Name: The Economic Opportunity Hidden in the Climate Transition | Marielle Remillard | TED
Uploaded: 2025-07-08T00:35:47.000Z
Duration: 12 min 26 s
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Do we have what it takes to reach net zero?

I don't mean this in a philosophical way.

Does humanity have sufficient grit and creativity?

I mean, quite literally, do we have enough stuff, cement, steel, glass, nuts, bolts, needed to achieve net zero?

Over the next 30 years, we're going to need to build 42 billion solar panels, 1.3 million wind turbines, 476 nuclear reactors, establish a hydrogen economy, overhaul our electrical grid, and transform our transportation networks.

This is a lot of money and a lot of labor, yes, but it's also just a lot of stuff.

So as governments set increasingly ambitious policy targets and businesses overhaul their operations, whether by carrots or sticks, we can't forget a fundamental question.

I've been working on climate and sustainability topics my entire career.

I started as a policy advocate and activist, lobbying for stronger policy interventions, and later as a scientist and an engineer, only to come to the conclusion that those industries, while very important, move so slowly.

I'm not a very patient person, and climate change demands urgent action.

So I made my switch to the business sector, where we have both the resources and the agility to affect climate change on the necessary timescales.

Among the highlights of my career has been working at the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG's think tank.

There, our research team studies how to increase the speed and scale of the energy transition by looking at the transition economy as a system.

Underpinning our research is this idea that it's not just one sector that's going to need to transform, but all of them.

You know, it's not just wind or automotive industries.

These sectors are transforming in parallel, and we need to look at this holistically.

If we wanted to answer this question, can we achieve net zero?

Do we have enough stuff for just the wind sector?

Classically, you might approach this question by looking at all the materials you need to make a wind turbine and then comparing supply and demand.

And what you would see is that maybe through 2030, you'd see some scarcity in carbon fiber, possibly terbium, but it's really unclear once you get to the bottom of the list.

Once we start factoring in the rest of the economy, the picture looks like this.

There are 14 materials that would face scarcity in the wind energy supply chain through 2030, once we account for the full economy.

I don't know about you, but I found these results staggering.

It's exactly this type of perspective that we need to bring to policymakers to make informed decisions and to bring to investors so that they're investing in clean technologies that will actually have meaningful impact.

Now, you may be wondering, you know, isn't this just one scenario, right?

There are many pathways that you could take to reach net zero.

And in fact, there are hundreds of design choices that go into each of these individual technologies.

So to show you what I mean, we have a few different solar panels here mounted in different ways.

You can see this picture on the bottom left uses cement.

Whether they're mounted on the rooftop or on the ground will influence things like the number of inverters you need per gigawatt.

So what happens if we start factoring in actual design choices?

Our team wanted to do this, so we ran a modest 6,000 experiments where we varied not only the amount of solar and wind in our net zero scenario, but individual design choices.

So for our solar panels, we looked at whether they were made from crystalline silicon or thin films, whether they were framed in aluminum, whether they had a glass backing, and whether they were mounted on the roof or on the ground.

And we varied similar parameters for the wind sector.

What we found was that 45 percent of the materials needed to build solar and wind panels could face scarcity through 2030 under every scenario we tested.

Some of the materials we expected, right?

Things like cobalt or rare earth metals have been in the news for a long time, but others were a lot more surprising.

No one's talking about aluminum or carbon fiber.

For every decarbonization pathway, the mix of technologies down to small design choices can sway our ability to achieve net zero.

And for businesses, what this necessarily means is that they're going to look for substitutes as they try and overcome these scarcities.

But those substitutes and those transformations can lead to more scarcity.

It's used to strengthen the wind turbine blades.

It could easily absorb additional demand coming from the wind sector.

But to make fiberglass, you need boron, and boron is becoming increasingly used throughout the energy transition.

It goes into rare earth magnets that are used in EVs and wind turbines.

It goes into boron steel in the automotive industry.

It goes into borosilicate glass in certain types of solar applications.

So as we increase demand for fiberglass, we may put strain on boron supplies.

Well, as it would turn out, there's only a few countries that mine boron. 73% of known reserves exist in Turkey.

And to open a new mine, that's a 20-year process.

So yeah, we could replace carbon fiber with fiberglass, but it could have implications for the entire economy.

For all of these technologies, there's hundreds, maybe even thousands of components to consider.

So I could give you another example, right?

So if the wind example didn't resonate, we could talk about lithium-ion batteries.

They're skyrocketing in demand, driven by electric vehicles and grid-scale storage.

The anode material that goes into a lithium-ion battery is typically graphite.

We would pretty much need to double graphite supplies by 2030 to achieve net zero.

The graphite anode supply chain is dominated by China.

They control 100% of battery-grade graphite.

So there are a lot of people looking to expand supplies of graphite, but there's also substitutions that are under research.

Scientists are exploring the alternative of using silicon as an anode material, but this not only creates a new opportunity for silicon producers, but could put pressure in semiconductor and solar panel industries.

Okay, thrown a lot at you, so just to check that you're following.

Achieving net zero is going to take a lot of stuff.

That stuff is going to increase our demand, could lead to scarcity, and businesses will respond through substitution.

But there's one more thing I'm not sure you caught.

For businesses big and small, the energy transition creates the single largest industrial growth opportunity since the Industrial Revolution.

The energy sector that was once dominated by two fuels is now experiencing fierce competition among a broader range of climate technologies.

The materials and components that go into these could gain a share in a trillion-dollar energy economy.

And it's not just rare earth metals and clean tech.

I mentioned aluminum a little bit earlier.

This is an industry that has been stagnant since the 1980s.

But if we take our approach to net zero seriously, they will see a boon in their industry.

It's used in solar panel mounting hardware and frames.

It's used in conductors for the electric grid.

It's used to lightweight electric vehicles.

It can also replace other scarce materials like copper, thereby seeing increased demand through substitution.

We're seeing this trend for certain grades of steel, for silver, for epoxy resin.

There's also opportunities that exist by entering new markets.

So we could say, for an example, perhaps you are a manufacturer of automotive parts.

You may think that the electric vehicle industry is going to be the death of your industry.

But the same skills and labor that go into manufacturing parts for a gas car translate incredibly well to the wind energy sector, where wind turbines require thousands of mechanical parts.

Getting a foothold in that supply chain could diversify your product portfolio and lead to new revenue opportunities.

There's two drivetrains that are common in wind turbines.