iron and steel, chemicals, refining, petrochemicals, cement, shipping, aviation, and heavy-duty transport. These sectors collectively account for over 30% of global emissions and are also responsible for manufacturing clean innovations to decarbonize the rest of the economy. These clean innovations encompass low-carbon hydrogen, clean hydrogen, synthetic fuels, carbon capture utilization and storage, direct air capture, bio-based fuels and feedstock, and fuel cells. The slow uptake can be attributed to the high investment costs, which affect affordability. While many of these clean innovations have been successfully demonstrated at scale, they lack the demand-pull necessary to achieve market saturation. At market saturation, they would attain cost parity with alternative fossilfuel-based options. Without sufficient demand-pull, they risk falling into an "innovation valley of death." Although supply-push efforts have been crucial in reaching the demonstration stage, the benefits of learning by innovation have not sufficiently driven down costs. Therefore, there is a need to leverage the benefits of learning by doing, economies of scale, and diffusion of innovation through interventions that generate the necessary demand-pull to reduce costs. These interventions can be both internal, such as energy efficiency measures like process integration and industrial demand flexibility, and external, such as government policies and private capital. To expedite the timeline to achieve market saturation, it is essential to maximize the system's value from internal interventions and implement policy interventions that de-risk investment in these clean innovations, ultimately paving the way for private capital accessibility.

While renewable energy costs such as solar and wind are dropping, financial considerations continue to be stumbling blocks to fully address decarbonization efforts in other sectors and for other technologies. What can we learn from solar and wind?

There are several lessons to be learned from solar and wind energy. First, solar and wind technologies have received support for over 40 years through various interventions related to both supply-push and demand-pull simultaneously. The second lesson is that costs have decreased as capacity has increased, indicating that cost reductions from experience and economies of scale have outweighed those from learning through innovation. However, for other sectors and technologies, we do not have the luxury of 40 years of trial and error. We have less than 26 years to achieve market saturation. Therefore, there is a pressing need for intelligent and robust interventions informed by the lessons learned from solar and wind energy. There is a need to leverage the successes and challenges of solar and wind to inform our approach to decarbonizing other sectors effectively and efficiently.

Are you optimistic about the future of clean innovations?

I am optimistic about a future where clean innovations become irresistible and diffuse rapidly. Access to interventions that de-risk investment and increase demand-pull for these innovations will be crucial in driving their widespread adoption by both innovators and end-users.

Gbemi Oluleye is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London. She has built a unique expertise at the interface of engineering, economics, policy and innovation which she applies to develop participatory decision support frameworks to evaluate non-financial, financial, market-based policy, and efficiency and flexibility strategies to support clean innovation diffusion. She mainly focuses on clean innovations for decarbonizing heavy industry and heavy duty transport. Dr. Oluleye received a BSc in Chemical Engineering from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria; MSc in Advanced Chemical Process Design at the University of Manchester and; PhD in Process Integration from the University of Manchester. She has worked as the lead researcher in a range of projects in both academia and industry, covering emerging strategies for decarbonising energy intensive industries, novel demand-driven business models to support uptake of technological solutions for industrial decarbonization, accelerating uptake of advanced waste heat and material recovery technologies in the energy intensive industry, efficient energy integrated solutions for manufacturing industries, integration of renewable energy technologies in small scale industry, hierarchical ordering of alternative technologies for some foundation industries, exploiting energy efficiency in a business model to support technology adoption, fabric integrated thermal storage for low carbon dwellings, quantifying distributed energy potential for the UK, commercialization of biogas fuelled solid oxide fuel cells in Europe, pathways to commercialization of clean industrial systems and renewable gas production in Europe.