The energy transition moonshot: innovations that will transform our world

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Michael Farkas, Founder, Executive Chairman & CEO at Blink Charging: No one has quite figured out how to control Mother Nature yet. Mother Nature decides when we get sunlight or when we get wind. You can use excess wind and solar to actually convert that electricity and water into hydrogen.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week we hear from four very different companies, all working on new ways of producing or delivering energy.

Theye Veen, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at SkyNRG: Sustainable aviation fuel is a substitute for fossil kerosene, made from other materials like used cooking oil. At this moment, there are seven technologies that we can use to produce sustainable aviation fuels.

Robin Pomeroy: These are companies around the world looking to change our relationship with energy.

Stefano Buono, founder and CEO, newcleo: historically nuclear has become very big So now nuclear is coming back into the idea of making very small and modular machines.

Robin Pomeroy: New ways of generating electricity or fueling planes, but also convincing consumers to switch from old technologies.

Michael Farkas, Founder, Executive Chairman & CEO at Blink Charging: How many people after they purchased their first flat screen television ever went back and bought a tube television afterwards? I've never had anyone who said yes. And I believe that's the case with EVs. Anyone who drives an EV realises the benefits of having an EV.

Robin Pomeroy: Former CNN journalist John Defterios joins us to talk about the vital importance and huge opportunities of energy innovation.

John Defterios, World Economic Forum Energy Fellow: There is a real global moonshot to try to accelerate the transition. To do so, you need that innovation. There's no doubt about it.

Robin Pomeroy: We’re on your podcast app of choice and at wef.ch/podcasts where you will also find our sister podcasts, including Meet the Leader.

I’m Robin Pomeroy, at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at advanced energy solutions, this is Radio Davos

Robin Pomeroy: We're talking about innovation in energy. And who better to speak to me about that than John Defterios? He's a World Economic Forum energy fellow, was, of course, a journalist on CNN who covered energy for decades. Is that right, John?

John Defterios: Yes, for 30 years in fact, in almost every corner of the world, from Far East Asia to the United States. Robin, it's good to be back.

Robin Pomeroy: Brilliant. Yes, because we last spoke in Davos, didn't we? I would encourage our listeners to listen back on that, to hear what was said in Davos on energy, of course, one of the most important subjects facing us all right now.

Now, in this episode, we're going to talk about innovation, because I was at an event, actually the inaugural event of the Advanced Energy Solutions Community at the World Economic Forum. So part of what the Forum does on energy is in this section called Advanced Energy Solutions. So that is companies that are in fast growing segments of the energy system, such as clean fuels, hydrogen, storage, new nuclear, carbon, and demand management.

And they invited lots of CEOs here to Geneva, to the World Economic Forum, to talk about what they're doing.

So these are companies with innovative ideas who are doing new things, pushing ahead with energy innovation. And I'm going to play you a few of the interviews that I did back then. It was even before Davos.

I'm just wondering, John, when we talk about energy innovation, why is innovation such an important thing in the energy sector?

John Defterios: Because we need all hands on deck. Robin, is the simple answer. If you go back to the Rio agreement, the climate accord in 1992, one would make a pretty good case that for better than 20 years we didn't see a lot of innovation when it came to broadening out the energy system itself.

I think the seminal moment was 2015 and the Paris Climate Accord, which set the goal of capping global warming at two degrees centigrade, preferably to 1.5, by 2050. To do so, estimates from the International Energy Agency and IRENA in Abu Dhabi say you need more than $3 trillion a year invested in new innovations and energy technology to get us there.

So the fact is we spent $2.2 trillion, according to the Forum itself, in 2022 on energy, $1.3 trillion, over half, went into renewable energy, for example. Most of that's going into solar and wind. But we need to have the innovation in hydrogen, for example, in electric vehicles, even nuclear technology, to get there.

So the challenge is we don't see that level of investment yet, $3 trillion per year to 2050 to have any hope of hitting those targets.

