Reskilling workforces, developing hydrogen and CCS vital to energy transition: Enel CEO

The transition to a zero-carbon economy will hinge on governments successfully facilitating the shift of large sections of their workforces to new sectors, as well as a rapid acceleration of technology in renewable hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, Italian utility Enel's CEO Francesco Starace said June 23.

The bulk of the energy transition would be achieved by a massive increase in electrification of energy and transport systems using existing technology, Starace said at the Reuters Global Energy Transition conference.

Such a transition would create jobs and economic growth, but would require a massive redistribution of large sectors of the global workforce to renewables. It would be essential for governments to facilitate this shift in jobs if net-zero targets are to be met in time, he said.

"That requires, therefore, a big effort from countries and politicians around the world to devise systems that enable a transition from one sector that gets less and less active to another that gets more and more active," Starace said.

It would also need "a reskilling and retraining and a conversion of professional capabilities of millions of people around the world," he added. "Without doing that, this transition will take longer. It will happen anyway, but it will take longer, and it will be also very controversial."

Innovation needed

However, Starace said that electrification of energy systems would not be enough, and clean hydrogen technology as well as CCS would also be needed to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors, noting that while solar and wind technology is already mature and available at scale, hydrogen would not be available in sufficient quantities until after 2030.

"We are talking a lot about hydrogen," he said, but "the hydrogen we need is not there."

"We need to find ways of generating green hydrogen with costs that are acceptable to the industry, which today they are not, and that requires time," he added. "It can be done. It is a curve of cost reduction that other industries have done before. PV panels have done it. Batteries have done it and other technologies have done it. We see no reason why this shouldn't happen, but it requires a lot of innovation."

For CCS, Starace said there was some way to go to reach a widespread practical application of the technology.

"We are simply not there yet," he said. "Whether we can get directly to direct air capture or get there indirectly through carbon capture and sequestration, it remains to be seen. But both technologies are not satisfactory at this moment, and we need to work hard to make them satisfactory by 2030."

But he said the innovation industry, governments and global organizations had shown during the coronavirus pandemic should give hope.

"Today, we have about 2 billion of the world's population vaccinated. This was unthinkable a year ago. So, we should not be afraid of this challenge."