Low carbon energy technologies will need global investment of $5 trillion between 2015 and 2025 in order to bring down costs and accelerate deployment, according to a new report from the Carbon Trust.

Carbon Trust analysis, based on the International Energy Agency’s Energy Technology Perspectives 2015 2 Degree Scenario, estimates that US$5 trillion will need to be invested into the deployment of low carbon energy technologies by 2025. 

However, the Trust says that taking a collaborative approach internationally can reduce the costs of the investment, creating a huge economic opportunity for countries willing to work together strategically on developing new innovations and deploying existing low carbon technologies.

The world could save an estimated US$550 billion on the cost of deploying clean energy technologies over the next decade, if countries work together to accelerate innovation by unlocking global collaboration.

This is one of the key findings in this report, United Innovations: cost-competitive clean energy through global collaboration, published by the Carbon Trust, with funding from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Prosperity Fund.

While most of the technologies needed to complete the transition to a low carbon energy system already exist, their costs need to be reduced further and their deployment accelerated to have any chance of meeting 2050 climate change targets, the report says. Global collaboration can help on both fronts, but it has proven extremely difficult to generate real momentum for action. The right stakeholders need to be around the table and align priorities and incentives in a way that maximises mutual benefits and minimises risks.

The report says that while governments have a crucial role to play in making international collaboration more effective, it is the private sector that will ultimately drive action; both in terms of providing the required technical know-how and as a primary source of investment.

For the private sector, the incentive is acquiring valuable new IP, securing access to new markets, and sharing high risk/ high cost investments with other players, reducing the respective impacts on balance sheets.

According to the Trust, even a piecemeal approach looking to fill existing gaps could prove extremely effective at accelerating the development and deployment of low carbon energy technologies. bringing a 2C world closer to our grasp.

Marine energy is one of five technology case studies included in the report in order to demonstrate how international collaborative initiatives could be structured. Each technology has different innovation needs and collaboration drivers at different stages of the framework described above.

The case studies illustrate how different interventions are needed by technologies to plug remaining gaps, align stakeholder incentives and accelerate low carbon development and deployment.

The report  splits marine energy into wave energy and tidal energy, each with different innovation needs. Across the board, more policy commitment for marine is also needed, the report says.

Wave energy needs additional research and development into main components and subsystem wave converters to reduce costs and improve reliability, where concepts must be demonstrated at a single device level before making the leap to small arrays. Collaboration on wave energy is needed to support technology development to converge on a single design, and on tidal for array demonstrations.

For wave, the main recommendation is a targeted innovation programme that supports devices and components in small scale R&D settings, backed by more coordination at government level to facilitate convergence.

On tidal energy, the report says tidal stream power has already undergone a broad convergence in design and that current needs relate to transitioning from device demonstrations to initial array demonstration projects, plus additional innovation in subsystem technologies such as foundations and moorings.

For tidal energy, countries need to support array scale demonstrations.

Click here to download the full report United Innovations: cost-competitive clean energy through global collaboration