And then we have to look at new innovations as well. There's a lot of work taking place in, and it's expensive right now, direct air capture, for example, literally huge hoovers or vacuums on top of buildings to take pollution out of the air. Carbon capture utilisation and storage sounds very complex, but it's taking and capturing the carbon from an oil facility or a gas facility. We see movements there. Candidly, you have to have a market, Robin, and that's what the private sector has been looking for. And I would say with those goals set of 2015 and even with the fact that we have climate deniers, if you will, now there is a real global moonshot to try to accelerate the transition. To do so, you need that innovation. There's no doubt about it.

Robin Pomeroy: So that's that's the case. Huge input needed when it comes to innovation. Let's look then at, so at this event, the Advanced Energy Solutions, the inaugural event where they brought together a dozen or so companies, I had the chance to speak to four of them. I want to play you just short clips from those interviews that I did. And the first one is the field of aviation. Is that a sector you look at particularly, John?

John Defterios: I do because I fly a lot and I've always wondered, Robin, how do you have interventions in something that's used so often? So I think we need to have great penetration in the sustainable aviation fuels market. Even in global shipping, an initiative that I've covered here at the World Economic Forum, a lot of people said you couldn't have breakthroughs. That's not the case. When you start to get momentum, you get the CEOs of companies. I think very importantly here when it comes to aviation, Robin, you actually have the users that are flying on the aeroplanes saying, we want to measure our carbon footprint and if you don't make inroads here, we won't be flying as much because they have to report to their shareholders. So this is a case where the private sector is driving innovation, I think.

Robin Pomeroy: So there's various options being explored for how you make aviation sustainable. There's batteries, there's hydrogen, biofuels, there's synthetic fuel. And we're going to hear here from Theye Veen. He's the co-founder and chief commercial officer at Sky Energy, which makes sustainable aviation fuels.

Theye Veen: Sustainable aviation fuel, which is basically a substitute for kerosene, fossil kerosene, but then made from other materials like used cooking oil and other bio waste that you can use for for fuels.

At this moment, 0.1% of the world is flying on sustainable fuels. And that needs to change, of course. At this moment still sustainable fuels are more expensive than the fossil fuels, so that needs to change as well with policy regulation mandates to make a level playing field.

Robin Pomeroy: So take us back again to the kind of the raw ingredients to make sustainable fuels, because sometimes with biofuels, there's been concerns about the environmental impact as well. So could you just walk us through what will be those raw inputs that go into making this fuel?

Theye Veen: There's a wide range of of of feedstocks that you can use and that depends on technologies. And at this moment, there are seven technologies that we can use to produce sustainable aviation fuels, and not all fuels are made in the same sustainable way.

So what you're talking about is the first wave of first generation biofuels where oils like palm oil, soya oil was used and is still being used. So what we're looking at for this first technology, that's the HEFA technology, that's where we use waste oils. The best example there is used cooking oil, but of course used cooking oil is not produced at a large scale to exchange that into the whole aviation industry.

So if you look at other technologies, you can look at forestry waste and you can also look at carbon. So CO2 from the air, with green electricity, you can produce synthetic fuels. And synthetic fuels, that's what I sometimes call the Holy Grail, because green electricity - can we do that unlimited? Well, probably, yes. And then you can produce green hydrogen. And CO2, we have enough of that. So with that, you can create synthetic fuels at a large scale.

Hydrogen planes are not there yet. So that will take 20, 30, 40 years before that really will be scalable, as we see it.

Electric planes. You see you see examples today and in in ten years time, we'll probably be flying short range with not too many people. We'll see that happening.

But for the larger scale, the long haul flights for the next 20, 30 years, we see sustainable aviation fuel as a drop into these fossil fuels with existing infrastructure as as the solution.

Robin Pomeroy: Existing infrastructure - so we don’t need new aircraft, is that what you are saying?

Theye Veen: Well, the synthetic fuels that are based on hydrogen do not need any other aircraft. If you if you start working with hydrogen in the aircraft or electric, then you need a different aeroplane.

Robin Pomeroy: Okay. So synthetic fuels can be manufactured using hydrogen?

Theye Veen: Yes. And you can use the same planes as we're doing right now. And these planes, they will keep flying for the next 25, 30 years, because this is not a cycle of five years that you buy a new car. This is a cycle of 25 to 40 years that these planes that are delivered today, they will be flying for the next 40 years.

So that's an important part of why this industry does not change that fast.

