As the earth continues to warm and concerns increase over climate risks ranging from extreme flooding to heatwaves, world leaders are gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for another round of climate discussions at COP29. For companies, the strategic consequences of climate action — particularly in the face of rising global uncertainties — are top of mind. Corporate leaders are thinking about how to meet their own net-zero goals, and how to manage the opportunities and risks to their businesses as the world aspires to decarbonize today’s high-emissions system.
What is often missing from this conversation is a recognition of the difficulty in transforming the complex physical assets underlying our current energy system — a system that has been optimized over more than a century to deliver high performance, that is deeply embedded in the global economy, and that serves billions of people.
Today, this transformation remains in its early stages, with much of the hard work yet to come. According to McKinsey Global Institute research, only about 10% of the low-emissions technologies needed by 2050 to meet global commitments have been deployed to date. For the remaining 90%, new assets will need to be built and new physical challenges will need to be confronted.
Recognizing that the energy transition is first and foremost a physical transformation is a truth that can get lost in the abstraction of net-zero scenarios. But it’s vital if a new energy system is to retain, or even improve on, current performance and secure an affordable, reliable, competitive path to net zero.
25 Significant Technology and Infrastructure Challenges in the Energy Transition
To shed light on the needed transformation, we identified 25 significant physical challenges in what we believe is the first comprehensive assessment of the “nuts and bolts” that must be overcome for a successful transition. These challenges relate not only to the development and deployment of low-emissions technologies, but also to the supply chains and underlying infrastructure that need to be transformed.
These challenges span the whole of the energy system — from managing the variability inherent to solar and wind-generation technologies, to finding ways to produce industrial materials such as cement or steel in a low-emissions way, to creating the supply chains and infrastructure like gigafactories and charging stations that will unlock the full potential of electric vehicles (EVs).
This assessment highlights the challenges that companies will experience — both directly and indirectly through their suppliers and clients — as they progress on their own decarbonization journeys. And of course, these challenges can also be read as a map of opportunities, as commercial solutions will be demanded by the market.
Three Levels of Difficulty
We categorized the 25 challenges into three levels, reflecting the amount of progress that still needs to be achieved and the difficulty of achieving that progress. For CEOs aiming to navigate their businesses through the net-zero transition, these levels can be a useful guide to judge what needs to be done, when, and how.
Level 1 challenges require progress in deploying established technologies and offer near-term opportunities.
The three level 1 challenges encompass decarbonization efforts where mature, established low-emissions technologies can meet the performance requirements of most, if not all, use cases. They often involve technologies that are rapidly coming down the cost curve and overcoming previous limitations — for example, passenger electric vehicles that can travel for longer distances on a single charge or heat pumps that are becoming more effective in the very coldest temperatures.
When it comes to level 1 challenges, companies should ask themselves how they can benefit from the deployment of these technologies. Some may see near-term opportunities for new revenue streams. These organizations should explore areas in which they have a strategic advantage in the geographies that offer the most attractive prospects for value creation. Other companies may see the near-term potential to use these technologies to reduce their own emissions — think, for instance, of organizations electrifying their own vehicle fleets.
Level 2 challenges require companies to anticipate and address infrastructure and supply-chain bottlenecks.
The 10 level 2 challenges we’ve identified involve bottlenecks preventing the scaling of mature technologies — for example, the need to increase the number of EV charging stations more than fivefold by 2030; the need to increase the supply of some critical minerals by two to seven times in the same period; or the need to substantially accelerate the build-out of clean firm power, such as nuclear.
Companies that play a direct role in removing bottlenecks, such as mining companies that supply needed minerals or construction companies that build grid infrastructure, will of course benefit. But these challenges have implications for other companies whose own net-zero goals and business opportunities depend on addressing bottlenecks. Think, for example, of automakers that want to expand their presence in EVs — they are dependent on getting hold of sufficient supply of critical minerals for batteries and sufficient roll-out of charging stations to power the vehicles.
To remove bottlenecks and secure supply of critical inputs, these companies may need to strike new partnerships with key suppliers, find ways to support the development of new sources of supply, or bypass supply constraints. For example, several automakers are innovating rare-earth-free motors that do not rely as heavily on inputs that may be in short supply.
Level 3 challenges require companies to innovate new approaches to tackling them.
We call the 12 level 3 challenges we’ve identified “the demanding dozen.” The technologies needed to address them typically don’t offer a level of performance that matches their fossil-fuel based counterparts. For example, electric trucks powered by batteries can only cover 20% to 45% of long-haul journeys that their diesel counterparts cover today, because their heavy batteries limit the range they can travel and the weight of their payloads.
Level 3 challenges also often face interdependencies with other difficult level 3 challenges. Developing low-emissions steel, for example, is likely to require large volumes of hydrogen, low-emissions power, and even carbon capture. Making those available and viable is in itself difficult.
Addressing level 3 challenges typically requires huge scaling — by hundreds or thousands of times. For example, in 2024 only about one million tons of hydrogen were produced in a low-emissions way — a number that needs to scale by orders of magnitude under typical transition pathways. Yet there is almost no track record that could guide such enormous scaling.
For all of these reasons, the technologies associated with level 3 challenges are far from cost competitive relative to traditional alternatives.
Navigating “the Demanding Dozen”
While fully addressing the demanding dozen will inevitably take time and resources, some headway can be made that both reduces emissions and costs — for example, improving energy efficiency in industrial processes. Of course, companies that can supply the products and services to enable such approaches also stand to gain.
Ultimately, however, the really hard stuff remains. Companies need to judge which of the demanding dozen challenges they are in a position to address, where they can create comparative advantage, and where they have the potential to create value.
As they consider this, they need to appreciate what makes level 3 challenges particularly difficult. Addressing interdependency issues, for example, will require companies to foster collaboration. The Hybrit project in Sweden is attempting to address interdependencies associated with manufacturing low-emissions steel by mobilizing many companies across the mining, energy, and steelmaking sectors.
To address performance and cost-competitiveness gaps, companies will need to both innovate to improve technologies and reengineer systems in a way that ensures that technologies work together effectively — efforts that will inevitably require some out-of-the-box thinking. For instance, truck drivers have to stop for mandatory breaks at given intervals. If routes were reconfigured and the location of depots adjusted, the trucks could charge during those breaks. Or in some cases, the challenge of decarbonizing industrial materials could be bypassed by using different materials. In Sydney, a 40-floor-high hybrid skyscraper is being built using wood in combination with a steel and cement frame.
Companies will need to work out when it makes sense to team up with other organizations to address level 3 challenges, or when they should innovate by themselves — and what capabilities they will need to build to do so.
Companies have a vital role to play in the energy transition, but the path forward is not straightforward. By developing a deep understanding of the physical challenges involved, they can boost their odds of navigating an effective way forward — one that both reduces emissions and creates value for the business.
This article originally appeared in Harvard Business Review.
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