What you also see is that more and more corporations, the big corporates, are getting more aware of their footprint. And what you see is that the, especially financial institutions, service providers, travel is the biggest part of their footprint. 80% of the companies' footprint is travel. And with that, aviation is the biggest part.

And in the last three or four years, what we've seen is that these corporations also stand up now. So they say, okay, we want to have our staff flying on sustainable fuels, which is amazing because with that you get a lot of push on the demand side. And you also see that they're willing to take a risk and to commit for the longer term, which makes a business case more feasible and investments more feasible. And that's helping to accelerate this industry.

Robin Pomeroy: So are you optimistic about about your business and about sustainable aviation fuels?

Theye Veen: I'm quite optimistic. The goals that were set to get net zero in 2050 are quite ambitious. €1.5 trillion need to be invested in new production capacity, which is incredible. But if we all sort of work together and we we partner, then I think there's a lot possible.

The chemical industry also needs hydrogen. Shipping needs hydrogen. Everybody needs hydrogen. So we need to make sure that we add up these numbers to make sure that we come to a feasible case for 2050 net zero.

Robin Pomeroy: So that was Theye Veen, Co-Founder and chief commercial officer at SkyNRG talking about sustainable aviation fuels.

We'll stay with transport, John. I'm going to move to road transport here. What's your feeling about the electrification of cars and other vehicles? Is it what we need? Is it going fast enough? Have we reached any kind of tipping point, do you think?

John Defterios: I'm glad you use the word tipping point because I was actually moderating a private session about seven years ago and in the audience we had BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and I was saying, look, this is coming, this industry is starting to move. And this was the early days of Tesla. And I actually had the co-host of the institute come up to me and say, you sound very alarmist, John. I mean, this is not moving that quickly. Well, look what's happened in the last seven years.

Has it happened fast enough? I would say not yet, Robin. Interesting numbers, 1.5 billion vehicles on the road today. Only 16 million are electric vehicles, but 16 million is three times more than we had in 2008 18. So the last five years we've seen a tripling of the market.

But you need huge infrastructure, right? It's the charging infrastructure that needs to go there. But I think there's even something that we have to weigh here that's geopolitical and that is the jobs in the industry itself. So if I just took the U.S. market, you have nearly a million people working in manufacturing of automobiles and car parts, for example, 1.2 million, in the United States again, working in dealerships. You know, in the electric vehicle market, you don't need that many people producing a car. And so it's going to have societal change in terms of the jobs market. But because we need to build the infrastructure over the next decade is going to be quite radical. The numbers that come up in your interview here of nearly half a billion chargers that need to be out the market quickly. And they're just not there yet.

Robin Pomeroy: Well, let's look at the infrastructure sector there and we're going to hear from Michael Farkas, who's the founder and executive chairman and CEO at Blink Charging, which is involved in electric vehicle charging.

Michael Farkas: We just started our 14th year and yet I'm saying we're at our infancy. You know, when you look at the scale and numbers of how many charging stations are deployed, how many EVs are on the road, and you look at where we need to be in 2030, in 2040, 2050 and beyond, we haven't even scratched the surface.

You know, there are a couple of million viable chargers that have been deployed globally. When you look at some of the numbers that we're seeing and some of the estimates, you've seen some as high as 450 million chargers needing to be deployed between now and 2040. So when you look at a couple of million to where we need to go, we have we haven't even started.

Robin Pomeroy: Do you think that charging is a barrier for people thinking of getting an electric vehicle? They're worried about running out of electricity, the battery running low or not being able to find a charging station?

Michael Farkas: Yes, definitely. It was definitely a major concern in the beginning and it definitely hindered growth. But people are seeing more and more charging stations everywhere. And there's a business now and there's hardware now that really allows people to drive across countries.

So I think it's less of an impediment as it was before. But there is something called range anxiety where people think they drive a lot more than they actually do and that these batteries aren't sufficient.

But when you look at the cars that are now being released, in America, we have the Lucid, over 600 miles on a single charge. You have other cars from China that are coming out, 500-600 miles on single charges. That's way more than anyone could handle in a single travel. You need to relieve yourself. You need to get some food. Human beings don't travel that far in one successive way.

Now the question is, do the consumers want those vehicles? I think that's the question that everybody wants to ask. If you look at the consumer acceptance rate of a technology that's similar to EVs, the last product you had was flat screen televisions. And I can tell you, and I've asked this question for the last 14 years, how many people after they purchased their first flat screen television ever went back and bought a tube television afterwards? And the answer is, I've never had anyone who said yes to me. And I believe that's the case with EVs.

Anyone who drives an EV realises the benefits of having an easy from much, much cheaper in regards to per mile costs in fuel. It's really beyond incredible, especially when you look at these exorbitant gas prices today. When you look at maintaining the car. I had a Tesla that I originally gave and replaced it with another one. For three years. I had no service, no transmission fluids and no brake fluids to maintain the car. The only thing you really need is, you know, I had a couple of flat tires and you got to go out and buy windshield washer fluid, which you don't usually do on an internal combustion engine car. You get it when you're refuelling. But other than that, maintenance in the car is incredible.

And when you look at the cost for fleet operators for operating EVs versus internal combustion engine cars, it makes tremendous sense. So you're seeing massive amount of fleets globally converting to EVs because the fact of how much it's saving them for fuel and for maintenance.

So, yes, I believe those numbers are achievable. It's just a matter of having the right product out there and the manufacturers are making them now.

Robin Pomeroy: Where will people be charging their electric vehicles mostly.

Michael Farkas: You're going to have charging infrastructure everywhere. It's a matter of the what type of charging infrastructure for that location.

In single family homes, you'll have the equivalent of the power output of, let's say, a a washer dryer. So you're talking about 220 volts in the U.S. You know, single phase. Here in Europe will be three phase, roughly about 11 kilowatts of output.

On highway routes, you're going to have superfast chargers. They're even talking about megawatt chargers now. But we see for the commercial market roughly about 350, 400 kilowatts.

In the middle, you'll have retail locations, some of them that want to draw their customers in for longer periods of time will have chargers that are less powerful. Those that have customers that stay in their locations for shorter periods of time will have DC fast chargers. And, again, it will be dependent upon the type of locations that are there. But to answer your question, every location that has parking spots is going to be lit up in the future.

Robin Pomeroy: And is the technology changing rapidly? Or have you got to a point now where a charger is a charger. Or do you envisage or are you experiencing big changes in the technology that you're deploying?

Michael Farkas: Charging rates are, again, it's not how fast a charger could dispense that energy. It's how much energy is available at those locations. That's more of a limiting factor than the chargers today. There are a lot of different powerful chargers. You can put superchargers that can charge cars in 10, 15, 20 minutes in locations. Can you get faster than that? Yes. But it's also a matter of, again, getting that energy to that location, from that location into the car. That's where the bottleneck pretty much is.

But yes, we think that's something that's going be very incredible moving forward.

Robin Pomeroy: Michael Farkas of Blink Charging, Let's move away from electrification to hydrogen. Often touted as a fuel or the fuel of the future. For people who've not really come across hydrogen? Why why do people talk about it in such kind of hallowed tones?

John Defterios: It's got a great potential, Robin. That's the bottom line here. It's this ability to store power through water with hydrogen. Now, again, you have to remember the source of the hydrogen, right? You could have coal feeding a hydrogen plant, which you don't want. But the idea is to use as much solar and wind as possible so it's clean energy coming.

You can actually, when it comes to manufacturing steel, for example, hydrogen can be very powerful. So this is where the Holy Grail is.

So if you can have hydrogen infrastructure, and we talked about this with electric vehicles, you can have the infrastructure in place, you can leverage the technology.

What I find is extraordinary, because I'm in the energy space, you know, probably half of my time, even today, there was that momentum, that tipping point, that happened five years ago when people started to say, you know what, this offers phenomenal potential. So the deployment of actual capital into the hydrogen space that we're seeing in Europe, the United States with the Inflation Reduction Act, but I'm even seeing it with the major oil and gas producers. You have the UAE, for example, a member of the Hydrogen Council, the global council, and they want to try to come up with these innovations to accelerate the transition.

And also you save oil and gas for high value manufacturing or in the industrial sector, and you can use hydrogen to reduce the carbon output, of course, and that comes at a very low cost once the infrastructure is built.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's hear then from Jason Hugh, who is president and CEO at Fuelcell Energy.

Jason Few: Fuel cells are really all about chemistry. And what fuel cells do is they take a feedstock of fuel, whether it be hydrogen or renewable natural gas as an example, and it mixes it with air and reforms it effectively into hydrogen. And then it uses hydrogen to make power. And all that is done without combusting the fuel. And oftentimes when you think about traditional power generation, where you run into environmental issues is because you combust the fuel. And in the case of fuel cells, it's a chemical reaction. There's no fuel combustion. We make hydrogen and we make clean baseload power is the way you can think about fuel cells.

Fuel cells make electricity and they make electricity by using air and fuel. Let's take hydrogen, for example. And they use that hydrogen then to actually make electricity. So it's an electrical chemical process in which electricity is made.

When you think about renewable energy, one of the challenges with renewable energy is that it's intermittent. And by intermittent I mean it's not available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or that it's not consistent and that you don't control the input. So no one has quite figured out how to control Mother Nature yet. And so Mother Nature decides when we get sunlight or when we get wind.

But those are very important technologies for the energy transition. And so what we need to be able to do, in the industry it's called firming up the capacity. Today that's done using natural gas, combustion engines or coal plants. We believe the best way to do that is with hydrogen and to use hydrogen as the energy store as a way to firm up the capacity of wind and solar.

And you can use excess wind and solar to actually convert that electricity and water into hydrogen. You can store that hydrogen, and that's a process called electrolysis. And through electrolysis you convert electricity and water into hydrogen. You store the hydrogen. And the same way that you store natural gas, for example, in salt caverns or in pipelines, you can store hydrogen - zero-carbon hydrogen, and then you can reverse that hydrogen and actually produce power.

So there's a number of different uses for hydrogen. We just talked about it being an energy source, storing it as it's kind of like a very large battery, a battery that you can create the hydrogen and you can create enough of it. You can continue to regenerate it so you don't run out like a traditional battery would run out of power.

Other ways to use hydrogen is in transportation. So you can create fuel cell electric vehicles, whether that's light duty cars and trucks or that's heavy duty cars and trucks. If you think about heavy duty trucks or classic vehicles, there's a tremendous amount of emissions associated with that. But you can use hydrogen as the fuel for those vehicles. And the only waste product is water, as is another way hydrogen can be used.

And then thirdly, there's a number of industries that are going to be really hard to decarbonise or industries that need what we refer to as high grade heat. So if you take steel manufacturing, for example, you need like 1,200 degrees of temperature. Well, hydrogen can provide that high grade heat or fuel that you need to create that high grade heat to continue to do things like make steel, which are very important to us as a society.

So it can be used in power production, to be used in transportation, and it can be used in really hard to decarbonise industries like steelmaking, cement, glassmaking. So it's a very universal fuel. And today, you know, it's very abundant.

And there we have a very unique capability in that we're the only technology that we know of in the world that has the ability to capture carbon from an external source, let's call it an industrial boiler or a chemical plant or a refiner. And we take what would normally be flue gases that get emitted into the air. And instead of emitting those flue gases into the air, we we take those flue gases and we feed it into our system as air.

And we are able to then concentrate and separate the CO2. And beyond that, we do something that's also incredibly valuable. Our platform and the chemistry process that we actually go through, we actually destroy the NOx as well, which is also very harmful to the atmosphere.

And so with that, we have the ability to capture carbon and we produce power at the same time, making it a very unique solution relative to carbon capture.

And we think that there's a couple of things that are really important to achieve decarbonisation. We think hydrogen has to be part of the story. We think long duration energy storage has to be part of the story. And because there are a number of industries that are going to be really hard to eliminate emissions, carbon capture must also be part of the story in order for us to achieve our climate goals.

Robin Pomeroy: And how will you make money out of that?

Jason Few: Well, for us, there's a couple of different ways in which we have an opportunity to make money. One, we make money by selling our platform. We can make money by providing our platform, but then getting the opportunity to sell the electricity from the platform as a way to make money.

We can make money by being the ones that actually make the money from either selling the CO2 to, let's say, a building manufacturer that's making building materials out of CO2, which are now permanently sequestered in those building materials, or in the cases of, for example, in the United States under the IRA, or the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, actually to sequester that carbon, there are tax incentives for doing that. We can monetise and take advantage of those tax incentives as a way to make money.

So there are a number of different business models that we can leverage in order to make money while doing good for the climate by capturing carbon.

Robin Pomeroy: That was Jason Few, President CEO at Fuelcell Energy, one of dozen or so chief executives or senior executives from innovative energy companies that were at this event in Geneva, the Advanced Energy Solutions event.

And we're going to hear from one more, John. And this is in the field of nuclear. We're going to be listening to Stefano Buono, who he was a nuclear physicist at CERN here across the lake in Geneva before going out into the commercial sector, if you will. He's the founder, CEO of newcleo.

But before we hear from him, where does nuclear power fit into all of this? Because for some of us, it seems like a 20th century kind of experiment that maybe didn't work that well.

John Defterios: Well, in fact, it took a couple of big black eyes because of Chernobyl and Fukushima, the disasters.

But what I think we need to focus on here is the fact there's been a lack of innovation for the last 35 years. That has changed because of the energy crisis, which has given us focus because of Russia and Ukraine and the strain on supplies and the fact that nuclear is a clean burning fuel.

What is very important, of course, is what you can do with the waste, and some of the innovations, and I think this is the case in your interview, is talking about reusing the waste here. So it's not a storage issue, but it's getting the power from that waste to deploy.

But nuclear has cost a lot of money, which has been the other deterrent. So once you have a plant up, the cost per kilowatt hour is equal to that of solar and wind, which is extremely competitive today. vis-a-vis a dirty energy like coal. But the outlays for infrastructure. I was at the Hinkley plant in England just a couple of years ago for the last project I did for CNN, which is the global energy challenge, looking at the energy transition. That that plant was stalled. You know that, they had a lot of controversy around it to get the permits in, but it's nearly $40 billion to complete it.

So where the innovations come now are small modular reactors, which is phenomenal. So the the lead time for permitting, and then to have generation after generation roll in, so you're not wedded to one gigantic plant and the outlays of something like that that we see here in the UK.

Robin Pomeroy: Well, let's hear from Stefano Buono of nucleo.

Stefano Buono: We're trying to leverage on 70 years of experience in nuclear and try to propose a new way to build nuclear that is more sustainable. So we try to understand what scares people and why nuclear was not successful so far.

And the reason was essentially the cost and of course the fear of accidents and the waste.

So we are trying to solve these three problems in our new design. The first problem maybe today is the most important is the waste. And to do so, we have decided to use the waste as our fuel because this is still possible with new technologies. You can actually do fuel, using the nuclear waste, essentially plutonium and uranium that has been used by the nuclear industry to actually produce more energy, much more energy, 200 times more energy than was was initially extracted.

So this is very powerful to use the waste to create 200 times more energy.

Another thing that is very important is the cost. You mention the big installation, very costly installation. I think historically, nuclear has become very big because the nuclear needed to try to be as cheap as possible. And people thought that having a more, bigger production of energy could have led the cost down. Actually, it happened the opposite.

So now nuclear is coming back into the idea of making very small modular machines that can be produced in series. And so that can be built much faster than what's being built today. So this is another aspect very important.

And the third aspect, very important, is the safety. Of course, safety is very important for the nuclear industry. But the nuclear industry has always been a very safe industry. And the studies, the recent studies that try to make the balance of the deaths per megawatt, gigawatt hour produced shows that actually nuclear has been the one of the safest way to produce electricity. But the perception of the people is is the opposite.

But further improvement can be done on safety. And what is very important in the next generation of nuclear is that you can enhance passive safety, so you can make your reactor switch off in any condition. Even if you try to create an accident, so even if you are a terrorist, passive safety creates those conditions to switch off the reactor just by natural laws. So this is very important. Passive safety that is a concept possible in the next generation of nuclear.

Robin Pomeroy: How does it work then? Your systems receive the nuclear waste from traditional nuclear power plants. And then what happens to that material? What do you do to it to extract energy?

Stefano Buono: We actually want to create our own fuel. But this fuel that is named MOX, mixed oxide, has been actually invented almost 60 years ago. So it's a technology that has been used in the past because in the past, the nuclear industry wanted to close the fuel cycle, so wanted actually to reuse its own waste many, many times.

But the technology that has been used, uses sodium reactors. Sodium is an element that added chemical risk to the plant and to control this chemical risk the plant became very expensive. That's why these this idea of reusing its own waste didn't work, because the plants were too expensive.

So we are trying to use a different technology that doesn't present any chemical risk and therefore we can make it more economical. But actually the fuel is already being manufactured. So we are giving this, all the technology, a new life because we we we come with a technology that can be competitive.

Robin Pomeroy: And where does this technology now stand in the real world? Is it at a testing phase? It is a commercial phase. Where are things now? Where things are going?

Stefano Buono: It's very interesting because nuclear has essentially stopped really progress in the technology for 35 years. So the there has not been a new nuclear arriving on the market as product, but there has been a lot of research.

So essentially, the technology we are using is using the experience that has been created in the old times, in the seventies, in the eighties, and all the research that has been done during this time.

So today a project like ours is a kind of an industrial project. We are not discovering anything new. You don't need to bring new technology, but we need to put this technology together in a new industrial design. So that is what we are doing.

So I would say the technology is ready, completely ready. We need now to implement this technology into a real design.

Robin Pomeroy: Stefano Buono, founder and CEO at Nuclear, talking to me several weeks ago at the Advanced Energy Solutions event here at the World Economic Forum.

John, what makes you most excited about innovation in energy? Is there is that one thing that really you can't wait to hear the next advance on? Or do you just have your feelers out across the whole spectrum?

John Defterios: Well, I think we're capable of great things when we have alignment between governments and the private sector. I think the challenge to date, Robin, is that you have to send signals from government and policies. Even Ursula von der Leyen had her opening speech at Davos this year and we were together there when she said, I want a net zero to 2050 security pact, that we need to drive innovation as much as possible. That could have been a reaction to the policies that we saw by Joe Biden pushing through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really just a focus on building infrastructure for the next generation of energy, along with developing manufacturing capacity in the United States in a much cleaner way.

So I get very excited when I hear carbon capture in the oil and gas sector. They need to put it into deployment. Direct capture. It's expensive now, but if you start to deploy this technology, the costs will come down.

Electric vehicles, everybody likes the idea of electric vehicle. I think there's a disconnect, though, Robin, in the energy sector. Everybody says, I'd like to move to electric vehicles. You know, you need lithium and cobalt and copper to make these vehicles. That means mining. Can the mining sector clean up its value chain, if you will, fast enough?

But the reality is that places like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Africa, they have access to this resources, but we have to have the policies that support it and then have the technology to clean it up as fast as possible.

I also am fascinated by the geopolitical exposure. You know, China controls 85% of rare earth refining today. That seems like an over dependency on China, particularly with tensions between the U.S. and China today.

So I think the consumer has to see the realities of making an energy transition is not that simple, and we need to wake up to it. It's not a simple process here. Even if you have an electrical plant, a power plant in your in your country, you have to know what goes into that power plant. Is it coal? Is it oil? Is it gas? Is it renewable energy like solar or onshore or offshore wind? People say, I don't really like offshore wind. Well, it's clean burning, of course, it's so zero emissions, but there's a price to pay to get cleaner energy.

And I think that's the fascination today, getting that balance right between policy government and getting the private sector to innovate and invest fast enough.

Robin Pomeroy: Well, we'll watch with great interest as companies like the ones we've been interviewing push ahead, hopefully come up with new great ideas in the advanced energy area. That's the Advanced Energy Solutions part of the World Economic Forum. We'll keep a close eye on them.

For now. John, I hope to speak to you again very soon. Always a pleasure. John Defterios. World Economic Forum Energy fellow, thanks for joining us on Radio Davos.

John Defterios: Nice to see you again.

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts. If you like it, please give us a review and a rating. You can find our whole back catalogue on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen or go to the website wef.ch/podcasts where you can find my conversation with John Defterios at the end of the Annual Meeting in Davos in January, and there you'll also find all our other podcasts, including Meet the Leader and the World Economic Forum Book Club Podcast.

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This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Editing was by Taz Kelleher, Studio production by Gareth Nolan. We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening, and goodbye.